I have become very aware recently of the fact that I tend to be very roleplaying oriented, and have many people in my routine PFS group that also lean towards roleplaying. Here's what I mean:
When I create a character, it's typically because I've become fascinated with a certain class or race that I haven't played before, and a million ideas for cool characters that could be of that race or class pop into my head. I create a stupid amount of backstory for some of my characters, and some of them aren't very well optimized. One of my favorite characters that I've created is a cleric of Groetus who has a very odd balance of maturity and childishness. He preaches of End Times and death, yet will put the life of his fluffy pet rabbit over his own, and constantly dotes over the thing. (Just as one example) Here's the thing, though. From what I've seen, Karawan doesn't seem to be an optimized cleric. His oddity and nihilism grants him abysmal charisma, which is the stat used to channel energy, basically depriving him of a class feature. Karawan just doesn't seem like a charismatic guy, so I didn't give him a high charisma score.
I guess that, though I try to make characters that can aid a party, I am much more likely to choose ability scores, skills, languages, and the like based upon my characters' personal experience, and not what is necessarily best for the class. They have to have had some reason to become the class, so I wouldn't make a wizard with zero mental skills and all physical ones (seriously, they wouldn't want to be a wizard in the first place.), but I don't seriously optimize. Thus, I tend to be a very, very roleplay oriented player with maybe a little bit of rollplay thrown in.
To be honest, I was shocked the first time I played with a true optimizer, as I saw them exchanging all sorts of concepts that would have worked with their character's personality for ones that didn't compliment the character that well. They worked very well on a gameplay standpoint, but seemed very uncharacteristic of the character in question.
TLDR: How do you balance roleplaying with rollplaying, and which one do you consider more important to your enjoyment of the game? How well do you work with roleplayers/rollplayers?
I'd love to start a good discussion here on the topic, but let's try not to murder each other over our opinions. :)
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I tend to find that those who optimize tend to also be better roleplayers.
Self defined "optimizers" or "roleplayers" to the exclusion of one or the other tend to be bad at both to my experience.
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Why do people think taking horrible choices is better "roleplay"????
I mean, Skill Focus (craft basketweavig) does not make you a good role player if you are a fighter. In fact it makes sense that a fighter would, you know, dedicate his life to mastering his craft, the ability to fight.
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I tend to find that those who optimize tend to also be better roleplayers.
Self defined "optimizers" or "roleplayers" to the exclusion of one or the other tend to be bad at both to my experience.
I disagree. Optimization is nice for having 'signature skills' but also leaves someone less-rounded to handle things that may not exactly fall into their purview, and nothing derails roleplay faster than having an inability to recover effectively from say, a botched Diplomacy roll by the only person who optimized that.
I tend to be a generalist, with some key skills that the character 'is about' but try to get any 'weaknesses' shored up as quickly as possible because they WILL get hit on.
From a story perspective, it's easily defined as 'Huh, I learned something new today about relationships' or 'Okay, I need to read up on dungeon critters, that pudding almost ate Rob!'
Have some things you're good at, some things you're not so good at, but nothing so horrible that you get your party killed, imo?
Edit note: Truth in advertising, I'm HORRIBLE in the home campaigns I play in for 'recruiting the opponent'. ie, I bring them over to our side through various means, even if my Charisma isn't the greatest. Because at the end of the day, the opponent that you don't have to fight (and that doesn't have to die fighting you) is a potential ally.
Bad enough that at one point the GM had to bap us all over the head and go "NO, you can't befriend the anti-paladin and the lich cleric. Nice try. They want you dead, period."
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It isn't a balance. That implies they are at opposite ends of a spectrum. That's a false dichotomy.
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Why do people think taking horrible choices is better "roleplay"????
I mean, Skill Focus (craft basketweavig) does not make you a good role player if you are a fighter. In fact it makes sense that a fighter would, you know, dedicate his life to mastering his craft, the ability to fight.
Do forgive me if I wasn't clear. Taking terrible choices is not better roleplay. I understand that. My question was more aimed at those who create a character who is described as a gruff, antisocial dwarf but has a charisma score of fifteen because he needs it for his class.
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Step 1) Come up with a mechanical concept - what the character can do, not who they are (that's fluff and has no business in designing a character)
Step 2) Fine-tune that concept to its most-efficient form, cutting out extraneous things (it doesn't have to be the "best" version of a class, but it should be highly effective in at least 1 useful area).
Step 3) Come up with a personality that would make sense/be interesting for the mechanics chosen.
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I tend to find that those who optimize tend to also be better roleplayers.
Self defined "optimizers" or "roleplayers" to the exclusion of one or the other tend to be bad at both to my experience.
I disagree. Optimization is nice for having 'signature skills' but also leaves someone less-rounded to handle things that may not exactly fall into their purview, and nothing derails roleplay faster than having an inability to recover effectively from say, a botched Diplomacy roll by the only person who optimized that.
I tend to be a generalist, with some key skills that the character 'is about' but try to get any 'weaknesses' shored up as quickly as possible because they WILL get hit on.
From a story perspective, it's easily defined as 'Huh, I learned something new today about relationships' or 'Okay, I need to read up on dungeon critters, that pudding almost ate Rob!'
Have some things you're good at, some things you're not so good at, but nothing so horrible that you get your party killed, imo?
Optimization != specialization
I think of a concept I want to do mechanically, like deciding I really like the Hexcrafter Magus archtype. I then work out how to get all the pieces together in a way that will make for a powerful character, only really limited to still be aesthetically pleasing to play. For example, when I built a Hexcrafter for a Shackles game I was aware of the Prehensile Hair build, but I didn't like the idea of killing people with hair, so I just focused on a rapier.
After I've put together a mechanically solid and powerful build, I build a character concept to justify the choices I made building it. For that Hexcrafter I used traits to get Int to Diplomacy and Intimidate, but tanked my Charisma. I roleplayed that as him being a very unpleasant and arrogant person when he didn't want something from someone else, but when he put in the effort he chose every word perfectly and always had a plan, and back-up plans for that. But I also had him fervently loyal to friends and absolutely dedicated to protecting the life and livelihood of anyone that accepted his command.
To explain his Hexes I made a backround with the cannibalistic witch in the party. The witch had performed a ritual, snatching out one of his eyes and forcing a burning coal inside the socket. Helped explain why the Hexcrafter was a curmudgeon, he had an everburning coal stuck in his head, but also helped explain his high Intimidate as an effect of his baleful eye.
That character is one of my favorites, because I love playing politics in the Shackles, but frankly I could have built a character to do much the same roleplay with a completely different class. I don't like to tie my roleplay and mechanics together at the hip. I spend my time building decent builds because the math is the part that is harder to address if I mess up.
Personally I think the roleplay is the easy part, at least my group always enjoys the characters I play. So that's why I don't spend a lot of time with backrounds, unless the GM asks me for something. My concern is being a capable character mechanically, because I'd much rather hold myself back if the GM asks than have the GM dumb down the monsters so I can handle it.
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Charisma is a measure of force of personality, not of social grace.
It can represent social grace, but it can also represent a lot of other things.
The gruff, antisocial dwarf might just exude a strong personality that says to everyone around him that he is not to be messed with.
Think like Wolverine. He's not an example of a low charisma character. He's an example of a fairly high charisma character who just happens to be surly and mad a lot. In spite of that, people still like him because he's charismatic. Intimidation is a form of charisma.
Contrast that with Spiderman, who is a helpful, funny, good natured person, and in spite of that everyone hates him. That's an example of lower charisma in action. In spite of his best efforts, he cannot sway people's opinions about him until they've spent enough time around him to really get to know him.
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Roleplaying and build optimization are not mutually exclusive - this is the basis of the Stormwind Fallacy, and it's completely true.
People who think that you can't be optimized AND be a good roleplayer generally are terrible "roleplayers" themselves and fall into stereotypical concepts, contrived backstories, overused tropes, and have a general air of pretentiousness that makes you wonder exactly how many trilbies they own...
I lost a taste for "serious" roleplaying years ago because the vast majority of players are actually pretty horrendous at coming up with interesting characters and tend to fall into melodramatic tropes so hard that they break the fremdschaemen meter.
Meledrama =/= automatically-good storytelling/characterization.
Darth Vader shows no melodramatic tendencies on-screen, instead being somewhere between an unrepentantly-evil anti-villain or Byronic hero; he's the bar-none most-interesting character in Star Wars as a result.
Anakin Skywalker is nothing BUT melodrama, and was an absolute waste of a character and decades of anticipation.
Han Solo is not melodramatic in the slightest, and Han is by FAR the most enjoyable character since he therefore holds the dual titles of "Mr. Awesome McBadass" and "The King of Snark".
Most roleplayers think they're Darth Vader and instead are Anakin Skywalker, which makes me want to vomit.
I prefer to play Han and treat a game as a game, rarely being serious in the slightest while tearing apart monsters and enemies easily.
TLDR: How do you balance roleplaying with rollplaying, and which one do you consider more important to your enjoyment of the game? How well do you work with roleplayers/rollplayers?
Speaking generally, I don't think there's much of a connection (my guess would be that they're actually positively correlated).
Nonetheless, it definitely has an impact on the way I make characters. If I focus on the mechanical side first, I rarely care about the character or ever think of him as more than a bunch of abilities and modifiers. My preference is to rather come up with a story or personality and then create the character mechanically, after the fact. (This is confused somewhat as I also prefer rolling stats in order to get that process started - so it goes roll stats, come up with story/race/class, then choose feats, spells, etcetera).
As a consequence, the characters I put more effort into 'building' are generally rather flat or inconsequential on the roleplaying front. When I roll up a character the way I prefer, they are inevitably poorly optimised. I suspect there are many people like me who then confuse our methodology as some kind of logical dichotomy between the two.
In terms of playing with others, it really doesn't bother me. I don't care if you're effectively built, spouting long soliloquies, both or neither. The only thing I would be upset by is if you tried to tell me how to roll up my guy.
Ah, I get what several of you are speaking of. The method of building a character first based upon stats and secondly upon a personality probably works for a lot of people, and is probably a fairly balanced way to make an effective character. I guess I just find myself to enjoy creating a unique character more than an optimized one. Thus, I typically build a character's personality before building the stats, because the character pops into my head before the crunch does.
This has some faults to it, including the creation of a character that is less optimized than another might be. I was partially just curious as to if anyone else thinks this way.
Once again, I do think that I have some rollplay in me as well, as I do try to create characters that fit into a role in the party after creating the personality. I don't see rollplaying as a bad thing, nor roleplaying as a bad thing. They aren't on the same scale; I agree with you, Doom. They are definetly related in some way, though; they both come into play while creating a character. I simply don't focus on the optimization as much as others do. A person can focus on both equally, but some people spend more time in and find more joy in the personality than the crunch, and vice versa.
My method lately has become an interwoven process, and it often takes several days or even a week to finish because of it.
What I do is I first ask myself what I want to play. Maybe I want to make a melee kinetecist, or maybe i want to make a mindblade magus, as are more recent examples.
So, I've decided that I want to play a mindblade magus. He's going to be intelligent, he's going to be dextrous, he's going to have mastery over a lot of weapons, etc. He won't have much charisma or wisdom, since the mindblade is pretty MAD for everything. So I flavor it as he's very fit and very intelligent, but a little too smart for his own good and will often stick his nose into other people's business, but only when it interests him.
Now I've already got a very basic character concept, now I start going a little bit more into the stats of the character. 16 intelligence, 8 charisma, 8 wisdom, 15 dexterity, 12 con, 14 strength. (or something. I forgot what the stats ended up being, don't have the draft available at the moment) I look up and down at the different magus arcana he should take, what feats he might take at what level, list after list of different things that might make a good mindblade. Eventually I settle in on a TWF build, since always wanted to stray from the normal "one-handed weapon" trope of regular magi. I also take a detailed look at all weapons available, since the mindblade has a much higher ability to take advantage of the odd weapon in the odd situation.
Suddenly, one weapon catches my eye. The swordcane. My brain switches gears, and I realize that I really want him to use a swordcane for the roleplaying aspects. The character begins to solidify in my head. He's older than one might expect an adventurer to be (but not so old that he suffers physical penalties and gets mental benefits, etc), and his charisma manifests that he looks even older than he is. During off hours and non-combat, he manifests a swordcane for "support", and most people just see it as a cane of psychic energy. This is a man who has a frail body but can support it with his mind, and his mind doesn't seem to be able to do much more than give him a stick to lean on.
Back to the character building, I now fixate on spells. He wants to stick his nose into other people's business, he wants to appear as a simple old man, he picks disguise self. He takes a trait to gain a class skill in bluff and/or disguise, and puts ranks into those skills. From previous decisions, he wants to go TWF, so he picks multi-charge touch spells to try and take advantage of many more attacks per round. He's a psychic and takes a huge concentration penalty, so he takes warding weapon as one of his spells as well.
Switch gears again (it often happens without warning), begin thinking about the implications of manifesting any weapon you want. This man loves weapons of every kind, and will often just spend his downtime looking at different weapons and military tactics. He should have an intelligent view on combat. My mind begins to envision a situation where he will go into spell combat and cast a multi-touch, then unload all his TWF attacks on one of his victims. Next round, he uses a swift action to manifest the largest damage die he can think of, like a battleaxe, and makes a charge against a target 60ft away, leaving behind the corpse of his eviscerated enemy. Then, the turn after that, he takes a step back, manifests a reach weapon, and goes into spell combat to trip the enemy and threaten him that way. Versatility is key, combat manuevers to take advantage of the weapon choices.
So back to feats, early levels before TWF can kick in will be combat expertise, improved trip, and improved disarm. Very intelligent maneuvers, and can take advantage of the weapons you have available.
... and that's a character I'm still in the middle of building. but that's basically how it goes.
TL;DR, I identify what I want to play, and constantly jump back and forth between mechanical and roleplaying choices to build off of the other and make a character that I really like the feel and gameplay of.
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Yeah, my general policy for character creation is to nail down what I want to play as far as personality/combat style/etc, then figure out the best way to do that within the game mechanics. I might make some suboptimal choices creativity, like my one crazy peasant rebel who dual wielded a hammer and sickle, but I saw no reason not to make him the best hammer-and-sickle wielder I could manage.
Charisma is a measure of force of personality, not of social grace.
It can represent social grace, but it can also represent a lot of other things.
The gruff, antisocial dwarf might just exude a strong personality that says to everyone around him that he is not to be messed with.
Think like Wolverine. He's not an example of a low charisma character. He's an example of a fairly high charisma character who just happens to be surly and mad a lot. In spite of that, people still like him because he's charismatic. Intimidation is a form of charisma.
Contrast that with Spiderman, who is a helpful, funny, good natured person, and in spite of that everyone hates him. That's an example of lower charisma in action. In spite of his best efforts, he cannot sway people's opinions about him until they've spent enough time around him to really get to know him.
Wolverine became popular on his own merits out of universe and is generally disliked in universe by most that meet him, except for his random 'teenage girl of the decade' he's toting around. He's only remembered because you can't kill him and he's really good at killing people. Spider-Man however, is only disliked in his own universe because of slander from one person with a newspaper. His actual charisma would be quite high as everyone who meets him who isn't having their face pounded in does in fact like the wall-crawler quite a bit.
So no, Wolverine would have a low Cha and Spider-Man would have a high Cha in-universe.
A better example of a character who's a jerk with a high Cha would be Doctor Doom actually. Despite the fact that he is a villain, he is still genuinely loved by the people of Latveria. Yes, he's probably the most arrogant person on Earth with serious claims of grandeur, but his people still love him. Admittedly, he's cured cancer, AIDS, his country is thriving economically and in education and science and general health. They just have to give up the personal freedom of not fighting Doom...
High Charisma doesn't mean people like you more. And vice-versa.
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I like building mechanically sound/powerful characters based on builds/ideas I have interest in exploring. I do take into consideration the campaign and what not though, if it's an urban focused game I look for classes/archetypes that do something similar to what I want mechanically that fit the scope of the world/setting/adventure (or party needs if joining an on-going game).
Usually I leave the fluff till the end, where I look at what I made mechanically and try to come up with an interesting story to go along with it. But I might go back a change a few things too, if it's not a huge hit in effectiveness but contributes to a more useful character I'l;; adjust accordingly.
It doesn't always go like that, sometimes I have a character idea in mind that I optimize towards mechanically, but that is usually the exception. For me, I think while building a character I tend to develop the backstory as I choose things. Usually by the time I get to the "fluff" part I have a good idea of what I want to do anyways.
But, going back to the original question, I value them equally. I like Pathfinder for it's moving parts, it's why I play it. The mechanics/rules of the game are just as interesting/fun to me as the roleplaying aspect. If I had to pick, I'd say mechanics take an edge but I definitely would not enjoy the game like I do without the roleplaying.
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So the big problem here is that Pathfinder kind of rewards you for optimizing your character. If you're playing a fighter an optimized halfling of doom is the difference between +3 atk (Weap Focus, Greater Wep focus, Bracers skill at arms: longsword used) and +4 dmg (weap special, Greater weap special) with two circumstantial damage buffs that are effectively power attack (Halfling racial power attack, and power attack: they stack) that basically translate to you hitting like a truck and not having any of these real bonuses.
If you want a game where people are highly rewarded for branching out into lots of other things, go play shadowrun 5e. Eventually increasing their skill becomes so prohibitively expensive that they just spend their XP on other skills.
Look at it this way: many people who optimize their characters do so in the hopes that they can just get in character with the confidence that their build will keep the character not only alive but also effective throughout the game. Sometimes characters are not even optimized for survivability, sometimes it is just fun to make a character that the GM knows he can kill at the drop of a hat—mainly because these characters tend to be funny and over the top.—
Optimized characters mean the GM can go crazy with encounters. He can pull out the nastiest of the nasty. If he wants the party to face an army of bloody skeletons when they don't have anyone who can channel positive energy, he can. If you have a bunch of "roleplay" characters that are unoptimal because that is how you view "roleplay" characters then you run into the issue that you all might die when the GM decides that you're proven enough to survive an epic fight that has the gloves taken off.
People just tend to have more fun when their characters are optimal and can compete. Yes, it makes you more specialized and niche oriented, but so long as all of the major niches are covered, who cares.
Optimization allows for trick builds, it allows people to play stupid things that only work in specific circumstances. The gun toting rogue alchemist (vivisectionist) with extra hands comes to mind since two levels in rogue more or less unlocks all the rogue talents that lack level requirements. Bonus points if the character is a drow that sees in deeper darkness.
If you want to make roll-players become role-players then roleplay with them doing things that they wouldn't roll dice to do. They might be the most mechanically sound badass this side of Golarion, but when they have to make personality decisions they actually have to make them. Also note that diplomacy doesn't work on players. Sure, he might be one of those cop-outs that roll intelligence or whatever to decide what is the best decision, but those people are always boring.
Basically, the general rule in any TTRPG is to focus on your character. You are the hero of your own story, don't worry about that dude who created a Golden Kobald Summoner (Synthesist) with all dumped physical statistics in a ~campaign about killing kobolds~, seriously, you'll just give yourself a headache. Instead, focus on what your character thinks about these interesting people, and which ones he wont mourn.
I once upon a time made a completely optimal badass character who had unoptimal aspects about his build—that later became extremely optimal, but for reasons I didn't know at the time.— I roleplayed him just how I would roleplay Hamlet: angry, broody, dark and vengeful at times. My experience was that while my character could mop the floor with the other, not as optimized, player characters he also tended to be the one that stood out the most because of how he was roleplayed. Now, don't get me wrong. It might seem annoying for everyone to be using elven spears are rogues or wakizashi on magi, but that is just the metagame. Everyone wants to be the best they can be, because when push comes to shove, they can shove a hell of a lot harder.
I had a group of players that preferred playing unoptimal characters. Hell, their characters sucked—BADLY—and I always wondered how hard I should go. For the campaign finisher, I told them, "For the end boss, I'm not going to hold punches. You guys are going to be going up against optimally built enemies. They wont be built to kill you or pick on your weaknesses, but they are going to be built to do what they do really well." They all assented that they understood.
About 6 months later they fight this big-bad band of badasses. They lose, obviously. However, the nature of their loss is what they joked about. They understood that they struggled with "epic" CR+3 encounters that were built more or less not to challenge them but feel big. This was an "epic" CR+3 encounter that would challenge an optimal party. It was just four NPCs with a collective CR that fit the party's, and they more or less were built as I would build an adventuring party.
So, what happened? The party wanted to play THOSE characters, because holy crap they were strong. I walked the players through how to make them, and within a week we started on a new campaign to kill the characters that killed their last party. They fought unoptimal encounters like they had previously, and won without much issue. They tore through enemy lines to the point that a couple of times I just had the enemies run away from them or surrender. When they met the guys who killed their last characters, they were so much more powerful than the bad guys that even they were not an issue for them and the PCs were at WBL.
People like feeling powerful, but they also like being able to roleplay. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can be Lancelot the charismatic playboy and Lancelot the killing machine. You can have crises of faith, deep seeded emotional issues and any number of character driven needs—none of which are mechanical.— Understand that part of being a roleplayer is realizing that you can play a super-powered character, and still have tons of fun. You don't need to cripple your character, as the personality you give the person is far more interesting than the mechanical aspects.
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*snip*
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In my experiance, those that tout the whole "optimizers are just badwrongfun and are bad" flag are often people who have poor system knowledge and/or refuse to learn.
I mean, what does it hurt if your charavters DOESNT suck at everything AND has character.
For instance, im making an Umbral Agent for a game coming up that is kinda fun. It is a Mesmerist with Cleric VMC and the Darkness(loss sub) domain. It is a human and utilizes Dirty Trick in combat along with his double Gaze+ chains so he is blinded, entangled, shaken, and whatever else i decide to build into Mesmerist gaze ability. Throw some dirty tricks to further debuff him and you got a nasty recipe.
I OPTIMIZED him to do a role (debuffer/flanker) but he is also a person. I just havent finished writing his back story because i built him like.... 3hours ago lol. Havent figured what I wanna do with him as a person yet lol. But he is gonna have a back story and is very RP driven (high Bluff skill, diplomacy, and intimidate)
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I mean, what does it hurt if your charavters DOESNT suck at everything AND has character.
By restricting your characters only to the hypercompetant you close off at least as many character types as you open up. Thus good characters are sacrificed on the altar of optimization in order to feed your own ego trip. And if another player in the game has decided to play one of those characters you run a high risk of invalidating the things they are good at simply because you made a character who's good at everything.
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But I like being competent.
I mean sure, playing a musclehead archer with no dex sounds interesting, but when I fail to protect my party because I miss everything am I really helping anyone?
What's wrong with wanting to be a very sneaky man who is all right at talking to people and very good at shanking people?
If I'm gonna do something I wanna at least be good at it.
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But I like being competent.
I mean sure, playing a musclehead archer with no dex sounds interesting, but when I fail to protect my party because I miss everything am I really helping anyone?
What's wrong with wanting to be a very sneaky man who is all right at talking to people and very good at shanking people?
If I'm gonna do something I wanna at least be good at it.
Optimizing doesn't make you competent. Optimizing makes you hypercompetant, able to overshadow the other people who didn't spend a few hours finding broken parts of the system to exploit.
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I mean, what does it hurt if your charavters DOESNT suck at everything AND has character.By restricting your characters only to the hypercompetant you close off at least as many character types as you open up. Thus good characters are sacrificed on the altar of optimization in order to feed your own ego trip. And if another player in the game has decided to play one of those characters you run a high risk of invalidating the things they are good at simply because you made a character who's good at everything.
So, the fighter with 20 STR invalidates the fighter with 16 STR, just like the latter invalidates the fighter with 12 STR, who invalidates the fighter with 8 STR. Optimization is not binary, it is a scale. You and your group get to choose where you stand.
That has two important corollaries. 1- it is arbitrary and consensual. 2- it is not an indication of your personality. It does not determine whether you are good guy or someone bent on "harming the game".