D&D 5e Player's Handbook

I picked up the Player's Handbook first thing last Friday. I've been reading it, helping friends make characters for fun, and thinking about running a game some time in the future. Here's my thoughts on it so far:

- They kept the layout designers from 4e. So much art, so much a work of art. It's beautiful.

- They're taking the "flavor" route and writing things out in paragraphs. Sure, there are the normal charts: ability score bonuses, items and their cost and weight...you know, the usual. But there's a lot of plain English. This can be good and bad. The way older editions (1e, 2e, BECMI) read like textbooks or instruction manuals. Bad for creativity, good for reference. Once I get past the beauty of the book, I'm going to tabulate this thing with the little 3M page stickies. I'll be labeling Races, Classes, Combat, Spells, Armor, and so on. Perhaps the DM screen - which I know they're going to sell eventually - will be more efficient.

- Warlocks are an advanced class. I can't even get a character name out of my players, but to set up a backstory detailing how you interact with your infernal patron? That's a lot of pure imagination right off the bat. I'm going to enjoy the ramifications of such a class, though. Someone choose Warlock!

- The index isn't bad. That's way more important than anyone realizes.

- The first chapter is an okay character creation summary section. It doesn't summarize the races when it says pick a race, for example. Unless you know it by heart, you have to read the entire chapter on races to know which race to play. In comparison to, say, Werewolf: the Forsaken (the last game I ran), the creation summary section is less informational. Just as a talking point, though, I have to ask myself: is summarizing the "Bone Shadow" tribe as this kind of werewolf who behaves like this and takes these powers, all on one page, a credit to the game world? It's a credit to speeding up character creation, for sure. It may lend itself to flat, two-dimensional characters. But does the impatient character creator, grumpily ignoring most of the chapter on races, make a ONE dimensional character as soon as he chooses a race? Would he even know what it means to be a dragonborn? At least, the new Werewolf player knows his Bone Shadow stereotype. The new D&D 5e player less so. I don't know whether that's a bad thing. I don't know how much pandering to bad, impatient players I and the book need to do.

- WTF is up with those triangular silver coins? They'd poke you in the pocket, get the edges snapped off, and generally would be strange to carry around. Bleh.

- There needs to be a sentence saying how many skill proficiencies a character has at start, and where they come from. (Class, Background, etc.) My friends would choose their class proficiencies, thinking that was all they were going to get, and then they get more. Well then!

All in all, I'm liking it more than 3e, 3.5e, and 4e. It's on a par with 2e rules-wise, but on par with 4e beauty-wise. I had high expectations, and the book is meeting them fairly well.