The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[awa]

There is never a character-creation minigame.

That a few RPGs feel to some players like there is one, is a sign of faults in their design.

A minor nitpick I have seen games that legitimately had a character creation mini game, where you would pick a profession for part of your life and then roll to see what happened during that period and what happened to you.

So character creation mini games do exist but that's not what your talking about. I personally dont believe any-kind of mini game was intended. If there is we have to assume that the creators both had impressive system mastery and then deliberately set out to make their game less fun for a significant number of players and never mentioned the mini-game in any of the material printed at the time.

None of those seems plausible (particularly the system mastery) in particular if you look at the post hes talking about taking toughness or not. Toughness is not a good feat but if you think toughness is the problem and not the caster with a candle of invocation you dont have system mastery.