Not fully playing a class.

Umbran said:

The player/GM can swap things around, how is it the *game* design that's at fault? The game *allows* them to not be in this position, but the game is at fault? What?

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I have nothing against a game where the player ends up with abilities that he or she doesn't want to use. Seriously, it doesn't bug me at all.

I do have something against a game where you have many abilities that you may or may not want, but you then have to dig around through forty supplements in order to optimize based on which abilities you might want to use later on. Playing the actual game itself should not require you to first play a completely separate character-building mini-game, nor should your success within the game have anything to do with how you built the character in the meta-pre-game.

If a player doesn't want to use a significant part of their character's abilities, it's definitely a reason to have in-depth conversation about it. Because it means something is not right.


Maybe the player doesn't really want to play this game. If so, it's better to make it clear (and switch to a different game) at the beginning, than to wait until we're halfway through the campaign.

Maybe the game is badly designed and the class abilities don't work well together. If so, we either change the game or discuss what is wrong and repair it with house rules.

Maybe the player doesn't understand how the game is intended to be played. If so, it must be explained - and then the player changes how he plays, we change the game or the player resigns.

Maybe the player lacks the rules knowledge to use the class abilities and avoids them because they are confusing. If so, educating the player will solve the problem.

This is why we have subclasses (2E, 5E) and Archetypes (Pathfinder). 4E builds also solves many such problems.