My first foray with 5e
I attended a massive marathon D&D5e session yesterday playing a half-orc warlock named Christian (his family are converts to Christianity and he adopted a new name when he converted). Originally he was, like the rest of his family, a half-elf and he's only a half-orc because he was transformed into one by an archfey.
From the swamp dissenter // wipe the mud from your face // gaze upon the mirror // and see yourselves of orcish race!
But that's backstory and not so relevant to a murder hobo dungeon crawl like like yesterday's monster event. There must have been 50-55 players there across 5+ tables.
Anyway the character was originally envisioned as 1st level but I needed to level him up to 13 for the game. But even at 13th level he didn't contribute as much to the party as he could have if I had more system mastery. The build was suboptimal at best (at least for combat- I didn't give him eldritch blast which I'm told is virtually a necessity for warlocks- although the DM took pity on him and fixed this "oversight") and being a newbie I didn't use the abilities I had optimally. For example, it is only in retrospect that I realize I could (and should) have used my warlock's pact boon, pact of the blade, to provide him with decent weapons (all he had was daggers). I knew going in that playing a martial half-orc warlock I was playing against type but I didn't expect it to have the negative effect on the party it did.
I also brought a spare character, a human vampire anti-paladin, should Christian not work out for some reason. But she is something of a special snowflake as there are no character creation rules in 5e for creating PC vampires or anti-paladins and only WotC material was permitted at yesterday's event. I did ask the DM though and she said she'd allow a vampire and I probably could have gotten away with reskinning a normal paladin as an anti-paladin , just RPing her as lawful evil instead of lawful good. But it didn't come up, and really I don't mind having played Christian- I just wish I had taken better advantage of the rules.