Skip Williams

Skip Williams is one of the chief designers of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition alongside Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell. He is notable for his "Sage Advice" column that was run on Wizards of the Coast's website for a time; which covered errata, rules issues, and similar issues of Skubbery. Many of his clarifications were interesting, if only on a basic level. He also wrote several splatbooks for the system, which run the gamut from entertaining to absolutely game-breaking.

Skip had earlier written M2: Vengeance of Alphaks, which continued two traditions of the day: the Epic Levels tradition of being bad, and the M series tradition of being derivative. Under You Know Who he co-wrote WG9: Gargoyles and WG10: Child's Play for initial-stage 2e Greyhawk, which the Greyhawk fandom hated. (It would only get worse from there. Although we will note, in fairness, that his later-submitted prequel to the A series would be fine.)

Skip is better known, these days, for his creative interpretation of the rules and for absolutely fucking hating the semi-newly-introduced Sorcerer class. He is on record as repeatedly voicing his feelings that the Sorcerer "wasn't a proper caster class" and that in breaking with the Vancian casting system for a more spontaneous spells-per-day model, that the Sorcerer was horning in on the Wizard's gig. (Monte Cook didn't like the 3e sorcerer much either; he'll roll his own for Eldritch Might II, and will float other mage-options for Arcana Unearthed.) According to several sources affiliated with WotC, Skip is the primary reason for the huge amount of content that blatantly favors the Wizard over the Sorcerer - to the point where almost any book he wrote would openly shaft the Sorcerer in favor of the Wizard. Some of this fuckery was rolled back in 3.5 and Pathfinder; for example, the 3.0e sorcerer had no class skills whatsoever that relied on its god stat (charisma), while 3.5e added Bluff.

The Wizard/Sorcerer splatbook from 3.0, Tome and Blood, is one of the most notorious examples, as of the various prestige classes and items in the splatbook, a huge number of them blatantly favor the Wizard, such as Metamagic rods (which give Wizards free access to a Metamagic feat but mandates that the Sorcerer still spend a full-round action to use them). Of the fifteen Prestige Classes in the book, all but nine are vastly easier for a Wizard to acquire than a Sorcerer, and one is essentially Wizard exclusive. To elaborate: many of these prestige classes can be spliced into by level 6 for most, but a Sorcerer must be at least level 12 for the exact same classes. The one Prestige Class in the splatbook that is Sorcerer-exclusive also happens to substantially undercut the Sorcerer's spellcasting capabilities; it does not get any additional Spellcaster levels and essentially gains stats better for a combat-capable class.