Number 1: my barbarian idea was just “funny Russian man with pet bear”, who dual weilds a hammer and sickle. I chose totem barbarian with a bear totem, and little did I realize that would make me practically invincible
I did the accidental #5 to #1 pipeline. Which is pretty easy to do in DCC. I just rolled some amazing stats for a fighter, went “ok I’ll be our muscles” and picked up an extremely powerful cursed sword.
The GM decided to buff the curse and actually make the demon inside it the main BBEG of the campaign after I took my first swing with it and one shot what was supposed to be a tough mini-boss for our party.
haha that’s cool and I’m not a furry
Funny enough, come to think of it, I don’t think any of my PCs have fit into this.
One of my favorite characters I’ve ever had fits perfectly into #15. She was a tiny goblin that was on a quest to collect as many skulls as possible and had a sheep that she won in a contest as her steed. (She was about 2.5 feet tall and the rest of the party was human-sized or larger, so I had to roll endurance checks to keep up with them sometimes if we were traveling a long distance.)
One I did was “joke character who ended up being very serious.”
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2: Conall. I played a loud and boisterous bard with bagpipes specifically because I intended on drinking a lot of whisky and not bothering putting on an accent other than my natural one during the one shot
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3: Kairi. Paladin who was built to make everyone around her as invincible as she was.
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5: Pech. I played a Pathfinder 2e one shot as a fairy barbarian that I specced into being able to carry a human-sized greatsword. He was more functional than I expected him to be
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6: I swear the amount of kenku I play is not a furry thing I swear
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8: Morgan. This one was Lancer rather than D&D, but look up the Death’s Head frame from Lancer and you will immediately understand why I picked it when I wanted to be able to simply point at a thing and decide that I did not want it to be there any more
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12: Absolutely the mischief-making rabbitfolk rogue who once opened a locked door by throwing a bag of spices over a rhino to annoy it and dodging aside when it charged him
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15: Whistle. Whistle is a monk who grew up under a villain and had his world view shattered when an adventuring party took said villain down. He now travels with his new friends earnestly attempting to un-learn his awful ways. He is visually an emaciated scruffy kenku wearing rags
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From the title I thought this was going to be about personal computers and upon opening the image I was very confused for a second.
No, I don’t look at what community the post is from when I’m scrolling all.
Also missing from the list is the horny bugger. It doesn’t matter who or what it is, if it’s near them, they’ll try to seduce it
Missing:
- god-like magical being, masquerading as Just Some Dude (closely related: The Super-Powered Self-Insert)
- Most boring, generic build available in the system, played ironically (“His name is Hugh M. N. Fi-Thor”)
Oh! My first dm assigned me the god-like magical being role! It started as a group campaign and ended up being just me and her husband, and I was super new to it, so she wrote out a whole thing that my character was unaware of, and the entire story became finding out about this.
My own backstory probably sucked, but my character was a fire genasi mix who was trained as a mage blade. She was purple with white eyes due to badly botching her familiar summoning spell, so she ended up with a thievy purple monkey (incapable of following directions, unless I critted the roll) instead of the phoenix she was aiming for.
The dm snuck a giant gem into my inventory thanks to that sneaky thieving monkey (which caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine of a familiar that doesn’t obey fucking anything.) it ended up being an artifact from her ancestors, and unlocking the secrets of it brought out my latent goddessness.
So that was a blast.
Thanks for bringing up those memories! It was so long ago now…
DM assigned specialness is different and often really fun.
I’ve played a few “mystery backstory” games those are really fun, especially the one where we had to figure out even our class
one time my buddy was running a game of Monster of the Week and I came up with the most mundane character possible: a Wisconsin corn farmer named Pete Faber, competing with angels, demons, and the miscellaneous supernatural
Sounds like he could be the next Ash Williams who works on over in housewares at S-Mart!
Can you guess what is the basic flaw for me in AD&D, which eventually led me to walk away from it? How the game builds up expectations for the player.
The average person just flips open a player’s book, a monster manual or some other tome on the game lore and instantly the person thinks their character will be, from the start, like the model characters they’re reading upon, which they never will or even can be, as the game does not permit it, in my understanding and experience.
As a player, it was extremely frustrating to handle DMs that expected a newbie mage/ranger/fighter/whatever to take risks as if they were seasoned veterans and had high capabilities from the start. That is nonsense.
No class in AD&D is (or was; I speak from years of distance) capable of great feats from the get go, as the way the characters are built forces a level 0/1 into basically discarding any capabilities a trained individual into a specific profession would already have. It would be better to just say the characters are slightly above average commoners.
As a DM, I was quick to get fed up with players that wanted to pull stunts that would be barely feaseable to high level characters/professionals, regardless me going through the basics as I did above.
People are idiots but the game was set up by morons and others just tried to build on top of it to improve it, with mixed results at best.
#5 is always fun. Especially when I accidentally become #1
Where does the “ridiculous minmaxed character to game the mechanics” fit in? We had a miner/scribe once.
I think that’d fall into #8, biggest explosions
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One of the reasons I despair D&D is the most popular RPG. It’s almost all combat, and not even great combat at that.
I don’t hate D&D, but I did notice how much harder combat gets from DM’s side to prepare, and also how much more bored of it the players are. My players started doing everythign to spend more sessions on their own shenanigans, character moments, roleplay and NPC interactions. The thing is we love our campaign and characters, but are too high level to switch systems. So we’re taking break to play short Mage: the Ascension campaign.
I am now learnign two different new systems, Mage and WFRP, pray for me.
You are aware that most of DnDs mechanics are focused on simulating fights? If you do not like that, you are maybe playing the wrong system. Beyond that, how are you totally useless in combat? All classes get combat-abilities in one way or another and are designed to be at least moderately useful.
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My personal favorite aspect with respect to combat is, “I look around, what objects and furniture are in the room?” Then proceed to use that stuff in combat. Long rug? I’ll attempt to trip the opponent by pulling it up. Chandelier? Yeah I’ll throw a hand axe and try to break that chain. Some DMs thrive off of it, some are put off.
Have you tried PBTA games, because the whole consequences things really push that kind of play
You are my favourite kind of player.
Ooh, or my other trope: be a cleric with heavy armor and a shield. On your first turn in combat, walk out in front of everyone, cast Shield of Faith, and take the Dodge action. As a free action, yell “come at me, fucknuts!” If you can pick up the Shield spell, you’re mostly invulnerable, and it’s pretty much viable at level 1.
Being useless in combat is a personal choice that can absolutely be avoided without hampering your ability to be a skillmonkey. You won’t be obliterating the enemy en masse, but that’s what the casters are for.
Play a Thief rogue and have a blast with fast hands when initiative is rolled, or be almost any bard and hand out bardic inspiration while you stand as a mild speedbump of meat between the wizard and the enemy.
Or maybe chat with your DM about game expectations prior to playing? I know it’s an impossible ask for the internet at large.
The problem is that while combat focused PC have armour, high initiative, multiple attack per round, and don’t fail their roll. You’re like acting at the end of the round, once when other PC do it 3 times, fail your attack and as soon as you get hit you’re unconscious. The cool part of putting the big combat at the end of the session is that you can take a nap, and have the GM waking you up at 5 combat is over, let’s give the XP and the first train homes leaves in 30 minutes
Ah so we’re complaining that dumping constitution makes you die faster? Yeah if you roll up with 8 strength 8 dex and 8 con you’re going to get split in half by the first kobold you encounter, what a concept.
If you’re playing a bard with 14 charisma(or heaven forbid, 16 like a filthy minmaxer), you’re only a few percentage points behind your team on your vicious mockeries. You genuinely have to try to be truly useless.
Chat with the whole party. Some of them might not be happy with you avoiding all the combat.
Absolutely, there should be some level of “okay who stands in front of the skeletons, who fireballs the skeletons, who puts the fighter back together after they get fireball’d too, and who stops the whole party from getting killed by a trap before they even reach the battle”. If you’re gasp optimizing, you might even tailor your skillmonkey around the gaps in your party’s abilities - you probably don’t need the world’s best arcana checks with a wizard in the party, but it would be nice to grab face skills if you don’t have any other charismatic fellows around.
That is a lot more optimization than I’m used to. In my group people just come up with characters they want to play and the GM works with that.
Mind you, we do discuss what kind of game we’re playing so we don’t end up with four pure noncombatants doing a dungeon crawl. But ending up with four wizards? Yeah, that might happen or even be encouraged.
I really don’t wanna have to discuss who has to change their character concept because we need a healer or our party composition won’t be optimal.
It’s not about who has to change their character concept. But about building a party which can work together.A session zero and common character creation is universal seen as a good practice
I’ve seen campaigns where players had to actively avoid PvP due to big difference in goal/loyalties/alignment. Let’s avoid the my family hates your familytrope.
Then, indeed, not doubling the skills or have skills not matching the campaign. You don’t want to have 5 pilots for one space ship. Especially if it means you don’t have a social character.
There is more character I’d like to play than games where I could play them, so not that much of a problem anyway
I find that a lot of D&D players seem to have a fairly mechanistic view of the game, more so than with other games. This is probably a result of D&D, as an offshoot of a tabletop strategy game, being designed in such a manner. Now, your approach is already a lot softer (and I agree that some preplanning is recommended) but the “every party needs a tank, a caster, a healer, a skill monkey, and one of the needs to be the face” I responded to is fairly common in the D&D world.
I don’t agree with that level of party planning. I find it awfully reductionist and belying a mechanistic view on how the game works. I also never found it necessary. Every single element in that list is optional if the players and GM can deal with it. Heck, I’ve never even been in a game with a semi-dedicated healer. For something with clear, limited in-world roles (like your starship example), you do need to allocate them but games like that are rare.
Of course, like I mentioned that D&D’s design informs the way it’s talked about, my experiences are colored by the systems I’ve played, particularly The Dark Eye. TDE affords players much less power than D&D. Spellcasters are much weaker due to slow resource regeneration – they use a mana point system and a high-powered spell will take multiple long rests to recover from. Sure, you can combat heal or throw a fireball but only when necessary. Also, there are way more skills so even with all party members pitching in you won’t have expertise or even competency in everything.
As a result, the idea of having a party that can take on any challenge (and/or deal with several high-stakes battles in a short time frame) is unrealistic. This actually frees up a lot of conceptual space since there’s no one party that can do every kind of adventure. So with some coordination you can make anything work, even a party with no combat or magical skills who Shawn Spencer their way through quests.
What absolutely needs to be worked out are things that could set the party against itself or keep a player from interacting with the others. But that’s more of a player behavior thing; e.g. you can play a perfectly selfish, evil character who still puts the party’s interests ahead of their own – if they’re played to consider having reliable friends worth more than short term gain. So yeah, I also expect a certain amount of character tailoring, just on the roleplay level rather than mechanically.
Just for clarification - you don’t want ensure your party has, say, someone with the ability to talk to people, but you also don’t want to talk to your DM ahead of time to ensure you’re not playing a politics heavy game where a face will be absolutely necessary to make any progress?
Not everyone needs to be specced into being the perfect version of one of those four basic archetypes. Like you mention, “dedicated healer” is essentially gone in place of short rests and healing word spam. But won’t it feel awful goofy to have a player die as the three other 8 wisdom barbarians fail their medicine checks to stabilize?
The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.
I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.
Yeah ime players tell the gm what they’ve decided to play when they know and the understanding is they pick something that works with everything else. Or we all decide what we’re playing collaboratively, that way if we’re all squishy controllers at least it’s on purpose
True in pathfinder, not so true in DnD 5ed
I’ve done too many of these. I tend to fall on 1 often though.
Haha, yeah, the fact that I played almost exclusively women and my few masculine characters still often had more feminine features and mannerisms was totally just to challenge myself. Never a subconscious exploration of my deepest desires.
Says the now VERY out and proud about it transwoman.
