Played Conan for the first time yesterday. As we run on fairly tight timelines (we only really have 150 minutes on a Wednesday to play in), we tend towards short adventures (two or three sessions) and pregen characters. On this occasion, I might have communicated a bit late in saying I wanted to play a Shemite Borderer and ended up with a Nemedian Borderer instead. You might think it probably doesn’t matter – but I had done some pre-game reading and worked out a bit of background, so not getting the character I wanted did have an impact.
While I enjoyed the adventure, I felt the Conan character sheet painfully imposing. Tons of boxes. Lots of text. Piles of stats and modifiers. All scary, all the time. I tried to ignore it. Better to have fun and roleplay, and not worry too much that come the end of the adventure I might have made a single significant roll against any of these numbers. Seeing a character sheet like this reminds me why I feel uncomfortable with D&D, OGL and games of that ilk. Pathfinder might well be fantastic, D&D might be a revelation – but, the volumes of books and the tsunami of numbers really put me off.
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