Is it rude to aim at your players obvious weak areas?

[5ekyu]

"But to me that is wrong. You built a raging barbarian with dump stats for intelligence and wisdom. Your 6 or 8 wisdom means you are too damn stupid to know the wisdom of letting the silver tongue bard speak to merchants for you. You are arrogant and blustering, you never ask you make demands and you do all the things annoying jocks do when they feel entitled but times that by 10."

This is IMO wrong -you asked.

You dont get to decide how their character is played.

Matter of fact take most of the hostility and derogatory references to annoying minmaxers - that's wrong too.

Go find a mirror and tell that guy how you feel about annoying GMs.

There is nothing wrong about the king wanting to meet the hero who dropped the dragon, but it would be a pretty badly replayed king who did not expect the better story to come from the bard. Surely the king has his own share of "great at bashing" types he would not have speaking to dignitaries when it mattered.

 

[FrogReaver]

I will start this by saying I am not a fan of min-max players. You can play that way but you will not be happy in my game.

So here is my question. You have the annoying min-max melee character of some sort, imagine some sort of barbarian build that deals insane damage. He dump stated all his mental stats and has no social skills, opting instead for athletics and other skills that benefit during battle.

Outside of combat said player generally hangs back letting the face players do all the interacting including trying to have the party bard buy all his gear for him because hey, the bard has the skills and can get him the best deal.

But to me that is wrong. You built a raging barbarian with dump stats for intelligence and wisdom. Your 6 or 8 wisdom means you are too damn stupid to know the wisdom of letting the silver tongue bard speak to merchants for you. You are arrogant and blustering, you never ask you make demands and you do all the things annoying jocks do when they feel entitled but times that by 10.

It also means that when the party kills the dragon, and the barbarian lands the killing blow he lets EVERYONE know. So I wonder, would it be wrong for a crafty noble or king to interrupt the party bard who is telling him how they killed dragon and ask that the warrior who landed the killing blow please step forward. Now the barbarians lack of social skills and his single focus character design becomes a huge weight around his neck and the party loses out on tons of potential rewards as the king decides to negotiate with the barbarian instead of the bard.

Is this wrong as a DM or is it reality. You create a dumb powerful character, you created someone so socially dumb that he doesnt even realize how dumb he is and that means he doesnt let others speak for him because damn it he is Flash Thompson and everyone should automatically fawn over him when he tells them all how cool he is.

It is and will always be wrong for you to pick on the barbarian character's low stats until your reasons for wanting to do so change. When your goal is to punish instead of to be entertained you've went off the rails IMO.

 

[S'mon]

"Is this wrong as a DM "

Pretty much, yeah.

There are plenty of ways to play low INT & WIS. The GM doesn't get to tell the player how to play, only to set the (eg) Persuasion DCs, which should be same for Barbarian as for Bard.

 

[S'mon]

If you let a player role play around blatant holes in their min maxed characters are you going to let players with characters weather in const talk their way into more damage as a balance?

Bards "talk their way into more damage" all the time. Look up Cutting Words.