The key to a good bad build is that it needs to bring SOMETHING to the table, be it mechanically or enjoyment. Take our Rise of the Runelords' Lady Silk.
Lady Silk is the invention of my friend, based off of the idea that between three of us, we needed to have our bases covered (there are actually SEVEN players, but several were new and a few have a tendancy to be unreliable so we wanted to be sure to have an arcanist, healer, traps/skills guy, and a melee capable). She's a hurling build, so right out of the door is a sub-par build. Yes, she is capable at range or melee, but the build is so feat intensive that she only JUST came into her own at level 11. It should suffice to say that the two-hander barbarian and the favored-enemy-everything-we-are-actually-fighting bow ranger outshine her mechanically. What Lady Silk brings is style.
She WAS a 6'7" Shoanti man, former member of the Blushing Rose (aka, a transvestite prostitute), struggling to make her name as a rising actor. She lays claim to all the dresses and jewelry we find, and proclaims "I don't do that anymore" when innuendo is used. She is now a dwarf, having been a halfling, and for a period of about 20 hours a Kelishite man. Three reincarnates, with the player using his shirt re-roll to attempt to get the gender to be female (we use an expanded reincarnate table), and not yet has Lady Silk become the woman she knows she is.
The player admits it's a subpar build and that in Rise of the Runelords we could really stand to have something more optimal, but we refuse to play her out until the dice let it happen. Only a reincarnation into a beautiful female form (so no hobgoblins or bugbears), a devastating permadeath, or a total TPK will see the end of Lady Silk.
And she's all the fun we could hope for at the table.
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these are pretty much impossible to make useful, and therefore are frustrating for the rest of teh party to haul around...even if the player of said mishmash is having fun with it.This I never understood - how is it frustrating for the rest of the party? How does anyone enjoy the game less if someone else's character is not as effective? Pathfinder is a relaxed pastime with friends. If one of them is not as useful, whatever.
wholehearted agreement. Youre at the table to play your character, not mine. Stay in your own damn lane.
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wholehearted agreement. Youre at the table to play your character, not mine. Stay in your own damn lane.these are pretty much impossible to make useful, and therefore are frustrating for the rest of teh party to haul around...even if the player of said mishmash is having fun with it.This I never understood - how is it frustrating for the rest of the party? How does anyone enjoy the game less if someone else's character is not as effective? Pathfinder is a relaxed pastime with friends. If one of them is not as useful, whatever.
The problem is that the game is less like a highway and more like a carpool.
If you smoke or sing loudly off key while the rest of us are crammed into the backseat (the DMs driving, of course), it's gonna bother me.
The difference being that one person bothering 3 people is much worse than 3 people having fun while one person is annoyed.
Neither is an ideal scenario, but "the needs of the many" and all...
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That would be (arguably) true if this were indeed based on "need." But it's not ... it's about desire—the desire of the majority to impose its will and style on the reluctant minority, which is distasteful at best.
Regardless, when there are conflicting interests, you need to go along with the majority or leave.
There's no shame in leaving a group that's not a good fit, none at all.
I don't watch sports with my friends because they get really into it and I'm just this guy sitting over here going "Okay look, they can't hear you, and screaming louder won't change that, okay?".
Should I tell them to pipe down when obviously I'm the problem here? I think no.
I think we'll probably have to just agree that these things should be settled, if possible, long before play begins.
However, I definitely agree here. Compromise is much easier to reach at the beginning of the game, bypassing these all or nothing scenarios. Even without compromise I find that if all the cards are on the table from the start people are less annoyed by things they were warned about (since they agreed to it ahead of time).
wholehearted agreement. Youre at the table to play your character, not mine. Stay in your own damn lane.these are pretty much impossible to make useful, and therefore are frustrating for the rest of teh party to haul around...even if the player of said mishmash is having fun with it.This I never understood - how is it frustrating for the rest of the party? How does anyone enjoy the game less if someone else's character is not as effective? Pathfinder is a relaxed pastime with friends. If one of them is not as useful, whatever.The problem is that the game is less like a highway and more like a carpool.
If you smoke or sing loudly off key while the rest of us are crammed into the backseat (the DMs driving, of course), it's gonna bother me.
intereresting. I don't agree wholesale, mind, but damn interesting perspective. Makes me think a lot about how I run my games. Huh.
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Even non-competitive video games get annoying when someone isn't doing what they're supposed to. If I'm playing some co-op game with a friend, like Left 4 Dead, Borderlands, Dungeon Defenders, whatever I don't want someone to be goofing off all the time. A little is fine, but when every game (session) you play you essentially have dead weight attached to you when you want to beat the mission you've been stuck on for a month...
And yes, the rules are rigid, but at the very least when you're playing a game like that the person can just STOP GOOFING OFF. Very hard to do that in PF, because in this case the person isn't just goofing...
1) Again, a computer game is inherently different from Pathfinder in that there's no interaction with a human running the game - it's a rigid computer program. So if you try co op with a moron, the game has no way to adjust to that, and you will indeed be stuck in a frustrating situation. The comparison, I feel, is misplaced here.
2) In Pathfinder, if the GM notices only 3 out of 4 members in the party are being effective, she can just create encounters meant for, like, 3 and a half PCs or something. Just tone down things a little. The game would still be challenging to the 3 active players.
There are two kinds of bad build - there's "I'm optimizing less than the others at the table" (this can be solved by reducing difficulty in a way that would still keep the 3 better optimizers challenged while not making the bad builder 100% useless), and then there's "I'm taking this game as a joke and purposefully create a clowny character". That's a different matter and if that's what you mean that I agree, it's annoying. But simply making a fighter with low strength or something really isn't all that much of a big deal.
and then there's "I'm taking this game as a joke and purposefully create a clowny character". That's a different matter and if that's what you mean that I agree, it's annoying
Yep, that's what I mean. Those are the builds I consider bad, for the most part.
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and then there's "I'm taking this game as a joke and purposefully create a clowny character". That's a different matter and if that's what you mean that I agree, it's annoyingYep, that's what I mean. Those are the builds I consider bad, for the most part.
Well then I see what you mean, but I think my issue with those builds is a bit different - it's not so much about being useful during the game as just being insulting. The rest of the people around the table are trying to have a game where they play heroes who stop nameless evil and protect innocents, and you just had to go and build a character so dorky that including it in the mental image kind of makes the image silly.
Then again, such build are usually coupled with really bad behavior - never even trying to keep up with events and just doing random things, like running forward in the dungeon triggering every trap. Or stupidly attacking an NPC for no reason. Or trying to pick pocket a king.If a player has a goofy build but actually tries to incorporate that build into the game and have fun with the rest of us, that's fine. I once had a summoner PC, which was both overpowered and really didn't fit with the rest of the campaign. Plus the Eidlon has such a bizzare collection of traits and power that nobody at the table was quite able to figure out how it looks like. However, the player was serious about the game, and every single stranger the party was meeting started the conversation by staring at the eidlon and attempting to figure out how many legs did it have. It became an inside joke and was integrated into the campaign, and all was fine.
So to me it's less about the build and more about behavior.
I think there's a fine line between "silly" builds and "bad" builds. There's some overlap of course, but here's how I see it:
An optimized "silly" build can be good. If you want a character that does something off the wall, but is still useful, go for it. Make the best X you can be.
But if you want to make something silly that's almost nonfunctional...just stop, please.
A Barbarian built around throwing weapons and Body Bludgeon is silly, but can be reasonably effective.
A Wizard who never uses spells and instead uses Hand of the Apprentice to throw his weapon for his action every round is bad, full stop.
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I'd rather play with a fun player running a sub-optimal or even downright horrid character over a bleeding-edge optimizer any day of the week.
This depends very much on the personality.
I have some times played with a guy who always made very sub-par PCs and called every one who didn't powergamer (not in those words). All of his PCs were in some way antagonistic and tried to cause trouble.For example in CC he played an unoptimized dwarf fighter rogue who bullied the townspeople in the starting town. He got drunk, went to some shop to buy something and after he had what he wanted he told the shopkeeper he has no money and left without the stuff the shopkeeper had fetched for him.
Later he kept on tying break the law when my paladin was around to cause trouble for my pc.
So it is not always the case that players with sub-optimal builds are better to have around than min-maxers.
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I'd rather play with a fun player running a sub-optimal or even downright horrid character over a bleeding-edge optimizer any day of the week.This depends very much on the personality.
I have some times played with a guy who always made very sub-par PCs and called every one who didn't powergamer (not in those words). All of his PCs were in some way antagonistic and tried to cause trouble.For example in CC he played an unoptimized dwarf fighter rogue who bullied the townspeople in the starting town. He got drunk, went to some shop to buy something and after he had what he wanted he told the shopkeeper he has no money and left without the stuff the shopkeeper had fetched for him.
Later he kept on tying break the law when my paladin was around to cause trouble for my pc.So it is not always the case that players with sub-optimal builds are better to have around than min-maxers.
Very true. Also min-maxers can be really fun to play with. Equating optimizer with unfun is awfully unfair.
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and then there's "I'm taking this game as a joke and purposefully create a clowny character". That's a different matter and if that's what you mean that I agree, it's annoyingYep, that's what I mean. Those are the builds I consider bad, for the most part.Well then I see what you mean, but I think my issue with those builds is a bit different - it's not so much about being useful during the game as just being insulting. The rest of the people around the table are trying to have a game where they play heroes who stop nameless evil and protect innocents, and you just had to go and build a character so dorky that including it in the mental image kind of makes the image silly.
Then again, such build are usually coupled with really bad behavior - never even trying to keep up with events and just doing random things, like running forward in the dungeon triggering every trap. Or stupidly attacking an NPC for no reason. Or trying to pick pocket a king.If a player has a goofy build but actually tries to incorporate that build into the game and have fun with the rest of us, that's fine. I once had a summoner PC, which was both overpowered and really didn't fit with the rest of the campaign. Plus the Eidlon has such a bizzare collection of traits and power that nobody at the table was quite able to figure out how it looks like. However, the player was serious about the game, and every single stranger the party was meeting started the conversation by staring at the eidlon and attempting to figure out how many legs did it have. It became an inside joke and was integrated into the campaign, and all was fine.
So to me it's less about the build and more about behavior.
I often have players wanting to play something that'd traditionally be an NPC role, like the merchant who needs escorting or the aging wizard who shuffles along and is likely to die if someone sneezes on them. They'll obviously be "terrible builds", but the campaign will then be run with that in mind (so I'm going to factor their reduced combat effectiveness into APL, for example)
Not done to cause problems, not done because the player is being a jerk, and works great in my games. I think that tends to get missed in this kind of discussion, which is really more about "someone brought a combat-unfriendly playstyle to a combat-focused table"
I often have players wanting to play something that'd traditionally be an NPC role, like the merchant who needs escorting or the aging wizard who shuffles along and is likely to die if someone sneezes on them.
The aging wizard is one thing; that's a perfectly pratical character type that won't be any problem. The merchant who needs escorting; that's very different question, and it's very easy for it to be a problem. When you have a character who isn't an "adventurer" along, but they're travelling because they want/need to do X, what happens when another character wants to do Y? Does the person who isn't an adventurer turn into one long enough for that to be done? Do they go off to do their own thing for a while, which is pretty awkward for a GM to handle? Or is it a matter of other PCs not having any real say in what the group does, because this one PC is only along for a particular sort of event and anything not related to that means they aren't able to participate properly?
The merchant who needs escorting; that's very different question, and it's very easy for it to be a problem. When you have a character who isn't an "adventurer" along, but they're travelling because they want/need to do X, what happens when another character wants to do Y?
Typically, it'd be a situation similar to Jade Regent, and the NPC escort from that taking up the entire campaign (or imagine the situation of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, with the Fellowship consisting of a bunch of experienced adventurers plus four newbie Hobbits)
Storyline-wise, I'll usually set something like that up along the lines of a third party bringing the party together and giving them the task.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I often have players wanting to play something that'd traditionally be an NPC role, like the merchant who needs escorting or the aging wizard who shuffles along and is likely to die if someone sneezes on them.The aging wizard is one thing; that's a perfectly pratical character type that won't be any problem. The merchant who needs escorting; that's very different question, and it's very easy for it to be a problem. When you have a character who isn't an "adventurer" along, but they're travelling because they want/need to do X, what happens when another character wants to do Y? Does the person who isn't an adventurer turn into one long enough for that to be done? Do they go off to do their own thing for a while, which is pretty awkward for a GM to handle? Or is it a matter of other PCs not having any real say in what the group does, because this one PC is only along for a particular sort of event and anything not related to that means they aren't able to participate properly?
In a game like that, in my experience, the players knowing beforehand allows them to reach an agreement. The merchant player optimizes for party face, allowing the rest of the group to more freely optimize for combat. Any attempt of the DM to punish me for my 7 cha and 7 int was directed back to the merchant. "Why you talking to me, man? I be the bodyguard, you be wanting tha talk with de bossman." Also, merchants can be very inspiring "come on guys kill them quick and you get bonus pay" (bard using oratory for his performances), alternatively the merchant may know a thing or three about locks and traps, either because of a shady past, or because he needs to use them on his own shop (rogue built for trapfinding and skill monkeying).
A bulid optimized for skills is still an optimized build.