D&D 5E Lessons learned

[ccs]

I'm right there with in loving to roll up stats.
3d6?4d6/keep 3? Straight down the line or arrange as i please? Whichever, I'm good with it & will make it work....
Ill most likely break even.. but if I get super lucky? Great! If I get screwed? Then I'll play that in good faith as well.

But I love rolling stats and then seeing what I can make from it! The first 5e pc I got to play was pretty stat-poor, with his high stat being Con, of all things- so I made a gnome wizard called Friendo the Mediocre Mage. OMG he was so much fun!

Friendo sounds like the perfect companion for my own stat poor character - Garth, the special needs Halfling.
Due to some amazingly bad dice rolls. The best that could be said of poo Garths stats was "Well at least he doesn't have a negative to his Con...." Yes, a single +0 was the highpoint stat wise.
And as this was in 1980s Basic/Expert Garths stats never rose as he lvd up.

 

[the Jester]

Friendo sounds like the perfect companion for my own stat poor character - Garth, the special needs Halfling.
Due to some amazingly bad dice rolls. The best that could be said of poo Garths stats was "Well at least he doesn't have a negative to his Con...." Yes, a single +0 was the highpoint stat wise.
And as this was in 1980s Basic/Expert Garths stats never rose as he lvd up.

Damn, dude. Garth sounds like what was referred to as a hopeless character back then. If your array was terrible enough, even I would let you reroll, even back in the day. (Now my rule is "if your array is boring", which is highly subjective, but includes both too good and too bad sets of stats.)

 

[Voadam]

I either play a concept character (my recurring viking wizard so in 5e lets go bard skald school) or I will take some randomness and make it work. Last face to face game as a player random rolls on race and class got Dwarven cleric. It was an existing world so I checked out the knowledge on dwarves and they had a thing of Karlsbad Marxhammer and his little golden scrolls so I decided I would be LG communist dwarven rune mage. "Anyone can learn clerical magic, it only takes 20 or 30 years of apprenticeship." and of course Communism works if your whole society is LG at base. When I healed people it would be things like "To each according to their needs." Warhammer and throwing sickles. The DM set up a bit about oppressed peasants at the Keep on the Borderland for me to provide support to. It was a lot of fun.

 

[FrogReaver]

@Warpiglet

Please take this as a friendly critique. Reading through a 25 line post with a break every 1-2 sentences is tough.

 

[Ancalagon]

Yeah, proper paragraphs would help.

BUT

That being said, you are correct. A character that is based only on a mechanic will grow stale. Or part of the game isn't when it's time to use your "triple fire-sword technique" (or whatever combo you concocted), so you feel impatient for the fight to start.

But if the character is interesting, has depth, then you can roleplay that character all the time. It doesn't matter if you are in the middle of a fight, talking in the camp, sneaking into a library or negotiating for a ship's passage, you are always your character. You may remember when you and I collaborated to make a fighter/hexblade character. While the mechanic was a bit complex, the real gem was the roleplaying