I just spent the past two hours trying to build a 2e version of a former PC—A sorcerer whose parents were professional bandits. I builte her as a human (Varisian) sorcerer with the Imperial bloodline and the Street Urchin background. It's a very straightforward character without a lot of bells and whistles.
Bottom line up front: I had a very hard time following the directions, and I'm still not sure I got it right.
I was doing this pretty much cold, with just the rulebook. I have been avoiding the playtest messageboards so that I would not be unduly influenced by opinions (and all the 'GRAR!!') here.
I was definitely having quite a lot of trouble figuring out how to build the character.
First: It's a lot of flipping forward and back through the book. At one point, I was using four different bookmarks.
Second: The overview section on pp 12-17 is both hard to follow and missing a lot.
Some things I wasn't sure about...
1) When you get a Background Feat, there's a prerequisite skill. Are you automatically trained in that skill, or do you have to spend a skill point on it? (It feels like it should be free, but there is nothing that explicitly says that. It feels weird to have to spend a precious skill point on a background that's flavor.)
2) I'm not sure that I understand how AC is calculated. A sorcerer is unarmored, and not wearing any armor, but do I still take the non-proficiency penalty for being untrained in armor... even when not wearing any? The wording on p. 176 seems to say that you do take the penalty, but that doesn't make sense.
3) There doesn't seem to be a way for a sorcerer to take a familiar at L1. That's weird: Any time I've played a character with a familiar, the presence of the familiar is firmly entrenched in the character's backstory. I suppose I could say that the character has a normal pet cat following her around everywhere, and hope that the GM would allow me to "talk" with the cat... but again that feels off.
4) I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind splitting the functionality of the detect magic and read aura spells.
Things I liked...
1) The Street Urchin background that gave a small amount of thief abilities to a non-thief.
I will probably have more thoughts on this tomorrow, as it's after midnight and I should go to bed now.