A party where every PC has the exact same build?


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gnomes, because they will INTENTIONALLY dress the same to throw people off. Call themselves Mr. Loompa.

Bards, alchemists, investigators, gunslingers, or paladins would be fun.


Barbarians could be funny, too. Also, a party of rogues.


Kobold Cleaver wrote:
Barbarians could be funny, too. Also, a party of rogues.

Rogues + the teamwork flanking feats could be extra ugly


Ryan Freire wrote:
Kobold Cleaver wrote:
Barbarians could be funny, too. Also, a party of rogues.
Rogues + the teamwork flanking feats could be extra ugly

The main thing holding rogues back is that they are desperate for flanking. Give them flankers, and they can teat things apart.

It is the main reason why I consider grabbing those feats to get an animal companion for a rogue. A nice wolf or bird would suit perfectly.


What you really need is a bunch of Barbarians using Hero's Display and Terrifying Howl together as they go to town with two-handers.


Kobold Cleaver wrote:
I think this would be a fun play-by-post concept. I'd play in it.

Fun? Probably.

A good way of forcing complex RP? Doubtful.


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Snively wrote:
alchemists

Generalist alchemists could actually work really well for this. Their main drawback in a normal game is that despite their abundance of options, action economy prevents them from doing more than one per round. With four alchemists in one party, the problem goes away entirely - one alchemist can throw a bomb for battlefield control while another throws a bomb for damage while another drinks an extract and the fourth engages in melee. With the infusion discovery, they can simply have a centralized pool of extracts, mutagens, and even potions and elixirs to distribute as necessary throughout the adventure, becoming much more adaptable to a variety of situations. With a little planning, they (and their pack of tumor familiars) can even deliver such substances to one another with syringe spears, poisoner's gloves, or wands of touch injection.


Sundakan wrote:
Kobold Cleaver wrote:
I think this would be a fun play-by-post concept. I'd play in it.

Fun? Probably.

A good way of forcing complex RP? Doubtful.

That depends on how you look at the game. I think your perspective tends more towards the use of rules to inspire character, as opposed to a character design more divorced from rulesmastery.


Well, in this case it doesn't matter which direction you approach character creation from...your character creation prowess is unchanged here whether you work rules down or story up.

What I'm getting at is this idea does NOTHING to force a player to make better characters...differentiated by something other than skillset, yes, but no more or less 2D than they otherwise would be.

Remember that's the topic of this thread, whether this makes for a scenario that forces more complex characters and deeper RP. I don't think it will have any effect one way or another, because this doesn't encourage anything deeper than skin deep character design.

Making your players write a "15 minute background" style thing where they MUST have people they know, and MUST have some kind of goal beyond the campaign would work better in that regard since it actually directly interacts with RP and background, unlike here.


My question: why would you use Pathfinder to play this game?

There are some really good games out there that focus heavily on character interaction, dialogue and choices, that have zero stats. I've personally found that these games have changed how I look at roleplaying in general and given me more "tools" in my toolbox as it were, as a player and GM.

A short game (1 session) that I highly recommend to pull out for those "we just finished a campaign but don't know what to play yet" nights... is Fiasco. Basically it's a Cohen brother's movie. The game walks you through a little bit of setup, you don't even have character sheets, just note cards with a few prompts between each player. Each player gets to describe a scene, have dialogue with other players (who can be their character, or act as any required NPC). The outcome of scenes impacts the ending of the game because you earn dice. At the end, your character rolls the dice they've collected and a table tells you what kind of ending you get. Usually it's bad.

One of my favorites involved us all playing retired nuns at a convent. We did horrible, horrible things to each other.

I can recommend other games as well. It's good to shift out of the comfort zone from time to time. Playing a game that does some of the heavy lifting (to get out of your comfort zone) for you means you get to focus more on just playing the game and having a good time.


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Irontruth wrote:
My question: why would you use Pathfinder to play this game?

Because Pathfinder is 100% capable of supporting such a game... and it also has an incredible depth of mechanics. My hope would be that once I got more practice in RP that doesn't use mechanics as a crutch, the interaction between the mechanics and the RP would be freer and more fun.


+1 to the idea of using some of the ideas posted above as standardized NPC squads put together by strongly organized institutions with the will and the means to put together what they want to oppose, aid, or work at cross-purposes to the PC party. Of course, mono-build parties wouldn't be the one, but they would fit thematically for something like the governments of Cheliax and Nidal.


I think that for the right game and players you could make a very enjoyable game out of everyone having simular characters in terms of abilities.

On the flip side, I 100% disagree that it would make roleplaying easier. Rather the reverse, there are some players that are already good at divorcing themselves from pure mechanics into roleplaying and they will be the ones that find the game enjoyable. Someone who needs the mechanics and builds will not learn more about themselves and advance as a person. If anything they will fall into a deeper rut.

However, some free advise of how to build for this game.

When creating a game system around a preset character you need to have options. Basically, instead of having a typical party character with a set role such as control wizard or DPR guy you should pick a class and skill set that does a little bit of everything. Classes that might normally seem unappealing for lacking focus are ideal. And abilities should be general enough to apply to a bow as well as a sword. I would heavily recommend considering houseruling a number of build centric feats as being free. Not an uncommon practice with how essential many are, but very much needed in this sort of game.

Honestly, if it was me I would try and make it an all Paladin game, but without alignment or deities. The mix of spells, healing, and combat features seem like a good fit for giving players choices on how to be involved.


There is nothing wrong with a theme party of any type, although I think identical builds would be problematic, since a team is a lot stronger with some specialization to handle the different aspects of the problems they face, both in combat and out.

I don't think it has anything to do with the problem you think you have. Not being good at building a complex personality, character motivations, and stuff like that doesn't have anything to do with mechanics of a game at all. I could be wrong, but I suspect you would find that the characters from such a scheme would be either even more vanilla or just caricatures not characters, then they would be if people who weren't good at breathing life into their characters at least had a the crutch of mechanics to help them out.

There are some creative writing or dramatic exercises and methods that can help with this sort of thing, but really it mostly just comes down to trying, failing and trying again until you are good at it, like most things in life.


UnArcaneElection wrote:

+1 to the idea of using some of the ideas posted above as standardized NPC squads put together by strongly organized institutions with the will and the means to put together what they want to oppose, aid, or work at cross-purposes to the PC party. Of course, mono-build parties wouldn't be the one, but they would fit thematically for something like the governments of Cheliax and Nidal.

Well, for organizations, "parties" might be more "entire military divisions".

So they might have the same general people, but it isn't all represented in a small group. They have squads of front line tanks, cavalry dealing DPS, archers and wizards bombarding from the back, and clerics way on the back lines healing wounded troops. With large groups, a small 'party' sized group might be the same as a single party member for the players.

Of course, that is from the military side. For more of the scale of 'government agents' or 'investigators from the guild', they might see some more internal variety, since they are a group that moves somewhat independently on the roads. But the organization might not have the wizards can clerics to toss around for a traditional adventurer party (heck, even adventurers probably don't have that; most are likely a mix of fighters, rogues, and rangers; heck, I think the bard's heterogeneous abilities are due to the fact they try to fill in for a warrior, a skill monkey, a buffer, and a healer;the players are part of the "One True Party" with the special powers gathered together)

Sovereign Court

Shouldn't the things that happen to a character influence what feats/skills/classes he takes next? A character that gets hit with mind-affecting crap more than normal might want to take up Iron Will training, and the unlucky dude that's always getting grappled will start learning Escape Artist.

If you force everyone to use the same build, aren't you basically preventing character development from having an effect on the mechanics - and thereby also limiting what character development is actually possible?


Ascalaphus wrote:

Shouldn't the things that happen to a character influence what feats/skills/classes he takes next? A character that gets hit with mind-affecting crap more than normal might want to take up Iron Will training, and the unlucky dude that's always getting grappled will start learning Escape Artist.

If you force everyone to use the same build, aren't you basically preventing character development from having an effect on the mechanics - and thereby also limiting what character development is actually possible?

The simplest answer there would be 'we went through the same training'. I can see organizations that might have very regimented training routines, which aim for a certain 'build'. Of course people might stray from that...those people are those who 'failed' the training and got kicked out. Your party is made up of people that finished the training.

How each character reacts to their training, their opinions and their backgrounds before their training... yeah, that can vary, and it is usually the juicy bits of good characterization. He isn't a 'cop' with training in firearms and grappling, he is a guy from Rhode island that signed up for the force because he saw his little brother get killed in a gas station shoot out, and thus he finds it difficult to handle hostage situations since he is always scared of seeing a similar scene again.

And thus the movie ends with him shooting the hostage taker and saving the victim (female lead that has to lean on his chest that revealed because he lost his shirt...somehow), all before he does a one liner and the credits roll.


This reminds me of the all white mage party for final fantasy. It's really fun and comes down to using one or two as offense and one or two as healers. The same would work in Pathfinder, and in one round you could heal almost everyone back to full during combat. But more over you could smack people, keep buffs up, and maintain healing. Same with using Druids but that would have a more offensive feel. While bards would be cool and buff heavy. Witchs would make a solid debuff base where one round could knock enemies down very quickly.

The end result of this will be extremification of abilities if all the players know what they're doing, while it could also be horrible. Mixed builds could also be interesting, as could hybrid classes. Pretty much any class other than one-trick ponys would work (rogue would have problems for instance), and it would be really interesting to see for classes like barbarian.


^Eldritch Scion Rogues might not be so bad . . . .


An all-white mage party? Eh. It would never work.


RumpinRufus wrote:
Irontruth wrote:
My question: why would you use Pathfinder to play this game?
Because Pathfinder is 100% capable of supporting such a game... and it also has an incredible depth of mechanics. My hope would be that once I got more practice in RP that doesn't use mechanics as a crutch, the interaction between the mechanics and the RP would be freer and more fun.

It's funny because my experience runs opposite to what you're saying, but whatever, I'll butt out.

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