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It was down to the wire, but the votes have been tallied and our latest Patreon poll has a winner. By the narrow margin of a single vote, it’s Dread Necromancer by a nose! I hope you will all join me in welcoming our gothy gal to Handbook-World! (Better luck next time, Samurai!)
Dread Necromancer has every right to be depressed. There are a lot of reasons why a GM might ask you to reconsider your character choice, and she happens to embody all of them at once. The evil thing is an obvious pitfall. Plenty of tables ban evil alignments outright, and every one of them has a “this one time there was PVP and hurt feelings” story. There are mechanical issues as well. Classes with too many pets tend to slow down games, and all those adorable zombie waifs are going to take up a lot of time at the table. Then there’s the issue of campaign theme. It’s hard to fit a necromancer into your standard Big Damn Heroes campaign. Walk into town with a retinue of unpleasant undead monstrosities and the quest givers tend to turn around and flee.
I’ve had to have this conversation myself exactly twice. The first involved a pre-errata scarred witch doctor in Pathfinder. The player in question has a talent for optimizing, and I was worried he might overshadow the rest of the group. We compared notes, came to an understanding, and wound up getting a witch doctor anyway. This one just happened to be a standard witch / investigator multiclass. (It also turned out to be a damned cool support caster.)
The second involved this frigging thing. On the off chance you don’t want to read through the full skittermander entry, suffice it to say that Starfinder’s most adorifying critters gave me some strong kender flashbacks. The player and I compared notes, came to an understanding, and mutually decided that I am a fun-hating killjoy who deserved to sleep on the couch for a few days.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever disallowed certain classes in one of your games? Has a GM ever asked you to rethink your character? How did the conversation go? Let’s hear it in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Oh good, I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Space Kender when reading about Skittermanders.
How’s this for a backhanded compliment? Ahem: “I’m sure I’d enjoy them in fiction.”
I was really hoping the poll would tie and you’d have to multiclass them. 🙂
Skittermanders really don’t seem that bad. They are like six-armed parasitic gnomes, from that description; nowhere near the thieving assholes with cruel taste in jokes that somehow embody all that is good and innocent in the world.
I’ve never disallowed a class from a flavor perspective. I haven’t had to disallow evil characters either. I make sure that my evil players take the Belkar Bitterleaf approach; you can lie, cheat, and be the most terrible you can be, but you must find a reason to work with the party. Currently we have a Dagon-worshipping Warlock in a group of good and neutral characters, and he does his evil by either slipping off to do it alone, or accepting that the party will often block him from his evil actions.
I was seriously considering rolling up 6th level versions of each class and making them duel. Of course, you then get into questions of system, prep time vs. no prep time, how many minions to allow, and relative build power. Bleh.
For “Samurai vs. Necromancer,” make it an Order of the Flame Samurai and then the number of minions doesn’t matter – each one makes the Samurai stronger. More or less.
“I was really hoping the poll would tie and you’d have to multiclass them.”
I FIGHT FOR HONOR AND SKELETONS!!!
I suppose having minions helps keep the enemy’s friends off your back while you use Challenge.
As for alignment restrictions, my main GM disallows all three Evils and also Chaotic Neutral, for simplicity’s sake. I am a little sad about that, since I have a character concept whose alignment is somewhere between True Neutral and Chaotic Evil – she’s very selfish and wants fame and glory, but she decided long ago that this adventurer/hero thing was the best way to get it (“Yeah, I could try to become an evil overlord, but can you think of any time that’s actually worked?”) and so avoids doing anything actively “Evil” that would sabotage that. And she’d never steal from her teammates or anything like that. After all, the more effective they are, the quicker victory comes and the less work she has to do/damage she has to take. Also a good reason to keep them alive in all circumstances short of sacrificing herself. After all, Smart Evil tries to look like Good whenever possible, right?
Methinks you need to roll up a dude for Way of the Wicked. Get it out of your system and such.
My favorite evil campaign called for our merry band of cutthroats to fetch the BBEG some orphan tears.
“But Boss… There aren’t any orphans around here.”
“Then go make some!”
Cue evil chuckling.
Flavor wise, my two rules are a) be able to work with the rest of the party, and b) fit in the setting. The latter is generally not too much of a problem since I tend to go with a fantasy kitchen sink approach, but if in the setting I have only certain sentient player races that exist then a PC that’s not one of the races would be vetoed.
Mechanically, my rules are a) don’t overly slow down play by the class’s design, b) I must have a working grasp of your mechanics, and c) don’t be overpowered to the point of overshadowing the rest of the party. I try to work with players on this, so a minionmancer who can resolve their turn and minion actions very quickly is fine by me. The latter two mostly apply to homebrew brought in, which I generally am fine with (usually with a few tweaks) but reserve veto rights should it prove to be a problem in play.
Seems reasonable on all fronts. Of course, being a forum-dweller, my mind immediately goes to worst case scenarios involving unreasonable players. You know that type.
“What do you mean I can’t play a half-tarrasque? You’re ruining my fun!”
Have you ever encountered that guy, or is he a purely theoretical concern?
So far my players have been reasonable. There was one I had though that insisted on playing an undead conjoined twin minotaur barbarian wielding a greataxe in each pair of hands. In 5e Flavor wise I could stretch to work it in (the PCs had already establishes themselves as powerful murderhobos, another freak wouldn’t really change that. Plus there was an undead island he could have come from nearby.) Mechanically was where it got to be a real pain. Fortunately I had already given the other players personalized magic items that got stronger as they level up, so I just made his homebrewed racial features his “special magic item” to keep him in balance with the rest of the party. A headache for me, but the player liked it and the rest of the party was fine with it…until they also found out the minotaur was dangerously bipolar (and I mean CSI bipolar.) Fortunately that only came up once before the campaign ended, but it happened during the bbeg fight and very nearly caused a tpk.
Was the bipolar thing a result of the player’s RP, or was it a penalty built into the custom racial features? I’ve been thinking about mental compulsions recently, so if it was the latter I’d be curious to know how you implemented it.
Also, good on ya for working with the player. It takes guts as a DM to allow that magnitude of weirdness.
That was player RP. I don’t like to force those sorts RP features on players.
I’ve banned Kineticist from my table, mainly because the class is so dense and confusing that I don’t really get it.
I’ve also shot dow every attempt of one of my players to play a psionic class from dream scarred press, mostly because I’ve ran through it in my head 50 times and in the majority of those found it unbalanced.
I hear that a lot about Kineticist. I think it’s got a lot to do with the way it used to be presented on d20pfsrd. It got better:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/occult-adventures/occult-classes/kineticist/
Oh yeah thats a big improvement on the old way they set up the page. Also, as long as you ban or massively nerf psychic reformation, I really wouldn’t consider psionic classes op. They are defiantly stronger in some elements, such as defenses, but they also fall behind in others significantly, such as typically having less utility then similar casters, endurance, blasting ability, and so on. I would say similar things about the akashic classes dream scarred made. Path of war on the other hand is completely unbalanced compared to baseline pathfinder, as it is an attempt to both give martial characters more utility and to allow them to match the usefulness of casters in battle with all the stupid amounts of cc and what not they provide late game, and as such is completely unbalanced relative to the normal martial and partial martial characters. I would still say they are well made, it just is that every player has to understand that if they are allowed and played in a game, you really can’t be non-path of war full martials, though the path of war archetypes for those martials are often pretty good too, if typically somewhat weaker still then the base path of war characters.
I’ve never quite understood the problem with the original Scarred Witch Doctor. Was is just that the CON casting gave them more HP than normal, and that they had higher AC than typical for an arcane caster? They’re still unarmored d6 HD 1/2 BAB casters, right? I mean, I guess by definition they have Orcish Ferocity…
I’m not sure what to say about the Skittermander, other than that I found the description of their “conquest” by the Vesk to be hilarious.
“They’re not fighting back? What to we do?”
“I don’t know! This isn’t fun. I’m going home.”
Kender, on the other hand, seem infamous for a reason. An entire race devoted to the idea of encouraging everything a player would not want in a partymate while using narrative fiat to insist that they aren’t bad guys and should be loved despite their clearly harmful and problematic actions? A SOCIETY DESCRIBED AS AN “OMNIGARCHY” WHEN IT IS CLEARLY JUST A WELL-FUNCTIONING ANARCHY!?!? (Don’t make up nonsense terms like that around a PolySci major.)
Tiny. Adorable. Annoying. Those are the words to describe both kender and skittermanders. The latter cause my traumatic high school kender flashbacks to act up. Thanks no thanks!
The 5E DMG has some pretty good rules for handling excessive mobs on page 250 so they don’t slow down play.
I always liked 4e’s minions as a concept. If only PC companions were equally disposable…
I admit that I like to optimize my characters a good bit for pathfinder. Its just a lot of fun for me to think of fun builds and to try to make them strong without using anything truly broken while still making sure that they keep their backgrounds and out of combat lives in full consideration with how they are built. Due to this, my dm has strongly suggested that he never wants to see me play a full caster, a paladin, a magus, a archer, a tiefling, or a guy with a british accent ever again in pathfinder.
Your GM banned British accents? Weird. I always thought that French had much more of a balance problem:
https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic885535_md.jpg
No, he just banned my british accent, at the insistence of everyone who wasn’t me, with that being the only thing he ever banned in the middle of a campaign. Though he did nerf magus fairly hard in the middle of the campaign as well, though he also did the same to a friends sky dragon tiger style monk.
What was wrong with the magus?
Basically due to the magus’ great action economy I was typically putting out around as much or a bit more damage then anyone else, while also being tankier and having more utility then the other players except the druid. We were typically facing guys around 3 or 4 cr higher, and I could reliably hit almost every attack, make most every save, and rarely ever be hit.
Was this early level? I had those worries myself before iterative attacks and 3/4 BAB became an issue. In my experience it becomes a much less dominant class around level 6.
Nah, we decided to do a crazy level 15-20 campaign in which we were allowed to pick any creature we wanted from the bestiary and subtract their cr or a bit more then their cr if the dm says so from how many levels you start with. There was also some confusion while planning the campaign that led to me thinking that we would all be evil, which meant that my first character, a demon worshipping aranea sorcerer, was soon seperated from the group to be replaced by my not evil tiefling magus. In hindsight, I think a big part of the reason my guy was so strong was that we didnt have many encounters per day so i had no worries about using points from my arcane pool and using my strongest spells every turn. Our only full caster never used quicken spells and wasnt that well optimized, while the giant giant psychic warrior was incredibly restricted on power points so even without many fights he couldnt splurge like me. The sky dragon monk didnt really do much with ki and basically just flew everywhere dealing around 100-200 damage a turn typically, and the gunslinger did not understand at all what he was doing. Another thing that might have helped my guy is that im pretty good at getting the most out of the gold we had.
At the end of the day, I think that the biggest issue with optimizing is relative power level. You just don’t want to overshadow the rest of the group, and not knowing how skilled your pals happen to be, that can be a big challenge. In the case of my scarred witch doctor pal, he wound up optimizing a support class. If it’s me in that situation, I think that sandbagging a little and “playing down” to everyone else’s power level could be a solution. Save the big guns for really hard fights, and then do quirky stuff for the typical fights.
I managed to make my DM ban super minmax builds when I played a witch with 27 INT at 8th level. (only using the +2 headband) however he let me keep playing the witch. She was one of my favourite characters to play ever. She could debuff like no other. She was pretty weak during the Undead arc, basically just punching things with Cure Light with her hair and doing the occasional buff hex, but in other combats she’s insane. Every time it’s her turn an enemy would go to sleep, get nauseated, get grappled by tentacles, etc. Her save DCs were crazy high, combined with evil eye and ill omen this was nearly unstoppable.
He also bans Base Summoner and I think Core Rogue. (For completely opposite reasons)
Replacing the witch is a character similar to Dread Necromancer up there, a Construct Rider Alchemist, starting at 11th level so I had plenty of gold to create some friends for the party and I. So I have her riding around a colossal animated object that also functions as her workshop to create more constructs! (Basically throwing the normal crafting while travelling rules out the window) She’s far from OP like the witch was, but her constructs (after commanding them, mindless sucks) can give her some great action economy.
I still want to build my bad punching debuffer cleric/monk. It’s something like 7 saves on a hit. I don’t even want to play it. I just want to inflict it on some poor GM one time.
sounds perfect for a one shot, any details on the build?
Bad Punching Drow Cleric of Cyth-V’sug
(Notes from my personal character builds folder.)
If I’ve got Stunning Fist interacting with the Touch of Chaos ability via Domain Strike, we can produce some fun shenanigans. With a conductive spell storing amulet (variant channel ftw!) of mighty fists, we can do some serious debuffing!
If my calculations are correct, if I can go Unchained Monk 1 / Cleric 5, at 6th level I can:
Strike with fist.
Touch of Chaos.
Unload a Bestow Curse targeting saves via Spell Storing.
Use Variant Channel via the Conductive property. Luck (harm) seems extra mean.
Attempt the Stunning Fist.
If everything lands, the enemy will be rolling 2d20 and taking the lowest at a -6 vs. the Stunning Fist. I may have to shout Chaotic Curse of Unlucky Fisting before making the attempt. As a bonus, I’m part way to Spring Attack thanks to the bonus monk feat (Dodge), and can get it online at 7th if I take a level in fighter. This seems like a very silly build. Cyth-V’sug be praised! (…Assuming I can get the GM to make an alignment exception. Otherwise I guess it’s “generic ideals of Chaos and Decay be praised!”).
This MAD concept is best in a “roll for stats game.”
1. Cleric: channel smite
2. Cleric:
3. Unchained Monk: domain strike, improved unarmed, dodge, stunning fist (retrain channel smite to mobility)
4. Cleric:
5. Cleric: spring attack
6. Cleric:
7: Cleric: weapon focus
Domains: Chaos, Plant (decay), Luck (for the variant channel). This deity might work for the effects of the disease variant channel. Could be thematically correct in a drow campaign. That option even adds the possibility of tacking on poison to this silliness.
The sequence should be:
1. Declare attack.
2. Announce Stunning Fist.
3. Roll attack. Hit like a champ with your unarmed strike.
4. Announce your intention to use Domain Strike as a swift action.
5. Resolve the Touch of Chaos effect. No save involved.
6. Roll damage and resolve damage.
7. If the creature was actually damaged, continue to next step. Otherwise stop.
8. Use a free action to apply Bestow Curse via the spell storing property.
9. Conduct a town hall style debate to decide whether poison or stunning applies next.
10. Duck the copy of the Core Rules that your GM just threw at your head for making him roll three saves.
11. Ask if it’s too late to declare that you meant to deal nonlethal damage, because it would be nice to roll intimidate for the Enforcer feat you picked up last level.
12. After an extended argument about the whole Enforcer thing, use a move action to quick channel your Variant Channel: Disease (harm) to apply the sickened condition.
13. Make petty comments on the group’s forum after you’re kicked out of game night
Jesus Christ! I love your sequence and that build just looks like insanity. Reminds me of my “get kicked out of game” build that gets broken at 6th and manages to focus on Crossbows to do it. Costs half of WBL though.
Bolt Ace gunslinger 6 wielding a +1 Shadowshooting Double Crossbow with Rapid Shot. Just buff DEX as high as possible, goblin would probably work perfectly.
Double Crossbows make one attack roll at -4 and count as hitting twice for everything except precision damage, but they take a move action to reload WITH rapid reload and Crossbow Mastery. Shadowshooting make it so the weapon never has to reload but the enemy makes a will save to take minimum damage (as if the dice rolled 1s)
If under the effect of Haste, at 6th level he can make 4 attacks, if all four hit they all deal two hits worth of damage, and each of these eight hits is 1d6+1+DEX, or 2+DEX with a successful will save on the first attack. Add in Deadly Aim for another +4 damage to each of these. Assuming a dex bonus of +6, that’s 24 damage on each attack, which he has four of.
Staying in Bolt Ace isn’t necessary after getting the crossbow training, but some multiclasses could make it even more insane.
lol shenanigans. Figures it would be a goblin.
Well it doesn’t have to be, any race that gives a dex bonus works. Just helps that goblins have +4 and also have the best racial feats.
I’m actually currently playing a necromancer (School Savant Arcanist) in a Carrion Crown campaign. To keep in-character (and as a self-imposed limitation to keep him from getting too powerful or bogging down initiative), he doesn’t actually create any undead (due to this being Carrion Crown, he has plenty of “natural resources”, though), and he destroys any he commands before leaving the site of any adventure. Thus, he’s not walking through town with a horde of undead minions to scare townspeople with, and while he’s a bit morally grey (a sort of “fight fire with fire” kind of guy), he’s not outright evil.
Does you GM just kind of assume that destroying undead is enough to make up for the “evil” descriptor in the spell?
More importantly though: how do you go about destroying you minions? Do you keep some kind of a cattle gun on hand?
He doesn’t use any [Evil] spells or abilities. Neither the Command Undead Necromancy school ability nor the spell have that descriptor. Like I said, he doesn’t actually CREATE any undead.
As for destroying my minions, that’s what the fighter is for.
I feel like there ought to be an archetype that rewards you for that style of play. It would take all create undead spells off your list, but give you XYZ bonus in exchange.
Oh! the necromancer also reminded me of one of my favourite “pathfinder” stories ever. I highly recommend checking it out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/64ltra/of_undead_and_understanding/
Hmmm… I am now strongly considering forming a 4th adventuring party for this comic: “The Rejects.” It’s got our girl DN and Gunslinger so far. Now I just need to figure out how to fill out the ranks….
Also check out the sequel, the same guy posted a followup. With some extra lore in the comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/6dhjd5/of_undead_understanding_the_dead_exodus/
What about Summoner? I doubt anyone could be much more of a Reject than Summoner.
Well, poor Gunslinger and DN are pretty desperate…
Someone really needs to create a good and affordable computer program for tracking damage and other combat stats so that lots of summons/followers/horde-of-zombies etc. doesn’t slow things to a crawl
I happen to know a program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvXG_9djNU&t=285s
I never saw necromancy as inherently evil, like murder is. A lot of settings play it that way, and you’d be well within your rights as GM to decide that the various Gods and religions in your setting have declared it as such, but on an emotional level I could never muster up the knee-jerk objections that D&D seemed to be trying to foist one me.
I always looked at it as something that was merely suicidally dangerous. Like, you’re in a D20 Modern setting and someone announces that have a gun with infinite ammo. “How’d you accomplish that?” you ask. “Well you see, there’s a tiny nuclear reactor in the handle” they say. “Nuclear?” you say. “Tiny”, they say; “barely large enough to take out a single city block”. “A whole city block!” you say. “And my good-luck charm is small glass vial filled with a hybrid strain of ebola and smallpox” they say. etc etc etc
That’s necromancy to me.
Imho, the danger also depends on the kinds of undea you’re creating. Allips, vampires, and the like, sure, but mindless stuff like zombies or skeletons I don’t see as any more evil than creating a golem. It’s not like the subject’s soul is using the body anymore, and if they want to via a raise dead it’s not hard fix to re-dead the zombie.
Here’s a fun little debate you can have: what makes a flesh-golem count as a Construct instead of an Undead?
You ever see the rules for the white necromancer from Kobold Press?
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/kobold-press-open-design/white-necromancer/
I always thought it was a solid attempt to take the evil out of necromancy, allowing for the style without the baggage.
I hadn’t seen that, but I always love reading about new variants. If nothing else it often gives me ideas for my own homebrew.
It seems very similar in essence to what I once tried to do with the otherwise ho-hum healer class from 3.5. I turned all his “Cure Wounds” spells into “Inflict Wounds” and made him a veritable font of negative-energy, which works with a handful of select “evil” groups who build for that. I called it the “Necrolyte”.
Sounds like a zombie glider.
I don’t know what that is O_o
A necrolyte? It’s an ultralight aircraft. Made out of zombies.
I was going to link that! I really wanna play that class some day, just for the flavour of arguing with a party that there’s nothing inherently evil about raising the dead.
If my years of role-playing have taught me anything, it’s this: you never need an excuse for arguing with the party about alignment.
Ah Necromancers, why oh why are clerics so much better at it than wizards? Is it because they get animate dead at earlier levels? Yes. Is it because they have the innate ability to heal their undead creations? Yes.
Yeah… Makes me want to wait for a gestalt game to play one.
I once had to explain to a DM why my character (a Dread Necromancer actually) would be fine in the game despite the group being mostly good. It helped that at the level I was making her I could afford a ring of mind shielding, and used my horde of undead laborers from the Undead Leadership feat as actual craftsmen.
I then later showed him the error of his ways by corrupting one of the other characters and building a dungeon as a business venture…
How does one monetize a dungeon?
Complicated pyramid schemes involving losing just enough money in treasure to get the word out and still making enough in profits from the treasures brought in by unlucky adventurers. It was a high risk venture per the old 3.5 business rules in DMG 2.
I imagine the high risk lies in avenging adventurers who come looking for their dead guildmates’ stuff.
Hahahaha, that 1d4chan Kender image is one of my favorite things in tabletop gaming.
Skittermanders seem potentially obnoxious, but at the absolute worst a 7 on the scale of 1 to Kender. Their best trait is their relationship with the Veskarium, so I’d explore them through that filter.
As a fan of of “redeemed villain joins the main cast” tropes and monstrous player characters in general, I often skate this line to see what kinds of fringe folk that I can brainforge into existence. A bit of trial and error in my early days helped me learn to respect the groups’ sensibilities and work within the setting’s lore. Those skills have served me quite well, since I mostly play PFS and I am frequently playing Summoners and magicians of varying shades of morality.
I’d accentuate these examples with amusing images, but I have no idea what format this website uses for link codes.
You know, I’ve heard enough people complain about the inability to edit comments or use formatting on this site that Ima see about finding a solution. There’s gotta be a suitable plugin out the somewhere.
Also, good on ya for the bit about gauging your group before pulling this stuff. Of course evil can work OK in a mixed group. Whether or not it ruins someone else’s fun is the big question.
My current DM disallowed Conjurers and more-than-one-minion based classes on the grounds of they take too damn long to run person by person (companions/mounts/familiars are still K). This allows him to put more NPCs on the field at any given time for the same time-spent-fighting allotment, which is nice because sometimes you’re just wanting to chew through 20 mooks for an hour. Watching your character reap those fragile lives like so much barley is gratifying.
4e minions, man. I want to homebrew them into other systems.
Of all the things 4e introduced, I feel similarly about minions. They got that one right.
I have a tendency to powergame sometimes… But in my defense, a Mercurial Platinum Fullblade sounds AMAZING!
When I go too deep two of the others that I play with and bounce rules off of will step in and curb my enthusiasm a bit. I try to take it in stride, mostly because I don’t wanna be the guy messing it up for someone else.
Here’s the thing that I always worry about: Does that hurt your fun? I was self-conscious as hell asking my own powergaming pal to reign it in with the aforementioned scarred witch doctor.
Yes. For a bit it stung that this cool idea was a no-go.
Then I had to decide if I liked it because it fit my character, or because it was super strong…
In the end I want something that fits my character’s design, and not just my desires.
If it fits both? Well then just keep brain storming until something works.
The most important thing for anyone to remember is “It wasn’t personal”
If it was, then there was something else broken, and it had nothing to do with a character sheet.
I’ve definitely disallowed classes before, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want people being evil. (In fact, the entire group was a super evil bunch of viking raiders). I just disallowed warlocks, sorcerers, paladins, monks, and wizards because the flavor didn’t mesh well with the campaign and I hate DMing for utility-oriented spellcasters.
I know, I know, I should just find a lower magic system, but I really don’t know what to look into for that and the group is already familiar with 5e.
I tend to like Savage Worlds for its flexibility in this regard. Pretty easy to pick up, and not so light on crunch that you’ll disappoint your bloodthirsty vikings.
At this point, I’ve probably played more evil characters than good during my gaming career. That’s partly because I like playing evil (and, more importantly, can actually do it well) but also at this point people just expect me to make evil characters, so anytime I make a good character, everyone suspects them of being secretly evil, which gets old very fast. I even once played an actually interesting Chaotic Evil character! Who got along with people! He was an affable highwayman, who had no honor, and would kill at the drop of a hat, but only if it was actually an appropriate response to the situation. With how many people I’ve seen play ‘Chaotic Stupid’ and ‘Stupid Evil’, I get why some people restrict alignments the way they do.
Testify! I think that it’s easy to turn “evil” into the sole defining feature of a character, and that’s when chaotic stupid tends to rear its head. Be a character first; be your alignment a distant second.
I’ve actually been working on another couple of characters recently, one of whom is an ‘only technically evil’ necromancer, who’s going to summon skeletons, but dress them up in enough clothes and armor that they can just pass for some mute bodyguards.
Armored Coat, yo:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/armor/armored-coat/
That quick armor makes a difference!
Awwww poor Dread Necromancer, so lonely and Misunderstood, she just needs a Hug =(.
I rarely Flat out disallowed something, because my Players are more or less reasonable, somehow we always made the weirdos fit. For Example a Necromancer, gets a few strong corpses too Ressurect every few Lvls, under the Agreement that he doesn’t make too many 2 or 3 Minions can be quickly handled, but Army Mancing is prohibited because it bogs down play and is OP. Also Undead can be disguised, with enough Plate Armour Nobody (but the Party) will know.
Being Evil is the smallest Object in my Opinion, you just need to have a good enough Reason too make it a Self-Interest of the Character to help the group or Force him. (Mark of Justice, Explosive Collar, Divine Quest, being a loving and Loyal, but none the less Evil Silbing of another PC, hating the BBEG Personally so goddamn much etc. ) Heck depending on the Quest you can even make an Antipaladin and a Paladin work together, if both their deities say. “Look Guys, we need you to Stop the End of the World as we know, we dislike it as much as you do, but you are gone stop it. Together.”
But really Now, Dread Necromancer needs a Hug, she looks so sad. She needs to talk to Wizard, I am sure he woud Understand!
Wizard, or Goth Phase Wizard?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/goth-phase
I’m betting the latter still has some eyeliner she could borrow.
Well wizard had his Goth Phase and even after he kept his Undead Rat, so i think those too might get along.
two* Go Damn it. I can’t type too safe my Life.
I try to steer clear of top tier classes in 3.5 (cleric, wizard, archivist, artificer, druid), simply because I’m pretty inexperienced as a DM and there are so many alternative options in 3.5 that I don’t feel like it’s actually hurting any character concepts to discourage classes that have the potential to break the game.
Ugh, the Necromacer! I’ve seen not one but two parties fall apart because of just that problem. That One Player would insist on raising some child’s corpse as a servant and try to play it off like it was something cute instead of something replusive. Both occurred under the same DM (not sure how she didn’t realise the problem the first time). She didn’t handle it well either – rahter than try coax the necromancer to rethink their design, she tried to argue that the rest of us shouldn’t be offended because in her setting necromancy “wasn’t considered evil”. That was the first we’d heard of that! Personally, I would be inclined to disallow such a player in my own game, not only because it would offend the others, but because that shit’s just messed up, man. :p
. . .
To answer the other question though, I often disallow a swathe of class (and/or race) options in my games, depending on the setting I have built. My current campaign is very strict – there’s no divine casters at all! I am convinced that every player who is not an optimiser/ powergamer can look at a restricted set of options and still come up with a character they are excited to play. And those are the players I want to run games for.
What power gamer hurt you?
I think there’s something to be said for the fun of playing with mechanics and rules. They aren’t just an annoying hurdle to get out of the way so that you can game. In my mind, those mechanics are part of the experience. The problem is that some players go too deep on mechanics, replacing the rest of the game with them rather than letting the two halves of play support and guide one another.
So in short: A limited palette can indeed produce interesting effects. It’s true in poetry, painting, and D&D settings. But some players get a lot of joy and pleasure from mix-and-matching across the breadth of the hobby, and that doesn’t have to be about power gaming at the expense of narrative.
Haha powergamers, they bully me… Seriously though, I find that even one powergamer in a party can diminish the experience of the players who have built according to concept rather than effectiveness. Because these concept players still want to be effective in the die rolls, and a campaign can have only one “difficulty setting” for all players! I think both are perfectly legitimate ways of playing the game, but I’ve not seen the tribes combine well. I know which tribe I belong to, and will happily stay with my own kind.
I suppose a player might have only one concept character they really want to play, and my restrictions would stymie them; but in this era of a potentially limitless player pool both I and they have the luxury to look for the game we can use to realise our respective desires. Restrictions on Class or Race are not arbitrary for me; they are an essential part of world building, and it’s the immersive and unique homebrew settings that are my main sell as a DM.