Competition
I think I mentioned way back when that I came to D&D late in life. It was Laurel’s dad’s group that took me in. They were patient, explained how the rules worked, and (since this was 3.5) they re-explained when I got confused. They even incorporated a few of my crackpot ideas into the game (My dragon paladin is from an ancient civilization buried beneath your setting! You’ve never heard of it!). But there is an incident that sticks out in my mind as a hiccup on the road to good gaming. It involved a wrestling match.
That long-ago campaign had been going for years, and there was a pretty-dang-beefy half-giant in the party. She was a barbarian with a Strength score well into the 30s, and was very much the group’s “me smash puny weaklings!” PC. You know the type: lots of rage and muscle attached to a short fuse and a low Int score. I’d improvised some bizarre “in my country we settle legal disputes through gladiatorial combat” backstory, and so described myself as a lawyer. I forget what exactly caused the argument, but looking back, I think that my gold-dragon-lawyer-paladin sounds pretty punchable. Suffice it to say that this half-giant and I stumbled into some sort of disagreement. We wound up going no-holds-barred in the t̶a̶v̶e̶r̶n̶ square ring, and that’s where the trouble started.
Now it was the GM that built my character for me. He knows what he’s doing when it comes to optimizing, and it turned out that he’d given me a slightly OP dude. He must have figured that the extra oomph would make up for my lack of experience. When it comes to “who can roll higher on a contested Grapple check” however, skill doesn’t really enter into it. I won handily at the thing Ms. Giant was supposed to be best at. The giant was less than pleased, and so was the player. Can’t say that I blame her.
I suspect that the classic lineup of fighter/cleric/wizard/thief is popular not simply because it works, but because it gives everybody a clearly defined role. Fighter is the best at fighting. Thief gets to be the skill guy. Wizard and Cleric handle offensive and defensive magic respectively, and everybody feels like they’re the best at their own thing. Having a well-defined role in the group allows you to carve out your own little chunk of conceptual real estate. You’re the lord of your chosen domain, and that feeling ties straight into the lizard brain power fantasy at the heart of this hobby. Finding out that some Johnny-come-lately has come to kick you off of your property makes your character feel lesser: less powerful, less interesting, and certainly less special.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever gamed with a player who horned in on your territory? How did you resolve it? Let’s hear it down in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
Hmmm. For me this is more an issue *during* character creation.
I did have the most bizarre example just recently. Started a game only to realize every single member of the party was made to be some level of party face. Even the SINGLE character who doesn’t have a charisma of 14+ has training in Persuasion.
We of course have no high Intelligence or Wisdom characters. Because why would you? *facepalm*
(I also am not blaming the players for this. The GM had more than enough people signed up as potential players. They could have made SOME attempt at picking options for an at all in any way balanced party.)
While I was paging through the backlog to make sure we hadn’t already done this gag, I came across this sort-of-on-topic comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/know-your-role
Here’s the relevant bit:
Of course, that’s better advice for homebrew than an adventure path. Printed materials sometimes have a way of assuming that you’ve got all the tools at your disposal.
You pretty much just described my 5e party for elemental evil party, we had 2 sorcerers, my revised ranger-warlock multiclass, and a rogue with decent face skill as well. The only non face character was our cleric. At first, we pretty much all just alternated in who played the face, but it ended up with us typically acting as hype man for our 6 int water genasi storm sorcerer Alex Jones as we worked together to take over the water cult. We had planned together to then use the cult to fight the other cults and end with them all destroying each other, but eventually Alex Jones became evil and started truly working to help the water cult win. This kinda caused the destruction of the party, leading us to make a bunvh of evil guys to continue the campaign as part of the water cult, in which 3 of us made necromancers, but as i was the only one who had actually made a backstory for his yet, we kept mine, and the others made different guys. That part ended in only 3 sessions as one guy became possesed by a elemental evil fire, which ultimately ended with both the water and fire cults destroyed, earth weakened, leaving air, which was naturally the weakest, to win.
That is basically the most “yup, that’s how roleplaying goes” story I’ve ever heard.
That seems awfully verbose for Magus.
Fun little behind the scenes fact about that. When I first pitched this comic to Laurel, it was Summoner and the eidolon Rouge facing off against Oracle and Barbarian. We ultimately decided that Ranger / Barbarian were closer conceptually, so swapped in the gals from Team Bounty Hunter.
Honestly, I think this specific page would be much better if you cut the spoken dialogue. It feels too long for Magus’s angry cheer-scowl to work. Or just cut it down to “c’mon, [x]!”
x = Skank, or some other low-grade expletive.
We’ve had at least one reader refer to Ranger as Barbarian in the past. The idea here is to lampshade the characters’ unintentional similarity, and we needed some kind of dialogue to drive home the point.
Could we have given Magus/Oracle pithier lines? Nope. The dialogue is the most perfect that human invention could ever hope to devise. 😛
Can you change my name in the other comment awaiting moderator approval, or delete it entirely? I’m The Rocktopus, I have no intention of using my real name.
Changed.
Closest to that ever happening was when a fellow player and I were both making replacement characters after a bad encounter.
I remember distinctly my GM telling me about how the other player wanted to get a couple of UMD skill ranks on her Inquisitor (note: Pathfinder, level 3 characters) and my GM told her “yeah maybe you shouldn’t, you’ll be upstaged”.
My character was a non-caster with +18 to UMD at level 3, so yeah, he was right.
As an occultist with a burning desire to get to +19 UMD ASAP, ima need to know how you managed that.
It’s almost definitely not worth it, lemme tell you that, but if you’re prepared for a bumpy first-5-levels, it’s easy.
Dangerously curious trait: +1
Magical Aptitude: +2
Skill Focus (UMD): +3
3 ranks + class skill: +6
18 charisma: +4
MWK tools: +2
MWK tools for UMD might be questionable by the GM, but with some nice flavouring and a reasonable limitation, they’d be too strict not to allow it.
And later on you can retrain your feats, so it’s not a problem. The game I play this in also had decent feat tax rules, so I didn’t feel too bad using my level 1 feat and my human feat on UMD.
Unfortunately as occultist you probably can’t afford to have high charisma, but Magic Item Skill should make up for it by level 4 or so
Happily, pragmatic activator covers for the poopy Charisma score. It’s practically mandatory for the class. Good call on the masterwork tools though. I may have to give that a try.
Circlet of Persuasion. It’s for some reason listed as a +3 to “All charisma based checks”. It doesn’t actually specify social checks. I don’t think they realised UMD was charisma based when they wrote it and were too lazy to go back and fix it.
Back in college, I spent a summer moving furniture in and out of dorm rooms so that they could be re-carpeted. It was hot as hell in the moving vans, but the pay was OK and I saved on air fare back home. I bring it up because that job came packaged with the best coworker I’ve ever had the privilege to work with: a refrigerator-shaped man named Roy. He was this huge, bald, Mike Ditka-looking guy with a love of 80s pop music. His favorite movie was freaking “Xanadu” with Olivia Newton-John, and I remember this 40-year-old man cranking the volume and belting out the chorus whenever it came on the radio.
We were talking about persuasion, right? Well Roy was also one of the strongest son of a bitches I’ve ever known. The hundred-odd beds we had to take apart every day were these obnoxious slotted things, and the steel springs were prone to jam inside the headboards.
“Hey Roy! This one’s stuck.”
“Yeah? Let me persuade it a little.”
Then he’d grab a nearby hammer or bolt cutters or another freaking bed and persuade the ever loving shit out of the stubborn furniture.
My point is that inanimate objects can be uncooperative. Sometimes you have to persuade them a little.
Here in the Persuasion business (aka fabrication, the non-spell version) we call that Percussive Maintenance and it’s the only way to truly convince certain things.
The “what kind of tool does this skill use?” has come up once or twice; I once read an account that the tool for the Truename skill was a megaphone.
I think a GM would be within their rights to say that you can’t apply tools to a skill that didn’t require tools in the first place. Masterwork lockpicks? Makes sense, as would a camo-outfit for Hide or crampons for Climbing. But some of it also starts to get real silly real fast, like waterwings for Swim or “masterwork rope” for Use rope.
What’s wrong with a “wand extender” for Use Magic Device?
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/victoria-von-hagen-holding-a-cigarette-holder-erwin-blumenfeld.jpg
There’s nothing WRONG with it exactly, it’s just a little…odd.
It’s like, most things in 3.5 have very specific rules with very specific limitations, and then occasionally out of nowhere WotC would include something entirely open-ended (and usually 10 times as abusable). As if late on the night before everything went to the printers, someone with a wildly different design philosophy was sneaking into the office and making small changes to the latest edition so no one else could catch it and stop them.
I don’t think that you can feel “upstaged” with UMD; it’s one of those skills that, like Perception and Sense Motive, is “the more the merrier”. It’s also not really an archetype-defining skill, unless the archetype you’re going for is charlatan mage. It is a very all-or-nothing skill, however, and you’re not going to get that much out of it unless you invest at least enough to reliably hit wand/scroll DCs. I think at least 1/3 of the characters in one of my gaming groups have ranks in UMD.
It was more of a “don’t bother trying to do it, someone else does it better” situation. Considering the Inquisitor character had maximum +6 on her UMD, she couldn’t reliably use any magic items with it, while I could. So she was better off just spending the ranks elsewhere and hitting things with her falchion. The “person using utility scrolls and wands” was kinda part of the role I was filling.
In a high-level situation, sure, having more people that can reliably use magic items can be useful, but at our level, the most likely scenario was she’d fail to use a wand a couple of times and I’d be like “okay, give me that, I’ll show you how to do it”
Not concept territory so much, but I’ve been in a few games where a houserule gave some of my class features away to everyone.
One was where my friend, a wizard, convinced the DM that the spell points variant in the DMG would make his character more fun. For those not aware, it’s basically the same as the sorcerer’s font of magic ability, but if all your spells started as points (meaning no conversion cost). It is intended as an alternate method of creating monsters with spell-like abilities, not as a player option.
Another was at a table with what I think is the most common houserule: that potions can be used as a bonus action. As a thief rogue, my problem was that my fast hands ability was now pointless. Other than potions, it doesn’t have much utility (RAI it cannot be used to activate a magic item), and once everyone got that ability, I felt like I lost a class power.
In both of these cases, the houserule did not in any way actually make my character worse overall, but both ended up helping other people a lot more. As wonderfully put by a movie villain, “When everyone’s super, no one is”.
I feel ya. I told this story a while back, but I was running an especially wonky Pathfinder character in a recent campaign. I’d done some multiclassing shenanigans with the magus and the occultist so that I could eventually add any weapon enchant on the fly. You give up quite a bit to make it happen, but I thought it was a worthwhile trade.
Another dude in the game was running vanilla magus. It can enhance a weapon in limited ways, but it cannot do the Swiss Army knife trick.
Dude: “Hey GM, can I add a special weapon property to my weapon instead of the normal +1?”
GM: “Sure!”
Me: Kermit_Face.jpg
I’ve never even heard of that potions houserule before.
The use it on Critical Role, so it gets a lot of exposure.
Potions are magic items too, you can’t use them with Fast Hands. If you want healing with your Fast Hands, take the Healer feat. Otherwise, it’s still useful for throwing fire, acid, or holy water, roping or chaining up a grappled foe, poisoning your weapons, throwing ball bearings and caltrops, and other more niche uses.
Why do my comments await moderation now?
Let me check in with Laurel. She’s the web designer in this duo.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I asked her to find a way for users to edit comments and apply formatting yesterday. There’s been quite a bit of user feedback on that point, and I’d like to implement something. I bet there’s a new plugin in need of tweaking.
I’ve built many characters and seen some that just tend to do everyones job, as can happen when there are different levels of optimization in party. Ideally i like to encourage all players to go for shooting the chandelier type options. People may have the same characters, but being creative in how you use the build makes the characters feel very different. Ive had 2 lance based barbarians in the same party before and because one was super defensive and tried basically to play the protector, and the other was big bad lancy lancy stabby stabby thry felt different. Usually builds have mutiple roles they can fill, and splitting up who does what helps
So rather than hashing it out before the game, you’re saying it can be fun to allow the characters to diverge through the course of play. That’s a neat idea, but it’s definitely an “it depends on the players” sort of solution. I’m thinking of a pair of summoners I had in a 3.X game. It’s was tough for them to plop down the same critters at the same level without getting a little competitive.
Really? I’d feel bad for the other players, not the two who take 12 turns per round and kill everything.
The monsters suffered. The players suffered. The summoned creatures suffered. Zon-Kuthon was a happy camper though.
I personally don’t usually have this problem, as I have a huge list of character concepts and usually choose which one to go with last to fill whatever niche in the party is missing. One campaign I joined though had an extreme case of this: when I joined there were five other players. One was a rogue, and the other four were fighters. I decided to go with a wizard because we really, really needed some Int and utility casting. Fortunately most of them were noobs, and the GM let them respec a bit as they level (one switched to paladin, one to ranger, one to bard, and the last stayed a fighter.) Still, that was a lot of BSF in one party. And if I’m being honest, it made my little wizard feel a bit more special. It felt quite nice to hit the chokepoint with a Grease and give all of the fighters big bonuses to the prone baddies, or a clever suggestion to get the lizardfolk bandits helping us deal with the water weird under the bridge. And I had a lot of meatshields to cover for me.
I’m beginning to see why Gandalf was into it:
http://periannath.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/partybalance_500x400.jpg
We usually build with the Healer, DPS, Skill Monkey, Tank, Support, etc… roles in mind.
So usually each character will take on a couple of these and there is either little overlap and everyone has clear-cut roles to play, or some or most overlap and it’s accepted that there is less of a chance that the party looses something vital if a character is incapacitated.
“Both of our characters are strong enough to hold open a castle gate? Well it just so happens that most castles have an inner and outer gate…”
“We both have amazing Stealth? Stealth Buddy Time!”
“Yay! One of our healers went down but the other picked him back up!”
Mostly it only gets stuffy if a character concept is getting dangerously close to another…
“YOU’RE a Stealth Ninja? Me too!”
“We’re like Barbarian Sisters!”
Although a completely asymmetrical party sounds kinda fun to me…
The three town guards finally climb out of the rubble that was their patrol area of the city wall, only to find the city burned and gone… now what?
I’ve always wanted to do an “all rogues” or an “all bards” game. I mean, who hasn’t thought about being their own thieves guild or touring as a heavy metal band? The only dude in my group that actually followed through on one of those concepts ran a Pathfinder gestalt game where everyone had to choose vigilante as one of their classes.
On the off chance you’re not familiar:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/vigilante/
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/gestaltCharacters.htm
D&D&Superheroes sounds pretty hilarious to me.
In 5e, an all bard group could actually end up being really powerful and versatile due to all the different rolles the class can fill.
It’d just be a rough start. Bards take time to come online with their various roles, starting with skills and support casting before working up to more powerful offensive casting and martial prowess.
True, it would be rough early, though i would say the group would become fairly good by around 3, and just keep scaling up well in capability from there.
The group I play with have thought about an all Bard campaign several times (mostly as a joke).
We have mused about different memes or genres, such as the all Skald band with armor spikes and black n white face paint.
We ran a campaign where we were only allowed to choose martial classes, and potions and magic items were near impossible to find. I ended up being the “healer” which was about as effective as kissing the boo-boo and telling the character to toughen up. After a bad combat, we’d have to lay low for weeks while people healed up.
The Pathfinder Heal skill sucks.
We houseruled that actually:
10 Minutes + 1 use of a Healer’s kit
Heal character for 1/2 Heal check result rounded down.
Can be aided.
Can be used more than once.
Can be used on yourself. (That way healer person doesn’t get shafted by being only one good at it)
The down side is the 10 minutes, since 6 uses is an hour, and that’s a decent chunk out of the character’s day.
There are some times it’s not feasible due to impending doom and whatnot…
I’ve been looking for ways to limit the Healing skill some how; it would be nice if you could use it to actually heal people (restore HP) in 3.5. However, since there’s no limit on how often you can use skills and they are one of the easiest numbers to pump means the balance point between “completely useless” and “‘effin broken!” is kind of wonky. Just making it take a long time makes sense I think, plus maybe a stacking DC for how many times it’s used on someone in a single day.
Well I forgot to add that we were thinking of making the health gain Temporary HP rather than a heal equivelant. It will get you through a fight, but it won’t last a full day. Maybe an hour per rank in Heal? Point is, ya still need a Healer or a good night’s rest.
Check out the Starfinder version of “Treat Deadly Wounds” over here:
http://www.starfindersrd.com/skills/
It makes more sense in a sci-fi setting, but I don’t think you’d break the game if you ported the rules set back to Pathfinder.
The DCs in question are under “Medical Gear” over here:
http://www.starfindersrd.com/equipment/technological-items/
Note that the medical lab (read: when you’re in the Houses of Healing) allows you to use “Treat Deadly Wounds” twice per day on the same creature.
It struck me as a solid attempt at addressing the issue.
One of my GMs uses the healing skill to complement magical healing. If you’re able to take one minute and hit the requisite DC your magical healing is maximized. Always struck me as a nice value-add for the skill.
Treat Deadly Wounds exists in Pathfinder as well as Starfinder. PF version goes off of HD a creature has. Heal 1/HD 1/D is what it comes out to be. Not great but it can be used in conjunction with long term care.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/heal/
Well sure. But the real difference is time. That one minute vs. one hour thing is a big deal for adventurers on the go.
Honestly, you can never have enough Muscle. Really! I mean finally a Buddy who won’t go down in seconds like the Squishies and who takes a bit of Heat off you! Two who have the same Field can work together greatly, and accomplish much more. There is only a Problem if one outranks the other so incredibly much, that the other is useless. Yeah your Paladin may be a bit stronger than the Barbarian. But really, when the Forces of Darkness are Charging against you, your Paladin will greatfull that the Barbarian is there, Hacking through tons of Enemies, so you can conserve that last Smite for the BBEG.
You got two Big Ass Fighters. Well as a DM that means double the Enemies! 😀
Oh, also we want to see that Swimsuit compitition! Pretty Please?
I may have to adjust this month’s Handbook of Erotic Fantasy script.
As long as we’re on the subject of too much muscle in the party:
https://i.redd.it/xa5iwkgnwpay.png
Muscle Wizard is a legitimate class, it should be noted.
Thx for sharing that Story!
Well then buckle in, my good Footman. Here’s the sequel adventure:
https://i.imgur.com/CByce.png
=) Great Thank you!
This isn’t a PC overshadowing another PC but…
I once pitted my PCs against a dragon who was way over their ability to kill. To compensate, I put them in a defensive fortification with a few NPC guards as disposable meat shields. Most importantly, I gave the fort 4 ballistas that they were supposed to use as weapons against the dragon. Siege weapons, cool right?!
Well it turns out the ranger was hyper-optimized and ended up dealing more damage with her bow than the ballistas could dream of. So they essentially went unused the whole fight and the party downed the dragon anyway.
I guess it turned out okay because my ranger got a lot of spotlight placed on her but the interesting key to the fight ended up being a dud.
It’s always tough to remember as a GM, but the encounter design mantra is important: Design problems, not solutions. I’m guilty of forgetting that one myself more than I’d like to admit.
Ballistae and other siege weapons are great for the low level, unenchanted mooks on your side. I was a pirate in a game and had a full crew for example, they could have used them to great effect.
I still want to make my necromancer / siege mage with portable ballista and a skeleton crew.
“Wouldn’t a fireball be more efficient?”
“Yes, of course. But it lacks style. Maniacal laugh.”
V:tM chronicle – was rolling up a Malk, and figured “hey, medium sounds fun!” – only to be heard by another Malk player who responded “Oh, my character does that, AND has visions… you’re going to take her thunder away!”
– Despite my concept being Anarch, when hers was Camarilla. Despite also taking the Ananke merit, versus vanilla Knight of the Moon. And of course, differing personalities, motivations, and goals.
She wound up seeking my character out to kill him; my character ate hers 🙂
Well. I guess that’s one way to take care of it.
“This town ain’t big enough fer the both of us.”
*CHOMP*
My groups generally end up using the “divergence through roleplaying” option. I’ll recount a couple of examples from my current longest-running game (it started before 4e or Pathfinder even existed, at the tail end of 3.5’s lifespan), a multi-party campaign where everyone has multiple characters:
We have two sorcerers, both blasters. Mine ended up focusing on single-target damage, and most of his offensive repertoire is lower-level spells with multiple metamagic feats applied. Now that we’re well into epic levels, he can deal almost 700 damage as a full-round action to a single target within 30 feet of him. The other player’s sorcerer ended up choosing crowd control and status effects, and most of that character’s offense consists of higher-level spells with huge area effects, like Prismatic Deluge and Reality Maelstrom.
We also have two factotums in the… jumbled mess of characters we’ve created for this campaign. Mine has taken the class’s name to heart (factotum in Latin means “do anything”) and is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades; he can cast arcane and divine spells (mostly low-mid level utility spells), is a fairly exceptional skillmonkey, and has a few martial maneuvers for combat situations. The other one is a DPS major with a skillmonkey minor. He can punch out demon lords (mine can only punch out a pit fiend :P) with a barrage of ranged unarmed strikes, to the tune of upwards of 700 damage per round, IIRC.
Yeesh. What’s the current level in that campaign? Also of note: How does your DM go about challenging you mechanically?
(My one experience with epic level 3.X involved a psychic warrior. I tried to cross a bottomless pit in an anti-magic hallway by going to size colossal and chimney-climbing my way across. The DM said it was impossible thanks to the “perfectly smooth surface” clause in the Climb rules. Kind of put me off of the whole epic level thing for a while, sad to say.)
A truism applicable to my gaming table back in the good old days…
Always two, there were.
A friend and I figured out our relationship early in our D&D career. My job was to hold things down and his was to beat them to death. We always played front-line martials, I optimized for grappling and he optimized for dpr. Together we could hold off and put down anything the DM threw at us, keeping the spellcasters and other squishes safe from damage. It felt like we were unstoppable, and it was great.
Throughout this experience, I don’t think either of us really felt like the other was stealing “our” spotlight, since we were both able to contribute meaningfully and approximately equally to combat.
Then, one time, we had a 2-player campaign where I was a rogue and he was a sorcerer. His spell list’s inclusion of choice picks like invisibility and his high charisma made me highly redundant, since he could both talk and sneak better than I could, and I was left to the role of pickpocket and mediocre damage dealer.
Part of this is, I think, that combat encounters engage the whole party, while out of combat challenges usually just involve throwing the guy with the best bonus at it. Martials don’t have to worry about hogging each other’s spotlights because you can never have too much meat and steel on the front lines, but sweet talkers work alone.
I’m convinced that the solution to this lies in designing or running your out of combat encounters (especially social ones) differently, but I’m not sure how that could be best managed.
We talked a bit about skill challenges back on this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/movement-speed
I guess 4e got some stuff right. 🙂
I don’t know about what edition you are playing, but in 5e, Charm spells usually just give advantage on the check. It benefits your Face.
We were playing 5e, and that’s true, but there’s still only room for one face. In our situation that was the guy with the highest charisma (the sorcerer).
The person with the highest number makes the check, and there’s really almost no use for another face character.
You raise a good point- now I kind of feel like for any encounter involving just one person you should have the whole group make a check and anyone who falls to far below the threshold adds a penalty to highest character’s roll against the DC.
Like, the party-face sorcerer is trying to negotiate a peace-treaty/trade-deal with the elves, when all of a sudden the barbarian in the background lets loose a giant, ripping fart. The kind that Giants would classify as biological warfare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVYj90nSpCw
Or the rogue is trying to pick a lock/disarm a trap, and the Ranger and Fighter get bored and loudly start comparing the benefits of their respective weapons in the background.
https://www.hugi.is/media/contentimages/80774.jpg
You could mostly solve the issue by having the other characters sod-off, but (1) there will be at occasional instances where you don’t want to split the party, and (2) it at least acknowledges that the rest of the group exists.
There was a time where my wizard upstaged everyone by solving all the problems in any given chat scene with the correct application of spells, but I figured out very quickly that I had less fun if I didn’t let the other players have their fun via them informing me about it later. But that’s not really the question today.
I made a dwarf rogue who tossed spears at things. He was alright at it, for a low level fellow. There was another dwarf rogue that tossed spears at things that came after me. I immediately felt determined to be the ultimate speardwarf tosser rogue on the site. It turned into a mild competition for a while. The difference here is that on a site, you rarely play with the same people from any one day to the next unless you try for it. It was significantly less of a problem than it would have been tabletop.
I feel ya on the wizard issue. I wound up solving this great big stink of a Mexican standoff with a mythic-empowered Mass Suggestion. I could practically hear my poor GM deflating. In retrospect however, that may have been the bean dip.
Question about spear dwarfs: Was the competition an enjoyable sort of thing, or was it an obnoxious stepping-on-toes situation?
It was more the former than the latter, if I recall. We talked cordially over strong alcohol as dwarves do IC when we played together, and OOC it was more surprise that we’d both had the idea to try to sneak attack someone with the heaviest thing tossable, followed by a scene where we wound up doing different things anyway (my dwarf snooped around some and came away with some convenient 5 fingered discounts, the other fought a warg and some wolves with the main group and got a neat scar), so there didn’t wind up being any particular contention.
We’re level 28, for the most part. One party is level 23, and there’s one party that hasn’t gone epic yet. You do have to get creative to challenge a party of that level, especially if the group contains optimized characters. Our DM mostly does it by pitting us against largely homebrewed monsters, with special defenses and attacks not in the books. He does do a lot of stealing from Pathfinder, however.
Right on. Now that I’ve got a little more experience under my belt I’d probably give Epic another go. I’d have to be very careful about cherry picking the group members though. The mechanical complexity in that style of campaign can be hilariously awesome or an insufferable grind.
Sorry, these are supposed to be replies to a comment up above, but are for some reason refusing to post correctly.
No worries. I killed the repeat for ya. 🙂
Huh. The whole stepping-on-toes thing has never been a problem in my home groups, but we usually did a good job of having a reliable Session Zero. Plus, we had a strong roleplay leaning, playing a lot of World of Darkness stuff when we weren’t rocking 3.5, so it was practically a nonissue.
Pathfinder Society, though, it’s a thing that can happen. Having multiple swole dudes isn’t an issue, really, since people love playing that and it just means you have a couple of Linebackers looking to snowplow through encounters. Real pain in the ass when it’s a skill related scenario, though. Multiple casters just mean encounters and challenges get dumpstered all the more swiftly and hilariously. Even skill monkeys can double up and aid or expediate tasks.
The real trick is when the numbers don’t match between the redundant people. My ‘main’ in PFS is a Summoner who’s Eidolon is an evolved Rogue-like thief, and she is damn good at what she does. There have been a few scenarios where someone relatively new to the game is playing a less optimized character or even the pre-built ‘demo’ Rogue and I keep my Eidolon on a leash to let them shine, only stepping in if they can’t step up to a mission critical goal.
Holding back for the sake of the table’s fun is a key skill for any optimizer, but doubly so if you’re a Summoner apologist like me. After all, it should be super chill when you’re playing Pathfinder in Ease Mode: https://imgur.com/Rt8kXYV
Dude… Good on ya for the high level brosmanship. I always think it’s a real aha moment for gamers when you move from making your character as awesome as possible to helping others feel as awesome as possible. The atmosphere at the table just improves all around, you know?
I’ve come into a group late and found out that I was roughly equal at doing certain tasks (detecting magic for example) as two other group members. It was a bit disappointing at first, but I revised my expectations a bit and was able to carve my own niche.
Nice. What were the characters in question?
This why my magical researcher, an Arcane Trickster/Knowledge Cleric. Y’know, the one with Squeak. 🙂
She came into competition with the group’s Warlock for magic-detector and Arcana-knower. The Warlock was actually happy to let me do it, as she was mute and relaying complex information was a chore. However, the group was largely racist against elves and half-elves such as me, so they still deferred to the Warlock anyway simply by dint of appearing human.
Oh, and a Paladin. Also a magic detector, and they also asked him rather than me or the Warlock a few times, even though casting the spell is about the extent of his magic-detecting capabilities.
Oof. Not sure if I ever told the story, but I tried me a mute character once. In a game predicated on talking, that mess got old in a hurry.
I once ran with a group that consisted of a half-orc barbarian, a half-orc barbarian/fighter (me), a dwarf fighter/barbarian, and a dwarf fighter. We were all melee, and all but one of us preferred two-handed weapons.
We. Were. Awesome.
Adventures turned not into trails of carnage, but full 8-lane highways of slaughter. Villains feared our unstoppable might. Dragons trembled, mighty wizards fled, DMs wept. Traps were defeated by sheer hit points. Magical locks were bypassed by sundering castle walls. With three axes, one greatsword, and all the alchemist’s fire a 20 strength could carry, we cut a bloody swath through the armies of evil.
Much plunder was had, and much ale consumed.
All-muscle parties are the best. DMs just don’t know how to deal with them.
I remember one fight where we had 2 paladins, 1 war cleric with a focus on heavy weaponry, and a melee focused ranger.
The DM threw this boss minotaur at us. It had a bunch of homebrewed special earth elemental magic powers, and was cracked up to be quite the hot stuff.
We killed it before it could even hit a member of the party. The DM, deciding that it had gone down too easily, had it come back to life as undead variants twice, and each time we smacked them back down before they could land more than a scratch on a PC. After the second time, the DM threw his hands in the air, said “I’m done” and walked out of the room.
I had a DM in college who really loved Domination spells, in all their myriad forms. All-muscle group challenges tended to become challenges because you had to deal non-lethal damage to fellow party members who were earnestly trying to kill you. We tried it once, when two people were gone one day and only the muscle-types were left. Session ended with the party stuck as statuary and most of us rolled up new characters. >.< (6 people in that group and 4 melee types. Sigh. Homebrew cockatrice. It was supposed to be a simple fetch-the-magical-ingredient-for-a-crazy-ritual quest.) We coordinated a little better afterwards, since we spent the second half of the evening making new characters right then where we could mostly talk to each other about it. “Mila” was the only one who wanted to be revived, and the roleplaying was EXCELLENT when she came back. The first time afterwards she was injured and bled, she looked at the wound in bewilderment and wanted to know how she could become volcanic without the heat. She pulled at her hair and worried aloud that the ‘weird plant growth’ would erode her head. She declared war on pigeons, consistently referred to her damage reduction as ‘hardness’, and later fell in love with a gargoyle. Even though it wasn’t a whole new character, she took the ‘transformative experience’ in a great direction, and it almost felt like a new character.
My gestalt Crimson Throne game features two characters: a barbarian/slayer and a kineticist/vigilante. If the former ever gets possessed, the latter will be a greasy smear. I may have to pull punches in “dominate person” encounters.
Props to Mila, btw. That’s some A+ RP right there.
Did the builds differ at all, or were you all straight up “hit hard with stick?”
The two half-orcs were pure bruisers. The dwarves had this weird feat where they were twins, so they could share a turn, like Dwarf A takes an action, Dwarf B goes, Dwarf A finishes turn, and they sorta built around it, but their clever strategies boiled down to “You knock him over and I’ll hit ’em with my axe a lot.”
I think that shared backstories are compatible mechanics are cool. For example, feats like Butterfly’s Sting…
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/butterfly-s-sting-critical/
…are practically begging for a pair of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser types.
The more I think about this issue, the more I’m convinced it’s not a problem in any mechanical sense. It’s only a problem when one player is unpleasantly surprised and feels that their thunder is being stolen.
The ranger and I were sword and board, while the war cleric and the other paladin used 2-handed weapons, so there was a tiny difference I guess?
I hope that you guys referred to each other as “other paladin” in game.
We probably would’ve, except that we enjoyed using my paladin’s name (Ho Lee) to make the DM cringe.
Paladin / Monk multiclass?
I just realized, they’re arm-wrestling left-handed. Which one of them is a lefty? Both?
Barbarian is a southpaw. Ranger on the other hand…
http://dnd.arkalseif.info/feats/players-handbook-30–106/ambidexterity–3321/index.html
Twice in one campaign, at the same time. We started at level 3, as many 5e parties do for obvious reasons. I was a Seeker patron, pact-of-tome warlock (I’ve mentioned this guy before, it was the team-dad one, not the booming-blade one). I was the first to build my character and have the DM accept it.
Then, as I was busy writing 50 pages of creative fiction for the guy (I am not joking; I write as a hobby), along come two other party members: a bard who has dropped one level in watlock (hexblade) and a sorcerer who on the first level up also took a level of warlock (patron: I don ‘t care I just want spells back on short rest).
Thanks to Wizards royally goofing the entire Hexblade archetype (someting I’d realised long before this incodent), any Hexblade is superior to other Warlocks. And unfortunately, as wankerish as it is, dipping one level of warlock is a move that usually pays off more than playing a pure warlock.
Ah, poor me. My character was complex, interesting, a great deal of fun to play and usually took a prominent role in RP situations. He also was completely redundant to the party in any die-rolling situation, and that’ leaving aside his penchant for outrageous misfortune (Thief would empathise).
I retired him when the opportunity arose, replacing him with a barbarian (whom I’ve also mentioned previously). At least, noone could get in on the barb’s schtick of cracking skulls and giving lip!
I’ve become a big fan of planning parties over the years. Talking with players and deciding who wants to play what — and how their backstories might intersect — is a lot of fun. It’s how we wound up with “The National Enquirer in Space” rather than the usual band of disparate space cowboys in my current Starfinder game. It also has the neat side effect of preventing this malarkey.
Indeed, that is wise. In my games I also endeavour to have a good planning session before launch. I might give the players a preview of the campaign opening and have them all work out their roles in relation to that (e.g. “you are all servants or associates of a particular noble house”)
Stat starfinder game… by “National Enquirer in Space” do you mean they actually run a magazine? That sounds hilarious fun, roaming the starlanes just looking for the latest goss.
(By the way, reading over some of my old posts, it’s shocking how many typos there are. It comes from doing this on a tablet. But very ironic when I mention I am a writer!)
Their current side-quest involves competing in a Wipe Out style game show for an alien zombie producer against their hated prime time news broadcast rival, Tip Flables. It is indeed hilarious fun.
My latest campaign is a party of almost entirely melee casters. We have an Eldritch knight fighter, a paladin, a circle of spores druid, and a knowledge domain cleric. Plus a rogue, the only one with no spellslots. Hopefully we’re diverse enough not to step on each other’s toes
If you’ve got casters, you’ve got options. I think that spell selection makes a world of difference.
Disclaimer: first of all i am not trying to get into the edition wars, in fact if i were to make my own version of DnD i would use 5e as a base as it has many good changes, but this edition has some very ridiculous moments too.
I do not mind much getting overshadowed as long as it isn’t for a ridiculous reason or it is something extreme, which fortunately, it only happened to me on 5e, where other classes have it easy to be better than the class supposed to be the only good at that or the book expects you to put points on stats or skills which are less useful for the class than to others. About what i did, i tried to talk with the DM to offer me more opportunities to shine but with the two groups i have tried so far i get ”the 5e is perfect” attitude or ”don’t worry you can be good at it too” and nothing changes.
As talking did not work what i have done is ignore it and tell the newbies in the group to spot the traps because they are better than me, and try to ignore classes when thinking about on how to flesh mechanically new characters in 4-5e.
In this case, i like to play DnD Rogues and the way the Rogue is supposed to be used in 5e, focusing on INT, even Rangers, Knowledge Domain Clerics, Druids, and of course Bards can easily be as good or better than Rogues at trap spot/disabling or open locks, and sometimes even better than a triple focused in traps Rogue, specially at lower levels. This, with no munchkin at all and basic Phb builds done by new players who haven’t read the books or used Internet to build them.
On the other side, ignoring Arcane Trickster and how the class is supposed to be stats wise to keep INT as an stat dump even though is supposed to be the secondary stat finally makes the Rogue the trap manager.
I suppose i took it well because i read the 5e Phb before the first session and got used to the ridiculous parts, and because all the party members in both groups are around as good as me in trap spotting, stealth, or spellcasting (took Arcane Trickster on the first), save one or two out of five-six on each.
As far as I know there was no session 0.