Betrayal
If you’ve been reading this comic for any length of time, you’ve heard me talk about my megadungeon campaign. This is Monte Cook’s Dragon’s Delve, which came packaged within the sadly defunct dungeonaday.com. Both exists now only as fond memories and PDFs. Even so, my playgroup is going on five years and 13th level, and we plan to chug all the way through to 20th.
I bring it up so that I can ask you this question: When you hear the term “megadungeon,” what do you think of? Old school crawls and labyrinthine corridors? Wandering monsters? Random encounters? My experience has certainly been all of that. It’s also been my longest contiguous game, and I’ve encountered my share of social encounters, deep roleplaying, and copious backstory as well.
Today’s comic is something of a follow-up to The Right Skills. I suggested there that, as a community, we overemphasize combat effectiveness at the expense of a well-rounded character. My years in the depths of a megadungeon gave rise to that belief. I’ve seen my pal the magus explode his share of monsters, but I’ve also seen the pure support bard save the day time and time again. Whether it’s countering a medusa’s petrifying gaze, freeing a sorcerer from a T-rex grapple, or putting ranks in all the right social skills, I can’t think of a character that has single-handedly “solved” more encounters.
In my experience, most games make it pretty tough to build a character with zero combat effectiveness. However, I think it’s all too easy to fall on the other side of things. I remember running an Exalted 2e game where a buddy of mine built a true combat monster. His guy was all martial arts all the time. He had great defenses, dealt respectable damage, and basically couldn’t die so long as he had a few motes of magic still swirling around. However, he had no way to contribute outside of combat. As soon as the talky scene started, he wound up sitting there bored to tears.
Speaking for myself, I try to answer three questions when I build a character: What will I do in combat? What will I do in social encounters? What will I do in downtime? I don’t think it needs to be much, but it does need to be something. And I’m willing to shave a point our two off of my fighter’s damage output so that he can intimidate properly or actually make that engineering check during exploration.
Such a character may not be optimized for damage output, but I find it’s a lot more interesting to play.
What do the rest of you guys think? When you build a character, do you try to hit the three pillars of adventure? Do you emphasize one over the other? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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To be able to focus on all three is my ideal character, but in the world of dump stats and MAD character concepts, they tend to underperform, or are simply outright impossible to achieve. Because of such, I tend to focus on only one or two of them…
I’m beginning to think that a better way to phrase my preference is, “I don’t like to ignore a pillar completely.” The perfectly balanced character may be near impossible to achieve, but I think you can have an “is able to contribute in most situations” character without making an underperforming jack of all trades. I don’t have to be perfectly tuned to solve all problems single-handedly, but as a player I want to be able to do stuff. I want the tools to at least try and do stuff mechanically.
The thing is, if you try to make a perfectly balanced character, you pretty much end up with something that looks like an NPC rather than an adventurer. Which isn’t bad per se, but unless there is a special theme to the campaign, the GM usually assumes you’re building a character that can take down a behloder when the time comes and makes combat around that level.
…which brings me to the topic of the day: combat, looking for combat, and asking people where to find combat. I jest, I jest, but I often don’t like the social aspect of D&D/PF, since it seems to me like it boils down to small talk until the quest giving starts, asking for directions, and the arbitrary no-fighting zone. Don’t get me wrong, brokering peace between two warring factions or disguising/bluffing your way straight to the enemy vault is fun, but the vast majority of social encounters just seems to mimic the most tedious parts of vidya.
Exploration is fun though. Investing in survival and knowledge skills never feels like a waste. I guess its because one can always (maybe) fight or elude the baddies, but some of them (particularly ones with <2 Intelligence) just might not feel like chatting, and few players play TTRPGs to feel powerless.
There is another, more personally preferred reason to all this (or maybe a result of this; not sure), and that is the fact that I assume most adventurers are social misfits. If a character wanted to become a craftsman or merchant for example, they wouldn't venture into peril of their own free will for a living. Whether it is wanderlust or solemn duty, I make characters that are adventuring partially because they want to deal with as little as day-to-day BS as possible, which includes social pleasantries.
I could also just be projecting frustrations onto these characters – that is also a possibility…
Thanks to a comment on here a few months back, I’m currently running a funky Occultist/Variant Multiclass Magus build for Pathfinder. It’s a class combo with a lot of fun tricks, most notably an “add any weapon enchant you want on the fly” ability. This dude is fairly well optimized for combat, but I made sure to take an ability called the ferryman’s slug sacred implement. I’m an Int-based caster. I’m no one’s idea of a party face. But if a situation comes up where I need to fake it, that one little ability gives me the tools to get the job done.
My point is that I’m not “perfectly balanced,” but I’m also not “perfectly optimized.” I’ve got the ability to contribute when the social situation calls for it, and that’s all I’m really after from my characters.
That’s seems more like a last resort rather than something you plan to do on a regular basis…
I’m all for having such a trick up one’s sleeve though, especially when I’m the GM making NPCs. Even the angry, xenophobic kobold sorcerers have a Charm Person or Locate Object in their repertoire.
Yay, more screen time for Magus! =^.^=
I tend to optimize for combat, but I want all my characters to be able to contribute somehow in the other two pillars. Even Martial characters get decent mental scores, and i’ll try to make good use of my skills and ribbon abilities.
5e has particular safeguards against the issue; all backgrounds come with some sort of ribbon ability, as do all classes. This allows them to contribute some of the time with unique and flavorful abilities, such as low-ranking soldiers obeying your high-ranking ex-officer character or the like. To supplement that, if two characters work together on something, the check is rolled at advantage and using the higher modifier between the two; even Lunk the Barbarian can help a Bard give a rousing speech or convince the guards to go take a break.
If nothing else, in every edition, every character has a base set of abilities and features that they can use to contribute to the other pillars. You can move, you can perceive, you can reason and think. These are all important to exploration. In social scenarios, any character can interact; even if they aren’t likely to succeed on a check, their words have meaning and relevance like anyone else.
———–
One of my favorite support characters i’ve ever played was a bit of a joke, a sexy but unintelligent blonde bimbo Bard heavily based on Melody from Josie and the Pussycats. I loved having her play the support role in social situations too, because she wasn’t really intelligent enough to handle them on her own. Instead, she let the other PCs make their arguments or tell their lies, and would simply add a bit of sex appeal to it. “Pleeease~” she’d say, full lips pouting, leaning forward a bit to show off her assets. Suddenly anything the others were saying became a lot more persuasive. =)
It took a little while to get a handle on her character, but after this comic, my mental image of Magus now involves the credulity (and voice actress) of BMO.
Oh my gosh, that’s adorable. I reread the comic in the BMO voice and it absolutely made it better.
Well bloody said! I think you’ve articulated my preferred playstyle better than I could.
I do love those background perks in 5e. They tend to come up at the strangest time, but it’s always amusing when they do.
I already made my complaints about the systems forcing people to choose between being good at combat or good at social stuff in “The Right Skills,” and IIRC I’ve also complained about how simplified the rules for social combat are compared to stabby combat (i.e. “Make a single d20 roll to see if you succeed this entire social combat”). Instead, I will raise a different issue on why, in general, everyone trying to be able to put points jnto mechanically contributing to social stuff is a discouraged by the system: mechanically, social encounters require far less teamwork than combat enocunters.
In combat, even if one guy is a combat god the encounters are almost always set up so that he alone can’t take care of it single handedly. Fighter might be good at taking hits and stabbing things, but he still needs someone to lay down AoE, someone to do the buffing and debuffing, someone who can control the battlefield, and some extra hard hitting ranged damage would also be really nice. The reason, CR is calculated to assume all of the PCs are contributing to killing it, so even a min-maxed out the wazoo level 9 fighter can’t just solo a cloud giant, or the gnoll hoard with the shamans in the back. And even guys who are very social can usually contribute, since the system places combat first and social guys usually have access to various buff and debuffs, and sometimes even controls (see the first two examples of your bard buddy.)
Now contrast with social encounters. There is no CR for them, no way to calculate it for the whole group contributing. What do you need to be good in those? First, you’ll need god-like social skills, and maybe so illusion and enchantment abilities. Some good knowledge checks are good so you know what you’re talking about but not strictly necessary. But you only need one person good with any one of those. If one guy knows enchantments, it’s often a waste for another to as well. And usually, a single person in the party can hit every one of those by themself. The bard, the arcanale trickster, the face sorcerer, the god wizard, they can get all of those and still contribute decently in combat. Yes, there are times when the entire party gets in on coordinating an elaborate scam or something, but 95% of the time the face can just handle the social encounter themself no problem.
Going back to your bard example, he may have been singlehandedly solved more problems than anyone else, but I ask, how many of those problems would have been substantially easier if your group had another social god? Or how many social encounters ended with you saying “We probably could have dealt with that if only more of us could have contributed?”
Goddamn I love talking about games. The starting assumptions fascinate me no end.
If I’m reading you right, you’re coming at this from an encounter-design perspective: “How does the group overcome the challenge?” In that sense I think that you make solid points. So did MSK in another comment, who had this to say:
In other words, you can already contribute by default, so why would you want to waste resources making your character perform redundant social actions?
For me, it comes down to player experience rather than encounter design. As a player, my mantra is simple: “DO STUFF.” If I’m unable to do stuff in combat because I’m stunned or dazed, I can only sit there bored to tears. If I’m unable to do stuff because my abilities are irrelevant, that’s just as boring. And if significant portions of the game involve talking and exploring, I want my actions to have a mechanical impact there too. The alternative is a functional inability to DO STUFF, and (for me anyway) that’s no bueno.
Here’s an example. Remember when my players formed a dungeon exploration union? The big dumb fighter had spent a lot of time and effort making friends with the town’s sheriff. This fighter works as a patrol captain in his off time, and so has a close relationship with the Watch, sheriff included. During this big social scene, our bard was busy organizing the guild charter and outmaneuvering the other adventurers in town. It therefore came to this big dumb fighter to make sure the sheriff was on board for the plan. After all, an organized band of the most powerful people in town could be a dangerous thing for a little community. During the scene our bard could have excused herself, rolled a crazy-high Diplomacy check against the sheriff, and gone back to politicking without any real penalty. However, that would have been a far less satisfying moment within the fiction. It certainly would have been less satisfying for the big dumb fighter, who got to leverage his relationship with the sheriff and make his own Diplomacy score relevant.
For me, the talky scenes aren’t just for the talky characters. I want to interact with them too. That has more to do with building engaging fiction than overcoming a difficult challenge.
It seems this is more of a difference in play-style philosophies. For me, my mantra as a player is less “Do stuff” and more “This is the goal, this is the obstacle, these are the resources we have or can get. How do we overcome it?” I’m always afraid if I take up the “do stuff” mantra I may fall prey to *shiver* politician logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trw1PbQt_Yo
This is also my biggest hesitant in taking non-specialized abilities which sends me from bad to mediocre in an area, if it is at the expense of choosing abilities that help me be better at what I am already good at. I think this quote from the Giantitp “New Warlock’s Handbook [3.5, WIP]” sums up my thoughts on the matter best:
“Just as it is possible to over-specialize, it is also possible to over-generalize. It’s easy to become the “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”–just pick from the “good” invocations you get a list of seemingly useful invocations that don’t complement each other in the least. Now you can do a little bit of combat, a little bit of social interaction, a little bit of scouting, and a little bit of sneaking, but you can’t do combat well enough to play the combat role (meaning the group still needs a brute), social interaction enough to play the social role (meaning the group still needs a face), scouting enough to play the scout role (meaning the group still needs a scout), or sneaking enough to play a sneak (meaning the group still needs a rogue-like). Congratulations: you’ve just become the fifth wheel. The problem gets worse if you happen to be bad enough at each of these roles, as the brute has to waste hit points protecting you in combat, the face has to struggle through a social encounter to get past your blunders, the scout hardly sees the point in your even trying to look, and you and the sneak get exposed when you fail your Move Silently check. At this point, you’ve gone from fifth wheel to spare tire: you’re literally only useful when one of the four falls flat, and they only need you to get you to the next stop so they can patch up the old one (or replace you with a new one).”
For this reason, in a solo or even dual campaign I am perfectly happy with my fighter taking a few more interaction and social abilities, because the group simply doesn’t have the resources to deal with those problems otherwise. However, once you get that bard who can bluff and lie her way out of murdering someone in the middle of the town square at noon, it ends up hurting the group as a whole when meatshield mcstabthemdead becomes less good at taking and dealing damage to try to solve problems that the bard can already solve far better than he could ever dream.
I should be clear that I am not saying that only the face should be doing stuff in the social encounters, or only the scout should be involved in exploring. Far from it. I love the story of the big dumb fighter growing a close relationship with the sheriff and using it to get his help, but imho that falls more under roleplay than rollplay (if I were GM, I would be using Rich Burlew’s diplomacy rules that would give a big bonus to the fighter for taking the time to befriend the sheriff and trying to help the community, which helps compensate for stat limitations if the you excell at the RP side).
In one game I am playing a treant sapling (only about 100 years old) who nevertheless has a much calmer and methodical approach to the rest of the world than the rest of the party. Even though I dumped charisma, he still can offer unique insights and ask questions the rest of the party doesn’t think of (most of the party are newbs, so he gets to play both a mentor role and a “meatshield” role). Even when we aren’t fighting, these insights still contribute meaningfully to the RP and social stuff. However, if ever there comes a time when we need to bluff or roll some persuasion checks on the guy we just met, I leave that to our bard to solve.
Differing playstyles indeed! For me, doing nothing is infinitely worse than doing the wrong thing. That’s because the goal (again, within my playstyle) is to create cool moments rather than to solve an encounter. When I spot a new player struggling to decide whether she should shoot the monster or start her bardic perfomance, my go to phrase is, “Do what sounds awesome!” Even if a character screws up, we the players still get to have fun watching it. In other words, my primary enjoyment of the hobby is watching stuff happen. Choosing the most optimal stuff is strictly secondary.
I think this has a lot to do with GM style. If we’re in a meatgrinder, I’m not going to devote too many resources to abilities in the “not killing monsters” category. That’s why the megadungeon in my OP is an interesting paradigm for me. Even there, in a game where I would have thought we were dealing with combat-first design, the challenges are varied enough that jack-of-all-trades types are valuable. This is especially true because that campaign is structured such that the aforementioned bard is present less than half the time (it’s the campaign I’ve talked about where everyone has 2 PCs, and players are explicitly free to show up or not to any given session). In that environment, generalization is more valuable because party composition changes frequently. More to the point though, even when these non-optimized characters get together as the party of the week, they manage to overcome challenges without too much struggle.
I guess what I’m saying is that, from my experience, the “spare tire” issue is a theoretical rather than a practical problem.
I’ll admit that my playstyle does leans much, much more to the “do what sounds awesome” side in Mutants and Masterminds than in D&D. I think that’s because Mutants and Masterminds is both far less lethal than D&D and the system both expects and encourages (both in fluff and mechanics) doing crazy awesome stuff.
Difference in edition may account for it somewhat as well. 5e makes it pretty hard to make your character that bad. Realistically you’d have to try to make it bad. Even if you aren’t the best at anything, you’ll still be good enough at those things to make it worth your while. That’s sort of why 5e Bards are so powerful compared to past editions.
That’s likely true. In other editions, I think there’s a “baseline effectiveness” though. I’m imagining your classic greatsword fighter when I say that. In 3.X, if you’re a full BAB character with a great sword and power attack, everything else tends to be gravy. That’s why I’m comfortable giving my half-orc barbarian…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/charactersheet.png
…a few ranks in Craft (weapons). He contributes just fine, even if he does have some less-than-optimal abilities.
That’s true, but you do run into a fundamental limitation of 3.5 and presumably Pathfinder. As you level and DCs inflate, “a few ranks” becomes less and less useful. The gulf between someone who put a few ranks in a skill and someone who increases the skill every level becomes ever wider. You could have 3 points and someone else could have 15 points. Your 3 points probably wouldn’t be very useful.
5e adds proficiency bonus and ability score mod together to determine your skill mod. This is nice, because under normal circumstances proficiency scales to +6 while ability scores scale to +5, giving proficiency extra weight by middle to higher levels. With DCs typically scaling up to no higher than 25 (“Nearly Impossible”), a proficient character who has a modest ability score stands a good chance of success at a variety of skills.
One place 5e messed up, in my opinion, was with static bonuses to skills. 5e was all about keeping the numbers in check, but they didn’t for skills for some reason. Whether it’s the doubled proficiency bonus of Expertise or the static +10 stealth bonus from Pass Without Trace, it’s more possible to fall off the dice with skill checks than any other aspect of the game. IMO, they should have made Expertise an Advantage effect instead. You can tell I’m being objective about this because I’m seriously advocating that they nerf my beloved Rogues in some way.
Yeah as awesome as Expertise feels to have, it really does break the whole part where everyone with proficiency SHOULD be able to effectively participate in a skill check regardless of what their stats are.
Expertise granting Advantage wouldn’t really break much that I’m aware of, so I’ll agree that would have been a better way to handle it.
Over the last couple years I’ve been refining a little RPG system (targeting my kids). I try to enforce a balance between combat and non-combat skills by requiring the number of one category to be no more than double of the other. So if you have 6 combat powers and 3 non-combat powers, you’ll need to take another non-combat one before you can boost combat effectiveness.
In D&D this is solved by forcing everyone to take a little bit of non-combat stuff via the skills system, but I always felt that all felt a bit disjointed from the rest of the game. D&D is a very combat-oriented RPG, judging by where the complexity in the rules exists.
That is an excellent point. Despite 4e style skill challenges and 3rd party offerings like the Skill Challenges Handbook…
http://paizo.com/products/btpy9tec?Skill-Challenge-Handbook
…the game as written is laser focused on combat. However, I find that adventure stories in general are more varied than combat after combat. You’ll have to talk to the quest giver. You’ll have to find a way across the pit. You’ll have to persuade the king. The rules aren’t necessarily present to support this interaction, at least not in as satisfying a way as a combat encounter. The story goes there anyway. When it does, I want to be able to affect the scene.
By megadungeon i’d imagine something thats pratically a world in and of itself with its own ecology and whatnot. Like, a plane of dungeon who’s basicly just one titanic, endless three-dimensional dungeon.
I’m not sure if there’s a technical definition, but in my mind it’s more of a campaign style than a physical place. In my lexicon, the megadungeon campaign involves The Town and The Dungeon as your primary locations. The entire campaign takes place in these two places.
I wish that dungeonaday.com was still live so I could point you towards the “dungeon design assumptions” page. Lots of good info there. I’ll try and remember to sort through my PDFs and see if I can’t find an equivalent explanation.
In the meantime, this is a pretty accurate portrait: http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-deepest-weirdest-hugest-megadungeons-ever-created-1568767965
Real nice to see Thief succeeding at something. =)
Megadungeon…. basically the same sorts of things I think when I hear “dungeon crawl”… just bigger/longer/more extreme?
I will admit that sometimes I fail to think about a character doing a full range of activities when building them.
I’ll also admit that I really should probably try and give every character I meet some kind of social skill as I often find myself as a player wanting to have my character convince/lie to people and realizing that my character actually has no chance of successfully doing so.
In part I blame issues like the fact that 5e D&D doesn’t give you as many proficient skills as I tend to want to have for a character. Like the designers thought I would like be make a “ninja” or “pirate” style character that can only likely succeed at doing half the things a ninja or pirate can do for some reason? Such things always make me wonder what he designers were aiming for.
Also I’ll always wonder why Intimidation is Charisma based instead of “your choice of Charisma or Strength”. It really makes no sense that you can silently glare at someone while bending a steel beam and the impression they’re likely to get is “Well that’s the worst balloon animal I’ve ever seen!”
*make. Not meet.
Yah. I’ve been annoyed by Pathfinder’s solution a time or two myself:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/intimidating-prowess-combat-final/
I’ve got to spend a feat on that mess? Ripoff! I’d actually considered making a comic about Bard out-intimidating Fighter by threatening to use an accordion, but the joke never quite came together.
That’s all I’m really advocating for here. I don’t think that you should tank your character’s combat effectiveness in the name of being well-rounded, but I think you want to have something to do when the talky scene comes up. I just want to enjoy all parts of the game, you know?
I bet this would be a less common issue to run across if games were less stingy with skills.
5e is less stingy with skills than any other edition i’ve played. There are only 18 skills out there, and everyone starts with a minimum of 4 proficient skills. Certain races and classes have the option for more skills, and even more can be obtained by feats and multiclassing.
I have a skill-optimized 5e character; she is proficient in 17 of the 18 skills (screw Medicine), has Expertise in 8 of them, can become proficient in any skill or tool for a short time once per short rest, has half her proficiency bonus added to any remaining ability check of any sort, and can’t roll lower than 10+mod for any of them. She literally cannot fail Easy or Medium DC checks for any ability except unskilled Strength checks, and she has potions for that situation.
Sure you CAN do that. But having everyone at a minimum of 4 out of 18 means *most* characters aren’t going to have more than 6. And if we want people to be able to have something of use in all the main types of situations while also still being able to fit a character concept, you’re probably going to need more than that.
I do agree though, screw Medicine. =P
The fact that your character hasn’t maxed out Diplomacy doesn’t mean you can’t talk during social interactions. If you choose not to participate, that’s on you, but I’ve met very few GMs who like to see everything resolved with just roll of the dice. Most of them and most players do like to try to talk things out a bit, although there are exceptions I’m sure. In my experience, the dice really only need to come out when the characters have reached some kind of impasse where no one on either side is willing to budge. If you Orc Barbarian, who’s of the “Brog smash!” type, suddenly offers a stirring soliloquy on the dignity of man, maybe that’s a tad out of character…or you could play it off as some previously unexplored bit of backstory. Make it work.
Also, I know that “don’t split the party” is dogma for a lot of players, but like with everyone else I think that has caveats. It should apply for dungeons where you don’t want the GM to have to be mapping and plotting simultaneous encounters, but in town it’s perfectly acceptable IMO; the party doesn’t need to traipse everywhere tripping on each other’s heals, videogame-style. One GM that I had did it in-between sessions sometimes, so we could keep things moving. You’d email him with what you wanted your character to do or look into or who they are talking to, and he’d respond with any followup options or requests for detail, and at the start of next week’s session he’d hand you a note with what you found out or accomplished.
Which led to at least one hilarious situation where my LG-monk “forgot” to mention that we were being offered a reward for solving some problem and the rest of the party learned to start double-checking anything I reported back on. Sometimes your actions help advance the plot and sometimes the rest of your party has to run damage-control, but if you’ve got nothing to do outside of combat, then IMO that’s only because you are actively choosing not to do anything.
There’s a lot of truth to that (at least in my opinion). However, there’s also a lot of controversy. Check the comments over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/gather-information
If you’re a smooth talker with a lenient GM, you can certainly get away with dumping your social stats. However, my preference for abilities that give advantages in social encounters or exploration goes a little beyond that. You see, one of my favorite things in gaming is watching rules reflect character. I like to describe the game world in the language of system rather than the language of…well…language. So while you can get away with a flowery speech to the king with only a +3 in the Talk Good skill, I find it jarring conceptually. If I’m a daring charlatan with a flair for disguise, I want the Actor feat:
http://engl393-dnd5th.wikia.com/wiki/Feats
I can get away with the same actions without it, but it doesn’t have the same feel.
That’s my preference anyway. YMMV.
This isn’t about getting away with anything unless you’re trying to minmax- being good at something and having something to do are two entirely different criteria, especially when it comes to social interactions.
In that game I just mentioned, there were only 2 characters in our party that mechanically benefitted from a high Wisdom score, and only 2 characters that had Sense Motive as a class skill- my Monk was the only one with both. The total number of ranks I had in the Sense Motive skill? Zero.
I was playing my character as a young, naive fresh-out-of-the-monastery adventurer, who learned most of what he knew from listening to his mentor’s stories and came across as almost tooth-achingly saccharine. I would actively refuse to make Sense Motive checks when the GM called for them.
It lead to such great in-character moments as “I trust this person to much to believe that they would lie to me” and “You need to get your head out of some fantasy novel and into the real world!” Both of which dragged the game to a screeching halt for a few moments while people pondered the ridiculousness of them. I was having great fun by playing up my incompetence (or at least my unwillingness to try and be competent). Despite that fact that Charisma was my dump stat and most of my other social skills were abysmal, I was still great in combat and the only member of the party who everyone else knew would take a bullet for them without question, so they didn’t want to leave me behind.
Someone later described my character as coming across as like a kitten with a machine-gun. You don’t know whether you should be running away from or towards this situation, but you know that whenever I opened my mouth something entertaining was going to happen because of it.
Sounds like a fun character. And in a weird way, I think that dumping Sense Motive fulfills my social encounter requirement: when the social encounter comes up, you have something to do. It’s probably not going to “solve” the encounter, and it will almost definitely lead to negative consequences when you inevitably trust the BBEG’s lies. However, that naivety is enough to push the scene on towards the next story beat. “Why yes. I do believe you. Please lead me into the ambush.” That’s not effective in game terms, but it is entertaining in narrative terms.
Players like yourself who can turn a mechanical weakness into a roleplaying strength are great. But what I don’t want is to watch players without that talent look at their character sheets, see a bunch of rules that mean “hit things harder,” and decide that they won’t participate in non-combat encounters.
Then those people need to take a course in remedial roleplaying.
Maybe it’s just me though- I’ve always been more of a roleplayer than minmaxer. Where someone else can take nothing but tier 4 and 5 classes and build some sort of uber-damager that can solo anything the GM throws at us, I’m busy figuring out whats the perfect phrase for sounding both perfectly natural and yet will affect everyone else’s plans like a tactical carpet bombing. That’s my thing, and it just bugs me people suggest that they can’t roleplay without mechanics to back it up, because it strikes me as being unimaginative and lazy. I know now that it’s not, and I’ve gotten better about sharing the limelight, but it’s still one of those pet peeves of mine.
Not everyone plays for the express purpose of saying “the perfect phrase.” Some gamers look at D&D as a series of challenges to be overcome through tactical play. Check out the conversation I was having with Bill for reference. My contention is that, to help these playstyles align, it’s best to have a way to contribute mechanically to non-combat encounters.
How about an example? I played in a 5e game last night that offers a good illustration of the principle in action. The warlock knew Undercommon and so had to be the one to make the Charisma (Persuasion) check against a duergar priest. The bard offered inspiration, the sorcerer offered the Help action (in the form of whispered suggestions to the warlock), and the party as a whole rolled a 29 on the check. Multiple people got to contribute to the success of the encounter, and each of them had a mechanical means to do so. The game rules reflected the RP situation and vice versa. To my way of thinking, that’s a satisfying social encounter.
You should do a compendium with picture included eventually of all the “PC class” characters we’ve seen so far. That’d be nice.
True that. A little bio next to each character would help too. “Fighter is That Guy… Inquisitor is the leader of Team Bounty Hunter… Barbarian brings muscle to The Antiparty… Etc. etc.” The need is only going to become more pressing as the $10 level of the Patreon has us producing a new character every month.
I know Laurel’s production schedule is pretty packed, but I’ll see if we can’t squeeze in the “who’s who page” in the next couple.
All my group are great roleplayers, but a couple of them have the Must Optimise gene and their characters are always capable of pulling off something spectacular. Because they’re nice spotlight sharers, they just don’t do it *all* the time, which took a bit of trust from me (I vanish in games, I’m the anti-spotlight) but actually works really well.
It hasn’t always been awesome, as playing WoW we had a vicious circle for a while when one character, being the best DPS class and build, would keep getting given awesome loot as a reward and then people wondered why nobody was catching up… I’ve seen precisely that happen in tabletop games with different groups and it’s the most infuriating thing! “Well, he did all the work so you get like a quarter of the XP between you.” Ain’t nobody catching up with him now.
Is that XP-sharing thing from particular system, or is it strictly homebrew? I could picture that causing a lot of bad blood in games. 🙁
Well, if I’ve built her right, Lini the Archaeologist should be able to stab, disarm, or trip in combat, find and disarm traps, know about anything, or chat her way past guards in any language.
Do you find yourself making many Diplomacy checks, or does your group generally RP through social encounters?
A little bit of both. We RP the situation mostly but some situations need a roll to see if it works. There was one time where the Oread mage managed to negotiate a demon leaving the realm and not coming back. The only reason to make the Diplomacy roll was to see if the demon would actually agree to leave or not.
Right on. I only bring it up because, if you’re a good roleplayer, it’s easy to dump a point or two in Diplomacy and call it a day. I like to have a little something extra mechanistically speaking.
I tagged this thing onto a recent lunar character:
http://ninjasensei.wikidot.com/lunarcharms:blood-kin-sense
In Pathfinder terms, I picked up the ferryman’s slug on my latest occultist:
https://aonprd.com/OccultistImplementsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Necromancy
The “inspire fits of grief” bit was interesting enough to give me some extra RP “business” beyond straight talking. For me anyway, it’s that kind of added flavor that helps to distinguish how one character approaches RP situations differently from another. YMMV of course. 🙂
Interesting.
My first Pathfinder Society character was re-plotted to be the party face, since he had a +2 to his Charisma, and none of the others had a positive charisma bonus at all. So, the wizard was the party face, and the others did the fighting. I even picked half my spells to boost my skills or make it more likely to succeed.
By level 8, I had a +20 on my Diplomacy skill, which was surprisingly useful, since it also was used for gathering information.
With an Int modifier of +Lots, wizards make surprisingly good skill monkeys. I remember making my last arcane caster good at horseback riding just because I could. (Dude found himself in the company of knights and such. He wanted to fit in.)