My Dragons
Game Design - Character Tutorial
So here's an idea.
You've just gotten your Collector's Edition copy of World of Ever Shadows: Arboreal Adventures, and you install it and sit through the patching and make your account and finally, finally log in. The character creation page pops up...complete with a box in the middle that says, "WoES:AA has detected that you have a new account. We recommend that you play the character types tutorial before proceeding." It offers you "Yes, I'd like to play the tutorial" and "No, I'll just create a character".
If you decide to play the tutorial, you get a series of little mini-games, maybe three or four of them that take ten minutes or less apiece. Each one gives you a quick intro along the lines of, "For the next few minutes you are Shalya, a trainee human fighter in the small village of Overlook." (These can be cutscenes with voiceovers, but should be extremely brief.) So you control Shalya for a few minutes learning the basics of melee combat, and probably how to deal with whatever the death penalty is in the game. Then you go on to Tarbin the trainee archer, who teaches you about ranged combat and the value of good positioning, then Elmati for magic and healing, then Farren for sneaking, thievery, and, say, reputation--did I mention there needs to be a reputation mechanic? (For extra bonus points, the three characters you aren't playing are controlled by the computer and you run through a pre-programmed party fight four times from their four perspectives. Maybe if you do exceptionally well with one of the four perspectives you get some extra character points to apply to your new character in that sphere, but that could be too easy to game.)
After the tutorial, you go back to the character creation screen. You have gained an idea of how to play the different character types and which ones you like, so you're less likely to end up with a character you don't enjoy. You possibly have some extra points to apply to your new character from doing well in the tutorial, and you have a vague idea of how various types of skills work. So you make your character...but that's another post entirely.