This is the story of how someone on the Magic: The Gathering team told me I built my character wrong.

It was around 2001 or 2002. I was a designer on the Forgotten Realms team at Wizards of the Coast. Chris Perkins was one of the senior staff at Dungeon Adventures Magazine. Chris ran a weekly 3E D&D game at the office using one of the awesome meeting rooms with the two-sided markerboard (the kind where you’d press a button and the hidden reverse side would scroll into view, and Chris would always pre-draw an awesome map so he could reveal it mid-session). Other players in this group included editor Jeff Quick, editor of Dragon Magazine Dave Gross, periodicals circulation manager Pierce Watters, periodicals editor-in-chief Johnny Wilson, designer Monte Cook (for a little while), periodicals editor Matt Sernett, and editor David Noonan (as a special guest star).

In short, the…