This is going to come off as a little harsh, but as long as there is an argument it looks like there are two legitimate sides to an issue. But there isn't here. And I need to show that. That doesn't just mean making a counter argument, it means dismantling the objections completely. Every objection you have raised is either completely without merit or objectively wrong. If the setting isn't sticking, that seems like it would be worth a post
on the Bug Reports & Technical issues forum, which may garner better
attention than a feature request. If the bug is fixed/made more user friendly i still have to set the thing every. time. If the setting is defaulted to yes that makes the bug irrelevant. Fixing the bug makes the annoying thing slightly less annoying but not nearly enough. If someone wanted to bring in an external character to my campaign, it
would require review and potentially adjustment of equipment or optional
features that didn't fit the specific rules I was running (there's a
lot of UA weirdness and just plain homebrew junk out there). I'd allow
import in a session zero to start the process, then turn it back off.
But that's me. This objection is just weird. Firs, If you aren't allowing players to import a character, under what circumstances would having that option off even be beneficial to you? You tell the players not to import a character and then the players don't import a character. What you need is the characters being made from scratch, the character import being on is completely irrelevant to what you want. It doesn't matter what the setting is, much less what it defaulted to. Furthermore, even within these very narrow confines I have no idea why you would review a character and import it rather than import the character and then review it while on the table. I need to review the character before they play ---> some logic ----> don't import it. Even then, surely you can see the confluence of events of " I don't even want a character on my table till after I review it" is much, MUCH rarer than Importing characters at all (which is virtually every organized play game). Between the two allowing imports is far more common, and thus should be the default setting. What do you think the ratio is there? 100 to 1? 1,000 to 1? Higher? The option to disallow imports wouldn't be eliminated, you would have to do the same thing once per campaign that Me and a dozen other people currently have to do once (or more) per table. However, the real problem for what you appear to be looking for is that
imported sheets belong to the DM No, for two reasons. 1) Is that allowing imports and giving each individual player control of their character is two separate steps. If this was true, that step would still be annoying. 2) You can evade that problem by setting the character to "edited and controlled by all players" (commie mode) before importing. It keeps that property when it lands on the table, and you can put your character on the map and tweak them without any further action by the dm. Then if the DM is using darkness and vision they can narrow the ownership back down to just you.