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PF isn't balanced. That's important to me when I DM, so I don't DM PF. When playing PF, I have no sense of accomplishment with any combat encounter. The outcome was decided before I rolled imitative.
Puzzles, exploration, and roleplaying is all I care about in PF. Combat just makes me sad and that is where most of the game is. I consider having fun with PF a skill and applaud those who accomplish it. The game doesn't do that by itself.
PF isn't balanced. That's important to me when I DM, so I don't DM PF. When playing PF, I have no sense of accomplishment with any combat encounter. The outcome was decided before I rolled imitative.
Puzzles, exploration, and roleplaying is all I care about in PF. Combat just makes me sad and that is where most of the game is. I consider having fun with PF a skill and applaud those who accomplish it. The game doesn't do that by itself.
That's sound advice for any game. I didn't have fun with the various Blah: The Blahing games from White Wolf. I knew tons of people that swore by them, and they had tons of stories. By itself, the game didn't do anything for me. Fortunately the people that played that played other games that I did enjoy, and we could still have fun together.
In the end, all that matters is if you have fun.
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Here is a general question...
Is it easier to role play...
Jack the human rogue 5?
Or
Jack the half android - half strix, slayer 1, unchained rogue 3, cleric (trickery) 1, raised By dwarves trait, glaive-combat reflexes-sping Attack build?
Or is it exactly the same?
If this were a general gaming forum, I would say they were the same.
However, since this is specifically a forum for Pathfinder, the first one is easier because the second one does not conform to the rules of Pathfinder (there is no way to get a half-android-half-strix in Pathfinder that I know of).
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There are some parts where optimizers and roleplayers clash intrinsically. Character creation.
You cannot both optimize and free design. One HAS TO take precedence. This isn't to say an optimizer can't be an amazing roleplayers though, but you can't do both in the creation phase.
Which are you?
Well... If you are making a Paladin and go, "I want Fey Foundling, so I can get bonuses to Lay on Hands on myself. So I am going to put it in my history."
Then you are optimizing over roleplaying.
That having been said I do notice optimizers won't take non-optimized items even if the non-optimized item makes more sense than the optimized one.
This is where reflavoring comes in handy. Flavor is mutable, and giving the paladin the ability to say "I'm taking Fey Foundling, but instead of having it tied to fey, I'm going to have it relate to something more intrinsically related to my character," and then suddenly there's no clash. Unless you're shackled to the flavor, there's no real disconnect.
This is where reflavoring comes in handy. Flavor is mutable, and giving the paladin the ability to say "I'm taking Fey Foundling, but instead of having it tied to fey, I'm going to have it relate to something more intrinsically related to my character," and then suddenly there's no clash. Unless you're shackled to the flavor, there's no real disconnect.There are some parts where optimizers and roleplayers clash intrinsically. Character creation.
You cannot both optimize and free design. One HAS TO take precedence. This isn't to say an optimizer can't be an amazing roleplayers though, but you can't do both in the creation phase.
Which are you?
Well... If you are making a Paladin and go, "I want Fey Foundling, so I can get bonuses to Lay on Hands on myself. So I am going to put it in my history."
Then you are optimizing over roleplaying.
That having been said I do notice optimizers won't take non-optimized items even if the non-optimized item makes more sense than the optimized one.
Hehehe with that said , it is certain many wont be giving the paladin such option (more often than not , if you want something , people make you take whatever flavor it is written there also) , reason the very first post of this thread is a joke about it.
So say hypothetical person has a background roleplaying concept, but doesn't have every detailed planed out. He picks what fits his idea mechanics wise but as he is picking out the mechanics some of those influence and cover gaps in his character's personality and background which in turn inspires going after additional mechanics until the process repeats itself into a complete character.
Is this person a filthy optimizer or a special snowflake roleplayer?
Is it possible to program your account to automatically hide any thread that contains the words "stormwind" and "C/MD". If not can this be implemented?
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The real problem with all of this is more then anything else in the reasons why people game.
The people who like system mastery tend to make better characters mechanically then the people who value story and social interaction more. This leads to those characters outshining the characters of the 'real roleplayer'. This leads to hurt feelings because as the roleplayer sees it the optimizer is taking away from him since he believes he vested more into his character then 'Just grabbing the best numbers'.
The inverse of this is the roleplayer tends to outperform the 'min-maxer' as a player by taking the head in non-rolling sorts of situations and monopolizing or dragging out the social interactions when the numbers guy is itching to get back to winning D&D.
Now comes the hard part.. Who's having badwrongfun ? Well depending on the situation both of them and neither of them. The simple truth is some people just can't have fun with the other kind there.. Here's the best example I can think of..
I love hotdogs. Cheese inside hotdogs are something I turn to when I want to murder the next irritation that crosses my path because they make me feel better. If you put sauerkraut on my hotdog.. I.. will.. end.. you. I despise sauerkraut with the hate of a thousand angry guinea pigs. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but you only like hotdogs cooked in sauerkraut and hate the kind with cheese inside. We cannot cook hotdogs together. We just won't enjoy eating the others product. We can make out hotdogs separate and try to eat them together and sometimes this works but often seeing me enjoy my krautless cheese pocked meatstick will bother you because you think it's gross.
Now back to gaming. Here it gets even worse because gamers are opinionated stubborn mules. If one gamer tries to help the other one with either roleplaying or character optimizing they take it as an offence because you're telling them through the offer to help they're playing wrong. And this is compounded even worse by the dark sides of char-oping and roleplaying I'll call them Munchkins and Snowflakes respectively. Both of these types are people who only care about themselves or even worse have the most fun by pissing in other people's Wheaties. Munchkin by rules interpretations bordering on cheating and snowflakes by making every interaction be all about them and their unique wonderful character Moondragozelea d'Whogivzakrud. Both of these types are also prone to go on at length about how their way is the way to play, and get defensive when you suggest other styles are equally viable. Jerks exist in both groups and human beings have a far far greater tendency to judge like things by the worst example rather than the best.
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The real problem with all of this is more then anything else in the reasons why people game.
The people who like system mastery tend to make better characters mechanically then the people who value story and social interaction more. This leads to those characters outshining the characters of the 'real roleplayer'. This leads to hurt feelings because as the roleplayer sees it the optimizer is taking away from him since he believes he vested more into his character then 'Just grabbing the best numbers'.
The inverse of this is the roleplayer tends to outperform the 'min-maxer' as a player by taking the head in non-rolling sorts of situations and monopolizing or dragging out the social interactions when the numbers guy is itching to get back to winning D&D.
Now comes the hard part.. Who's having badwrongfun ? Well depending on the situation both of them and neither of them. The simple truth is some people just can't have fun with the other kind there.. Here's the best example I can think of..
I love hotdogs. Cheese inside hotdogs are something I turn to when I want to murder the next irritation that crosses my path because they make me feel better. If you put sauerkraut on my hotdog.. I.. will.. end.. you. I despise sauerkraut with the hate of a thousand angry guinea pigs. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but you only like hotdogs cooked in sauerkraut and hate the kind with cheese inside. We cannot cook hotdogs together. We just won't enjoy eating the others product. We can make out hotdogs separate and try to eat them together and sometimes this works but often seeing me enjoy my krautless cheese pocked meatstick will bother you because you think it's gross.
Now back to gaming. Here it gets even worse because gamers are opinionated stubborn mules. If one gamer tries to help the other one with either roleplaying or character optimizing they take it as an offence because you're telling them through the offer to help they're playing wrong. And this is compounded even worse by the dark sides of...
You're assuming the numbers guy doesn't also like to RP, which is literally the point of the Stormwind Fallacy
Personally when I make a character for any system I come up with an outline first. What does he do to get what he wants ? How does he accomplish goals ? Then I do a quick build. Then I do some setting research for things that I think fit into 'Huh that's nifty' and come up with a backstory as organically as possible trying to flesh out the reasons for the stuff he can do and what he wants to accomplish. Then I run it by the GM to make sure he's cool with it.. Which confused one of my GMs very much as she had never had a player check with her to see if a character would fit into the story she wanted to do before. After that I make any final tweaks for backstory and power level as needed and I'm good to go.
I should point out though that I'm the guy who for a min-maxed to hell LARP character spent seven days four hours a day learning about the history and culture of the Prussian junker nobility and has thirty some accent tapes in the same file folder as his build guides and DPR calculators
The main problem with the Summoner's design is that it is selfish; you have all these great buff spells, but you have a personal pet that you're encouraged to use them on. So you've got the problem that mid/high level wizards bring (they have no good reason to let the fighter do their thing when they can just bring along a partner that works on their turn and does it just as well) except it starts right at level 1 and doesn't require any sort of game knowledge to do.
Is it possible to program your account to automatically hide any thread that contains the words "stormwind" and "C/MD". If not can this be implemented?
Generally forums assume that if you don't want to read something, you won't click on the thread. Self discipline is a wonderful thing.
Anyway.
Despite being somewhat late to the party (though I'm of mixed opinions whether that's a bad thing, given some of the previous posts I skimmed through), I figure I'll throw my 2c in.
I like to roleplay. I like character interactions, town drama, discussion and socializing vastly more than I like dungeon crawling. In fact, I will go on record that big dungeon grinds are probably my least favorite thing about this game - I love dramatic and story-driven combat, but the room-by-room grind of most dungeons bores me to tears. I've written multi-page backgrounds to most of my characters, usually wind up splurging large portions of my character wealth on things like luxuries, decent clothes, a nice house, investing in businesses, building a school etc (depending on the character).
I also like to optimize my characters, and explore what their options are (even if I don't use them). I always pre-plan my levels, feat and spell selections, and generally try to make sure my character is great at their niche, but with a diverse enough toolbox to avoid being a one-trick pony. I wind up with things like Barbarian/Fighter/Sorcerer/Dragon Disciple/Abjurant Champion characters, who behave in a fashion that none of the component classes would allow on its own, where feat, class and spell selection are painstakingly chosen to ensure the character performs well in his chosen role.
I didn't find the two mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, actually. I found the more I roleplayed, the more I optimized, and the more time I spent optimizing the character, the more invested I became in roleplaying them. The reasoning is three-fold:
- 1) Time: The more time I spent playing with the mechanics, the more exposure I had to the character concept. So rather than throwing something together at the table, or tossing the character sheet in a drawer for a week, it was regularly on my mind, and I wound up thinking about who the character was.
2) Life Span: My thrown together characters tended to get smacked around easily and regularly killed off. And it's hard to get invested in a character who seemed on the verge of death every few sessions - because why write a serious backstory, or get involved in politics if the next nat 20 the DM rolls is likely to put him in the grave?
3) Character vs Mechanics: Generally, I found that poorly built characters faced a choice - act to promote survival, or die, regardless of the personality of the character in question. The more I optimized the build, the more freedom I found in the game to play my character as my character, rather than as a metagaming extension of a desire to avoid a TPK.
But that's my experience with the game. People are different, thus, YMMV.
You're assuming the numbers guy doesn't also like to RP, which is literally the point of the Stormwind Fallacy
No. I'm assuming he likes it less than he likes the numbers because as a general rule when it comes to hobbies investment equals interest. For example I put more effort into hitting on chubby girls with freckles then I do skinny tan ones. If you like numbers more you put more work into numbers if you like the social aspect more you put more into that.. You'll note that I made the same assumption that the roleplayer isn't as good at number crunching that I did about the min maxer. Hell each of them might love the other aspect of it but shy away from it because they're afraid they'll suck or because a munchkin or a snowflake killed their parents and they don't want to be anything like the man who killed mumsie. Either way it's largely irrelevant since the from what I've seen the SWF while completely valid is mostly just used as an excuse to say 'Don't be mad I derailed your game brah.. I did it for the RPs' than for anything constructive.
I tend to not take sides in the roll vs role discussion... It's uncommon I find people that are more hardcore than me at either optimization <though there are lots that are probably better> or into IC roleplaying <Though still there are probably many who are better.>
The main problem with the Summoner's design is that it is selfish; you have all these great buff spells, but you have a personal pet that you're encouraged to use them on. So you've got the problem that mid/high level wizards bring (they have no good reason to let the fighter do their thing when they can just bring along a partner that works on their turn and does it just as well) except it starts right at level 1 and doesn't require any sort of game knowledge to do.
Heh.. I've made this same argument myself as to why I have a maturity minimum allowance on letting a summoner into my games.
Playing powerful characters is one thing. Playing sacks of numbers without character is another, but quite often they are the same. That's where I usually get lost.
You want to play a barbarian with an array of focused rage powers like superstitious, animal totems for pounce, and other powerful options? Sure. You want to do so while dumping charisma, intelligence, and wisdom? Fine. But actually play the character after you have created. Too often optimisation and it's focus on raw numerical power loses sight of the role-playing aspect. How many dump mental stat martial or dump charisma caster guides do you see with little or no focus on the character that creates? He was many people actually play up those created weaknesses outside of the numbers? Not many that I've seen.
If I had a nickel for every 'you don't need as much of X stat' crap I've seen I could play all the trolls on this thread to stay home.
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How many dump mental stat martial or dump charisma caster guides do you see with little or no focus on the character that creates? He was many people actually play up those created weaknesses outside of the numbers? Not many that I've seen.
If I had a nickel for every 'you don't need as much of X stat' crap I've seen I could play all the trolls on this thread to stay home.
Yeah, there's a reason for this. As a guide writer, I don't know the character everyone wants to build, and when I tell people they don't need Charisma as a Barbarian, it's because mechanically they don't. I don't give advice on how to RP low charisma because I don't know every character being built with my guides. Most people don't even turn to a guide for advice on how to roleplay due to how subjective the topic is. What's not subjective (for the most part) are hard numbers and combinations, things of which can be listed and quantified.
I don't see why it's crap myself. If you as a GM want to punish the character for knowing things they don't, maybe say "Yeah, what you said sounded really smart, but that's how you heard it when you said it. The NPCs just heard you going on about ham, wasn't super helpful." Same with Charisma, "It was a moving speech...in your head. But everyone else just couldn't stop looking at you drooling." Those are just examples.
Here's another nickel, some classes don't need as much of X stat for certain characters. Who's to say they even WANT to play a character who's got high stats in mental scores or other generally overlooked abilities? I've seen enough 'Thog SMASH' barbs to know that some are fine having all the charm of roadkill.
Guides are a tool, and we can mostly only help mechanically. You want to help someone RP, that's outside of what (at least my) guides are for.