Now I remembered that in a previous run I was a bit miffed that due to certain character creation choices I had made, I didn't have access to certain crafting skills. To avoid that, I looked up Solasta character creation to make sure I choose the right options for crafting. While I didn't find a good website talking about crafting character options, I did come across a site ranking the various character classes. The site gave a rather bad "C" ranking to the barbarian class. But of course for my playthrough, I do want to play the barbarian, druid, and sorcerer, because these classes are new to me!

Now in real Dungeons & Dragons, it doesn't matter if you don't have the most optimized class and build. A good DM will always adjust the challenge to the group composition. But in a video game, the challenges are fixed in advance, maybe modified by a chosen difficulty rating. But if for example you don't take a rogue or other character with lockpicking skills and you come across a locked chest or door you don't have the key for, that is on you. The game expects a certain mix of skills and abilities. You don't have to take the classic fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue party, but it is advantageous to take something similar. Fortunately the barbarian can replace a fighter, the druid a cleric, and the sorcerer a wizard, so I'm taking a rogue as 4th member and should be fine. But I might not have the best possible party, if the barbarian is really less good than a fighter or paladin. I guess I will have to live with that.

In other games, I have followed character creation advice to minmax an optimal party. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker I actually stopped playing my first campaign, because I wasn't happy with the main character I made, so I restarted with a better one. However, I am aware that this optimization and minmaxing has serious disadvantages: I reduces your options. Having more possible choices for character classes is fun, and if you exclude some of them for being suboptimal, you are reducing that fun. On the other side, if a game isn't very flexible with its challenges, you can also reduce your fun by having made bad choices during character creation and now not being able to do certain things. It's a bit of a dilemma, especially if you don't know the game yet, and don't know what will be needed.