If mental stats effect your PCs ability to think, then no-one could legally play a 30 int wizard, a 30 wis cleric, or a 30 cha sorcerer.Read the scenario ahead of time?
About three years ago I read this brilliant theory that you could RP absurdly high intelligence/wisdom by using the internet to guide your character's tactics and build; that way you were drawing on intelligence and expertise far beyond your own IRL capabilities and representing the sheer genius available to you.
I didn't believe it, at first. Then I started reading Emperor Tippy's stuff. I now endorse this method for supernally high mental stats.
..., whereas intellect is one's ability to learn and adapt.
A 8 Int bard is more "intelligent" than a 15 Int cleric based on the skill points they have (5 vs. 4), which represent how much they have and can learn.
That was just me spitballing about what IRL intellect means Pres Man. I don't associate the Int score with intellect, I treat it as a pure game mechanic, same for the rest of of the stats as much as possible.
I am agreeing with you. I was trying to show the flaw of directly relating game mechanics to character traits.
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"
Mechanics for mechanics, roleplay for roleplay.
"I want to RP having a wasting disease, so I take 6 con!"
The actual mechanical decision may not be RP, but in that instance it would be led by RP considerations, as the player has decided that's the character they want to RP.
They're coughing and wheezing half the time,
Strictly roleplaying
can't run very far,
They can run just fine on a tactical timescale, and can sprint 960' before becoming fatigued. They can march 8 hours without a problem, and hustle for hours on end before their low Con score impacts the situation.
and will fall over if a strong breeze hits them - to me that's just screaming "low CON".
I was going to say "isn't that a Strength thing?", but wind effects are actually Fortitude saves.
So the next version of the game should just scrap stats all together?
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So the next version of the game should just scrap stats all together?
*yawn*
If mental stats effect your PCs ability to think, then no-one could legally play a 30 int wizard, a 30 wis cleric, or a 30 cha sorcerer. It is impossible to express a personality or thought process with such stats. If these mental stats were indicative of personality rather then mechanics then the devs could not put them in APs because the thought process of these characters would be incomprehensible to the devs, and thus could not be roleplayed. Neither Albert Eisenstein or stephen hawking could even begin to comprehend how someone with 30 int would think. Aristotle could only speculate as to what a person with 30 wisdom could divine. There is not a celebrity or politician that could even begin to conceive of how someone with 30 cha would carry them-self.
If you must by the rules RP your mental stats, then ALL high mental stat characters are illegal to play.
By that logic, no one should be able to play any non-human race or any spell-casting character, because we can't possibly imagine how creatures like that think, either.
If, as some have posited on this thread, all the mental stats are really just meaningless, they why exactly do they exist? I mean this as an honest, serious question: Why bother?
If there's no difference between Int, Wis, and Cha, why bother figuring out which of those stats each caster class should use? Why not just let the players pick their casting stat? Or just create some generic spellcasting stat, like "mana" from some of the older systems*?
Why didn't they just limit skill ranks to those given by your class and make all mental skills based on your "mana" or have no bonus at all? Why did they spend the time to divide the skills into groups based on different mental stats?
That's not an insignificant amount of work, there. Why would they waste their time doing it?
And if the answer is "because 3.5", then just roll the question back to the 3.5 devs, or the 3.0 devs, etc. Why did any of these teams bother with mental stats at all? I mean, at some point during the "2.0 to 3.5" evolution, they added (and then later dropped) the "Comeliness" stat, so it seems pretty clear they were willing to change the existing stat array if they thought it wasn't working.
*I remember playing 2 different systems that used a "mana" stat for spellcasting, but I'll be damned if I can remember which ones they were. I'm pretty sure one of them calculated "mana" off of your other mental stats...but it's been a long time.
I honestly think it would be best to remove additional bonuses such as to-hit bonuses and spell DC's from ability scores would likely get people to be more liberal with their point buy. All you would have to do is pull out a couple key magic items and lower AC and saving throws for monsters.
Pretty easy to make the ability score arrays more consistent if you are not desperate for that extra 5% success rate.
I honestly think it would be best to remove additional bonuses such as to-hit bonuses and spell DC's from ability scores would likely get people to be more liberal with their point buy. All you would have to do is pull out a couple key magic items and lower AC and saving throws for monsters.
Pretty easy to make the ability score arrays more consistent if you are not desperate for that extra 5% success rate.
What's the point of stats at that point then? Might as well play a stat-less game if they have no mechanical impact.
I think it would be interesting to see what exactly the rules say about the stats.
About INT...what does it mean.
Direct quote from the Rulebook on two stats people are trying to argue about what is or isn't involved with them in the Rulebook...
Intelligence determines how well your character learns and reasons.
Charisma measures a characters personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and appearance.
There you go. That's the direct words from the rulebook. That's actually in the rulebook. Now, interpretation can be in the eye of the beholder.
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"I want to RP having a wasting disease, so I take 6 con!"
I'm sorry that's not RPing. RPing is role playing a sick character or one that is facing their death. It has nothing to do with having a low con. Low con is a mechanical thing.
Granted this may not be stormwind, but what would be a good fallacy for people who assume their poor mechanical decisions are somehow related to RPing?
The actual mechanical decision may not be RP, but in that instance it would be led by RP considerations, as the player has decided that's the character they want to RP.
They're coughing and wheezing half the time, can't run very far, and will fall over if a strong breeze hits them - to me that's just screaming "low CON".
I once had a Paladin with a 7 Con. I flavored the penalty as a rare genetic disorder that left her with a poor complexion (paler skin, tired features, etc), noticeably less stamina and a weaker immune system than most people. Her backstory included her father traveling the world looking for a cure and the abuse by her mother for being the reason he would leave them. She was eventually thrown out of her house by her mother in a fit of grief when her father was delayed from his return for a few months due to unfortunate circumstances which led to the belief that he must have died on his journey (the world is a dangerous place).
The now homeless sickly girl was taken in by the Church of Wee Jass. Through her own faith in the witch-goddess she eventually became a Paladin whose faith was placed in the goddess. Her body was fortified by her faith and allowed her to transcend her illness. She became a wandering vagabond who went for days or even months without sleep, and a rather unlikely heroine who would take on seemingly foolish jobs for pay (such as going into goblin-infested areas to rescue kidnapped children even when the danger and pay was too low for any sensible mercenary or adventuring company to risk it).
Good times.
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The counterpoint to which is, any time you're thinking about optimizing, you're not thinking about role-playing. So to make an optimized character who is also an interesting personality takes more time and effort than doing just one alone.
Factually false. When I come up with a roleplay heavy concept it generally requires that I spend even more time familiarizing myself with rule options to get the details like I want them. The rules-association increases the more specific and/or complex the RPing idea becomes. This is one of the reasons I enjoy flexible options because they make it easier to build what I want to roleplay without being a useless steaming pile with a pretty backstory.
(I am currently playing a game where we make characters by rolling 3d6 in order for each stat. It is very hard to optimize. Anyone think this will improve the quality of role-play?)
No, I don't. I think it might force you to think up a new character by forcing creativity, but a better roleplayer? Not a chance. Having a 6 Strength Fighter doesn't help anyone roleplay better than dumping a sack of tacks in your pants would.
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No. You should at least TRY to play your stat. I don't expect everyone to get an academy award in game but they should at least be making an effort.
No. You should at least TRY to play your CHARACTER. In Marthkus' defense, how he chooses to roleplay his character is up to him, and "playing ability scores" is stupid. Ability scores do not equate to a personality or even give much in the way of relevant information in this abstraction-filled game.
I opted to have my 7 Con paladin be sickly because that seemed like a nice roleplay idea that coincided with her overall modifiers. However I could have played her as seeming quite robust but having a glass jaw, or being prone to zigging when she should have zagged, or just treated her like a relatively normal person (a d10 HD paladin with a -2 Con is still tougher than your average person who has 3 HP and +0 Fortitude, meaning she's no more likely to get ill or feel the effects of a failed Fort-save than your average commoner, and she could whip most commoner's in a fist-fight any day of the week).
Characters are waaaaaay more complex than 6 vaguely defined statistics.
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No. You should at least TRY to play your stat. I don't expect everyone to get an academy award in game but they should at least be making an effort.
Despite being an advocate of "playing your stats" (And in that I consider everything on the sheet to be a stat, including skills, so I mean the combined effect rather than treating a single number on its own), I still think that's a table/playstyle call.
People in this thread have different ways they want to play. RPG rulebooks (with a single exception which I no longer even consider an RPG for that fact alone, and no I can't identify it as I'm still under the terms of a contract with the manufacturer) tell us to use them and play in whatever way is fun for us.
That's the part we all need to respect - each other's right to play the way we want, and never to look down on it as an inferior way to our own, just a different way. We may not all be able to coexist at a single table for long (to be honest, I believe I could happily play a one-off game with almost anyone here just for the fun of it, just not a weekly commitment), but we don't need to :)
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There's also the point that some of us invest vast amounts of time into a character.
Speaking personally? Most of my characters take a bare minimum of 20 hours to completely construct, between optimization and crafting their history/personality/identity.
NOTE: not all of this time is spent sitting at a desk pouring over tomes. A great deal of it is mental time invested while doing menial tasks that need doing elsewhere.
This reminds me of another issue. For a lot of us roleplayers, it's kind of a drag to put tons effort into making a character only for them to be pretty invalid through the game or to die off early because we thought it was cute to tank Con, Dex, and Wis because we wanted to "be a better roleplayer".
When I make characters it generally includes...
1. The character's mechanics (race, class, etc).
2. The character's history and motivations.
3. The character's family (mother, father, siblings, etc).
4. The character's associations and/or potential contacts or rivalries (old friends, the guy who stole her ex from her, etc).
5. I generally include generous plot-hook fodder that the GM can exploit to add depth to the campaign without lots of extra effort.
If I'm going to go through the effort, I'm going to at least try to be viable at the table.
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That's the part we all need to respect - each other's right to play the way we want, and never to look down on it as an inferior way to our own, just a different way. We may not all be able to coexist at a single table for long (to be honest, I believe I could happily play a one-off game with almost anyone here just for the fun of it, just not a weekly commitment), but we don't need to :)
Maybe one day when I'm done with my current campaign we can get a Paizo-boards Maptools game going. One day... ^.^
When I make characters it generally includes...
1. The character's mechanics (race, class, etc).
2. The character's history and motivations.
3. The character's family (mother, father, siblings, etc).
4. The character's associations and/or potential contacts or rivalries (old friends, the guy who stole her ex from her, etc).
5. I generally include generous plot-hook fodder that the GM can exploit to add depth to the campaign without lots of extra effort.If I'm going to go through the effort, I'm going to at least try to be viable at the table.
Out of curiosity how in-depth do you go? I usually do what you listed, but in really broad "fill in whatever details you want to fit your plot, DM" strokes. Tends to be about a page or two.
When I make characters it generally includes...
1. The character's mechanics (race, class, etc).
2. The character's history and motivations.
3. The character's family (mother, father, siblings, etc).
4. The character's associations and/or potential contacts or rivalries (old friends, the guy who stole her ex from her, etc).
5. I generally include generous plot-hook fodder that the GM can exploit to add depth to the campaign without lots of extra effort.If I'm going to go through the effort, I'm going to at least try to be viable at the table.
I touched a bit on this earlier, expressing the importance of ensuring you're playing a character the group are going to be okay with. Taking my low-con rogue into an optimized Age of Worms campaign is probably a good way for me to stick a finger up at the group (as is turning up to a table of heavy RPers with a psychopath that charges at every NPC in sight for the XP)
As you say, people do make the mistake of saying they're doing it "to be a better roleplayer." To be more accurate, it's usually their desire to roleplay a specific concept with defined vulnerabilities as part of that character. While that's a fine idea, it's something to do in groups that are actively supporting that kind of thing (including having a GM that's going to balance the game against that kind of character)
That's the part we all need to respect - each other's right to play the way we want, and never to look down on it as an inferior way to our own, just a different way. We may not all be able to coexist at a single table for long (to be honest, I believe I could happily play a one-off game with almost anyone here just for the fun of it, just not a weekly commitment), but we don't need to :)Maybe one day when I'm done with my current campaign we can get a Paizo-boards Maptools game going. One day... ^.^
I very much hope that happens :)
Something I think people are also forgetting is the hidden stat of Ego. Ego is something certain intelligent magical items have. It's also what players bring to their characters. THAT stat is your character's personality.
The other mental stats are purely mechanical. Those mechanical limitations though will effect behavior. For example, my fighters rarely bluff.
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The fallacy that I hate is the black-or-white attitude that "you're either optimized or you're useless," the one that equates roleplaying with being ineffective and a drag on the party.
You'll see it in pretty much every optimization thread... coming from some of the optimizers. As if there's no middle ground between 'optimized' and the Care-Bear Playground for Horrifically Useless Adventurers.
For some people, there isn't much of a middle ground. That's their call, if that's what they need in order to have fun. I believe the majority of us exist somewhere in that middle ground, but even that middle ground can have its differences.
In a long-term campaign, I need a group that can put the story first, and live with the fact that sometimes the rules will take second place to it, for example that a scene might get RPed through and NPCs agreeing with good ideas put forward by the characters without a single roll taking place (as I've said elsewhere, if someone offers me a million dollars for my Pathfinder Core Rulebook, they're not going to need any barter or diplomacy rolls to succeed, and they can have the lowest CHA on the planet - they can have it and I'll just go buy another one ;)) - however, I certainly have no issues with how optimized (or not) people's characters are in that game.
If someone else needs something different out of the game to have fun... well, who am I to argue with that?
For a one-off game though, I'm happy fitting in with whatever :)
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Well, in that case they have an absurdly high circumstance bonus, is all I'm sayin', amirite?
That'd be an equally valid way of doing it, yes. In my case, I'm just handwaving that chance of rolling a 1 ;)
Auto fail on 1 is not a rule for skill checks.
Auto fail on 1 is not a rule for skill checks.
It couldn't be even if you wanted it to -- then what would happen when two people both got a 1 on opposed checks? Do they out-fail each other until they both fall into a black hole of failure?
Auto fail on 1 is not a rule for skill checks.
<blink> Yeah I have no idea where that came from. Sorry 'bout that!
Then again I've only been awake an hour or so, I don't wake up properly for another five hours :)
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Its a quibble with a difference; I've run into people that create someone with a five charisma, then literally try to act as if that low stat didn't exist and that they were positive in all the manifestations of the stat, and consider it unfair when you ask for rolls in social situations. If you don't manifest your low stat in some way - whatever that may be- in play, I'm going to make you manifest it by calling for rolls.
So have I. I'm not saying a person with a low cha can't roleplay. It's when they take a low stat then try to act like it's not a penalty and expect to be as successful as someone else in social encounters with a charisma of 14 or higher. They can try like everyone else yet will probably not succeed as someone with the higher stat.
It's one thing to say that you have a low stat then roleplay it. It's another to have a low stat then say it does i nanyway penalize the character. If that's the logic then high stats should not give your character a bonus either then. If a cha of 7 is meaningless then so is a str of 20.
While I think the next edition of Pathfinder will have stats I don't think they will be tied into the system as much as the current version or older versions of D&D. So if someone wants to play a ugly character with a good chance of succeeding at social encounters they can.
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So have I. I'm not saying a person with a low cha can't roleplay. It's when they take a low stat then try to act like it's not a penalty and expect to be as successful as someone else in social encounters with a charisma of 14 or higher. They can try like everyone else yet will probably not succeed as someone with the higher stat.
OK, one PC ("Bubba") has a 5 Cha and 10 ranks in Diplomacy as a class skill (-3 stat modifier, +10 skill modifier).
Another PC ("Slick") has a 14 Cha and 0 ranks in Diplomacy (+2 stat and skill modifier).If they both attempt social interaction and each rolls a 10, Bubba has results of 21, and Slick has results of 12.
If you turn around and make Bubba "not succeed as [well as] someone with the higher stat" (i.e., Slick), then you are actively breaking the rules of the game in order to enforce your personal idea of what the stat means.
Out of curiosity how in-depth do you go? I usually do what you listed, but in really broad "fill in whatever details you want to fit your plot, DM" strokes. Tends to be about a page or two.When I make characters it generally includes...
1. The character's mechanics (race, class, etc).
2. The character's history and motivations.
3. The character's family (mother, father, siblings, etc).
4. The character's associations and/or potential contacts or rivalries (old friends, the guy who stole her ex from her, etc).
5. I generally include generous plot-hook fodder that the GM can exploit to add depth to the campaign without lots of extra effort.If I'm going to go through the effort, I'm going to at least try to be viable at the table.
It depends mostly on how much pre-game interaction I have with the GM and/or how quickly I make the character. Sometimes I'll throw the character together and work out the details during game (which is something that happened with my current PC, an Irrisen witch built using the psion class). We were playing Rappun Athuk but it seemed that the majority of the group felt like it was a bit too dungeon crawly and wanted something a little more RP-heavy, so we restarted into Reign of Winter on the next week after the GM pitched the idea and we all were down for it. So that character initially started conceptually as...
1. Was a shapeshifting creepy witch who dwelled in a forest.
2. She was fairly young by witch standards (25) and had some social complexities.
3. She had an older witch mentor who bonded with her when she died (who is represented by my character's psicrystal, which appears as a polished eyesocket from her mentor's skull with an opal fused inside of it).
4. Be creepy and witchy. This included spending fair amounts of time shapeshifted into animal or stranger forms, eating people (dead people only, she doesn't kill people if she can avoid it), and preform certain religious rites.
Pretty basic and generic. In this character's case, her only family was this older witch who raised her in the wilds for no immediately certain reason and was mean and scary to her for most of her youth (before mellowing a bit when Agatha was maturing into a teenager).
As the game was going I spent some time talking with the GM about Irrisen (I have the 3.5 PF Campaign Setting book, but I'm not as up on Golarion lore as the GM is :P) and tossing some ideas back and forth with him. After a few sessions the following was hammered out.
1. Her mentor was actually her aunt who was raising her away from society after the PC's mother was burned at the stake by some rebellious Ulfen.
2. She was in fact a noble witch of Irrisen descended from the Jadwiga line, though she didn't know this herself until her mentor revealed both her identity as her aunt and their family history to her later in the game.
3. Her aunt, recognizing the girl's great potential as a witch is using her for her own schemes to seek revenge for a grudge she has been carrying since her sister's death years ago, and unbeknownst to Agatha (the PC) her aunt Magthera has been trying to train her into being a ruthless wicked witch who will obtain much power and authority in Irrsen at the expense of her old enemies.
Makes me wish we were spending more time in Irrisen. :\
I'm a big fan of keeping things simple though. Starting with concepts, fleshing them out. Defining a few characters and getting a feel for their personalities and psychologies ("what made them like this?" being a good question to ask yourself). I rarely hammer out a few pages of information unless I'm writing short stories about them. I feel that emphasis on key people and events is easier for the GM to deal with than having to read a mini-novel to fully incorporate your character (I know that I've often went a little blank-faced when a would-be-PC comes with a detailed biography dating from their birth under the seventh stay that only appears on the 2nd tuesday of August once every three years, and then becoming more detailed from there o_o).
You can have low stats & high skills, but it does play out differently. High-dip low cha may be a GREAT salesman, but just unpleasant person. Think a stereotypical used-car salesman. He gets you to buy the car, but he just seems so slimy...
And now I must make a used-car salesman character, with 5 CHA and full social skills. Maybe make him an android so that he's awful at sense motive as well.
(monotone robot voice) "Come to B-0-B 's wagon emporium for all your used-wagon emporium for all your used-wagon needs" (apparently he had a malfunction and said emporium twice...)
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OK, PC 1 has a 5 Cha and 10 ranks in Diplomacy as a class skill (+10 modifier).
PC 2 has a 14 Cha and 0 ranks in Diplomacy (+2 modifier).
If they both attempt social interaction and each rolls a 10, PC 1 has results of 21, and PC 2 has results of 12.
If you turn around and make PC 1 "not succeed as [well as] someone with the higher stat" (i.e., PC 2), then you are actively breaking the rules of the game in order to enforce your personal idea of what the stat means.
They can both roleplay. The one with a lower cha has a penalty to his diplomacy skill. Sorry getting around the penalty of low stats with high skill points does not get used at my table. His diplomacy skill would be at 5 as I add in a -5 penalty to the skill roll. The character with the high cha also has less of a chance to succeed at diplomacy because of a lack of skill points.
I love these almost unrealistic examples people use. How often does the player with a cha of 5 boost his diplomacy skill with so many ranks. How often does a character with such a decent score in cha not boost his diplomacy. If people want to make characters with low attribute scores go right ahead. Don't expect every DM to allow you to ropleplay with them effectivelty. Want to cheat the system by ignoring low stats through roleplay and skill points go right ahead. I'm not the DM to do it with.
By the way, Ashiel ... great character concept in that paladin of Wee Jas. I bet you're a blast in a game.
Thank you very much Jaelithe, I appreciate the vote of confidence. I try to make the game more entertaining for everyone (players, GMs, guests). I'd really like to play that Paladin (or a reboot version of her) again some time. I put her together for a persist world RP but haven't played her since I stopped playing in that campaign (didn't have the time and stuff).
I miss the Paladin who was in our initial group with my current witchy psion though. He was very witch-hunter themed and my being a witch who initially was both naive and well-meaning had placed herself between the party and one of the NPC villainous witches when it looked like they were going to turn hostile to each other, and she was trying to calm things down (but ended up fighting on the party's side since the other guy wouldn't listen to reason). However, the Paladin took this as a proof that my witchy-witch was a spy and aligned with the evil ones that we were trying to stop.
So...he kind attempted to smite me. And then he fell. And I and she felt bad for him. She even tried to apologize to him when he lost his powers for being a misguided bigot. >_>
I miss him. :P
That said she has different problems now. We're 9th (almost 10th) level now and after so much killing (and I mean a lot of killing, 'cause apparently meeting friendly NPCs in an AP is few and far between :P) she's developing a taste for it, and she's not happy with that. Little does she realize it's mostly because her aunt, mentor, and lover Magthera has been pushing her more towards being cold and ruthless and her innate sense of goodness is making her sick about it. But she does seem to enjoy killing and that bothers her.
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I don't see anyone one who's argued different either, RD, but there does always seem to be the danger of over valuing stats when advocating stat based role playing. It took me myself a while to realize that an 8 Cha doesn't mean you're nauseatingly repulsive, it just means that you have a 5% lower chance of success than an average person.
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Actually speaking Stormwind Fallacy and my witch...
I didn't realize how much faith the rest of our group had in my PC's ability to deal with problems until one of my friends said something that cracked me up during one of the sessions. XD
The whole party save for my character (because she was out of range) ended up charmed by some fey-folk-thingies. When she recognized that they were charmed and started combat, it was her vs the 3 fey, and the rest of the charmed party (who weren't doing so great on their opposed Charisma checks to avoid fighting, even the bard who rolled low).
PC 1: "We're all going to die!"
PC 2: "Maybe not, Agatha's not charmed, so maybe it won't be a TPK."
PC 1: "No, that's what I mean. We're fighting Agatha. We're all going to die! :P"
We totally won the encounter without casualties however. (^_^)
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Optimization gets in the way of taking interesting feats for role playing purposes that don't optimize the character. Same goes for magic items or stat distribution and skill choice.
If you optimized you can still role play you character the way you want but you limit yourself to optimized version of that.
Now I don't have an issue with that. Where I do have an issue is when those who optimize complain about another player's choices that they take to flavor their character for role playing vs optimization.
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I don't see anyone one who's argued different either, RD, but there does always seem to be the danger of over valuing stats when advocating stat based role playing. It took me myself a while to realize that an 8 Cha doesn't mean you're nauseatingly repulsive, it just means that you have a 5% lower chance of success than an average person.
A 8 cha I don't penalize as it;s slightly below average. A charisma of 6 or lower I do. Your not fugly at that point your damn close.To me it's give or take. One wants to take a 20 str at the expense of dumping cha they can. I don' think it's fair to then turn around and go " I have a low cha but that does not mean anything" either