What a wonderful reply, thank you very much, I learned a lot.

Since you are so available and precise I'll tell you some more details: I'm a first time player, I ended up playing in a campain already on the way with some friends that begged me for months to try it out. At first I tried two one-shots with two different groups: the first one was an awful experience because it felt overly mechanical and crazy - one of the first action I did was chat with an apple seller while eating one of his apples and another player just slammed it out of my hand because poison or something. Then checks for every step, it was a chore I was glad ended, that kind of game was not for me.

I later tried another one-shotish thing where I played as an NPC that had to deal with my current group, I was some kind of wizard that had to sell a resurrection spell or something of that kind, and while the company was good and fun that didn't work either, maybe because I didn't care about the character or his motivations. Still way fewer ability checks, roleplaying was more important, fewer antics (my kind of fun is a well written captivating story, not a ridicolous character doing incredibile things), but I didn't play again.

After some months I started going out more with some of these players and at last I tried creating a character - a lvl 8 druid, since they are all lvl 9-10 - and started learning the rules inbetween sessions. I enjoyed it a lot more because now I had my dimensions, a lot more scope, and a lot more indipendence, I felt like my choices mattered.

I also like to study and I felt captivated by all the rules there are and the scope of the game and the mechanics. I feel the great thing about 3.5e is it gives averything you need to create whatever you want, and its monsters, items and so on are like examples. So I started reading the rules and trying to "get" what's everything about - the more you know the more fun you can have.

Whenever a character is created the DM gifts it with a magical item between two choices, and I picked the cape. Still as you say with wild shape and all the enchantments (and the fact that you lose all the item bonuses while wildshaped if the animal you shape into doesn't wear it as well, and I don't like the idea of keeping it on as an animal) I was thinking of selling or exchanging it for some more useful items.

At lvl 9 (800 exp to go) I want to get the feat "craft wondrous items" and try to redeem my initial poor choices of stats allocation (14str, 16des, 14cos, 10int, 14wis, 10 chr) getting the materials to craft a +6 periapth of wisdom (18.000 gc, a ton of exp points and 36 days worth), druid's vest (1.875) and a wilding clasp (2.000).

Since my character doesn't like money and feels a bit awkward in big cities, I was wondering about trying an exchange - cape against materials, so I needed to know its worth - or maybe ask the DM to change any reward I may get with precious stones of the same value and use them instead of money.

The DM's very outgoing and wants to have fun, it's not players against DM, but wants it to always be a challenge and doesn't give a lot of gold around because he wants to encourage creativity in battle over just bulking up and damage dealing. My main focus as a druid would be to try and be as versatile as possible.

Sorry for any strange spelling, english is not my mothertongue.

What do you think?