Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Okay. I took the minotaur and boosted him quite a bit. I find him extremely weak as a fighter. He lacks the heavy hitpoints of dragons and trolls, but does not have many special abilities he can GM in outside of Axe and Perception. You can accomplish the same with a dragon and even better. His armor skills rank under a knight's but he can never achieve more than master for chain and plate. Even an archer can gain master in chain. The Axe, imo, is the worst weapon proficiency in the game. And because the minotaur can only use a dagger in his left hand, that limits what weapons he can use and the amount of damage he can do. Magic-wise, he's terrible because he receives only expert in mind, body and spirit. Those skills are very utilitarian at best like a secondary or tertiary healer. But why bother placing any points in those areas at all when he can barely do anything with them? For misc skills he can gain mastery in armsmaster, body building and disarm trap. You can give the same effect to an archer since disarm trap is the only necessary skill among these. He should've at least received GM in armsmaster to make him competitive as a fighter. Really a weak character overall. One of the chief problems in the game is that only three of the races have innate abilities. Dragon, dark elf and vampire. Dragon and Dark Elf are really good, imo. What i think they could've done, outside of the mage and cleric class, was to add a few more abilities to the knight, troll and minotaur class. The knight would receive a special "of slaying" skill based on dragons, ogres, demons, and undead. Trolls could receive a rock throwing ability equivalent and maybe more damaging than the rock blast spell. At War Troll level he would gain the death blossom spell. Minotaurs would receive a special wizard eye ability that automatically unveils an underground map at higher levels. Maybe they could also receive something like a set trap ability that increases in damage per level of mastery as well as set off a random effect (blindness, insanity, poison) I think the way that the characters were handled with magic was wrong. Only the archer has valuable magic skills since master level is worth something in the elemental realm. But body, spirit and mind pretty much suck without grandmastery (or even with it). I think a more interesting approach would've been to allow these characters to GM in one or two realms of the above and/or light/dark magic. So a minotaur could receive GM in body magic and say Expert in light magic. A vampire would receive GM in mind magic and Expert in dark magic. imo, that would've made those characters more interesting. Alternatively, you could come up with a system that took a base race and provide a point system that allocated a certain number of skill masteries to balance itself out. On top of that, each race would have a basic innate ability to differentiate themselves against the other races.