My One Weakness!
Poor Jeremy. First he got stabbed with a spear. Then by his own femur. Then his shriveled black heart got ripped out by a barehanded NPC. Honestly, I’m beginning to think that (\*checks cast page*) Blaze Redscale might be on to something here. If Barmaid can give you the business with improvised barstool weaponry, there might just be some kind of congenital condition attached to your character sheet. One can only speculate that hyper-Eowynism is common amongst powerful undead. Either that or Barmaid is super serious about keeping underaged patrons out of the King’s Arms.
For the rest of us, I think that there are some interesting lessons to be gleaned from this little tableau. It’s been a few years since we last discussed character flaws, but the principles we talked about back then still apply. And just as it’s possible to overemphasize a character flaw as a player (I think back with embarrassment on the many “potheads” and “alcoholics” that graced a younger me’s campaigns), GMs can be guilty of the same thing.
Imagine you’re Jeremy. There you are rocking out with your bad self. It’s a dragon campaign and you’ve somehow finagled yourself a dracolich template. You look like a heavy metal album, and you’ve got a least one size category up on your partymates. If I’m that kid, I’m enjoying nine hells out of my power fantasy. Now imagine every other NPC you encounter I-am-no-mans you straight to the dome. The first time is a cool reveal. The second time is good for a laugh (“I can’t believe it happened twice!”) But by the time you’re getting KO’d by la vorpal chancla, the ‘interesting character quirk’ has probably worn out its welcome.
Notably, this business applies to more than literal mechanical flaws. If you’re a grappler who constantly runs into freedom of movement or a fire mage in a world inexplicably full of asbestos elementals, you know this feeling as well.
And so, for today’s discussion, I turn to all you upstanding inhabitants of Handbook-World for examples. Have you ever found yourself getting bullied by your own personal kryptonite? What was your secret weakness, and how did your GM abuse it? Tell us your sad tale of getting hard-countered down in the comments!
GEEKY GREETING CARDS For the holidays this year, Laurel just threw some brand-spanking new limited edition D&D X-mas cards onto her Etsy store. We’re also rocking our ever-popular d20 Class prints. We’re only missing “Monk” and “Warlock” at the moment, and I have it on good authority that Laurel will be working tirelessly to knock ’em out before New Year’s. So come one come all! Get your shopping done early and make a geek in your life happy.
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
I’m guessing Barmaid took Improved unarmed strike, Catch off-guard and Improvised weapon mastery. 😀
And maybe a couple of levels in a PC or Prestige class, because she kicks butt – so long as she isn’t flanked by an armored murderhobo and Handbookworld’s unluckiest criminal.
“Thou shalt not piss of thy server. Nor call her wench, less thou want to receive divine beatdown.”
Also remember one of the early ones where tavern owners were implied ti be ex-adventurers and high lavel to boot. So maybe the other staff is also ex adventurers. And if the tavern is outaide citywalls the staff to be competent in holding their own is standard assumption.
I love how some players get indignant about the “implausible” number of powerful shopkeepers. If the world was truly full of murderhobos, the evolutionary arms race would almost have to produce badass NPCs.
Tavern-crawling in real life:
You visit a half dozen bars. In one place, the beer is kind of flat.
Tavern-crawling in an rpg:
You visit a half-dozen bars. Two are fronts for cultists skulking in the cellar, waiting for the completely separate once-in-a-thousand year star alignments that will occur this week. In five of them, poorly-hidden trap doors lead to endless, uncharted underground labyrinth full of lethal traps and matchless riches. Three of the barmaids are werewolves. Two wounded travelers stagger in and expire after giving you a few cryptic words and half of a map. They’re not halves of the same map. In every single bar, a mysterious old hooded man at a corner table, his face shrouded in shadow, offers you a quest. In one place, the beer is kind of flat.
Lost it at, “They’re not halves of the same map.” Your tropesmanship is strong!
I‘ve got a character with Scent who can cast Create Water and found a Seeking Crossbow in session 1.
Yet somehow I am entirely unable to bypass the Plot Armor of invisible creatures.
This happened to another player in a game I was in rather than to me as such. We where playing Exalted and another player took this Solar charm that made his character extremely intimidating to the point where you had to spend a willpower point pr. scene to attack her.
All well and good, the problem was that the enemies always just paid the willpower cost, not just the big important badass ones either but the nameless hordes too. And while the GM did have those start each combat with less than max willpower (to make up for them only existing one scene) they didn’t even have anything else to spend willpower on. So the end result was that the other player effectively didn’t have the cool charm central to their image and some extras would have an invisible 1-2 instead of a 2-3 on their character sheet when they died/ran away/otherwise got defeated.
That, ah, wasn’t meant to be a reply. wonder how I screwed that up
Methinks your GM is playing fast and loose with the “real” location of invisible monsters.
Weirdly, this is one spot where a VTT does a great job compared to a physical tabletop. You have to label your grid with Battleship style coordinates if you want to repeat the experience IRL.
Maybe Barmaid is the wife of Fred the Fruit Vendor
https://youtu.be/aS9uJ4aausk
I really need to watch all of those. It’s very much Handbook’s style of humor.
In D&d 3.x, there are a lot of creatures – notably undead – that are immune to critical hits… and therefore also immune to sneak-attack. And so it’s not a lot of fun playing a rogue when everything you’re coming up against is immune to your best attacks, leaving you to poke at them with with a dagger (which they’re frequently resistant to).
oh, yeah.
I deliberately forgot about that as soon as Pathfinder 1e started.
And then Pathfinder 2e removed that entirely, making critical hits and precision damage two different things so that now Rogues can sneak attack a LOT of things.
There’s a reason I don’t go in for dex rogues. Str rogues with big fuckoff swords on the other hand….
that’s what the create water spell is for: invisible creatures still leave a trail in water.
But yeah, I do have the impression he’s playing silly buggers.
The devs eventually realized that was a problem. Unfortunately, rather than just errata it, they released a fix as an Alternate Class Feature in the Dungeonscape sourcebook. Now, provided you can find the darn source, you can trade your Trap Sense for the ability to still do half your SA dice against otherwise immune foes. Only in melee, but doing SA at all is enough to proc. other things, notably the feat Craven’s bonus damage.
There have actually been a couple of iterations on this idea. Death’s Ruin is the same trade, but while it only works on Undead, it also applies to your ranged attacks. Disruptive Attack swaps out Uncanny Dodge instead, and lets you trade your SA damage on an attack to give the foe a penalty to AC until they get hit again, which is actually pretty cool.
But overall, yeah, one has to question the design wisdom of making classes’ signature abilities useless against a wide variety of foes.
Ok I gotta ask if it was intentional that only female characters had done battle with him, or just a happy accident.
Funny story. I’d originally intended for the payoff to be that Summoner had been giving Jeremy talking-to-girls lessons.
Then Laurel reminded me that Jeremy et al are kids rather than young teens. After talking through a few ideas, I’m pretty happy we settled on “hyper-Eowynism” as the gag. It’s a suitably stupid term that makes me giggle like a dork.
To be fair, his first death was to Fighter
…maybe Fighter needs to do some introspection
I’ll refer you to the alternate Handbook of Erotic Fantasy timeline (and the picture of Fighter at the bottom of this page).
Ha! I mentioned as much on the Patreon post for this comic—maybe both versions of Fighter should spend some time taking 20 for a self-directed sense motive check (although I will admit, it could be a while)
Now I picture Fighter standing outside the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, staring up at the inscription like, “Pffft. Lame!”
Twenty extra build points.. and not one invested in Intelligence or Wisdom.
Dracoliches typically rely on Charisma, which still makes Jeremy a baffling case.
I blame Summoner. He gave Jeremy lessons on how to talk to girls!
And possibly Fighter: if Jeremy wanted to be like him at one point, he probably spent those 20 points on Str. and Con.
And we know what happens to the old Con.-score when someone is turned undead…
Flush.wav
Did you see my reply to AnonOmis1000 above?
Not yet! But we’d discussed the possibility of Jeremy demanding his money back from Summoner a while back.
It hasn’t happened to me directly, but I once had to try mediating a spat between two friends; where one had built a pathfinder wizard specialized to overcome spell resistances, so the other hiked up every enemy’s sr to be nigh unbeatable. Frankly, I think at that point the dm was in the wrong.
I think this is a spot where 5e got it right. If you have a BBEG that really needs a few rounds before it’s debuffed into oblivion, give it those legendary resistances. A straight up “it doens’t work” X times per day is much easier than futzing with static numbers.
I’ve never had the misfortune of being targeted per se, though I’ve had an issue in a pre-constructed adventure path where shortly after gaining a witch cohort who specialized in non-lethal magic, we entered a long stretch of undead enemies (I.E. immune to the vast majority of said witch’s stuff). Thankfully she was also one hell of a buff dispenser, so she was still pulling her weight.
I just feel bad for newbie debuffers. The number of times I’ve seen folks target constructs and undead with mind-affecting spells…. I’m inclined to give ’em a do-over every time, but it’s one of those spots where “the PC was panicked by combat and made a mistake” feels like the correct GM call.
With how often the girls have killed Jeremy, I wonder were and what his Phylactery is.
Also how did his buddy get in there
Blaze Redscale is to subtle and cunning for the guards and wards and deadly traps that feebly defend the King’s Arms. Also he’s there with his parents in the restaurant portion of the tavern.
Our rotating group’s characters numbered about a dozen, with size M folks making up only half and a motley assortment of gnomes and halflings filling out the rest.
Nevertheless, more than one DM insisted on blithely running adventures where the entire dungeon is “chest-deep in water” –as measured for humans– and filling it with Sahuagin (blind-sense), undead (crit. immunity), or trolls (scent). Few doors/chests were locked, but all were warded with magical runes (DC 25 + spell level).
Hide is impossible; sneak-attack is impossible; thrown weapons, leaping, and charging are out; and unless the <3′ members of the party ride the tanks in front like Master-Blaster, what’s a halfling rogue to do?
I like the 3′ deep water every once in a while. I like the 3′ high tunnels every once in a while. The trick is to make them a challenging section of your dungeon rather than the whole thing.
While it wasn’t my own kryptonite, I DM a Lancer game right now and found out somewhat recently that none of my players have any kind of defense against electronic warfare. I discovered this by including a hacker npc in one of the fights, which they immediately decided needed to be focused down so as to not auto die to it.
Players be like
“If it never comes up, it’s not a weakness!”
Players also be like
“How dare you target our vulnerable systems! Dirty pool, old man!”
What’s the point cost of “No Living Man may hinder me”, when you’re playing Buffy?
Never got into Buffy. Do incubi count as living in that system?
Probably not worth the cost of purchase, given the existence of Slayers, witches, and last but not least: tactical drones.
Playing an illusionist in what was revealed to be a zombie apocalypse campaign. Doesn’t matter that most undead are completely sentient or that mindless zombies should logically take everything the see and hear at face value; undead are all completely immune to illusions no matter if it makes sense or not.
Of course that cut both ways. Conjuring an illusionary bridge over a chasm that was real if you believed in it let the players cross while the shambling hoard chasing us fell to their deaths like lemmings.
What system are we talking? Just double-checked the pfsrd, and the undead there have “immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, morale effects, patterns, and phantasms).” I’m pretty sure that still leaves them vulnerable to figments, glamers, and shadows.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/Magic/#Illusion
Then again, I’ll be damned if I can ever remember the difference in the heat of the moment.
Played the much-maligned Synthesist Summoner in a short campaign. It’s a sorcerer in power armor, basically, and the GM didn’t like it. Only instead of letting me know they would rather I play something else, they had every other enemy use Dismissal starting from level 1 to try and remove my Eidolon.
The problem was, Dismissal has a will save that I could make pretty easily, and even if I did fail a save, I eventually had an Eidolon Anchoring Harness to keep my Eidolon from going poof, so it wasn’t actually a weakness. When they realized this, they asked me to retire my character, so I played a Medium instead and we didn’t have any more problems.
How powerful did you find the synthesist in practice? I’ve heard it’s pretty busted, but I’ve never actually seen one in action.
TBH synthesist summoner is pretty strong in that you, the player, can afford to dump physical stats because your outsider-mecha can make that up for you and you have both strong physical and mental stats. But you lose the action economy associated with having two controllable characters on field, and you don’t gain any extra actions so it’s not like you’re smashing and casting at the same time. So I’d say it’s pretty strong, but nothing busted.
The tactical advantages of having two weaker characters is usually better than having one character with really big numbers, but dang, the numbers get really big really fast.
You can optimize it a lot, getting untouchable is really easy with Scaled Fist Monk and Paladin dips to stack charisma to your AC and saves. Killing enemies in one turn is really easy with 7 weapons and a huge strength score with pounce. Plus, you are still a caster so you can toss out Haste and take crafting feats and everything. It’s the best melee character that I know of if you just want big numbers.
I find them less powerful than a normal summoner (there isn’t much you can give your combat monster that’s even remotely as powerful as it’s own full-caster-in-a-2/3rd-casters-clothes with their own actions), but people tend to overrate them. I suspect it’s something to do with the caster/martial discrepancy where a normal summoner subconsiously get’s compared with the former group and a synthesist with the latter.
My current Shadowrun character has two flaws: One is alcoholism, which is rather inconsequential and in fact flavor for a dwarf. He has the occasional fright of becoming a burnout or such from his alcoholism worsening, but otherwise it’s effectively as dangerous as dying of cancer in a game where you get shot at on a weekly basis.
The other flaw is a bit more serious: PTSD (flashbacks). As part of his backstory, the poor fellow had some experiences from an ill-advised but desperate fleeing into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, in a setting where such places produce horrifying spirits and paranormal critters.
As a result, any time he sees biohazard/radiation warning symbols or a toxic spirit, he get to roll how many rounds he’s a sitting duck for as he re-lives his barely-survived backstory traumas. Not fun when it happens during a gun-fight or other sensitive operation.
Our other party members had similar flaws: One worked for the mob, our hacker had a compulsion to leave poppies as a calling card wherever she did her hacking magic, another was a nocturnal species and was very drowsy for daytime missions, on top of being very fuzzy.
I get awfully nervous about playing with “mental flaws” these days. Go just a hair too camp with it and you’ve moved into offensive territory.
I think Jeremy’s weakness might be rubbing off on the rest of his party as well. Or at the very least, on Uchichi Draguto. Blaze Redscale probably flubs his charisma skill checks in their presence too.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dragon-encounter
Hmm, looking over the Dragon Party’s history, have we ever seen Blaze Redscale actually dual-wielding his katanas?
Now see, I’d happily do this concept. But every Blaze Redscale comic is one less Magus-doing-something-cute comic. Cost benefit analysis is not kind to the lizard.
Solution: Magus being cute whilst Blaze swings his katanas on top of her shoulders.
mecha shiva!
https://gifer.com/en/RL4
Clearly the only cure to Jeremy’s condition is controlled exposure – i.e. adding a female dragon party member to their super-ultra-awesome-rad dragon party.
But where might they find a player suitable for their… Uh, tastes, and of appropriate weakness-inducing gender quality? Hmmm…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/special-snowflake
But Snowflake isn’t a dragon!
…Yet!
The real Ludmilla, huh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i6ROv1JKfg
Or a horsey equivalent.
https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Dragon%20Horse
Who would have thought Jeremy would stoop to Fighter’s level of munchkin-ing, grabbing flaws for such boosters?
Or was perhaps Fighter the one who (begrudingly) ‘designed’ his character – at least as far as mechanics go?
Hmm, did we have a character yet who’s main comedic gimmick is ‘grab all the flaws for power’? Or is that represented evenly with the cast? Maybe Vampire Huntress – she’s yet to reveal her ‘player flaw’.
Van Helscion is too well bred for flaws.
In the climax of one of our party member’s personal plots, our GM sent out a Great Wyrm black dragon with size increasing and self buffing shenanigans (that we shut down with mage’s disjunction) and her rider. Both had mythic initiative (AKA two turns per turn cycle).
Dragon used its reach, flight, and Stand Still or something similar to keep us from getting close to her and her rider. As the barbarian, this was a pain in my behind. So to make up for it, I threw the animal companion at the dragon to bypass its reach+AoO, gave my rogue a ride to fire away at the dragon when he was invisible (I was large and could ‘fly’) and when the weasel I threw onto the dragon’s back eventually took down the rider off the dragon’s back and the rest of the party KO’d the rider, I held her hostage, causing the dragon to need to be careful and waste turns healing her rider from range. Which I slowed down by punching the rider while unconscious. The fight’s still ongoing and monster trucks with drills are now in the initiative order.
TL;DR GM made dragon that prevented us from getting close to it while we were blasted, so we got a little creative.
Soon, the Xmas strip cometh! As requested, I posted some poll xmas ideas in the previous comic’s comments. 😀 Hope you have happy holidays with your beloveds!
Good ideas. Next year. 🙂
Is Jeremy being on his back, ravaged/wrecked (giggity) by a maiden, going to be the ‘Yamcha death pose’ of this comic?
Had to google “yamcha death pose.” Not sure Jeremy deserves this indignity.
The closest thing that comes to mind is a one-shot GURPS thing that the GM described as being “like the Hunger Games”. I predicted the other characters would focus on their characters’ combat skills, so I went in the complete opposite direction. My character was a blind old man with no combat skills whatsoever; in exchange, he was so skilled at stealth, subterfuge, and wilderness survival that he could just hide and screw with the other players’ camps without getting into combat in the first place.
The one-shot was basically just a series of arena combats. I, um, didn’t win any.
The moral of the story? Clear communication is important, even for one-shots! (Especially in a system like GURPS where it’s easy to build a character completely incapable in certain contexts. It’s pretty tough to build a D&D character who can’t fight.)
I’ve had fun max-minning pathfinder builds. Probably the worst I’ve come up with:
1 level in Oozemorph Shifter, 4 levels in Unlettered Blade Adept Arcanist, 10 levels in the Evangelist prestige class, with Erastil as your chosen deity.
Be a small race with a -str penalty, like a gnome, and then dump your str to a 5 in point buy. For that matter, dump all your physicals to max out charisma and intelligence.
And then you teach some Druidic. By breaking your shifter vows you get locked into ooze form and thus lose speech. Since you can’t speak you can’t perform your deific obedience, so you lose all 10 prestige class levels.
Unlettered Blade Adept Arcanist can’t prepare spells due to the archetypes disagreeing on how magic works without actually being in conflict by modifying the same features, so they can’t even get around the issue with still/silent spell metamagics, and to top it all off, the archetypes ate all the exploits that might have helped the build.
At level 15, you’re effectively a level 1 oozemorph with str so low that, if by some miracle you actually hit something, you deal a maximum of 1 nonlethal damage.
If I had more of a chance to actually play, I’d want to get into “maxing the min” and trying to make the “bad archetypes” playable. Love that series on the r/Pathfinder_RPG sub.
Turns out that “like Hunger Games” is a broad arena of arenas. Big oof.
Best way to keep your flaw not getting too much trouble is to be you and not the DM the ones that brings the problems. For example on a game i played a demigod from a god of night and evil. All demigods got flaws, the union of infinite godhood and finite mortality can lead to quirks. His brother got switched sleep on which he is awake at night but as soon as sun start dawning he crash with sleeping. My pc got basically an really bad case of narcolepsy. He got sleep the moment he stopped trying to remain awake. Riding a horse, eating, on the middle of a speak. I keep pulling him into absurd situations to show how much problems he got. Our DM didn’t interfere for i was already bringing the flaw 🙂
Also it’s Blaze Redscale not Blaze “Rescale” 🙂
Should have checked the cast page. :/
Anyone can commit a typo with the name of the character they make. I mean, would be surprised if you didn’t got some of your stories about how players forget things about their own characters. Like name, class,feats, equipment and that 🙂
I wouldn’t be surprised either: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/misspelling
Tasty boar 😛
I have no mouth and I must roll (for initiative).
I recall a similar build which effectively turns you into a bomb.
You grab the tattoo feat which makes you explode on death, and then through shenanigans, you max-min your stats so that your starting dump-stat of CON is reduced to 0 by other stuff. Resulting in you immediately dying and exploding before the game even starts. With alchemist levels, you can also implant bombs into creatures, including yourself.
“You all meet in a tavern.”
“No we don’t.”
A DM can and should exploit their PC’s major weaknesses, especially in significant fights and especially if the character is very powerful. But they should exploit that weakness only on special occasions, and spread out whose weaknesses they use, so everyone gets good days and bad days.
I run not one but two campaigns with Kineticists, so I have to be very careful about where I put the feat Deflect Arrows, which allows the user to declare one melee attack per turn a miss (no roll). If I use the feat too much, then it feels like I am arbitrarily negating a PC’s main ability. This is particularly the case in the campaign where the Kineticist is super-optimized and can drop most bosses in two or three hits. Sometimes I need to get him under control, but I’m careful to give bosses Deflect Arrows very rarely. (More commonly, I have an enemy pick the Kineticist up, because he’s really weak to grapples and it’s funny.) Sometimes a one-v-the-party boss needs some added survivability, though. In the other campaign, the only thing that has Deflect Arrows is the Tatterman, because he’s a literal nightmare monster and the most dangerous thing in the campaign, and ignoring attacks is a great way to freak players out. (I also gave him a level of Swashbuckler, because parrying attacks provides a similar effect.)
I was in a campaign with a Sorcerer who was super-focused on enchantment spells, and then had to deal with a huge arc that was mostly ghouls and other undead, thereby negating her spells most of the time. Fortunately, she managed a backup career as a feared Holeymancer and backed us up with good use of Create Pit, and eventually we got to the ogres, who were much more vulnerable to enchantments.
I’m not the biggest fan of “save or don’t get participate in the combat” designs. I wound up forcing players who failed to 1v1 a “personal nightmare” monster in their own pocket dream if they failed. When they kill their personal nightmare, they reappear and continue the game. Much less frustrating than “I guess I run another 120 feet and end my turn.”
Good to know about deflect arrows though. I’ll have to see if I can’t annoy Laurel’s kineticist at the next opportunity….
Oh yeah, I’m not at all a fan of effects that force PCs to flee, especially if it’s something other than “I spend my turn to cast this spell that might disable one PC”, which is basically the same as Sleep or Hold Person. Frightened is especially underwhelming in a horror campaign, because telling a player that their character is forced to run away in fear doesn’t actually scare them. (Half the low-level generic haunts are useless because they merely force PCs to flee with no other effects, costing them maybe a minute in-universe.) I took out Tatterman’s “you must run away” abilities, left his aura of “Will save or be Shaken” and mostly rely on him being a slow-walking, respawning, parry-and-Deflect-Arrows guy with damage reduction and fast healing to scare the players. It’s worked so far. (The dream sequences where I get to cheat and let him autobutcher the PCs without ending the campaign also contribute.)
QOTD: Can’t say it’s happened significantly a lot, but I have a number of examples:
In one campaign, my first character (who I retired for being boring – never hitting, but also never GETTING hit) had apocalyptic weather control powers (Spheres of Power), and it turned out that the final dungeon was in the high mountains above the weather. Premade AP, so not the GM doing that.
Another campaign, as a player, I abused the kryptonite of the enemy. See, I chose Iomedae (2nd pick would have been Sarenrae, probably), and took Good and Sun domains. Both for flavor, given the setting. An entire book was filled with shadow enemies who were weakened by a Sun Domain power. Yeah. We had that book easy.
My NPCs don’t generally abuse player kryptonite, unless they’re prepared casters and have some reasonable knowledge of the players. They can do the same back to us, so fair’s fair. And they can learn and adapt when their effects obviously fail.
Oh, one big thing I did in a Mythic campaign I hosted: One player was basically unfindable. Really good buffs to invisibility effects, and all that. The NPCs attacking her (it was a “run or get captured” battle, no hope of winning) used disruptions in the snow to find her; if not for that terrain, she would have escaped the fight back to the other players. Yeah, snow is a kryptonite to anyone stealthy but without Trackless Step.
Minor thing that can happen a lot: rushing to melee with someone who doesn’t like it. Like archers or Mages.
My take on this one: Not being in melee is your top priority as a squishy dude. that’s just part of the game. Of course, if every dumb monster in every ambush always charges you first, then it’s time to get the brooms.
https://c.tenor.com/kICYRD-XLlUAAAAS/lies-liar.gif
Well, that changes the map into a positioning game. Which means tactics are working as intended. Generally happens from both sides (player and GM), but only with sapient enemies. Ones from civilizations that would have tactics more advanced than “CHARGE!” or glory/intimidation fighting.
I was imagining tactical genius oozes waiting to drop on the squishy guy rather than the closest one.
I think the best gameplay implementation of flaws I’ve seen is in Mutants and Masterminds 3e: Rather than your flaw giving you extra perks at the start, you get a hero point every time the flaw poses a challenge to your character (for instance, one of my characters had anger issues and would get hero points when their temper got them into trouble, while another couldn’t speak properly and got hero points for failing to communicate important information). Mechanically, this ensures that flaws balance themselves out rather than being either free points or not worth the hassle. Story-wise, it encourages players to lean into characterization flaws and means GMs exploiting them feels less like a punishment – after all, getting screwed over by your flaws in the short term just means you get to do even more cool stuff later.
I’ve seen some narrative games that run in a similar style. I do like the idea of putting this mess in the players’ hands. Of course, it only really works if you’re playing with some kind of meta currency like hero points or bennies.
A teammate played an oozemorph shifter in Strange Aeons. She minmaxxed her offense, declaring “It’s the tentacle adventure. My DR will protect me, since most attacks in this adventure will be bludgeoning damage!”
Most of the attacks were not bludgeoning damage.
Gotta read that player intro! It’s got important information!
Oh, I recently had a kryptonite of my own start to arise.
So I made a Mutants and Masterminds hero who is a pop star, and has singing-based superpowers. Her earliest power in childhood was super hearing. Because of this, sonic attacks tend to overwhelm her. She has to roll an additional saving throw whenever one comes her way, potentially taking debilitating penalties.
Unfortunately, the DM had (without either he or I knowing what the other was doing) designed a whole Rogue’s Gallery of villains and minions and monsters and giant mecha. Every last one of them bearing some sort of sonic attack!
Hey, Wonder Woman’s villains tend to tie her up. Just makes it more fun when you overcome your weakness.
Wait… people put kryptonite on their charsheets without the expectation of it coming up all the time? Why?
I bring up my character’s flaws constantly, I lean into them, I practically build my whole character around those flaws as their main driving focuses.
Okay, maybe as one half of their main ‘features” (they’re documented, once documented they are features not bugs).
Jareth Mooncalled, Elven Sage & Agent, absent-minded†, curious†, driven to learn more about the megadungeon under the city, xenophile… who has become a Cultist of Elder Powers because he’ll talk to and accept help from anyone…
Jednesa, Ogress Barbarian Wrestler, dumb as a box of rocks‡, incredulously poor vision, gullible‡, truthful‡, selfless‡, mild berserker issues… always the middle watch because “ogres have great night vision” (true, but she’s still half-blind), but she’s also a half-ton of meat that doesn’t know when to quit. Her only real fear is being blinded, which when it happened is the one of the only two times she’s gone berserk (the other time was fighting wights, which should not be touched, you guessed it, went berserk and started touching all the bad deadmen).
Ülo, teenage Troll Witch, absent-minded†, curious†, short attention span, addicted to hallucinogens, not very good at fighting at all, and has serious anger management issues… those anger management issues combined with “can’t fight her way out of a wet paper sack” are gonna get her in trouble. Although so far the other flaws are far more fun to play, wall up some treasure and then just forget what she did with it…
Dilandua, short, skinny, bishy, Shadow Elf Swashbuckler/Assassin dual spear wielder with a fairly rigid code of honor (essentially Bushido) who is in a party of thieves, brigands, and madmen… that code hasn’t been a problem yet, but it will be. Oh it will be…
Stenet Fjall, Dwarven Holy Slayer, overconfident, truthful, honest, strong sense of duty for “good people”, thorough intolerance of Evil (especially Evil Clerics, Undead, Demons, and Evil Mages*), greedy, stubborn… so far his flaws haven’t been problems, I mean who doesn’t like a “Paladin” who will carry out every scrip and scrap of loot, is honest about it, shares it (mostly) evenly with the group, and whose only real flaw is an absolute unwillingness to negotiate with Evil in any way shape or form…
.† Yes, I do like combining Absent-Minded and Curious. So the character see a shiny, go investigate, have some fun, and then forget to bring it back or tell anyone about the shiny back there, or who offers to wall up the treasure, but forgets to leave any markers (short attention span), makes it extra camouflaged, and then forgets where they did it. Sometimes “shiny” means “monster they had a chat with” which might now be hunting the party (hey xenophile get’s it’s play to).
.‡ These are all actually separate flaws, but they are all really the same flaw in the end, she’s just not smart enough to realize she’s being scammed, to dumb to lie, and doesn’t realize that ‘greed is good’.
.* What constitutes “Evil Mage”, well it’s starts with the second word which means “can cast magical spells” and then goes to the first word which means “has aligned with Evil”, but since Stenet can’t detect Evil, usually means “has attacked him or his friends” also is “overly destructive” or sometimes “just really annoys me”. Yeah, Stenet is a “paladin’ who really just likes to ‘get his smite on’ and since there is no such thing as a “non-Evil” Undead or Demon, they are always Smite worthy… really it’s just the Mages and Clerics of the wrong faith that can get tricky as to whether he should be getting smitey on them…
Careful there. This is more the point from the other comic…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/ailurophobia
…But you risk becoming a caricature when you go too HAM with this stuff.
Yeah, you definitely need to know when to pull back, but inversely sometimes that irrational fear really needs an irrational reaction.
We were playing a Gods campaign at one point in 5e, where we were basically level 20 characters with Fate Points added on to spend on things that Gods would logically be able to do. I played a trickster god, who was a level 20 Illusion wizard who focused on misdirecting enemies and lying really well. Good things, I thought at the time, to mess with mortals and have a bit of lighthearted fun.
Turns out that the campaign was a horror/mystery-themed one where we were trying to figure out what was killing off gods one by one, and as a result around 80% of the game was spent futzing around in ruins trying to find clues. The one NPC of any real importance had True Sight and a really high Sense Motive score, so the only spell I used that had any real effect was Wish (because of course). Even that was almost wasted since it turned out that one of the other players had been a traitor the entire campaign, and he almost succeeded at countering the spell. We ended up having to have a long talk about that game, but that’s what taught me the importance of having a session 0 to hash all this out beforehand.
Oof. “True sight” is very much one of the top hard counters I had in mind while writing his one. “Freedom of movement” vs. grapplers was the other one.
Any time someone says the words, “I want to play an illusionist,” my first reaction is to say, “Let’s make sure we’re both on the same page about how illusions work.”
Our Shadowrun game introduced two new characters with shiny new flaws.
One of them is a Technomancer who’s quadraplegic and effectively stuck in a hospital bed. He relies on a very well-crafted, human-mimicking drone do to any social interactions, and otherwise hacks from the safety of his home.
The other is an old-aged caster who’s unable to formulate their own plans or improvise, relying on other party members to tell them what to do.
My group had that same thought about the “remote technnomancer.” Our dude was a child who would be grounded if her parents found out, but still.
We wound up scrapping it since it took so much risk out of the game. How did you guy wind up balancing that mess?
Well, if his deck gets bricked, they die outright. Or if the authorities learn where he is (i.e. convergence happens), he can’t exactly go anywhere in a hurry.
They also rely on their drone for any interactions where there’s no wireless access, so if the drone gets wrecked, they lose a ton of money.
5 minutes after the party’s grappler-monk explained in full detail why he is ‘invincible’ and can take down any opponent, poor guy had to run away from a spider swarm.
to be fair, he had it coming…
(my fighter? pulled out a torch -worked back in 2ed edition, still works now)
Grappling is strong. Utility belt is stronger, lol.
Honestly, it kind of makes sense for Jeremy to have grabbed that perk/flaw after Fighter killed him the first time.
Actually, wait a minute. When Fighter killed him the first time, he yelled he was going to tell mom. But, we know Fighter killed his parents when he was young in order to have a tragic backstory. Did Fighter get adopted by silver dragons after killing his parents?!
I mean, that’s the only thing that makes sense. Why else would the silver dragon Jeremy be fighter’s brother?
My first long-standing character was a pyromaniac wizard with a violent aversion to non-fire spells (to the point that he nearly had a stroke when he found he’d accidentally caused widespread glaciation earlier in the campaign). Had magic missile as a fallback spell for when we ran into fire-immune things…
And then I picked up the ‘Burn Everything’ feat (fourth edition D&D). Have to admit to having a bit of an evil grin as a burned a (very confused) fire elemental to death.
Also tend to have a bit of a weird opposite experience with my usual DM- if a character has immunities, enemies just… don’t do that kind of damage anymore (typically).