In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet

While Fenn and Grak continued magic item testing, I stared at my character sheet and tried to determine how I was going to spend my points.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Well, no, that was the wrong question. The real question was the proper way to minmax, given the information I had available to me. Skills had both primary and secondary abilities associated with them, which probably helped to define success and failure in accordance with some hidden rules that I wasn’t privy to. My guess was that chance to Dodge was something like the roll of a die plus skill in Dodge multiplied by the primary stat and also half the secondary stat, but none of that was exposed to me and it seemed like it would be really hard to test, especially if (as I suspected) the rules changed depending on whether I was in combat or not.

One of the core concepts of D&D character optimization was avoiding MAD, multiple ability dependence. The general idea was that if your character could be boiled down