It's about time

I finally passed the Herald Level GM test for the RPGA. I've been trying to ace this thing for the last couple of days. You have to get 20 out of 20 questions right, but it's open book. Of course I don't have the books so I've been using the 3.5 System Reference Document and google for the occasional non-SRD question. You can take the test as often as you want, so I would take it several times in a row. The pool of randomly selected questions is small enough that I had memorized about half the questions asked in the test I finally passed. At one point early this morning I got kinda frustrated with the whole process. On the twentieth question I blew it. I had assumed that you could ready a sleep spell. You can only ready standard actions and sleep has a 1 round casting time.

Has it always required a full round to cast sleep? I don't think so. First they give it a saving throw to avoid and then they increase the casting time. Frankly,I never thought sleep was so overpowered that it needed to be cut down to size. It had a hit dice cap, it didn't work on undeaders or non-humanoids, and the numbers it could affect were really quite small.

I don't really have any plans to GM any RPGA events any time soon. That really wasn't the point of me taking the test. For one thing I wanted to see if I could pass it. Aside from the challenge there's the educational aspect. By taking the test multiple times I learned a lot about 3.5 D&D I didn't know. And I learned my way around several chunks of the SRD. I also now have memorized my RPGA number becuase I had to re-enter it every damn time I re-took the test.