players making useless characthers

troy31 · Feb 26, 2002

Our group has one player with the amazing ability to make every charachter next to useless. Not that he should cheese them out and min/max, but he's got this wonderful ability to have characters that are nothing more then space heaters with swords. Anyone else with this problme/source of humor?

He's got one bounty-hunter type fighter/rogue. Well, due to his distribution of skills and feats, he can't fight and he can't do any roguish sneaky sneaky. For the most part, he just absorbs damage for the other players and provides misinformation due to no skill ability.

In a party with a necromancer, he made an undead slayer.... And this was on a world with no undead (long story)... take my wife, please...

A paladin he made had such a low charisma, he had a negative mod to his class abilities.

Had one wizard so obsessed with destruction that he only memorized area of effect damage spells. And the game ended up beging fought mostly indoors...

Passed on using a vorpal magic sword with one warrior because he thought his plain old wood chopping axe looked cooler.

Made a super-strong guy in a superhero game with no real fighting ability or way to absorb damage. He'd run up to a villan, swing and miss, then get knocked out because the humidiity changed.

KingThorvar · Feb 26, 2002

Sounds like some nice comic relief for the game..

If he's having fun, let him go for it!

troy31 · Feb 26, 2002

wish it was that easy

I wouldn't mind if that was the case. But, he gets upset when everyone else is doing their thing and contributing and his character can't accomplish as much because he shot himself in the foot during character creation.

Hey, I've made worthless PCs that were still fun to play. But he tends to get upset when his character can't contribute in the same way as the rest of us who know how to make productive members of a fake society.

Tsyr · Feb 26, 2002

Yeah, I know a guy like this. Made a guy using a 1SDC weapon in a Rifts campagin that was intended to be high power (and this is by rifts standards... so most of us could level large buildings/take out minor gods/rule mid-sized nations with ease, but he couldn't kill a rabbit). Made a bard that was such a coward he ran away from fights and told our captors everything just to spare torture on himself. Made an avarial elf wizard who didn't cast spells because he hated magic after having been apprenticed to a wizard as a child. Carp like that.

Comic relief is all well and good, except when it comes at the expense of the party's fun. In otherwords, if nobody in the party finds the antics funny, 'tis not comic relief... 'tis just being a jack-rear-end.

BLACKDIRGE · Feb 26, 2002

Oh man, you have just described a player in my campaign. he likes to make characters that do things "different" than normal members of their class. He builds fighters that wield two weapons but won't take any of the two weapon feats. He builds clerics and wizards with no concentration skill and has them enter melee range to cast spells. He buillt a barbarian/psychic warrior that would rage immediatly and then never get to use psionics.

He's a good guy and doesn't complain when his characters don't amount to much, but the rest of the group is just left scratching their heads about some of the choices he makes.

Dirge

AFGNCAAP · Feb 26, 2002

Sounds all too familiar....

Had a player make characters whose powers/actions/attitude proved to be a hindrance rather than a help to the party. Typically turned out that, despite these characters' different backgrounds (& even alignments), they'd generally wind up having very similiar personalities.

wolfpunk · Feb 26, 2002

I made a character with a very low constitution. It was like 4 or 5 I believe. Anyway, I made this neat history background of his suffering of a terrible illness. I made a little table on which I could roll to determine how his health was for the round. While it made for a great story, the character was not much of an adventurer because he would get sick or pass out at pretty much the worst times possible due to bad dice rolls.

Character quirks, and tragic flaws are nice and all, but they tend to make the game a lot harder to work with.

DM with a vengence · Feb 27, 2002

If he agrees, for his next character how about assigning a 'coach' who knows the rules really well and can point out certain things that would make his character slightly more effective.

adndgamer · Feb 27, 2002

Re: wish it was that easy

troy31 said:
I wouldn't mind if that was the case. But, he gets upset when everyone else is doing their thing and contributing and his character can't accomplish as much because he shot himself in the foot during character creation.

Hey, I've made worthless PCs that were still fun to play. But he tends to get upset when his character can't contribute in the same way as the rest of us who know how to make productive members of a fake society.

Smack him up a bit and tell him to quit acting like an idiot. That's my only advice.

Quickbeam · Feb 27, 2002

Re: Re: wish it was that easy

adndgamer said:
Smack him up a bit and tell him to quit acting like an idiot. That's my only advice.

Hear, hear!! Simple, elegant and straight to the point

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Our group has a campaign dedicated solely to peculiar and misfit adventurers, which we play once every two or three months for fun. In that forum, characters such as the ones described above would all be spectacularly entertaining. Otherwise they aren't clever or amusing, and lack merit in every worthwhile manner conceivable...IMO

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Go home and annoy your siblings, not the DM and other players.