Thanks for a characteristically thoughtful review, Joe!
One of the trickier parts of doing this book was working with a set of rules that was changing as we wrote! Although playtesters are forever forbidden from talking about the details of their experience, let's imagine that since the
description for cloth armor specifies that "all characters are proficient with cloth armor" at one point we thought it made sense not to have to repeat it in the armor proficiencies line for each class.
The suggestion of including pre-made characters is a good one. We make up a lot of characters from 1st to 30th level as part of our internal design checks & playtesting, so for the second and third books in the Forgotten Heroes series I'll see if we can include some of those sample PCs with the PDF.
For characters from Fist, Fang, and Song, we had eight pre-gen characters (one of each build of the bard, barbarian, monk, and druid) available to players in the Gen Con tournament. That tournament module will, I believe, soon be available for download at the Goodman Games site - I'll post a link when that happens.
- Tavis
And yet another word from our sponsors
