| Tiona Daughtry |
I'm getting ready to start up a new game, ostensibly pathfinder 1 (though with some 3.5 additions, due to one player preferring that). And, in trying to set it up, especially with my personal issues of aphantasia (meaning that I am unable to imagine or remember visually, which makes maps challenging to build). As I was going through assets for this (will be using FGU for my vtt), I so so many things for pf2 and dnd5e, and know that there are a lot of people who wonder why I refuse to move forward into a 'more modern' game system. And it occurred to me again what specifically I utterly despise about both of the two newest dnd iterations and pathfinder 2 (my memory is blanking of starfinder uses this or not, though it likely does. I avoid it because I can't avoid guns in it effectively, and have an issue with guns philosophically). The fact is, each of the 3 systems I won't play use a modular creation system that forces players to stat up at least semi-optimally due to stats, etc. being directly determined by combination of class/race/background. And therein lies the real problem for me.
Now, as background: I am neurodivergent, agender, and grey ace. I am also disabled for multiple reasons, and a survivor of long-term emotional and mental abuse. This is all important as it reminds me that the world is full of 'non-optimal' heroes. It's also something that causes me to cringe at the decisive pigeon-holing of characters based on how the creation rules work. And that, in turn, brings me back to something a good friend has posted more than once.
There is a meme that resurfaces semi-regularly regarding how people think that they have to be of a quality to sell their work to participate in any art form or sport. It points out that society looks down on 'amateurs' even though the word is based on the idea of doing something because you love to. Our highly competitive society doesn't want people who do things just because they want to. If it's not 'marketable', society deems it worthless. As it deems *tons of people* worthless, since we don't fit in their idea of what we should be.
Now, as both a dm and a player, I love characters that play against type. The quirkier and more 'unexpected' the better. My cleric that went through the entirety of the original rise of the runelords campaign (and we started with those back in the pf1 playtest), she would not qualify as an 'effective character' by many player's standards, despite the fact that she really did hold her own. But, being a Varisian cleric of Calistria, she spent stat points in charisma, dex, and int as well as wis, so that she could make full use of the fact that Calistria's weapon of choice was a whip. When the rules with subdomains came out, I poked our dm, and he allowed me to use lust as a subdomain, and that, itself, caused some of the most utterly hilarious game moments (trust me, nothing gets a dm to stop and reconsider things than when you tell them that you're going to try to 'flirt with the dragon' which meant that she was using the Lust subdomain power, anything to please, on that dragon...and succeeded...also in the same dungeon, she did so against a fighter, who gave her the cloak of displacement she was wearing...all sorts of fun). But just because something isn't optimal doesn't make it ineffective or 'unfun'. And we need to make this clear.
My husband got me into reading a series of books (don't remember the series title, but the first book is titled 'npcs') wherein you have a very unexpected group of characters that are all 'suboptimal', but seem to be able to come out on top mostly through being unexpected. Having a crippled gnome end up a paladin of the god of minions, the half-orc bartender becoming a wizard, the town guardsman becoming a rogue, and, of all things, the mayor's daughter becoming a barbarian...it's very fun, and worth reading (or listening to, as my copies are audiobooks). No, you should not be *forced* by a game system to play an 'optimal build'. There are a whole lot of ways you can be sub-optimal and keep the game going, indeed, going riotously. And that's why I won't play systems that forcibly pigeon-hole your character concepts.
As a parting thought, I tend to use pathfinder 1 or dnd 3.5 stats for helping me understand characters I'm starting to write about for my stories, and the fact is, while those stats give some basis, every character I end up with there has a distinct quirk or multiples of them. You get a former-assassin who ends up a holy knight (yes, that happened in a story, and the character continues to be fun to write about), a woman who, despite a severe withering curse that had been on her for years, and who had no major magic at that time (most of what she had was for getting in and out of places without being noticed) who saved the life of a very powerful mage/warrior twice through thinking around problems from the position of weakness. You don't have to be overpowering, and systems that try to force you into that continue to direct you into destructive thought patterns. They discount the value of the least, and that's something I'm trying to wean people away from. Everyone can be a hero, especially those whom we consider not worth the effort.