Braken

Another character sheet from the early 90's. Level 14 Thri-Kreen Cleric. I assume we used the Dark Sun method for rolling stats, because this cat is off the charts. That said, I think this was a Forgotten Realms campaign. Ran the old "can I be from Dark Sun" hack. Those who gamed in this era may remember that guy. I do, but I don't remember being that guy. So much for my nostalgic illusions.
Learned how broken Clerics were with this character. I had never seen, let alone played, a high level PC cleric at this point.

Braken illuminates one of the gaming philosophies I maintained at the time: "people, monsters, keep trying to cave in my skull with hammers, set me on fire, and swallow my soul. And that's all before lunch. If I'm going to, you know, NOT DIE, I might want to strive to be as dangerous as possible."  I knew plenty of people who were very hostile to any kind of min-maxing. In part this was a reaction to the maladjusted high-school kids we were/played-with forever trying to build a better bastard. A non-zero number of folks acted competitively against the other players, and not quite as cooperatively as the hobby would normally encourage. They were grandstanding and trying to out do one another in-game to try to prove something outside of game. Playing the bullies they spent their days giving the slip down D-Hall.

While this is anti-social, it's not that I was wrong. Conan never took no damn ceramics class. But here my friends were trying to suggest I do that very same thing. I figured someone who could very well just die in an avalanche of ghoul guts might just, yeah... fuck it, memorize Pillar of Flame x4 for the day.