Froth Maw's page

Covent wrote:

Yes, this is correct.

Let me sum this up for you a different way:

Why is Indiana Jones so awesome while Lara Croft is just kind of flat (ironically) and boring? They're both genius archaeologists with a flair for athletics and puzzle solving. Yet, for some reason, Jones is a household name and Croft is kind of an inside joke in the video game community and not really important beyond that. Let's leave the actual actors, directors, and scripts behind each out of this for just a moment and dig into their characters.

Indiana Jones isn't optimized. He's not a super ninja kung-fu master; he loses and/or flees from half the fights he gets into. He gets punched in the face and goes down. When he does something acrobatic, it looks like he's just trying not to not fall to his death and you can see the fear on his face. When he's on the ropes, there's drama, and when he emerges victorious, we cheer because he beat the odds by using his wits, charm, courage, and as many friends as he can muster.

Lara Croft, on the other hand, is basically a genetically engineered super human with no flaws. She's a martial arts master, a sharpshooter, an extreme sports enthusiast, and a savant. She's absurdly rich, fawned upon by all who meet her, and swaggers through every mortal encounter with a smirk on her face that just screams, "I'm the star of this movie - there's no way I die here." She's all 18s, has all class skills, and has every feat in the book. She's basically a nerdy 13-year-old's fantasy girl and that's why the games about her could easily swap her out for another hero (cough- Nathan Drake -cough) and the movies about her are so awful.

So, the next time you sit down to make a character, ask yourself this: "Is this an Indiana Jones or a Lara Croft?" I think that will put you on the right track.

I'd rather be Krieg, Drax the Destroyer, Brock Samson, Dirty Harry, The Terminator, Judge Dredd, The Cole Train, Bronn, or Fezzik. Or, like, any other beloved and also competent person.

#1- IdowhatIwant

#2- That's all fine and dandy until you wind up with a useless party. It's happened to me several times, and a lot of DM's just aren't clever enough to make it a fun game, especially if your motivations and alignments are too far apart.

#3- You can have the most OP build imaginable and still give it a personality. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm usually the heavy hitter as well as the comic relief.

Being awesome?! A katana really offers no mechanical advantage over a European sword, and even has some disadvantages when you consider the tiny guard and lack of pommel. You just take it so that when you kill someone, the DM can say that your enemy stands for a split second, befuddled, as your blade passes painlessly through him, before his body falls to the ground in neatly carved pieces like a Christmas ham.

Tough luck for him. You said everybody else thought it was cool, so just do it anyway. He's the problem, not you.

But yeah, a plain jane Skald would actually be awesome for this party. I almost did this once and heavily regretted not doing it when I realized what I could have had.

On top of having an obscene amount of rage with no negative after effects when using the Skald, you can also get fast healing. It won't do a whole lot with some of the party members, but with your invulnerable rager, he'll have his DR as well as the Skald's fast healing when he's under raging song, which means he'll be able to sponge a ton of damage.

Moral of the story: If a character says "I want to attain ultimate power through magic no matter the cost", cut his head off so you don't have to deal with literally the most annoying kind of party member. Wild rager bro is the real victim here. He just wanted to follow his inner demons and kill some owl bears.

One of my characters that I made before I had a firm grasp of the rules wasn't set in stone, and he was kind of a mess. In the beginning he was built to grapple people and beat them up with a spiked gauntlet, but then I realized that that was terrible and switched to using a sword. Then I switched from barbarian to two handed fighter for the extra strength damage. Then the DM gave me a gauntlet that gave me a claw attack and I really wanted to use that, but I had already started building around using the sword. Then I got cornered by three wood golems and the final boss and died. If you don't plan, you'll probably die.
Also, as far as selling cool items and stuff goes, you should just give the characters stuff that they can use. My last barbarian would've turned his nose up at anything that wasn't an axe. Even his secondary was an axe, and he made all of his minions carry axes. That's not bad role-play, that's just a character who knows what he's about.

By melee, do you mean scuffles and large scale battles? Or can he stab them in their homes? Because I made a rouge who was a pretty good charisma based contract killer. He was garbage in traditional combat, but he was a ridiculous effective political assassin.

He was a demonspawn tiefling rouge with the beguiling liar racial trait and diplomacy, disguise and bluff all maxed out. I also had the feats deceitful and skill focus to boost his lying. Then I took the rouge talents convincing lie, honeyed words and charmer so I could re-roll any lies that failed. You'll of course need high charisma to lie and high dexterity to sneak, but the other stats are really up to you. Strength and intelligence are obviously more important than constitution though. If you go tiefling, you can also pick up may or claw and take the bite, so you'll always have a weapon that can deal a lot of damage in one hit so that you can coup de grace people in their sleep.

After that, all you have to do is sneak or charm your way into your mark's bedroom and bite their throat out in their sleep. I actually went as far as to sneak a war hammer into a palace to assassinate a queen.

A hat of disguise and glamered weapons are also highly desirable.

I want to have an all barbarian party SO. BAD.

Problems? Smash.
Fighting? Smash.
Ranged? Throw stuff at it or get a flying mount.
Social? Everyone is nice to you so they don't get smashed or so you'll smash things for them.
Healing? If you smash all the things, they can't hurt you. Then use the money you steal from the things you've smashed to buy healing stuff/hire a skald.

Chainsaw=amazing. Except I'd rather have a magic chainsaw that never runs out of gas.

We fought evil clowns once. We had an encounter on some rooftops where they'd light themselves on fire and then try to tackle us off the roof. In any other situations they just had super high dex and would throw knives at us. They'd also juggle jars full of alchemist fire and throw those as well. As far as monsters, they trapped us in a giant room that they then filled with skeletons that they had painted red and purple and dressed in masquerade stuff. You could do that with any monster, really. Just give them whatever monsters you want and then dress the monsters up like jesters. If you went with the typical flippy, acrobatic, juggling and throwing kind of jester, you'd probably want some strength based monsters to give them a little back up. A golem would probably be cool, especially if they had built it to look jester-ish.

Was playing a suicidally brave human fighter/barbarian named Ulf Helsmasher. DM split the party for two separate final fights and I wound up fighting a summoner who had been a member of our party before he got swayed to the dark side. I had a super OP magic sword so the DM expected me to stand there and bang it out sword against eidolon. The summoner somehow had no CMD even with his eidolon so instead I just tackled him and beat him to death with my bare hands. It took forever to punch him out, but it was one of the most anti-climactic things ever. My battle cry through the whole campaign had been "NO ONE OUT GRAPPLES ULF HELMSMASHER!" (lots of little spider-like construct suicide bombers had been trying to latch on to me through the whole game, so it came up pretty often) and it held up all the way to the end.