Do you look over your player's character sheets looking for mistakes?
I don't, but out of curiosity I decided to take a look at the character sheets I had from a game that ran a single session and failed to get off the ground. I expected to find at least one mistake per sheet and was not disappointed. I have three sheets out of the five characters that were iin the game.
First character: elven ranger. Mistakes: did not include armor check penalty in the skills total, and bought a human bane weapon without having a +1 weapon first.
Human sorcerer. Mistakes: thought the elemental bloodlines granted the movement power at level 1 rather than 15. The player probably looked at the chart and didn't read the elemental movement paragraph later on. Also didn't include his strength penalty to the damage on his throwing knives. Also had more ranks than possible in one skill (probably didn't realize you can't have level +3 anymore).
Human paladin: This one was a new player's character. Did not add str modifier to attack bonus, and didn't include armor check penalty in his skills total either.
This is, of course, just what I noticed. I didn't do anything like check feat requirements. As a bonus, I looked over a sheet of an npc I made for this game and his wealth total was a bit higher than it should be.
The system mastery required to make an errorless character is really quite high, which is why I usually don't go looking for mistakes in my players' characters. I like the complexity, but then I'm detail obsessive and I like math. I don't think most people do, and I can't help but wonder whether the game would really lose anything if it were simplified.
Or for that matter how differently the balance arguments here would go if we had a magic lens that let us see every unambiguously wrong rules interpretation the other poster has been using for years (for the longest time I thought weapon special abilities could not exceed the enhancement bonus on a weapon; e.g an icy flaming sword had to be +2).
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I always look over my players character sheets for mistakes, and 90+% of the time I find them. As the veteran and most frequent DM in most groups I play in, I simply know the system better thus make less errors.
If you go over a character sheet with a player in fine detail when they begin, explaining every detail to them and letting them do the math, that tends to help a lot.
As for simplicity, the games complexity is something I love about it, but were I a brand new player not used to RP or DND, i'd probably actually prefer to play 4E* as the learning curve is not so high.
*Disclaimer- I don't actually like 4E, am from a 3E background but still played 4E extensively. My post is in no way meant to encourage edition wars of any kind.
Thread Title: Here here.
The character creation process I can handle, but what bugs me with it's complexity is the combat system. I started playing back when 1st Ed AD&D was still new and with each update to the rules, the combat became more and more of a pain to run. I did not even play 3rd Ed for several years because of this, though at least that saved me from dealing the 3.0 to 3.5 switch and the early glut of bad books. But anyway, I miss the days where you could sketch out a quick map of the combat area and use spare dice or coins or whatever to represent the characters and enemies and not have to worry about grids and zones and attacks of opportunity and 5 foot steps and on and on and on.
This is why I chuckle a bit when d20 is derided as "dumbed down." We make sure to dot all the i's and cross the t's on players' character sheets, but everything else we do has been about shedding layers of complexity. We don't mind building complicated characters - that's part of the fun, and the main reason we're not exculsively using, say, Labyrith Lord - but I've been a dungeon master for a long time, and 3.x increases geometrically in complexity with each level gained. (And then there are the increasingly lop-sided modifiers. We actually build character groups to avoid these, and still they crop up ... but that's for another time.) I would certainly suggest checking players' sheets more often, though - the system works much better when the numbers are all lined up properly.
But anyway, I miss the days where you could sketch out a quick map of the combat area and use spare dice or coins or whatever to represent the characters and enemies and not have to worry about grids and zones and attacks of opportunity and 5 foot steps and on and on and on.
This is part of the reason we build and advance characters as a group. We don't use minis and combat is handled rather simply, so in order for characters to avoid getting screwed, we determine mechanical effects in advance. This is very important, since things we don't (or barely) make use of are built into the rules at several points.
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True. I didn't even realise how much of the game I take for granted until I watch new players build characters or run games of their own. I played my first game of Dark Heresy the other day and was often confused because there was no scaling difficulty class. Just roll under your relevant stat. I enjoyed myself, but I couldn't help but feel some grantularity was lost.
True. I didn't even realise how much of the game I take for granted until I watch new players build characters or run games of their own. I played my first game of Dark Heresy the other day and was often confused because there was no scaling difficulty class. Just roll under your relevant stat. I enjoyed myself, but I couldn't help but feel some grantularity was lost.
...you don't say?
;)
Damn multipost! :O
Damn multipost! :O
Damn Multipass?
(5th element reference)
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DM - You might want someone to take a look at that :p
I recently broke down and bought the Hero Lab character creation software. I was amazed how much faster character generation goes when you have a machine doing all the math and writing for you...putting together a 3rd level PC went from 30 minutes (by hand) to under 5 minutes (using Hero Lab).
It's going to make it very hard to go back to doing it by hand.
Usually when I look the character sheets over, I notice that my players usually don't add enough of their bonuses in. I have found that they are usually 18 instead of 20 point buy. They forget to add their favored class hit points or skill points. They forget to add the +1 for a talent they took. I have even seen someone forget to add in their Constitution bonus for hit points and they intentionally had a high Constitution so they could have more hit points.
I check someone's sheet if they seem really powerful or really weak.
Other then that, not really. If someone makes a mistake, it's sorta up to them to catch it. It's assumed none of us are cheating, because we follow the first rule of tabletop gaming.
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I check someone's sheet if they seem really powerful or really weak.
Other then that, not really. If someone makes a mistake, it's sorta up to them to catch it. It's assumed none of us are cheating, because we follow the first rule of tabletop gaming.
Its not really about cheating in my group, more often than not someone has a bonus wrong which hinders them. Its rare for me to find a mistake that boosts a character too much.
I always fill out the sheets for the character's in my game cause I have good penmanship (I hate messy illegible sheets) and a good grasp of the rules. Occasionally one of the player's will point out a mistake I've made and it'll be corrected.
I'd like to do the same with another group I play with cause I can tell their characters have omissions/mistakes on their sheets just by watching them play. For instance, once when trying to speak to a foreign NPC I asked which languages their characters could speak and I discovered that no one had taken into account the bonus languages they were entitled to for high intelligence. We paused the game for five minutes while I helped them pick out appropriate languages based on their backgrounds.
Another time, the party ranger's player mentioned that she wished that she could speak to her wolf animal companion as my gnome character suddenly did with his racial spell-like ability. Since her character was 4th level I sat agog at her and asked if she'd ever looked over her spell list before. A few page flips later she discovered that she could indeed speak with animals if she cared to. Afterward I created a little cheat-sheet for her and the paladin player with a handful of their best 1st level spells, IMHO, with brief descriptions of their effects and told them to choose two each game day.
That game is challenging for me since I often feel I'm playing all the characters when I, as politely as I can, suggest a class ability another player might like to use; such as the paladin's channel energy ability when we're up to our necks in ghouls. I desperately hope that I'm not coming across as being overbearing when I do such things. =/
Do you look over your player's character sheets looking for mistakes?
The system mastery required to make an errorless character is really quite high, which is why I usually don't go looking for mistakes in my players' characters. I like the complexity, but then I'm detail obsessive and I like math. I don't think most people do, and I can't help but wonder whether the game would really lose anything if it were simplified.
It's all relative. Some folks think D&D is complex, but games like Ars Magica or HERO absolutely destroy it in terms of character generation complexity (and math). Or Shadowrun. But I've seen hugely incorrect character sheets in something as simple as Jovian Chronicles (where you get X points for stats/perks and Y points for skills, usually 30/50, and the math still doesn't add up).
Often it's a consequence of the noodling process, where you fiddle with the numbers during character creation (again, and again, and again) and things get lost with all the changes. That's usually why I re-make my character sheet from the ground up after I'm satisfied with my character, just to weed out the errors.
I'm not so sure about Ars Magica - compared to 3.5 or PF. Sure, making a Magus involves a lot of scaling point-buy for talents, but other than that?
Try character gen in Ars when you give the magi 20 years of development. Or 50 years. All of the sudden there's 30 more points per year to spread among abilities (skills FYI), arts and spells, never mind seasons of actual lab-work scattered throughout. And that's if you go the simple route. For real fun advance a magus season by season for 20-50 years. Nothing beats it for producing 'interesting' magi, but user friendly it isn't.
. . . Whereas in PF, we now have to worry about metamagic feats (which are a way of sneaking in customizable spells through the back door), feat chains, bloodlines, etc. Then in 3.5, planning your character out *long in advance* so as to qualify for a prestige class. In some respects, Ars Magica seems simple.
D&D has always done a pretty good job of listing requirements for feat chains (typically including every feat along the path as a requisite for the final one), and I don't see how metamagic feats are a problem unless you go into splatbook 3.5 territory. Feat lists are the one thing that most players shouldn't screw up - there's no math and it's not like you get dozens of the darn things. I'd expect most screwups to take place in skill allocation, bonus accounting and gear purchases.
One thing I'd recommend for groups building non-1st level characters is to track level-by-level feat/skill acquisition. That should prevent most of the gross character creation errors.
I just put all my faith & trust in Herolab. I suppose I should double-check its output, but my assumption is that it handles things like skill check penalties easily.
(for the longest time I thought weapon special abilities could not exceed the enhancement bonus on a weapon; e.g an icy flaming sword had to be +2).
This sounds like a pretty reasonable house rule, though. I might choose to use that sometime :)
Do you look over your player's character sheets looking for mistakes?
The system mastery required to make an errorless character is really quite high, which is why I usually don't go looking for mistakes in my players' characters. I like the complexity, but then I'm detail obsessive and I like math. I don't think most people do, and I can't help but wonder whether the game would really lose anything if it were simplified.
It's all relative. Some folks think D&D is complex, but games like Ars Magica or HERO absolutely destroy it in terms of character generation complexity (and math). Or Shadowrun. But I've seen hugely incorrect character sheets in something as simple as Jovian Chronicles (where you get X points for stats/perks and Y points for skills, usually 30/50, and the math still doesn't add up).
Often it's a consequence of the noodling process, where you fiddle with the numbers during character creation (again, and again, and again) and things get lost with all the changes. That's usually why I re-make my character sheet from the ground up after I'm satisfied with my character, just to weed out the errors.
You want bad, try creating and then leveling up a Rolemaster character. AAAAaaarrrggghh.
Leveling up at the early levels involves almost completely rewriting the sheet. There are hundreds of skills, each of which is part of one of the 20 or so main categories of skills. Each category (with a few execeptions) gives a bonus to each skill in it based on class, ranks in the category, 2 or 3 of the 10 stats, and other modifiers. Then once you figure out how much the category bonus is you have to figure out what each skill gets from the ranks in it. Oh and did I mention that the ranks aren't all worth the same amount? And that some follow a completely different bonus format than the others?
To top it off the amount of points you get is based on 5 of the stats, and all of that stats start off lower than they will end up and you have to roll randomly per stat to see how much closer to their max they get, with the chance of them going down. So the stat bonus for each category can change each level.
I ended up finding a really, really, REALLY fancy character sheet online that does all that math for you and just kept reprinting the sheet every two or three levels.
I read over character sheets mostly to try to remember what generally everyone can do!
But all players read each other's sheets too. I have seen the "not adding strength to attack" problem before--and the character sheet even had a slot for adding in the strength modifier. It's just hard to remember everything.
It's helpful to use electronic generators but even those make mistakes sometimes---which is annoying when it happens because you're less likely to notice it.
TBH, I never recommend Pathfinder to newbie RPers without the caveat: "there is a lot to keep track of!" This doesn't turn people away necessarily but it's good to be clear about it up front.
In both the PbPs I'm in and those that I run, I create matrices so that everyone can see who is good at what. For at least 60% of the characters I'd say I find multiple skill errors. For the most part these resulted in them forgetting to add bonuses or forgetting their favored class bonus.
Also, I can't tell you how many times I've seen people putting ranks in fly when they are not yet eligible to do so.