That is about the same way I do it Sideromancer.
I'll think of an interesting character to play and then find some way to make it work. It really isn't too hard to do considering that magic items can help fill in weaknesses.
It also helps if you run APs or something similar. Optimization isn't really something NPCs and most monsters are built for.
Go for memorable.
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Why not both?
Funny and memorable does not exclude strong.
This problem gets easier if you're the DM. Encourage *everyone* to build around concept. That way, no one is looking around at all their friends being more effective in combat, because all their friends are just as unoptimized as they are themselves.
As a player, maybe talk your DM into fudging some mechanical advantages for you to help keep your off-the-wall build viable?
Edit: In the specific case of the improvised-weapon fighter, for example - maybe instead of enchanted weapons, you might come across a magical amulet or ring or set of gloves that would lend magical power to whatever random object you grabbed? Or better yet, get your wizard friend to enchant something just for you.
I don't value one more then the other and tend to adopt a degree of reflexivity. Sometimes mechanic will inspire a wider character concept e.g. Octavian the ifrit diviner (arcanist) was a hedonistic, promiscuous, pansexual former body/caravan guard who could detect and react to threats before they occur. He began as a theorycraft on how high could I get a characters initiative.
Other times I have a concept and then find mechanics to suit it e.g. Casimir the half-orc hedgewitch/herb witch (healing patron) was conceptually perfect for what I wanted but was mechanically inferior. The herb witch replaces alchemy skill checks with profession herbalism; this already isn't optimal as alchemy uses the witch's primary stat (+6 on Cas) and herbalism uses wisdom (+0 on Cas). This problem in't too bad as the herb witch gets a +1/2 level bonus to herbalsim, the real kick in the teeth is that the archetype forces you to take the Cauldron hex which grants a +4 bonus to alchemy. Also the herb witch archetype references poisons but grants no such abilities.
On the hedgewitch side you're made to sacrifice your level 8 hex to gain the near useless empathic healing ability. When coupled with the herb witch this minimally functional ability is made completely redundant.
Finally there's the half-orc weapon proficiency race trait. Mechanically useless to my witch and made zero sense for a human raised half-orc.
The solution to theses problems was talking to my GM about them. So now the cauldron hex grants a +4 bonus on herbalism. Instead of getting empathic healing I'll get the Witch's Bounty hex (it ties in with his backstory) which will save me from spending a major hex on it at level 10. Orcish weapon proficiency was replaced with Poison Use (both have the same RP cost)thus riding me of a nonsensical ability and 'completing' the herb witch.
Additionally I was ably to negotiate a rather nice alternative to the standard familiar. I'd wanted a raven (there's a raven on the mini I had)but the GM was against it and (eventually) informed me that he planned to give the party wizard a raven familiar (rest of the group doesn't yet know that we'll eventually gain a keep and upon crossing the threshold the raven transforms into a butler). Instead I got a non-sentient spirit which inhabits a skull; it allows me to cast melee touch spells to a range of 15ft (increases with level) as well as giving me Unseen Servant, Sentry Skull and Speak With Dead as SLAs.
People are going to scream stormwind fallacy in like 5..4..3...2...
It's true though, when you know what the best choices are, sometimes you know the thing you feel like doing isn't as good as it could be. It's awkward.
But the reason I want to get better at optimization is so I can do the thing I want to do and make sure it's not awful.
Sometimes when your character just doesn't measure up to the party over a reasonable length of time you have to bite the bullet and retire them. If your character's too powerful it's much easier to sandbag if need be.
Why not both?
Funny and memorable does not exclude strong.
It depends on what you mean by "fun" and "strong". Personality and roleplay aside, Some character concepts will always be weaker than others(crossbowman vs archer).
Strong is a relative term, IMHO it have to be compared against the other party members and not against the maximum power you can get from the game.
True, but when it comes to other people's characters (and my own) I tend to recall their personality, roleplay, and in-character actions far more than I do their mechanics.
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This is one of the reasons I like support characters. I can be AMAZING at being a support character while doing it in awesome ways.
Standard bard? Seems legit. Buff-and-smash cleric? Classic, tried and true. What about an Archivist bard? People start wondering where their bonus damage comes from, but they're happy with the extra knowledge skills I have and the SUPER good AC I provide.
Helpful Halfling? Suddenly, people are tearing their hair out, wondering how the heck I'm going to support without even having cure light wounds - and then they realize that at level 1 they're already getting a +5 bonus to attack from me, not to mention that I'm focusing on flanking and taking hits, and later I can give them teamwork feats, bonuses to AC as AoOs, saving throw bonuses, bonuses to AC just for STANDING BY ME, trip attacks... And without casting a single spell, I'm suddenly everyone's favorite support.
(Okay, so carrying some spare wands and scrolls and having UMD helps. I do that. But that's not why Helpful Halflings are so great.)
There's other fun support builds. Half-orc dirty fighter that uses whirlwind attacks to blind rooms of enemies? Check. Support-focused paladin? Check. Any character with multiple animal companions and boon companion doing their darnedest to provide all their melee buddies with flanking bonuses? You bet'cha. Summon-focused wizards and buff-focused wizards fill that role, too. (I love playing a buffster wizard.)
You can have fun in your given role and be good at it without having to be boring.
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You can be memorable and be strong, they are not mutually exclusive.
I will agree however that somethings are not well supported in Pathfinder, just don't try to build your character around those things.
Make your character memorable for their personality, not necessarily what they do.
eh, for most of my characters, memorability is completely unconnected to power level. its the personality quirks, roleplaying, and drive your character has that makes em memorable.
just my 2cp
I remember someone playing a typical paladin in a game I was connected with. Party ran into an undead little girl who asked the paladin if she wanted to play with it in its sandpit. Paladin, role playing its dumped INT said 'OK' and promptly walked into quicksand.
Heavily optimised, super unique paladin? Nope. Memorable? Yup.
IMO it's good role play that most of all makes things memorable beyond anything else.
Good roleplay can be memorable, but what's being discussed is are memorable BUILDS worth it.
Like with the false dichotomy between roleplay and optimization, you can have a build that is memorable and strong at the same time. Sure, there will always be a better build out there, but your build can be REALLY new and interesting and REALLY effective at the same time.
The best advice in this thread is
Pick a concept. It can be as weird as you want. Then, optimize it, pulling out all the stops until it still beats unoptimized normal characters.
This is a good way to play. This is how I play when I want to make a weird build.
And for everyone mentioning roleplaying in the context of builds: remember that you can roleplay just as well with a very well optimized build as you can with a build that is NOT well optimized. Again, what's being discussed here is if a memorable BUILD is worth it. And I think it can be.
(See: spell-less Aid Another Halfling support = more fun to me than playing some other supports, but it can be just as cheesy and powerful.)
Good ol' Stormwind.
Anyway, the character that you make needs to be 'functional'. I've played entire games with pregenerated characters and had some wildly funny and memorable experiences.
The majority of how people will remember you is how vivid and interesting your descriptions of things are, how clever and practical your approach to a problem is and how helpful you were to them.
No one is going to remember "that time you did 50 damage" or "that AC no one could hit" what they will remember is "Then he jumped off the boat onto the leviathans back and crit'd a bullrush, pushing it off the ship!" or "She failed her will save against a charm and TPK'd the party single-handedly!"
Here's my input as someone who's been through the same dilemma. I used to think, "Oh, I have this great idea... it might not be the perfect build by the numbers, but I think they'll be a memorable character!" I did this for many years, and it's not that I DIDN'T enjoy playing the character. However, what I didn't enjoy was being overshadowed by the accomplishments of the other players. I started to feel less like one of the heroes that was a peer to all the members of my group, to the quirky sidekick who was really good on their own but just not the ace who was going to save the day. Now, it wasn't all bad. From time to time, my unconventional concepts would be able to do things the more straightforwards character's couldn't, and in those few moments I shined. It just felt to me that they were too infrequent... so of late, I've gone to the dark side. I crunch through the numbers, I figure probability on weapon damages and utilization of feats. I don't quite min/max... but I'm a step closer than I ever thought I would be.
I would say, for yourself, you have to ask the question "What makes me enjoy the game the most?" Will you have fun running a character that might not be as perfectly crafted for the numbers of the game for the best result? If you are, I applaud you. I prefer creativity and originality, the sake of trying something different because you can. However, if you're feeling a bit weary of being half a step behind the rest of the members of your group, you're like me and you want to feel that sense of personal accomplishment.
Sadly, I play with a serious min/max'er with some of the flattest personality characters. It feels a bit like putting Nick Cage in a film roll... no matter who you want his character to be, it's obviously just Nicholas Cage being Nicholas Cage. I work hard to give my characters more personality, but I no longer feel free to explore some of the more quirky ideas like I used to. One of my favorite characters of all time was a rogue archer with the nickname of 'Ghost'. Ghost was a fantastic character, very complex and deep and played in the Eberron game world. Because Ghost had a secret that even his childhood friends didn't know... Ghost was a Changeling. His entire nature was shaped by a racial choice that didn't give me any advantages because he wanted so desperately to just be like everyone else and not show off his abilities. No one knew until he was killed in an adventure, and there was this big reveal gasp... which was great. Then, when they resurrected him, he had to have some heart to heart talks with his oldest friends. They were great dramatic moments. However, because I essentially wasted the benefits of his race, Ghost also was always the second fiddle through the campaign. And because I liked him so much, I was always a bit resentful that his contributions were less when he was such an interesting character.
I really like awesome, unexpected (at least for that type of character) mechanics. "Remember that Guided-Hand-Khopesh-Flurry-Sacred-Fist-of-Horus that would drop Greater Channel Smite Rulership Variant daze onto everything in his path? Good god! ...no pun intended".
Maybe it won't be the most optimal character at normal functioning, but often, grafting crazy fun powerful bonus abilities onto a build isn't that hard to do with minimal sacrifices.
Doing something fun, but ineffective because the game mechanics don't support it well?
Two possible problems:
(1) Will you get the group killed? Is the GM building the adventure around your group? If so, he ought to be able to allow for your weaker than average character. If you're playing published material and the GM doesn't want to change everything, then you have to build to a minimum competence level, taking into account the rest of the party.
(2) Will you get frustrated because you're weaker than the other PCs in the party?
A couple of possible solutions:
(1) Look for an existing build that makes the concept work. With all the options available, there's a half-decent chance someone has found a way to make the 'uses improvised weapons' character effective.
(2) If you have a friendly GM, look into reflavoring. Does it really matter if you say you're using improvised weapons when (mechanically speaking) you're actually a monk using unarmed strike?
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For a lot of builds, race doesn't really matter as much as guides would have you believe. That's because they are OPTIMIZATION guides.
Yeah, a gnome is an almost objectively worse fighter than a human, based on racial abilities. That doesn't mean the gnome fighter is bad. Make a gnome fighter that is otherwise optimized and you still have a very competent character.
The improvised weapon bit is harder to make that argument for, admittedly.
But there are a lot of things you can do that are distinctly unoptimized, but still viable enough.
Random recommendation: Be an archer rogue. With ultimate intrigue introducing ranged feint, you can get ranged sneak attacks online a LOT earlier and more reliably than ever before. It should be good enough. And it's pretty iconic. Look at Haley from order of the stick.
Echoing what people said above: pick a fun, suboptimal [not terrible, just suboptimal] option and optimize THAT as best as you're able. You'll be able to contribute and realize your character concept.
However, comma, if the rest of your group is all power gamers, maybe don't take my advice, as you may be left in the dust.
Blah blah Stormwind Fallacy blah blah.
While it's true that there's less work involved in optimizing a few certain builds, you can optimize quite a few abnormal, memorable builds as well. This guy (he's higher level now), for instance, threw a minotaur 60' in one scenario via Ki Throw and he's had numerous memorable Handle Animal experiences. People in the area remember the character by name. His character evolution was fairly organic and he's performed well.
Personalities are memorable and some gimmicks are memorable. It has very little to do with whether the character is optimized.
I have an idea for you. Ask your friend to design a seriously minmaxed character for you. Give him a rough idea of what you want, and let him fit together his wicked combinations of this and that that will turn your cool idea into a devastating character.
Then let him watch you roleplay with his creation. Let him see you take his intricate paper cut snowflake of rules-bending swirl into a blizzard of personal depth and roleplaying awesomeness. You might develop more appreciation for each other.
Good TTRPG is supposed to be a collaboration. Why wait till page 1 to collaborate? Start on page 0?
I don't do this for a few reasons... but firstly, this player doesn't consider themselves a min/max'er or a power gamer. They simply see it as taking the best advantage of the rules provided. The main problem is in the fact that all of his characters of the same class are statistically the same. Carbon copies that he gives a different name and sometimes a different appearance, but they're the same individual. Nothing that makes them unique, though I've urged him on several occasions to change things up. If I were to take one of his builds, maybe I could slap a new coat of paint on them, but it's still the same mass produced model. Nothing at the core to make them different, and that doesn't appeal to me. In this, I might be able to make this a Nicholas Cage from 'Matchstick Men', but it's STILL going to be Nick Cage.
Blah blah Stormwind Fallacy blah blah.
The Stormwind Fallacy is in fact itself guilty of a logical fallacy, guilty of the false dilemma among others. This happens because both the process of role playing and the results of this play are separate but both have value in contributing to your enjoyment of the game. You can enjoy the process but find the results less than satisfactory. This is what myself and Bober are expressing. We like our process, but we want better results in comparison to the results of our peers.
The main problem is in the fact that all of his characters of the same class are statistically the same. Carbon copies that he gives a different name and sometimes a different appearance, but they're the same individual. Nothing that makes them unique, though I've urged him on several occasions to change things upI don't think his problem here is that he's a minmaxer. His problem is that he's stuck. There are lots of ways to really creatively make really powerful character combinations. And if you let them you can let these ideas blossom into rich characters to roleplay.
I've offered him suggestions, but they don't appeal to him. He's a terribly competitive person and doesn't know any other way to be. He never plays support characters, ever. Sadly, this is the sort of person he is, and I've known him for too many years to expect him to change. He's also one of my two best friends so I'm not going to throw him under a bus completely, but that's not to say that I'm not terribly frustrated on frequent occasions when we game together. And when I've expressed my displeasure of always being the sidekick, he deflects it by saying it has to do more with my poor dice rolls (I DO have abysmal luck) than his characters.
Blah blah Stormwind Fallacy blah blah.The Stormwind Fallacy is in fact itself guilty of a logical fallacy, guilty of the false dilemma among others. This happens because both the process of role playing and the results of this play are separate but both have value in contributing to your enjoyment of the game. You can enjoy the process but find the results less than satisfactory. This is what myself and Bober are expressing. We like our process, but we want better results in comparison to the results of our peers.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand a word of this. It just makes me scratch my head and try to figure out what it's supposed to mean.
The main problem is in the fact that all of his characters of the same class are statistically the same. Carbon copies that he gives a different name and sometimes a different appearance, but they're the same individual. Nothing that makes them unique, though I've urged him on several occasions to change things upI don't think his problem here is that he's a minmaxer. His problem is that he's stuck. There are lots of ways to really creatively make really powerful character combinations. And if you let them you can let these ideas blossom into rich characters to roleplay.
Have to agree on this point. Anyone who wants to come up with an extremely powerful character can still find a bunch of different ways to do it. Even if the guy can't stand playing less than the best class, just bouncing between different Tier I classes and builds within them should provide some variety.
It depends on what you mean by "fun" and "strong". Personality and roleplay aside, Some character concepts will always be weaker than others(crossbowman vs archer).
Always is a strong word... Crossbow might be usually inferior to bow, but has a few unique strengths on its own: Better crit range, can be used prone (making you a good archer killer) and doesn't suffer from a Str penalty. Heck, you can even dual-wield crossbows (loading them is not so simple, though). Build to these strengths and you get something mechanically different, making a nice change from standardized bow usage. It is really feat intense, though...
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Blah blah Stormwind Fallacy blah blah.The Stormwind Fallacy is in fact itself guilty of a logical fallacy, guilty of the false dilemma among others. This happens because both the process of role playing and the results of this play are separate but both have value in contributing to your enjoyment of the game. You can enjoy the process but find the results less than satisfactory. This is what myself and Bober are expressing. We like our process, but we want better results in comparison to the results of our peers.
That was exactly my point in surrounding it with "blah blah" - it's just a token reference because it was bound to be brought up given the thread topic. It's referred to as a fallacy because the dilemma is false.
My point is that an enjoyable character is both mechanically fulfilling and a fun personality, with each providing memorable moments. The character I linked was an example of that.
... both the process of role playing and the results of this play are separate but both have value in contributing to your enjoyment of the game. You can enjoy the process but find the results less than satisfactory. This is what myself and Bober are expressing. We like our process, but we want better results in comparison to the results of our peers.Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand a word of this. It just makes me scratch my head and try to figure out what it's supposed to mean.
I'll use a comic book analogy, because both in comic book stories and in Pathfinder you're dealing with heroes. My friend the min-max'er likes Wolverine. He's a bad mutha (shut yo mouth). He's one of the most impossible to stop heroes in the Marvel universe. His powers combine to make him one of the most perfect killers. The way he goes about being a hero has had a great effect on the grand scale of the super hero-ing world than most.
Me, I like his teammate Nightcrawler far more. I find him a fascinatingly complex character. His powers are... a bit more all over the place. They don't make him a perfect anything, they're all quite quirky. And not that Nightcrawler hasn't had his impact on the super hero-ing world, but perhaps not a tenth of what Wolverine has accomplished. Yet they're supposed to be peers.
Both of them go about being a hero in their own way, and left to their own path they might feel good about their accomplishments. This is that "process" I was talking about. How they go about their role. However, if you measure the good that each of them has done, even though Wolverine's done more than his fair share of horrible things, it's still far more than the good that Nightcrawler has accomplished. This is the result part of things. And while these two are best friends, there are very few situations with the two of them are going to play out where Wolvie doesn't look like the big hero and Nightcrawler is the sidekick. Hopefully, this clears up my point.
When you role play, you want to feel like you're pulling your weight in the group. You're contributing an equal amount to accomplishing your goals. It might be fun to play the quirky one, the one with some interesting and unconventional facets, but when you have other players more intent on optimizing their builds your find you're not making the same contribution. Your value as a hero is less.