Unfair Contest
Today’s comic is all about learning to appreciate your own limitations. It’s easier said than done.
With the power fantasy of gaming lodged firmly in our collective unconscious, it can be hard to remember that we aren’t supposed to be Superman. We aren’t even supposed to be Conan, outmuscling all comers while outwitting master thieves and wizards. The OP heroes of fiction might work well as a literary concept, but dice and probability have a way of catching up with you.
Think your barbarian ought to hold her own in the boxing ring? The monk was built for this biz. Wanna be the best archer in all the land? Your elf bard may have proficiency, but they’re no ranger. That rogue tends to win at sprinting contests. Your tough as nails fighter can’t take as much punishment as the barbarian. The abity to cast Healing Word does not make you a life cleric.
If you’re playing a class-based system, you’re not going to be the best at all the things. And even if the mantle of generally-competent badass is your goal, you still won’t be quite as badass as a specialist at their chosen gimmick.
For seasoned players this is an obvious point. We’ve long since figured it out and moved on. But as I’ve been hanging out at tables with newcomers this summer, I’m reminded that learning to accept it is part of the gamer lifecycle. This can be a rude awakening.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we talk about all those times when you realized you were second best? What was the thing you were trying to accomplish? Who did it better? And how did that make you feel? Let’s talk deflated egos and realigned expectations down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Can I just say that I love how smug Patches the Unkicked looks? 😀
Life usually dumps on the pup when Antipaladin isn’t there to save him, but this time he won! He beat the big, scary meat-eater fair and square. Treats and belly-scritches for Patches! 😀
Is Smug a step closer to Evil? Maybe Antipaladin is have an effect on the puppo?
Impossible. How could Antipaladin of all villains make someone more evil?
You’re right. Dunno what I was thinking.
I wonder how many of the judges will wake up as trees later. Or in the middle of a prehistoric jungle.
The violent tree transformations were the best part of the live action Cowboy Bebop. Is that a save or die druid spell?
I’d classify that as a buff myself. Druid may think she’s clever now, but she’ll regret it when she realises she turned the judges into slow-moving assassins with colossal size, hundreds of hit points, a dozen or more limbs.
She cannae e’en flee underground, fer trees ‘ave tha dwarf-foe special trait, so they’ll be able ta follow ‘er e’en thar.
I imagine Allie de-stresses from situations like this by playing with her favorite chew-toy, Eldritch Archer.
If he didn’t want to be chewed, he shouldn’t be so fluffy.
A character I’m playing certainly has some limitations. As a Ratfolk Swashbuckler, he’s got good AC, his attack bonus is high and he has a good crit range. The limitation? He regularly does 0 damage on hits or crits due to having a STR penalty, having a small weapon and not yeh having access to ‘your damage uses DEX instead of STR’, giving him a pathetic dmg range of 0-3.
Of course, this was planned/expected, the character is trying to use a glaive and get bladed brush/Slashing Grace to qualify for class features/dex build, but needs to level up first to ‘activate’ his true potential. Or get an agile enchant.
He’s also pretty limited on the ‘things to do / tricks’ department by how often he crits/kills things and his Panache pool.
What game system is this? Can’t be 5e or you could just get a dagger.
Pretty sure we’re talking Pathfinder 1e. Dex builds take until lvl 3-5 to “turn on” fully.
That or three levels of unchained rogue.
I realize I’m not much of a munchkin, but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to get three levels of unchained rogue before level 3-5.
Unless you’re an Inspired Blade Swashbuckler that gets both Weapon Finesse and Weapon Focus Rapier as level one bonus feats. Then you just need to take Fencing Grace and you’re golden. I have 2 characters that take a starting level in it just for the dex to damage.
Alas, I’m playing an Azatariel swashbuckler, and am wielding a glaive (got a Shelyn theme going), so I have to endure a few levels of being ineffective at doing damage.
That archetype is rather potent though, assuming you’re fine with only using a rapier for the entire game.
My second character I ever played was a 3.5 human cleric, with the travel and luck domains. What with how 3.5 clerics are, there wasn’t a lot I was unable to do, and so I spent most of the campaign enjoying my power. During one fateful encounter, our ranger died, and refused resurrection so that the player could bring in a rogue. As part of my attempt to do everything, I’d been putting the odd skill point into hide and move silently, but when the rogue started rolling 80’s, I realised for the first time that this was something I was totally outmatched in. Rather than just charging into every room and brute-forcing the issue myself using too many ranks in diplomacy or just raw force, I let the rogue go first, stealth about and figure out what our plan was.
CoDzilla, eh? Yeah man. That mess could get close to superman at high level. Nice to see that the rogu had a niche for himself though.
Recently, I had a frustrating experience with my mobility-focused swashbuckler Rishia failing to chase down a thief. Despite her high movement speed, strong ability to balance, jump, climb, swim, and tumble around obstacles, and her combat focus on grappling and disabling foes, she just couldn’t keep up because the thief also had ludicrous speed along with a short-ranged teleport ability to skip obstacles entirely and enough stealth to completely vanish when out of sight for just a few seconds. While Rishia fared better than the rest of her party, I’m still bitter that what could have been her big chance to shine ended with her falling victim to the Worf Effect instead.
What chase rules were you guys using? Or were you just running the chase in initiative order?
Basically, we had a set series of obstacles to get past with appropriate skill checks, such as piles of barrels and crates, closed gates, and streams of water. Once a character successfully navigated one obstacle, they moved on to the next. Not sure if they were official chase rules or just something the GM made up on the spot. I do know it wasn’t considered combat, though, so combat-only abilities like panache didn’t apply.
Sounds like the official chase rules. A cool system in theory, but I’ve had a frustrating time of it myself. During a module with a rooftop chase at roughly 3rd level, my 20 dex rogue with max acrobatics ranks and generally high skill modifiers was facing dcs she’d have to roll 16 or above to hit. Not sure if the rules were misapplied or just meant for higher level parties, but we succeeded purely because the party muscle kept getting nat 20s and the npc built for the chase was barely doing any better with the DCs (she had a few lucky rolls to start but little else).
That said, I think karma repaid me since said Rogue got a nat 20 vs an npc barbarian type’s nat 1 in a strength contest, so, hey.
The module was fun, but it had a decent few points where the difficulty spiked at random to where our otherwise kinda crazy party went from cakewalking fights to facing things way over our level. Paizo’s balance sensibilities have never been too sharp.
Crimson throne? Yeah.
My guys wound got hit with a DC 25 obstacle straight off and nearly lost their quarry. I had to allow improvised “alternative options” like “drop two stories to the ground, take damage, and run around the impossible-to-climb building.”
It was a suitably cinematic moment as the party’s big guy landed hard, got up, and followed the chase from street level. However, chases do seem like one of those moments where you have to invoke A LOT of handwave to get ’em to work.
One of my most recent characters was an elven bladelock in Barovia. Thanks to tactical playing and a good handful of luck, this character managed to actually keep up martially. As the high levels gave the paladin better smites and the moon druid more forms, I dipped into rogue and fighter, finally reaching the perfect balance of offence, defence and utility I’d been aiming for. The character ended up retiring shortly thereafter, up until they were called to aid in the final fight.
They then proceeded to do not much at all. Increased threats had made us build more powerful characters, which in turn made the threats more powerful. The elven bladelock found themselves dealing 1d8+7 damage on a hit (which was rare) while hexblade-paladins and shepard druids battled against a deity’s dark avatar, dealing and healing hundreds of damage as the fate of worlds hung in the balance.
Did the retired bladelock not get a chance to level up “off screen?” Surely the class can optimize a little harder than that…?
The character was only two levels lower than everyone else, and so it was figured they wouldn’t need to level up. They probably could’ve been optimised more than they were, but at the end of the day hexadins and the like are a tier above even the cheesiest of non-hexblade bladelocks. Poor luck during that final fight also did not help.
Still, they found their spot. While the current PCs tussled with the main villain, the bladelock led conjured velociraptors in holding back the minions, chasing them around the battlefield whenever more got summoned.
What exactly is that… string of rope with comically large pencils stuck to it?
I think that was a fence the pet is supposed to pass by going around the posts, passing each on an opposing side. Allie ripped the whole thing out of the ground.
It shouldn’t have been tough for Allie to put her feet on alternating sides of the posts. It kinda violates the spirit of the contest, but she’s an allosaurus at a dog show.
I’m assuming by that point, she already had her head stuck in the tube and couldn’t see where she was going.
https://static.zoomalia.com/prod_img/9148/la_slalom-agility-16044.jpg
Yay, Allie… my favourite minor character.
Looked back at her earliest appearnace recently.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/major-class-feature
I’d like to apologize on Druid’s behalf for misgendering her dino. Everyone fails a Nature check sometimes.
I blame Jurassic Park for getting frogs in the dino dna
Putting aside how wrong
Michael CrichtonDr. Wu was about “junk DNA,” why the heck didn’t they use the DNA of actual dinosaurs, like chickens? Or at least other living archosaurs, like crocodiles? Why frogs? Humans are more closely-related to dinosaurs than frogs!(I know it was because Michael Crichton wanted the park’s safety measures to break down and couldn’t think of a good way for that to happen. As evidenced by the bit in the book where someone asks “Wait, weren’t they also sterilizing the dinosaurs” and the answer given is basically “I dunno, maybe they irradiated the wrong but”.)
(Yeah, I liked that book in middle school, but my opinion dropped as I learned more about…everything it’s supposed to be about. Just like most Crichton books.)
Eight years ago, I was still a fairly fresh-faced tabletop player, taking part in my… third or fourth game (PbP can support a lot of games at once) of Pathfinder (1e, at the time the only e), a delightful round of Council of Thieves. I had this whole concept, my first (of *many* to come) female character, a half-Succubus Tiefling Oracle, big Blind Seer energy, and because I like the offensive spells I made her a “Bad Touch” build. *Heavy* emphasis on the Touch Attack offensive spells. Unfortunately, I brought her to a party with an Inquisitor, Hunter with his Cat companion, a Swashbuckler, and a Bard with a bow. With four frontliners, and my AC generally being the worst in the party, yeah, I wasn’t getting anywhere close to the front lines. Eventually the Swashbuckler and Bard left, replaced by a whip-wielding Mesmerist, and an Archerdin, so things didn’t exactly get much better for me. That campaign was when I learned that being bodied into the dedicated healer and Guidance Spam role sucks, and also that Bones just generally was not a good mystery in PF1e.
From the RP side though, that was probably the best character I’ve actually written, I had a lot of fun writing what spellcasting I did manage to do, and had an… interesting encounter the first (and only, I retrained it shortly after) time I used my Raise The Dead revelation.
Folks are quick to shout “Stormwind Fallacy…”
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/22250/what-is-the-stormwind-fallacy
…But I do think that you get a certain freedom to play with all your RP options when you foreground character concept over optimization. The bones mystery is evocative, but you “aren’t supposed to take it.” It’s a tough balancing act to pull off.
Me: my favorite high-level Rogue. Speed, stealth, Bluff, the usual package. If I can finagle an elaborate condition to remove someone’s Dex. bonus or attack invisibly, I AM DEATH. So, of course, my party chooses combat scenarios wherein that’s usually not an option. (sigh) I make my single attack with little shortsword and yield my time to the Armored Division sitting to my left.
My Son:
[DM]: “Your gnome is…” (looks at sheet) “…ABCDEF?”
[Son]: “Arcanist, Barrister, Cleric, Diviner, Evoker, Fighter, yes.”
[DM]: “This build actually looks legal, but you do realize that you’re 15th level, but you can’t cast anything above level 2, right?”
[Son]: “…”
Two questions.
1: Have you communicated your “help me set up for the backstab” issues to the other players? If you propose a few tactics or spend some gp on bribes, it might encourage a bit of the jolly cooperation.
2: Is your son enjoying the character?
1. Thanks for asking. 🙂
Oh, yeah. Sadly, it’s an old issue. These days I usually just play a cleric and let it be somebody else’s problem. (They don’t like it much, either, but we are who we are.)
2. (Again, thanks for asking.) Yeah! His inspiration is Billy Flynn from the musical Chicago. The gnome’s name is Ra’s al d’Asylum (pronounced, he’ll tell you, “RAZZ L. DAZZLEM”), and his original purpose was to irritate the other PCs with his ranks in Profession (Lawyer) and language (Legalese).
The distribution of shares following an encounter was (by design) neither simple nor equitable when Raz was around.
lol. That’s a great name.
As for the positioning thing, one of my current new-comers is a bit put out about other PCs rushing off and leaving her unprotected archer to get charged. Meanwhile I’m sitting there like, “You gotta say something, my dude!”
Still, I understand that nobody wants to be a quarterback:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/general-disarray
I’m fine being overshadowed. The biggest bad guy in the room doesn’t tend to charge at the second place adventurer, so I’m more likely to come out alive and conscious in the end.
Not to say I didn’t used to care more about being the best. I remember a day and age where I got pretty bummed about my barbarian not being the best damage-dealer in the party. I mean come on, my weapon rolls a d12, it should be the best thing in the party, right?
Well, part of the fault lies with my pink dice. Those ones seem to despise players, and roll well only when used by a DM against players. They were still new to me at the time, and I didn’t know. That blasted d12 never rolled anything higher than a 3 over the course of an entire 5-level campaign.
I gather you have an opinion on this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/average-damage
One of the schticks of my mad surgeon Doktor Krauss from our pseudo-Victorian Pathfinder campaign was his fierce, unshakable determination. He lived for one goal — to restore his alchemically-suspended, brain-in-a-jar wife to full life and function — and no law of man or paradigm of science was going to stand in his way.
Mechanically, his build ought to have supported that drive. But at key plot-critical moments, no d20 I rolled for his Will save could score above a natural 3.
Our GM handled these botched saves well, treating them as PTSD-triggered flashbacks. “The burning tenement fades to black. For a moment you can’t remember a thing, and then it all becomes clear: you’re back in the lab fire in Rottingen, and you must have struck your head. You have to get Leah out of here before it’s too late! Who are these strangers? They’re hiding Leah from you. Make them give her back!”
After a few of these episodes, it became a key part of his character: beneath his iron-willed exterior, Krauss knows he is very near cracking from grief, lack of sleep, and the unstable experimental cognatogens he pops like candy, but he views all of this as a calculated risk. He needs to hold his mind together for precisely long enough to finish his work; any second beyond that is a second stolen from Leah!
Dang, that’s a neat way to handle bad luck. And a neat character arc. This is the kind of campaign I wish I could play in.
Gotta love it when the dice get a role in the fiction. You guys are doing it right. 🙂
So, when I first started Pathfinder I wanted to play something strong, so I just looked up a tier list and picked whatever sounded cool at the top. What I didn’t realize was that this tier list wasn’t about how strong a class was, or how easy it is to do well with them, or anything like that. It was basically just a list of how close a class was to being a Wizard. So, with my newly printed Witch, I joined my first campaign.
Now, I hated this character more than I’ve hated any character since. The spell list is awful, so every other caster had better stuff than anything I could do. Hexes required being within 30 feet of an enemy, and Cackle took my move action every turn, so I was throwing myself into danger. Slumber, the ability I built the character around, did nothing to all the clerics and undead we ended up fighting, and even the giants could make their saves or had allies to pick them up immediately. Even the Ranger could kill a single enemy easier than I could, and they didn’t have to worry about immunities. I had no defensive options, no blur or invisibility or mirror image or emergency force sphere or displacement or even shield. It was agony, and I was happy when they got killed in one hit by a stealthing Rogue I couldn’t roll high enough to see.
I would have been happier with something that didn’t rely on a tactic as situational as slumber spam. Maybe a Bard or something, with actually good spells and an ability that is always useful. As it was, I was overshadowed by the martials at dealing with single targets and casters at using spells, so I felt like I didn’t excel at anything.
Oh my gods, how big were the allies?!?
Too bad about the “pick them up immediately” bit. That’s a standard tactic for sleep, but if a character is being overshadowed it’s nice for a GM to “play dumb” for a bit and let the spell work as a TKO.
This is the danger of debuff builds though. You either end the encounter in a shot (anticlimax) or do nothing (frustration). There tends to be very little in between when you’re save-or-sucking.
I usually either build a character that fills a gap in the party (thereby being the best in the party by default) or play some weird fun idea (which makes it difficult to evaluate second-best-ness, and often makes me the best in the party at something). So I’m less familiar with being second-best at something that my character is “supposed” to be good at than…just not being very good at what I intended my character to be good at.
This happens a lot in Pathfinder, which has a lot of cool classes and archetypes, but also a lot of “build traps”. Sometimes the effectiveness of one build choice relies on another that you didn’t recognize. Sometimes the class/archetype/whatever isn’t good at what you’d expect it to be good at (Magical Child, I’m looking at you). And sometimes an idea that looks cool in the book doesn’t work so well when the dice hit the table.
The example that stands out to me is my first Occultist, Blake Thornbur. Part of the problem is that the Occultist class is unfocused, and that it’s bookkeeping-heavy (especially if you try to shuffle your resources to become a decent generalist). Another problem is that the class’s most distinct strengths revolve around investigation (particularly investigation of the occult, surprise surprise), which just was not a thing in that campaign. But part of the problem is also that I didn’t really know how to build an Occultist, either in the sense of “you need to actually focus on something” or the sense of knowing what choices were good for an Occultist.
Unsurprisingly, I started using online guides to help me plan character builds after that, especially the first time I play a new class. I don’t follow them religiously, but they provide a decent template for me to muck up.
5e doesn’t have this problem, but by the same token it doesn’t have as much variety in its classes. The difference between a warlock and a wizard isn’t as big as the difference between a witch and a wizard, and the differences that 5e subclasses make pales in comparison to how radically Pathfinder archetypes can modify the base class. There are trade-offs, but at this point I prefer the Pathfinder mold.
Well now you’ve got me curious. What is the magical child good at vs. supposed to be good at? Tiara throwing?
This is my approach as well. It’s difficult to grock a class in isolation, and the build guides help show off a few generally strong options while you try to wrap your head around complex mechanics.
Word. Somebody a million years ago commented on Handbook about a VMC magus version of the occultist. Lots of neat self-buffing with a side order of necromancy for support and utility. I had great fun with that character, and he was pretty effective if you pulled all the knobs and dials just right. But holy crap was the plate-spinning a challenge!
The Magical Child is supposed to be a Pathfinderication of magical girl characters, as indicated by the name and transformation sequence. Its spell list and other class abilities mostly focus around strengthening its familiar and summoning more creatures, making it more of a battle-pet class (like the Summoner) than a magical blaster or debuffer or whatever.
Very few magical girls are Pokémon trainers and vise versa; while magical girls often do have magical creatures accompanying them (whether talking cats or merchandisable fantasy creatures), they rarely help out in combat. While I’m not super familiar with the magical girl genre, I tend to think of “energy beams” and “heart-shaped magical projectiles” before “battle housecat,” and searching for fight scenes from iconic magical girl anime turns up a lot of magical attacks, though mostly of the “fantasy wizard” variety and not the “girly cuteness” variety. Also a surprising number of pysical strikes, especially from Pretty Cure, whose heroines really like kicks and backflips. (The only Precure characters I saw using more than one ranged attack were the villains.)
The designers probably intended to design a battle-familiar archetype, and they might have decided to do that after trying to figure out what distinguishes magical girls from other kinds of spellcasters and deciding it was the cute critter. But that means that they made an Ash Ketchum and marketed it as a Sailor Moon.
If I were designing the Magical Child archetype, and for some reason the “magical blaster” thing was off the table, I’d probably riff off the “magical idol singer” archetype and mix in some bardic DNA. But I’d probably push for “magical blaster,” because that is what most people are going to think of when they imagine playing a magical girl in Pathfinder.
I don’t mind being the best as long as the character is fun to play. I’ve taken options that aren’t mechanically the best but are just cool. Like my cleric taking Wild Growth Channel. It takes two extra uses of channel energy to make vines grow in the area of the channel that can entangle targets. It’s not optimal and uses up your channel rounds very quick, but it’s perfectly thematic for a cleric that is basically a druid that can wear metal.
I tend to follow this approach myself. 🙂
Still, I think that problems come creeping in when gamers aren’t aware that their choices are suboptimal.
“I wanted to make a cool nature cleric. Why are my entangle DCs so low? Why can I never heal?”
If you know what you’re getting into, it’s fun to turn these mediocre abilities into a self-imposed challenge. If you’re a newer gamer though, you might find yourself trapped by ’em.
True. It can suck if you’re expecting to be great at everything but can’t figure out how to do it mechanically.
I had the idea for a super craft proto-paladin. He knew his limits with skills the roleplay and backstory was down. But he was first level fighter, which delayed cleric progression. I was last in damage, best at AC, third best healer. Completely outshined by the druid pre healing spirit nerf. The experienced players asked if I had X spell that was always a level or 2 away. It was frustrating, I had some downtime ideas to build with the world and my tools but the DM didn’t do downtime. A character that could in theory do everything I wanted ended up being the worst at everything but saves. Being dice cursed at the time didn’t help either.
Oof. Shifting your build to defense is the worst.
I had a buddy go gun tank in Pathfinder a while back:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/gunslinger/archetypes/paizo-gunslinger-archetypes/gun-tank/
Dude still talks about how frustrating it was to watch enemies ignore him while, “I couldn’t do anything.”
The trouble with defense builds is you need to be sticky, and the easiest way to do that is to jump up CMB… which is utterly counter to how Gun Tanks play.
I’ll keep this DnD related, but let me simply say that you’ve not seen a power gaming munchkin until you’ve seen one playing Rifts. I spent many a game with my cool dude either banned or somewhere around lastest place most of the time. And the banned dudes were generally banned over being lizards instead of hairless beach apes.
But moving on, we’re doing some FFD20 (here if curious: https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/ ) and I made a perfectly competent Samurai. I’m never quite sure where my characters will end up power wise; I tend not to worry about it. I have my one sword swing a round, I make the most of it. I am, so far, dice cursed which is more frustrating…
But I have this friend who just is a munchkin. He’s a wonderful guy; he just makes everything as broken as he can within whatever the limits are. He already has the highest AC and arguably the highest offense with 4 attacks a round, with the highest bonuses due to also getting a unique version of rage *that makes his attacks also do fire damage.*
As time goes on, it should level out, but it’s a bit WTF right now.
I have no problem becoming second fiddle. I’m more likely to get it out of here alive and with my wits about me if the largest bad person in the room doesn’t charge at the second place adventurer.