...Or as a player, acutally, but since I'm the one who GMs most for my group:

The rules have bite to them- They take a bit of rehersal and practice to get used to.

However, I just created 8 complete, from scratch, SoY characters to be used in an upcoming SoY campaign, based loosely on a post-apoc future/fantasy game that I was running earlier with another system (there are 5 players, I want them to be able to choose the character they want to play from a larger pool).

It took me two hours to create, from scratch, and for the first time, 8 complete characters.
Disclaimers:
1) I am not using the World of Near (though I am using appropriate cultural/racial keys and secrets).
2) 4 of the 8 characters are based on previous characters from the original campaign, so I already had an idea for the Pool/Ability/Secret/Key spread for those characters. The other 4 were completely fresh.
3) Each character (after initial 5 Advance bonus) has at least 2 Keys, 3 of them have 3 keys. I intentionally left one of they keys blank to let the player decide what they want to do with it.
4) I was pretty conservative with most of the abilities, pretty much choosing from those in the book, howerver I did create a few tech-based ones. I was also conservative with the Secrets and Keys, finding most of what I needed in the book in some form or other. I didn't set out to or need to invent new Secrets or Keys.

So, 8 characters in 2 hours. While watching TV.

I'm familiar with D&D 3E, but when my group sat down to make CONAN OGL characters for our current campaign, there were four of us, passing around two books, and it took between 90 minutes and two hours to complete One Single character, each (mainly because of reading through all the Skills, Cross-influence of skills, feats, abilities, compiling all the skill or related data together, etc. Plus, some "Hey, pass the book, I need to see that chart to find out how many pounds my Scholar can lift while walking...").

So, one CONAN OGL character vs 8 Shadow of Yesterday characters. For some, this is an apples and oranges comparison, but for me, since I'm using SoY to get the same kind of pulpy action/romance/drama game that I was trying to get out of CONAN OGL, I think the comparison stands.

Anyway, that sold me on the game. We'll be playing it in about 4-8 weeks, as soon as we're done with the current CONAN mini-campaign. I'm really looking forward to it. Look for Actual Play posts then.

-Andy

Andy,

If you could write up the world you're using and the Keys and Secrets you make for it on the TSOY wiki, I'd be eternally grateful.