Telling other players about your characters is sort of like telling other people about the dream you had last night: if you don’t keep it short then you’re going to bore the hell out of your listener. This version of Let Me Tell You About My Character is pretty long, but at least it’s here. Using this post as an outlet will (hopefully) keep me from cornering you at a cocktail party and regaling you with tales of my Roguish exploits. Although this is technically the first in a series of posts, rest assured that I don’t go through many characters so installments of LMTYAMC will be few and far between.

I’m currently playing two very (mechanically) similar Human Rogues, both of whom are named after favorite NPCs from a previous campaign. The first, Maximillian III, is 3rd Level and I play him in Living Forgotten Realms (LFR) at events hosted by NARPGA. The second, Thelias, is 11th Level and I play him in my home campaign (set in a mutated version of Ravenloft which includes elements of the Witcher novels). These characters represent my very first foray into 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. [...]

Player’s Handbook 3, which is due out next year, will feature a new mechanic called Skill Powers. Skill Powers are previewed in Dragon #379: D&D Insider subscribers (you should be one) can read about it here.

In short, Skill Powers will be Utility Powers available to characters who are trained in certain skills: for example, your 2nd Level character who is trained in Diplomacy could, instead of taking a class-based Utility Power, take the 2nd Level Diplomacy Skill Power, which allows you to increase the hit points your allies recover during a short rest. [...]

I cut my teeth on D&D in early 1990 with the D&D Basic Set (the red box with the great Elmore cover art). After a brief foray into the Expert set I moved on to the then-young 2nd Edition of AD&D. In that system I was almost always the Dungeon Master. By the time I entered High School in 1992 the Golden Age of RPG Publishing had begun: I played Palladium’s Robotech, Heroes Unlimited and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, and ran some memorable Rifts campaigns…but my first love was AD&D. I was quick to move my amorphously-homebrew game into the Forgotten Realms, and incorporated trips to Ravenloft and Sigil (the nexus of the fantastic Plansecape setting). I also ran and played in some great Spelljammer campaigns. [...]