Years ago a dm had us all make characters in secret. We were specifically told not to eachother. Everyone made a barbarian or ranger.
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Years ago a dm had us all make characters in secret. We were specifically told not to eachother. Everyone made a barbarian or ranger.
When I did that for my first campaign, we ended up with a NE Elven Magic-User/Thief, a LE Half-Orc Cleric/Assassin, a NE Half-Orc Fighter/Assassin, and a NG Human Ranger.
I never did that again. That poor, poor Ranger...
Me: So it would be better if I built my heavily armored lich hunting dwarf paladin and then find the GM has decided on Skull & Shackles? But I stick with the character I made even though he won’t get much opportunity to do what he is good at, will likely drown in his full plate, and will almost certainly fall from grace since the AP is about becoming pirates?
Him: Yes, that is the type of problems you have to learn to overcome with specialized characters.
Me: But in-character my undead hunting paladin would refuse to become a pirate.
Him: You have to find some way to work around that.
Me: That really doesn’t sound like that much fun to me, why would I want to do that in-character or out-of-character?
Him: That's just the way it goes sometimes.
So, it's metagaming to build a character to fit thematically for a campaign, but it's NOT metagaming to force your character to act contrary to it's own characterization for the sake of OOC knowledge and circumstances?
Wait, that last bit is the definition of metagaming! OH NO!
Several people seemed to get very offended by this topic. They made statements like: That is about the limit of incredibly cheesy meta gaming. How would you know you were going to be encountering undead to make an oathbound paladin. You just want to stomp all over the GM’s game. You couldn’t possibly know your career will be needing an investigator/spy to specialize in that. Etc…
My response would be this.
"Given that I normally GM rather than play I'm usually the one handing out this information so people can stomp all over my game. My thinking is that a player who finds out his character is completely ineffective and a drag on the group or the game is going to endeavor to remove themselves of that character and replace them with another more appropriate character to the game. By being upfront and direct with my players about what they'll need to succeed I allow them the chance to fail by their actions, not by dint of bringing a water pistol to a chainsaw joust. If a character is overpowering the game through an overspecialized character it is not the player's burden to provide a variety of challenges to the group but the game master who is empowered to provide a varied and dynamic experience. Playing gotcha with a players character is neither challenging nor fun. It's wasting a player's free gaming time to satisfy some kind of misplaced nerd code."
"On the flipside I try to talk to my gm about expectations at their campaign whenever possible and attempt to put in the work to make sure I bring in a successful character. Because I know from my GMing experience that bringing in a new character due to death or despair is difficult work that breaks the flow of the overall narrative. And ultimately I know that the rest of the group relies on me to do my part to ensure their success. What the GM gets in return is a character that is more a part of the narrative they built, not a bizarre outlier screaming as hard as possible to be noticed but a living breathing character who belongs to the GM's story rather than the results of a player crunching numbers to build something he thinks might work. My goal as you so elegantly put it is not to stomp on the game but to create a good narrative from either side of the table worth talking and bragging about. I don't hold to notions that players should be punished because they lost your guessing game and if a GM forces me to play a guessing game with them than I will in all likelihood not continue playing at that table for long. I don't like having my time wasted."
It seems that the subtlety of this situation is escaping people.
Creating a character that fits into a campaign well is as different from creating an undead-blasting specialist as creating a well built general character is from creating a number crunching juggernaut.
Which is exactly the point here.
GM: "Hey, this campaign is going to have undead in it"
Players: "Hmmm someone should probably play a cleric"Is completely different than:
Players: "Let's go find the best optimized undead killing machines we can...."
Their loss.
A lot of the enemies in Carrion Crown aren't undead. Undead just feature highly. :)
I understand your point mind but it needs to be understood that only so much metagaming can actually occur even in this situation as every gm adds their own spin on to modules and ap's.
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I've always played and run in homebrew campaigns. Sure, me and other GMs have supplemented published material, but it's always been in arcs, plots and for the most part settings created by the GM. When I was a kid in 1e & 2e, we made characters in droves, threw them out there and saw what stuck b/cause that's how the systems ran then.
When we got to 3x our games changed. We didn't "roll up" our characters any more...we built them.
This changed the way the GMs thought, myself included. My gaming groups and I no longer thought "how can I mold my vision to fit these characters in" but rather "what kind of game do I want?" As a result we GMs could craft a game with a point and major themes/events/villains already planned with the confidence that the players would be prepared to keep up.
I agree w/the OP in that this idea of forcing characters to adapt is silly. It does a disservice both to the GM and the players. If player x makes an undead hunting paladin, that's indicative of the kind of game they want to play. Sitting down as the GM and then announcing "I'm running Skull & Shackles" not only invalidates most if not all of the choices player x has made but also sends the message that the GM really doesn't care WHAT character you made; this is what the game is.
Now some of my grognard friends would and have told me that fluff is fluff; if you haven't even rolled your first combat yet you can always re-do your backgrounds, motivations and such. But my response is always that, even if your not optimized, you've built this character to do a particular job and now will have little to no opportunity to pursue that focus. My grognard friends would have me build fluff-less generics with little 1st level specialization who can fit into any setting: sword & board fighters, vanilla rogues, wizards with arcane bonded rings and healer clerics.
I crave a more unique, personal experience from the outset.
I'm not saying however that my grognard friends are wrong. If you make Genero the Vanilla Wizard you can adapt him to any campaign and make his personality fit as you roll on through the story. But to me that feels boring - I'm only playing the character that fits into the mold the gameworld sets for me. Had I known what the game held in store for me ahead of time, I'd have made the character pre-tailored to the material and ended up in the same place anyway.
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Similarly, I don't think I'd want to make a computer/techy/cyberpunk like character, and then find out that the story is all about living on an island somewhere and the highest tech level is bamboo.
At some point my players are going to ask me what in the world posessed me to run a game of Paranoia with a "Giligan's Island Meets Cyberpunk" theme.
And I'm going to tell them it was you. Then I'm going to tell them they need to figure out how to make a datadeck out of coconuts and sea shells and do it quickly because the minigun equipped giant stone head is coming for them.
This just made my morning.
And if they succeed in doing so, you of course need to tell them that they can build advanced electronics out of seashells, coconuts and bamboo, but they can't just use wood to fix the hole in the boat.
That is far too complicated.
I am aware that the undead blasting oracle is not the most powerful undead killer in existence. But it is kinda fun to be able to quick channel the undead mooks while using searing light on the major undead. An oathbound vs undead paladin would have done even better, but I bet not a whole lot better. And he couldn’t have done all the other spell and healing things I was doing. However, I would have to say that I think the most effective character build in CC would be:
I guess I would mention again that I don’t always build characters specially for what I perceive as the most likely task in the campaign. I do try to always build something that specifically applies to the storyline. Occasionally that is just fluff or attitude. But usually not.
Ex: Adventure trying to find something on a series of pirate/pirate infested islands. Most of the group build PC’s with a distinctly nautical theme. But I wasn’t really sure how much of the actual adventuring was going to take place on the ocean or if the ship was just to take us from island to island. So I built a shapechanger druid. Fly, swim, or walk as the situation required. (I didn’t actually do a very good job with that one, but that was the intention.)
There are really only 2 situation where I typically build the ‘generic’ characters that can play in any campaign.
The group is mostly noobs. Either new to PF specifically or RPG’s generally. They don’t need to be confused, overwhelmed, or made to feel useless. I make a moderately effective fairly generic character that can demonstrate many of the baseline rules to them while helping to keep everyone alive. Usually a battle cleric with enough intelligence to have some useful skills.
Joining a new group where I can’t seem to get much description of what is going on. I used to have a general purpose 1/2orc barb/ftr mapped out with several branching possibilities. It is a rare group that can’t make use of some more combat power. Wasn’t specialized, but did have some feats for grappling to take on casters or for live capture. Light armor and some ranks in stealth doesn’t make you a scout, but you can hang with a sneaky group and not blow cover. For straight up fighting, he can rage with a greataxe. If a tank is needed, he can wear medium armor and a shield and has some DR with fairly high HP. Medium wisdom and ranks in perception and sense motive for non-combat utility. He could be used in almost any group and still contribute decently. He wouldn’t necessarily shine. But I don’t want to chance hogging the spotlight with a new group anyway.