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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5486435" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 225: January 1996part 2/8Skills & Powers in 8 easy stages: Get your calculators out folks, it's time to do some serious character designing. AD&D has always been relatively simple to build a character in, especially if you start from 1st level. Even the wodges of complete splatbooks only add a couple of steps to each character, given the amount of resources you have to spend. Incorporate Skills & Powers stuff, though, and the number of options goes up by several orders of magnitude. Be prepared to spend a lot longer making characters, and to need a proper character concept before you start number crunching if you want to be optimal. This article aims to make it less daunting by spelling out exactly what you have to do, but still makes it clear that it will take a lot more work before you get to play, and there are a lot more opportunities to make one character more powerful than another based upon the skill of their players rather than the luck of the dice and the treasure they get. So this makes it clear that this is where one of the big changes in 3e started. People want more choice, and though not all of the ideas tried here worked (subabilities in particular needed to die with a vengeance) some of them did. So as with all the letters about Athas a few pages ago, this sees them recognising that some of the things they've done recently may be divisive, and trying to do damage control. Exactly what effect that will have I'm not sure. Does it win back people alienated by recent changes? Does it make things worse to admit fault, when many people wouldn't have noticed the problem anyway? In any case, this is a rather worrying way to kick off their features. Secret origins and motivations of player characters: We may be starting to swing back towards the crunch side, but we're still right in the middle of 2e territory. Which means they follow up the mechanical advice with one on establishing your character's backstory. With particular emphasis on why they became an adventurer in the first place. Makes sense, really. As we've found before, taking a focussed approach on what we really need to know gets us playing sooner than writing several pages of fluff that may not ever come into play, particularly if you make it so long the DM can't be bothered to read it anyway. So this is quite decent advice that seems likely to speed up your game rather than slow it down, by getting you to fill in the right kind of details instead of the wrong kind.</blockquote>

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