Matt Gwinn's page

He is a newly acquired friend, but I've known him around 10 years. I do care for him. He is a good guy.

He doesnt, god I hope he doesnt find it, I'm trying my best to cite facts in here.

The fact is, he is summed up as a old guard roleplayer that prefers pure roleplaying games. My guess is that he would be far better playing Burning Wheel or Call of Chutulu rather than Pathfinder

My guess is that you are probably right, but I'm betting that he can't find a group willing to play those games. He's probably only playing in your campaign because that's what everyone else wants to play. Chances are he doesn't even like Pathfinder that much, at least not the way you guys play it. It's a pretty issue these days and I've experienced it myself. For a long time I "sucked it up" and played in groups I didn't fit in, out of necessity.

My guess is that he is desperately trying to make the game fun for him by playing it more RP style and that's difficult to do when he's not only fighting the system, but the other players. Playing in an AP doesn't help either. It sounds like the GM is the only one that has his back at all.

If you're truly his friend, maybe you can work with him a bit and work around his style of play. Try RPing more and putting fewer combat expectations on him. I bet if he starts having more fun he'll find ways to make his character useful in the campaign. A player's first priority is having fun, everyone else having fun is a close second. Let him get to his own fun first.

Back on the subject of character death. How many of those deaths were followed by raise dead spells? Once your cleric can cast 5th level spells, death is meaningless. Collect the corpses and start praying.

Also, are you winning? Are the bad guys ultimately being defeated?

My party is a well stablished adventiring company currently level 11-12 on its way to Sins of the Savior module.

- His gear is mainly for flavor (Hey do you want a Ring of Deflection +2? No thanks my Ring of Sustenance is awesome!)
He does a decent job with trap disarming

Sounds like you've gotten by pretty well for 12 levels with his "ineffectiveness", so why is this a problem now? Do your characters charge into combat expecting the rogue to suddenly become someone else?. Does he ever say he's going to help in combat and then doesn't? Plan your attacks better I say.

This sounds more like a personal problem than a game problem. Is this guy a friend of yours, because you don't sound like a friend of his.

And it sounds like he turns down his share of the treasure anyway. If he's turning down rings of protection+2, that means someone else (maybe your character) is getting it. So, basically he disarms traps for you for minimal compensation. That sounds like a fair deal to me.

The classes (from my point of view) are done to fulfill a role. And the rogue (from my perspective) is done to dish high spiky damage, be a buttload of skills and disarm traps (among other things).

Rogues only do spikey damage under specific circumstances, so no, that is not what they are designed for. This is especially the case in older versions of the game that didn't let you sneak attack because you were flanking. Back in my day you had to actually "sneak" up on someone to sneak attack them and you typically only got to do this ONCE per combat.

Rogues are skill based characters and historically have no place in combat. Can you make a combat rogue? Sure, but why would you when you can make a fighter and get more feats, more hit points and can wear better armor? And why bother when the rest of the group can clearly handle that part of the game without you

This is the definition of a Rogue
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.

I don't see anything in there about Spikey damage.

I dont know if I'm making a huge mess but last time I checked a lot of characters have died in our adventures and the rogue usually survives

Maybe the rest of you should take a page from the rogue's playbook and you won't die so much. Like death even means anything at 12th level. You have a Cleric & a witch with Raise Dead spells coming out their ears. And if by some chance they both bite it, good thing you have a rogue who can cast Raise Dead off a scroll with Use Magic Device. Good luck getting one of the other characters to pull that one off.

And for the record, I'm quite certain that all of the character deaths have far more to do with the game being broken at 12th level than your lack of a few sneak attacks. At that level a GM has three choices, avoid combat entirely, let the party walk through combats, or jack up the bad guys to the point where someone is certain to die.

by not being in line of sight of the monsters, and running away from danger. In my opinion not being HEROIC NOR ADVENTURING.

As the Wizard of Oz says, "As for you my fine friend, you are a victim of disorganised thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom."

And didn't you say his character had a high Wisdom?


- Is he being rewarded by acting as a coward?

Doesn't sound like it if he's turning down treasure. And maybe cowardice has nothing to do with it. Maybe he's being rewarded for roleplaying instead.


- Is optimizing your character wrong?

No, but it's also not a requirement to play the game or to have fun doing so.


- Is not contributing to combat at all ok for your standards?

Absolutely. If a player makes a non-combat character, the GM should give the character other things to do. If he's not, then the problem is the GM, not the player. 


- Am I a huge drama queen?

Well, you're something all right. LOL

Ok, here are some random thoughts on the situation.

Alignment
For starters, this is one of the reasons I don't use alignments in my campaigns. I've been DMing for 27 years and I've found that only in the most extreme cases do players even pay attention to their alignments and even less often do they play them well. Typically I will ask during character creation what a character's alignment is, so I can at least have a baseline to know what I'm dealing with, but after that there is no need for labels - he IS how you play him (which I find is most often chaotic good). Now this does require me to adjust a bit with certain spells and abilities that are alignment based. Except in the most extreme/obvious cases (ie demons, devils, angels) detecting someone's alignment is subjective and based just as much on who is casting the spell as the target. Good and Evil isn't black and white in real life and shouldn't be in the game either.

Arguably most things that characters do in D&D/Pathfinder are pretty despicable and would rarely be seen as "good" in the eyes of our own society. The basic gist of the game has always been "go into the monster's layer (the term monster being fairly suggestive), kill it and take all it's stuff. Even when the killing is "justified" due to some evil act perpetrated by the "monster" the base mentality necessary to go out of your way to kill another intelligent creature is pretty sociopathic, and to do so with the expectation of compensation is even more morally bankrupt. So, when we talk about good and evil in a fantasy game we really can't base things on what our current society believes.

Troglodytes
The bestiary describes Troglodytes as being feral, Chaotic Evil and having an average intelligence of 8. It's highly unlikely that they'd surrender at all, let along beg for mercy. In fact the concept of mercy is likely to be completely foreign to them and, in their minds, would be equivalent to accepting death.

If you're intent was to play these Troglodytes as neutral, you needed to make this clear to the players way in advance, especially the gnome whose racial hatred is based on the troglodytes in the bestiary, not the neutrally aligned ones in your campaign setting. And before you say anything, yes, it is possible for a troglodyte (as written) to not be chaotic evil, but it's not likely that an entire society of them would break from character like that.

Taking Prisoners
So, setting aside the fact that the Troglodytes were being played completely out of character, what did the part intend to do with their prisoners? Let's investigate the options:

1) Cart them around with them for the rest of the campaign?
Talk about inconvenient, not to mention dangerous. Even if the Trogs didn't escape or try to kill the party the first time they were untied so they could pee you'd still have to resort to one of the other options eventually.

2)Drop them off in the nearest city for a trial or permanent incarceration?
Now we're getting back into "what is evil". The only wrong these Troglodytes have done (that can be proven) is defend their home from raiders intent on stealing all of their stuff "to get through the winter". In what universe is that considered "good"? And what's the likelyhood that the troglodytes would get a fair trial, or a trial at all? They'd likely just be killed or let go depending on which town you were in.

3)Kill them. Clearly you consider this evil, so we'll rule this one out.

4) Let them go. This is really the only truly "good" option and probably the stupidest when taking into account the nature of troglodytes. Then again, doing the right thing isn't the same as doing the smart thing.

Clearly taking them prisoner to begin with was, not only unlikely to be an option to begin with, but a not very well thought out plan.

Player vs Player Combat
This is simply not cool and should really be the focus of your concern. Unless the bard player told the gnome player "you should totally try to kill me for trying to stop you" there's no room in a group of friends for that to be an ok thing to do.