Post originally by Chris at 2004-03-09 15:58:18
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OK, I've owned AU for a while and have seriously considered roping my D&D group into a session or two sometime. But I still have a couple things about AU that concern me, big problems I have with D&D that AU doesn't seem to address.

Firstly, skill points. I've always felt that D&D's skill points were unnecessarily skimpy, to the point that most characters can't really have a diversity of skills and all you can afford is to load up on a couple of the really broad skills like Diplomacy, Hide, Move Silently, Spot, or Survival. While AU's classes are way more flexible than D&D and this is a huge draw, the skill point allocations seem even skimpier, to the point that characters never have the disposable skill points to invest in the more interesting but more specialized skills.

Secondly, the spells. While generally I think AU does a great job with a much more flavorful and apparently less-abusive magic system, two spells than can really break games are still in there basically unchanged from D&D - Flight and the Fireball-equivilent. Easy and early access to Flight is a major balance problem in D&D, and AU's flight spell is more powerful due to it's longer duration. Likewise, you've still got the 3rd level Fireball-equvilient in there.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Chris
http://homepage.mac.com/c_farrell/iblog