Cheers! Yeah, didn’t want to break up the flow with me looking at the rules every couple of minutes. Good that everyone else is also new to it - no one can call me out for not doing it by the book! Do need to revise spellcasting a bit, though.
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Spell stuff is my achilles heel. The different rules between classes around what spells they know, what slots they have and then levels and components and stuff. I pray no one ever goes sorcerer or wizard in one of my games.
“Oh, a dragon arrives and kills the wizard, you need to start a new character”.
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I confess I still don’t have a clue 
I just say it with such drunken gusto you’ve never said I can’t
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Good all rounder, wise as all hell obviously.
17 INT? You’re a wizard, Ruffers.
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Heeeyoooo
Slightly more in-depth thoughts on Multi-classing for @anon89873996 and @grievoustim:
Mostly I think it’s best done at lower levels when you advance quickly and so you get the most flexibility in a character.
It’s popular for people trying to create a specific character they know from a game or a book or whatever, or for people trying to maximise their character’s ability to survive.
There are generally two schools of thought on it: some DMs don’t mind while others like you to give a rationale for character making this change, mainly because of players choosing just to make their character more powerful so it’s meta-gaming.
Note that you never get Heavy Armour proficiency from this even if that class you pick has that. You’ll need to use a feat to gain it. But if you’ve a character with unexceptional DEX and you see taking a level of Fighter as a way to improve your AC by wearing heavy armour it’s not going to work.
I created my warlock as I’ve not played one before and they seemed good. They have a particular patron option called the Hexblade that is very popular because it’s quite ‘fighty’ (they get to better weapons and armour proficiencies) but when I conceived my character (a street urchin) a fey ancestry made more sense.
However, when we started playing it quickly became clear we were lacking a frontline. We had me, a Bard, a Cleric, a Wizard and and Artificer. And only the Cleric was really doing the work and one or more of us would keep getting taken out and making death saves.
I reckoned a survivor like my character would definitely look at improving his lot and from a survival POV having my 2nd character level be 1st level fighter made sense:
- 1d10 hit points for the level (I got 11 total so went from 10 to 21 HP)
- Second Wind, allowing me to regain 1d10+1 hit points as a bonus action.
- Choosing the defensive fighter type, giving me +1 AC with a weapon in my hand
- Ability to use martial weapons, meaning I could use a finesse weapon with a d6 dmg (I’ve a +3 DEX)
- Proficiency in shields and medium armour
Grabbing a shield put me up from AC 15 to AC 18. If I can get Scale or a Breastplate that’ll go to 19, and if I can get Half-Plate I’ll be up to AC20.
And yeah, it totally made the difference. We ran into a troll and were able to put him down without anyone being taken out.
Keeping with fighter doesn’t really work for my character so I returned to Warlock for 3rd level up, hence now 2nd level Warlock, 1st level fighter. And unfortunately, I won’t hit the 4th level Ability increase for a Warlock until everyone else hits 5th level, which puts me a little behind my comrades but note that when I’m 4th Warlock / 1st Fighter my Proficiency bonus still goes up to +3 like other 5th level characters because it’s based on my character level which is the total of all my class levels.
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Thanks for writing that out Theo, really interesting hearing how it works in a practical way.
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Oops
I hope you will be more forgiving of your sorcerer 
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Ha ha. It’s actually very simple (it isn’t).
Yeah I am honestly not sure why there are warlocks and sorcerers TBH. It feels like two sides of a very similar coin.
Tasha’s rules are pretty decent btw: it’s basically saying now that whatever race you pick you can choose where the attribute bonuses you receive go, as long as each goes to a different one.
There’s a comprehensive list of proficiency swaps to allow for you to, say, ditch that Shortsword proficiency with an Elf and get something else, or to swap out a skill for one that suits you better. There are new spells and stuff too plus a load of little buffs for each class at various key levels that the DM might allow.
By no means a must-have book but nice.
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By the way @grievoustim you were talking about buying actual books. There are advantages to going with DNDBeyond. For one thing there are likely to be Cyber Monday sales.
While you don’t get the physical book I am a fan of the layout online and on your phone you get an app option which has a good way of showing the books I think.
Plus when you have content you can then use the character builder and use that content. This helps because the site does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in making you aware of all your powers and their consequences.
Anyway in terms of volumes to consider:
PHB has the main stuff
Volo’s has a lot of the more interesting races
Xanathar’s has some good extra spells and extra options for a lot of the classes.
If you want the MOST races actually the Explorer’s Guide to WIldemounte will unlock almost every race there is, albeit with backgrounds fitting that guide, but mechanically they are the same (the orc is slightly different but most people don’t want to play an orc).
Thanks Theo, think Gloren might be set in his ways as a punching dwarf now 
.
I have some hard nostalgia for poring over hardback rulebooks when I was 12 or 13, but we’ll see
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You think so? I just read up on warlocks as I didn’t knkw how they worked, and they seem to function a lot differently (other than both relying on charisma) to sorcerers and have a very different character vibe with the differences between what various sorcerous origins give you versus the patron things with warlocks. Pretty different spell lists too! (obvs though you have played tonnes more than me, so maybe in practice these things don’t work so differently)
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Yeah, I bought PHB on dndbeyond as it makes it so much easier to fathom in my character sheet for a n3wb like me.
Interesting what you say about multiclassing as well. I’ve started thinking about a future character I’d want to play, and it would make the most sense for them to be a multi-classed bard/cleric. But I’m thinking that purely from a role play perspective so probably doesn’t actually work for game play?
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Ah well I am just thinking from mechanics I suppose, both quick builds are very similar, both charisma then con.
Spell lists… So they probably are very different but certainly in the case of the Warlock, you’re only picking 2 spells and TBH there are usually just a few high performing spells you pick and then you leave it.
Probably not explaining that well but I’d imagine 90% of 1st level Warlocks will have the same two spells. This could just be my limited view of course, because I am normally maximising my combat effectiveness for any character I build.
Equally, I meant two sides of the same coin considering there are Clerics, Druids, Wizards and then even Bards going big on magic.
This is likely also my prejudice from being an old skool player as neither sorcerer nor warlock were a thing in 1e and 2e
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Anything can work I reckon. Clerics tend to want good melee skills because they have almost nothing that returns on a short rest whereas most classes seem to. So they tend to need to be good fighters to offset this.
I played a crap-at-fighting one and I didn’t really feel I was fully pulling my weight until 5th level. Before that I was just “Toll the Dead guy” (a Xanathar’s offensive cleric cantrip that can do 1d12 to injured baddies).
Bard would give you lots more options.
Ha was thinking more of 1st level: sleep and retributive strike.
But yeah cantrips are also pretty firmly set (blade ward being the other popular one).
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I took this as one of my first level spells 
(and got to use it to drop a very high up flying bad guy to their doom as my first cast)
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Ran a simple little scenario for my nephew and his parents last night. He was updating the characters this morning with the level up and it reminded me about ability scores.
Obviously it’s a bit annoying that it’s only even numbered ability scores that alter the adjustment value so that STR 15 is the same as 14, 17 the same as 16 and so on. When I’m creating characters and I have a race with a +2 and a +1 but say my high stats were 15 and 14, I will put the 14 into the +2 ability score and the 15 in the +1 to get two 16s instead of a 17 and a 15.
Anyway, the point is that when you get to a level that gives you an ability score bonus you should consider the feats which you can take instead of an ability score +2 bonus.
I generally reckon that if your main ability score is a 14, 16 or 18 etc. then using the +2 to get it higher will be the best option. But if it’s odd-numbered and there’s no obvious other odd-numbered ability score to increase then there are a bunch of feats that give you a +1 to a single ability score and then some special abilities