Character Stuff!

So, over the course of Winter Break, my character sheet for the Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I'm doing at school went missing.  This is rather irritating - not only do I have to re-invent my character from memory, I also lose valuable points (we started at a high level, and I had really good bonuses for my basic stats, which I lost).

This is also an opportunity, however, to reinvent my character.  I have learned through the course of the first episode of the campaign that Bards can be useless in fights and easy to hit (and one of the irritating things is that, in the course of re-doing my character's stats, I lost some Hit Points, so she's easier to hit).  Saturday's session was the last of this episode (think Star Wars), and our DM has said that the characters will have three years between the end of this episode and the start of the next one (the characters will do their own thing for three years; the actual group is going to meet up again in a few weeks).

In that time, we'll have the chance to level up our characters and give them any items we want.  We'll also have the chance to budge around our classes and feats if we want to - this means that my character, Anaïs, is going to get a new job, essentially, in addition to being a Bard, and will learn how to do a lot of cool things.

I used to hate character building, because it's a very tedious process (involving, among other things, a crap-ton of dice rolls and adding those rolls together, and that's just the beginning).  Maybe it's gotten easier because I'm not working from scratch on Anaïs, but it's a lot more fun now that I know a bit more about what I'm doing.

There are several books you can use for character building, but those normally just cover the basic classes, skills, feats, armor, and equipment that you can use.  The Player's Handbook is designed for the new kids who don't know how to set up a character.

Once you start getting the hang of what number gets what bonus on what, you can actually start looking into the cool things on the DnD wiki page, which is actually a lot of fun.

For example, now that I have the ability to cross-class my Bard with something, I decided that I was going to give her a few levels in Fighter - a warrior that's not as stupid as a Barbarian, but will still let me use more weapons and get cooler feats and class skills.  Then, however, I found out that the important stats to a Fighter were the stats that the Bards tended to do without.  Bards rely a lot on Charisma and Intelligence, and can do without Strength and Constitution; Fighters tend to rely more on Strength and Constitution than Charisma.

After looking on the DnD Wiki, I found a homebrew class that I really liked (homebrew means that Wizards of the Coast didn't invent it, but it's developed to work in a DnD-type campaign and available for public use).  It's called a Songblade, and it's a tactician/ fighter; it gives me the weapon usage I need while still using my good stat.

I'm starting to like character work. :)