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Welcome back to part 2! I hope the wait wasn’t too painful for all of you.

If you haven’t read part 1 of the Beginner’s Guide to Creating A D&D Character, you should definitely do that first, since the material I’ll be covering here is going to depend on the stuff I covered in the previous article. Otherwise, let’s continue on!

Choose Your Skills
Just as we all have skill sets that we use for our jobs and other things, so do our D&D characters. The skills you choose to focus on for your character is going to largely define who your character is. So if you want a stealthy character, then you’d want to focus on skills that would help you move around undetected. Likewise, if you want a scholar, you’d want to focus on skills around knowledge.

However, the skills you’ll be able to choose are going to depend on what class you chose for your character. Fortunately, the skills for each class fit well for them. For example, the skills a rogue can choose focus on stealth, theft, and guile. However, the skills for a fighter focus more on what he could use in combat.

However, you’re not directly tied to your class’s skills. You can choose most skills that are not on your class skill list to focus on as well. However, you’ll have to spend double the amount of points on them to raise them up one rank. The maximum that a cross-class skill can be is also half of what a class skill would be.

Also, each class gets a different amount of skill points to spend. Some classes tend to be more skill-intensive whereas others you’ll hardly even use skills. To find out what skills are considered to be class skills, and also to find out how many skill points you get, look for the Class Skills section for your class. There’s also a table that shows which skills are class skills for each class on page 63 in the Player’s Handbook, which might be easier to look at than the paragraph block on the class description page.

The last thing I want to point out is that there is a maximum to the number of ranks you can have in a skill. For class skills, it’s 4 at first level, 5 at second level, 6 at third, and so on. It’s half of that for cross-class skills though, so 2 at first, 2.5 at second, 3 at third, etc. There are a couple mathematical formulas that make this a bit easy though:

• Class Skills: 3 + Your Character’s Level
• Cross-Class Skills: (3 + Your Character’s Level) / 2

Now even though you’ll have half a rank for a cross-class skill at times, you’ll be dropping the .5 whenever you add it to a roll. Still, you should keep the .5 marked there, so that you know how much you’ve spent on that skill already.

You’ll notice on your character sheet that there’s columns for Ranks, Ability Modifiers, and Miscellaneous Modifiers for each skill, as well as the Ability Score that skill is tied to. Of course, the ranks are dependent on the skill point you’ve spent for the skill, as was discussed above. The Ability Modifier would of course be dependent on the ability score tied to the skill. Just take that appropriate modifier and copy it over. The misc modifier can be from any number of sources, such as racial features, class features, and even feats. All those things are added up to give you your overall Skill Modifier, which is what you’ll add to your d20 roll whenever you do a skill check.

However, before we even get to feats, there’s a couple things I want to point out…

Racial Traits & Class Features
In a way, these can be considered Feats that you get just for choosing the race and class that you did. And just as Feats can have various effects on your character, so can traits and features.

Sometimes you can get a bonus, or penalty, to an ability score. Sometimes you’ll get a bonus, or penalty, to particular skills. You can even get extra skill points, or even extra feats! And sometimes they can have more unique effects.

You’ll find Racial Traits listed as part of the race description for your chosen race. Likewise, you’ll find your Class Features listed under the class you’ve chosen. Make sure to mark them down in an appropriate place on your character sheet, especially if it includes space just for traits and features. If they modify things, make sure to mark those changes! For ability scores, just add or subtract the appropriate amount, and use the final result as your permanent ability score. For pretty much everything else, look for a Misc Modifier column or box, and fill in the modifier there.

Feats, the Special Treats
Yes, that was probably a bad rhyme. Feel free to slap me in a comment at the end of this post.

As I mentioned above, Feats can have several different effects on your character. They can increase some skills, give you bonuses to hit, make it easier for you to wield certain weapons or wear certain armor, or even just add in new abilities that you can use.

However, most feats will have some sort of prerequisite that you’ll need to meet in order to take it. It’ll be noted in description for the feat in Chapter 5 in the Player’s Handbook.

Once you choose a feat, make sure to write it down in the area on your character sheet that’s set aside just for them. Some character sheets give you a LOT of room to write them down, including brief description, page number, etc. Other character sheets hardly give any room, though I still recommend jotting down the page number just in case.

Now that you’ve marked down your feats, as well as everything else, and marked down any modifiers it may have given you (and done the appropriate math), you’re mostly done with the more technical portion of creating a character!

However, I don’t think a nude character would fare too well in a dark, damp dungeon.

Equipment!
Everyone needs to have something to help them out while adventuring. Just as a computer programmer without a computer is practically worthless, so is a fighter without a weapon, and so is a wizard without spell components.

However, equipment requires cash. And you’re going to need some cash to get started. So take a look at Page 111 in the Player’s Handbook, and you’ll find table 7-11: Random Starting Gold. So find your class, roll the number of dice it indicates, and multiply if it’s noted there. That will be how much gold your character gets to start out with.

Thankfully, currency in D&D is generally in tens. So 10 silver equals one gold, and 10 copper equals one silver. Likewise, 10 gold equals one platinum. You’ll find a table that describes coins on page 112, table 7-2.

You’ll find weapons, armor, and other adventuring gear and services throughout Chapter 7 of the Player’s Handbook. There are some very handy tables in that chapter that makes life easy, since they’ll hold all the stats you’ll need for weapons, armor, etc.

Once you’ve chosen a weapon, all you need to do is just copy its stats down onto your character sheet. Then for the attack bonus, just copy over the appropriate one, using melee for melee weapons, and ranged for ranged weapons. Also, one note on melee weapons, if you have a modifier to your strength score, add that to your damage for melee weapons! So in the case of a +2 modifier, and you buy a longsword, your total damage will actually be 1d8+2.

One final note on weapons: they come in two sizes. Normally you’d use the size for Medium (M) sized creatures. However, since some races are Small (S), normal-sized weapons are rather large for them. So there are smaller versions of those weapons just for the small folk. True, the smaller weapons don’t do as much as their normal-sized counterparts, but at least they can be wielded with much more ease.

The next big thing to worry about aside from weapons is armor. Just as with weapons, there’s a handy table that has all the stats you’ll need. However, keep an eye on the Maximum Dexterity Bonus, Armor Check Penalty, and Speed. The bulkier the armor, the more it can slow you down! So your Dexterity Bonus may temporarily be lower than what it normally would be while you wear that armor. Also, if your movement speed is normally 30 ft., you may end up moving more slowly than normal while wearing the armor.

Meanwhile, certain skills can be adversely effected while wearing armor, such as climbing, jumping, swimming, etc. Such skills are typically marked on your character sheet for easy reference. The armor check penalty for whatever armor you’re wearing takes effect whenever you use one of those marked skills while wearing that armor. This can prove deadly for your character in some situations, especially if swimming!

Lastly, if you’re character is of a class that uses arcane magic, you’ll need to pay attention to the Arcanne Spell Failure Chance. The bulkier the armor your character’s wearing, the harder it is to weave arcane magic. Every time you cast a spell, you’ll have a percentage chance of that spell fizzling out, instead of actually being cast. This is the primary reason why you usually don’t see wizards and sorcerers not wearing any kind of armor.

Finally, as far as armor goes, worn armor and shields stack. So whatever benefits and penalties you get with them add up. So a wizard would be in really bad shape if he were wearing half-plate and carrying a tower shield. In fact, he’d be lucky if he can cast anything, since his spells would simply fizzle out 90% of the time!

After weapons and armor, there’s a bunch of miscellaneous items and services that can still be useful to your character. I’ve heard of some people getting very creative with seemingly random adventuring gear, so definitely keep your mind open!

Almost Done!
In fact, if you’ve chosen a class that has nothing to do with magic at all, you are done! Congratulations!

However, if you’ve chosen a spell casting class, such as Druid, Cleric, Sorcerer, Wizard, Bard (I think that’s all of them in the Player’s Handbook) then you’ll have a bit more to do. Besides, all spell casters need to know their spells!

However, before I leave you off, I do want to point out a free resource that everyone can use to create a character sheet. That would be the official D20 Source Reference Documentation. Now, it may sound a bit complicated, but it’s really the same material you’d find in the printed D&D books, just without the pretty pictures.

You can find the 3.5 SRD at:

• Wizards of the Coast 3.5 SRD
• The Hypertext d20 SRD

The stuff you’ll find on Wizard’s site are a bunch of RTF documents, which can be opened in your favorite word processing program, such as MS Word, OpenOffice, or even Mac word processing programs (sorry, I’m not as familiar with them ).

The Hypertext d20 SRD, though, has all of that in easy to read web pages. It’s very well organized to boot, so I highly recommend giving it a shot!

Meanwhile, I’ll see all you spell casters again next week, so I can help you fill out your magical repertoire!

Update: Part 3 is available, for those of you making spell-casting characters!  So check it out for all your divine and arcane magical needs!