Missing - The *didn't listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood* and end up with a character who doesn't fit with the party/canpaign - The traitor, you know the Scorpion/Tremere who will betray the party at every possible occasion and stab any PC showing their back -The hero, who feel like their main character - The anti hero, in general their player use all the possible flaws (and therefore built a strong character) A one eyed, alcoholic single parent with a deadly enemy, but they can shoot a coin at 1000m, so feels like they'll have again to do the job rather than staying home. And many more

The problem is that while combat focused PC have armour, high initiative, multiple attack per round, and don't fail their roll. You're like acting at the end of the round, once when other PC do it 3 times, fail your attack and as soon as you get hit you're unconscious. The cool part of putting the big combat at the end of the session is that you can take a nap, and have the GM waking you up at 5 *combat is over, let's give the XP and the first train homes leaves in 30 minutes*

It's not about who has to change their character concept. But about building a party which can work together.A session zero and common character creation is universal seen as a good practice I've seen campaigns where players had to actively avoid PvP due to big difference in goal/loyalties/alignment. Let's avoid the *my family hates your family*trope. Then, indeed, not doubling the skills or have skills not matching the campaign. You don't want to have 5 pilots for one space ship. Especially if it means you don't have a social character. There is more character I'd like to play than games where I could play them, so not that much of a problem anyway

Have you tried PBTA games, because the whole consequences things really push that kind of play

Can you guess what is the basic flaw for me in AD&D, which eventually led me to walk away from it? How the game builds up expectations for the player. The average person just flips open a player's book, a monster manual or some other tome on the game lore and instantly the person thinks their character will be, from the start, like the model characters they're reading upon, which they never will or even can be, as the game does not permit it, in my understanding and experience. As a player, it was extremely frustrating to handle with DMs that expected a newbie mage/ranger/fighter/whatever to take risks as if they were seasoned veterans and had high capabilities from the start. That is nonsense. No class in AD&D is (or was; I speak from years of distance) capable of great feats from the get go, as the way the characters are built forces a level 0/1 into basically discarding any capabilities a trained individual into a specific profession would already have. It would be better to just say the characters are slightly above average commoners. As a DM, I was quick to get fed up with players that wanted to pull stunts that would be barely feaseable to high level characters/professionals, regardless me going through the basics as I did above. People are idiots but the game was set up by morons and others just tried to build on top of it to improve it, with mixed results at best.

Half-human and half-horse sounds like the bestiality had already happened!

I find that a lot of D&D players seem to have a fairly mechanistic view of the game, more so than with other games. This is probably a result of D&D, as an offshoot of a tabletop strategy game, being designed in such a manner. Now, your approach is already a lot softer (and I agree that some preplanning is recommended) but the "every party needs a tank, a caster, a healer, a skill monkey, and one of the needs to be the face" I responded to is fairly common in the D&D world. I don't agree with *that* level of party planning. I find it awfully reductionist and belying a mechanistic view on how the game works. I also never found it necessary. Every single element in that list is optional if the players and GM can deal with it. Heck, I've never even been in a game with a semi-dedicated healer. For something with clear, limited in-world roles (like your starship example), you *do* need to allocate them but games like that are rare. Of course, like I mentioned that D&D's design informs the way it's talked about, my experiences are colored by the systems I've played, particularly The Dark Eye. TDE affords players much less power than D&D. Spellcasters are much weaker due to slow resource regeneration – they use a mana point system and a high-powered spell will take multiple long rests to recover from. Sure, you can combat heal or throw a fireball but only when necessary. Also, there are way more skills so even with all party members pitching in you won't have expertise or even competency in everything. As a result, the idea of having a party that can take on any challenge (and/or deal with several high-stakes battles in a short time frame) is unrealistic. This actually frees up a lot of conceptual space since there's no one party that can do every kind of adventure. So with some coordination you can make anything work, even a party with no combat or magical skills who Shawn Spencer their way through quests. What absolutely needs to be worked out are things that could set the party against itself or keep a player from interacting with the others. But that's more of a player behavior thing; e.g. you can play a perfectly selfish, evil character who still puts the party's interests ahead of their own – if they're played to consider having reliable friends worth more than short term gain. So yeah, I also expect a certain amount of character tailoring, just on the roleplay level rather than mechanically.

Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/Dzner6zTEVs

\#5 is always fun. Especially when I accidentally become \#1

I did the accidental \#5 to \#1 pipeline. Which is pretty easy to do in DCC. I just rolled some amazing stats for a fighter, went "ok I'll be our muscles" and picked up an extremely powerful cursed sword. The GM decided to buff the curse and actually make the demon inside it the main BBEG of the campaign after I took my first swing with it and one shot what was supposed to be a tough mini-boss for our party.

Where does the "ridiculous minmaxed character to game the mechanics" fit in? We had a miner/scribe once.

Ah so we’re complaining that dumping constitution makes you die faster? Yeah if you roll up with 8 strength 8 dex and 8 con you’re going to get split in half by the first kobold you encounter, what a concept. If you’re playing a bard with 14 charisma(or heaven forbid, 16 like a filthy minmaxer), you’re only a few percentage points behind your team on your vicious mockeries. You *genuinely have to try* to be truly useless.

Just for clarification - you don’t want ensure your party has, say, someone with the ability to talk to people, but you also don’t want to talk to your DM ahead of time to ensure you’re not playing a politics heavy game where a face will be absolutely necessary to make any progress? Not everyone needs to be specced into being the perfect version of one of those four basic archetypes. Like you mention, “dedicated healer” is essentially gone in place of short rests and healing word spam. But won’t it feel awful goofy to have a player die as the three other 8 wisdom barbarians fail their medicine checks to stabilize?

I think that'd fall into #8, biggest explosions

Also missing from the list is the horny bugger. It doesn't matter who or what it is, if it's near them, they'll try to seduce it

Some basic discussion of what the adventure or campaign is going to be about is of course necessary. A full-social adventure with a party of dedicated murder hobos won't work. But if the characters fit mostly within the requirements of the adventure then everything else can be adjusted. Let's say the GM wants to do an adventure where the characters will investigate a murder of a member of the city council, which will lead into uncovering and fighting a cult that is infiltrating the city's upper echelons. The players are only told that the adventure will involve investigation, combat, and high society interaction. The players come up with a detective, a brawny priest, and a politician who likes dueling. So they've got the investigative and social skills, the priest and politician do reasonably well in combat, the priest can even provide some healing, but there's no ranged firepower and nobody can break into anything. The GM can tailor the adventure to match that; there's no need for anyone to redesign their character so that the party can engage flying enemies or obtain evidence from a locked room. Likewise, if the party were to consist of three wizards from the local college, the adventure could still work. One of the players is suggested to hold a teaching position at the college to provide social clout, one should ideally have some experience with investigation or political scheming, everyone is recommended to keep Mage Armor prepared, and the cult now favors ranged combat. The plot might move a bit slower because of less plentiful healing opportunities and frequent rests. All of this assumes a GM who primarily wants to work with the players to tell a story. If the GM wants to do an unforgiving grind where the players will need to use every advantage (in and out of game) to survive, this won't fly. Bring an optimized roster or perish. (Of course, most unforgiving GMs I know won't allow magical healing so that character injuries actually mean something.) I probably wouldn't join that game but some people roll like that. On the whole, I don't find it that goofy when characters die in combat. At least not goofier than when parties always just happen to consist of people whose skills perfectly complement each other, especially ones that form by happenstance.

> The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.

The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like "just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup" can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping. I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.

From the title I thought this was going to be about personal computers and upon opening the image I was very confused for a second. No, I don't look at what community the post is from when I'm scrolling all.

Me and my best friend played halfling twin brawlers one time who would use each other as improvised weapons and crawl in big guys Shadow if the Colossus style. It was the most fun thing ever, but the DM turned out to be the “if someone doesn’t lose a limb during every encounter I have failed” kind of DM so it didn’t last long.