A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
PC taxonomy
-
This post did not contain any content.
\#5 is always fun. Especially when I accidentally become \#1 -
Number 1: my barbarian idea was just "funny Russian man with pet bear", who dual weilds a hammer and sickle. I chose totem barbarian with a bear totem, and little did I realize that would make me practically invincibleI 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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
-
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*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.
-
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.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?
-
Where does the "ridiculous minmaxed character to game the mechanics" fit in? We had a miner/scribe once.I think that'd fall into #8, biggest explosions
-
This post did not contain any content.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
-
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?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.
-
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 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.
-
That is a lot more optimization than I'm used to. In my group people just come up with characters they want to play and the GM works with that. Mind you, we do discuss what kind of game we're playing so we don't end up with four pure noncombatants doing a dungeon crawl. But ending up with four wizards? Yeah, that might happen or even be encouraged. I really don't wanna have to discuss who has to change their character concept because we need a healer or our party composition won't be optimal.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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
-
Play identical twins.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.
-
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.Yeah ime players tell the gm what they've decided to play when they know and the understanding is they pick something that works with everything else. Or we all decide what we're playing collaboratively, that way if we're all squishy controllers at least it's on purpose
-
Oh! My first dm assigned me the god-like magical being role! It started as a group campaign and ended up being just me and her husband, and I was super new to it, so she wrote out a whole thing that my character was unaware of, and the entire story became finding out about this. My own backstory probably sucked, but my character was a fire genasi mix who was trained as a mage blade. She was purple with white eyes due to badly botching her familiar summoning spell, so she ended up with a thievy purple monkey (incapable of following directions, unless I critted the roll) instead of the phoenix she was aiming for. The dm snuck a giant gem into my inventory thanks to that sneaky thieving monkey (which caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine of a familiar that doesn’t obey fucking anything.) it ended up being an artifact from her ancestors, and unlocking the secrets of it brought out my latent goddessness. So that was a blast. Thanks for bringing up those memories! It was so long ago now..
-
One of the reasons I despair D&D is the most popular RPG. It's almost all combat, and not even great combat at that.I don't hate D&D, but I did notice how much harder combat gets from DM's side to prepare, and also how much more bored of it the players are. My players started doing everythign to spend more sessions on their own shenanigans, character moments, roleplay and NPC interactions. The thing is we love our campaign and characters, but are too high level to switch systems. So we're taking break to play short Mage: the Ascension campaign. I am now learnign two different new systems, Mage and WFRP, pray for me.
-
This post did not contain any content.One I did was "joke character who ended up being very serious."
-
I always do “every non-combat skill, useless in combat”, which is absolutely infuriating with beginner DMs because all they prepared is combat encounters and I have nothing to do
Look, if I wanted to fight, I’d go play a video game. I’m here for the part video games *cannot* give me, and that’s talking to a real person and coming up with rube-goldberg solutions to solve problems without shedding blood 
You are aware that most of DnDs mechanics are focused on simulating fights? If you do not like that, you are maybe playing the wrong system. Beyond that, how are you totally useless in combat? All classes get combat-abilities in one way or another and are designed to be at least moderately useful. -
You are aware that most of DnDs mechanics are focused on simulating fights? If you do not like that, you are maybe playing the wrong system. Beyond that, how are you totally useless in combat? All classes get combat-abilities in one way or another and are designed to be at least moderately useful.
-
Sure but what's your TTRPG character?A former foot soldier in the crusades who had a panicked war horse fall on his legs in a skirmish somewhere on the way to Antioch and was left behind in Bulgaria by a retreating supply train on his way back. His shattered leg never healed well and he is in constant pain he has mostly learned to live with, does not speak the language and is edging out a small existence as a gravedigger in a bigger city, dragging his twisted limb through rain-soaked earth, muttering prayers in a foreign dialect to saints no one there worships. Somewhere between Neutral Good and Neutral Bitter, depending on the day. I know it is a bit hammy.
