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.
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
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2: Conall. I played a loud and boisterous bard with bagpipes specifically because I intended on drinking a lot of whisky and not bothering putting on an accent other than my natural one during the one shot
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3: Kairi. Paladin who was built to make everyone around her as invincible as she was.
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5: Pech. I played a Pathfinder 2e one shot as a fairy barbarian that I specced into being able to carry a human-sized greatsword. He was more functional than I expected him to be
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6: I swear the amount of kenku I play is not a furry thing I swear
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8: Morgan. This one was Lancer rather than D&D, but look up the Death’s Head frame from Lancer and you will immediately understand why I picked it when I wanted to be able to simply point at a thing and decide that I did not want it to be there any more
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12: Absolutely the mischief-making rabbitfolk rogue who once opened a locked door by throwing a bag of spices over a rhino to annoy it and dodging aside when it charged him
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15: Whistle. Whistle is a monk who grew up under a villain and had his world view shattered when an adventuring party took said villain down. He now travels with his new friends earnestly attempting to un-learn his awful ways. He is visually an emaciated scruffy kenku wearing rags
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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
#5 is always fun. Especially when I accidentally become #1
Missing
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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
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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.
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MORE FLAWS
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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 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.
I think there’s also a pair:
- Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
- Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.
I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.
This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.
- Whatever lets me create the biggest explosions
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 😆
Being useless in combat is a personal choice that can absolutely be avoided without hampering your ability to be a skillmonkey. You won’t be obliterating the enemy en masse, but that’s what the casters are for.
Play a Thief rogue and have a blast with fast hands when initiative is rolled, or be almost any bard and hand out bardic inspiration while you stand as a mild speedbump of meat between the wizard and the enemy.
Or maybe chat with your DM about game expectations prior to playing? I know it’s an impossible ask for the internet at large.
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.
Chat with the whole party. Some of them might not be happy with you avoiding all the combat.
Absolutely, there should be some level of “okay who stands in front of the skeletons, who fireballs the skeletons, who puts the fighter back together after they get fireball’d too, and who stops the whole party from getting killed by a trap before they even reach the battle”. If you’re gasp optimizing, you might even tailor your skillmonkey around the gaps in your party’s abilities - you probably don’t need the world’s best arcana checks with a wizard in the party, but it would be nice to grab face skills if you don’t have any other charismatic fellows around.
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.
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 familytrope.
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
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?
True in pathfinder, not so true in DnD 5ed
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.
My personal favorite aspect with respect to combat is, “I look around, what objects and furniture are in the room?” Then proceed to use that stuff in combat. Long rug? I’ll attempt to trip the opponent by pulling it up. Chandelier? Yeah I’ll throw a hand axe and try to break that chain. Some DMs thrive off of it, some are put off.
Have you tried PBTA games, because the whole consequences things really push that kind of play
Ooh, or my other trope: be a cleric with heavy armor and a shield. On your first turn in combat, walk out in front of everyone, cast Shield of Faith, and take the Dodge action. As a free action, yell “come at me, fucknuts!” If you can pick up the Shield spell, you’re mostly invulnerable, and it’s pretty much viable at level 1.
You are my favourite kind of player.
One of my favorites that I ever played was a character I where I rolled my stats first and ended up getting a -3 modifier even with mulligan rolls. Every other stat was anywhere from decent to fuckin ballin’. I sat and thought about it for a minute: what stat would be fun, interesting, and challenging to have as a -3? STR would suck, INT and CHA would be anything from really annoying to insufferable or ablist to play (every VERY low int character ever in D&D podcasts is extremely cringe to listen to), so that leaves WIS and DEX. I chose DEX and said that it was because my human fighter was a war veteran with an Above Knee Amputation from the war. From there, I arrived at him using pole arms because they help him to steady himself on his peg leg outside of combat, and that he’s deeply uncomfortable with magic, since magic cost him his leg and many comrades in war.
It led to one of my all time favorite moments in an RP where he and the paladin were dining in a Giant’s great hall, having a disagreement about how to proceed, when the Paladin cast a spell on him (I can’t remember which, I want to say it was silence or Zone of Truth, but it can’t be because it specifically targeted him). My character stared him down, slugged down the rest of the drink, then flipped the table and commenced to trying to murder the paladin. It was a pretty nuts PvP fight, since we both ended up successfully avoiding the party members who were trying to restrain us, landed a few solid blows on each other, and it only ended when the Giants had had enough of our shit.
Oh shit I’ve done the same thing with the same modifier for the same reason! We used a “roll 3 6x3d6 arrays and pick one” method and the one with 5 Dex was the only interesting one of the three, so I made him a former shipwright whose leg got fucked up when a mast collapsed on it
I think he passed one dex save in his entire career
I ran a game where one of my PCs played a character with high Int and Cha and like 6 Wis. He played it very well as a character who was too clever by far but consistently made poor choices counting on his wits and charm to see him through.
Awful little creature reporting for duty
Awful little creatures make the most fun characters by far regardless of game or setting.
Every party needs one, just to keep the party moving. When the entire party is busy hemming and hawing about how to best approach an encounter, they often need a Leroy Jenkins to just axe-chop the door apart and start taking heads.
The real issue is that oftentimes, the heads belonged to the hostages that the party was there to rescue. If the awful little creature had actually paid attention at all, they would have known that. But they were grabbing their fifth beer when that part was explained, (and they wouldn’t have listened to it anyways), so they had no idea who was inside the room.
Sure but what’s your TTRPG character?
Dead. cackles
My sister always picked those lol just troublemaking groblins
I’ve taken more damage from party members trying to get me under control than from the enemy. Now they keep me on a leash.
Missing:
- god-like magical being, masquerading as Just Some Dude (closely related: The Super-Powered Self-Insert)
- Most boring, generic build available in the system, played ironically (“His name is Hugh M. N. Fi-Thor”)
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 time my buddy was running a game of Monster of the Week and I came up with the most mundane character possible: a Wisconsin corn farmer named Pete Faber, competing with angels, demons, and the miscellaneous supernatural
Sounds like he could be the next Ash Williams who works on over in housewares at S-Mart!
I can’t play with my friend because we play the same guy.
Both rogue. Both street tough types rather than the shadowy assassin type. Both used to end up taking a couple of levels of either Bard or fighter and ended up with a swashbuckler. No strength, all dex and cha.
We did play together a few times and would swap out which one of us got to play that guy. The other always played a very angry wizard. Just grumpy as shit. Good at a lot of things, but preferred to either fireball or magic missile his way out of situations. Talking to NPCs? I think I’ve got potions brewing. Must be off!
Before we played together we played the same MUD separately. Yep, same character. We ran into each other from time to time.
In high school we played at the same place but a couple of years apart. I started going when he left for the Navy. The guy who DM’ed there said my character reminded me of that guy a lot.
I want to play BG3 with him remotely and both play swashbucklers.
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.
Separated at birth. Completely oblivious to their similarity.
Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/Dzner6zTEVs
If we didn’t both know who our fathers were and if he weren’t a few years older that would absolutely describe us anyway. Went to school not far from each other and I played baseball against his younger brother, then was on the team with his brother for fall ball. Different churches that were part of the same cult. Similar teenage interests. Same social circles just a few years apart. Same branch of the military and same rate (this is where we went from being aware of each other to being friends). Both married and divorced young. Super similar career paths. Both settled in the same large city several hours from our small hometowns (I got here first, for once) and played music with the same people. Super similar adult interests completely separate from our teen interests. It’s fucking freaky. We didn’t even realize it for years until it was pointed out.
He eventually moved out east while I stayed. I’m one of like 3 people he still keeps in contact with in the state.
Have you ever thought about taking him on a trip to El Dorado?
