Persiflage
First Post
Man, oh man, I feel your pain. I'll spare you the long version, but my first character in 3.0 - generated after a several-year sojourn away from role-playing - was in pretty much the same boat. I didn't even have the restrictions to core-only that you have, so I was able to get really creative and on paper I thought my concept looked great. Some real role-playing hooks, a great background and some serious multiclassing led to what I thought was a table-jumpin', chandelier-swingin', quip-makin', death-from-the-shadows-dealin' awesome sonofabitch.
What I got was a big pile of suck with a rapier, who spent most of his time in combat failing to matter because:
a) the things we were fighting were immune to some or all of the heap of d6's he could theoretically generate on a hit, or...
b) he couldn't get to the fight in time to contribute, or...
c) when he did get to the fight he couldn't hit anything, or...
d) he was incapacitated by an area screw-you effect, or...
e) all of the above.
Compared to the rest of the party he was an absolute waste of space, sucking up a share of the experience points for an overall negative contribution to most encounters: and boy, did that sting.
Three sessions in, by agreement with the DM, said character gave a whole bunch of ill-advised back-talk to a powerful NPC who eventually petrified him and used him as a hatstand.
I generated a new character that could actually work in the context of the game we were playing, and never looked back. What I learned from this debacle is that D&D allows you to do lots and lots of things that simply aren't effective. There are traps for the unwary - like "being a Fighter" - built in to the very fabric of the game.
I've read this thread and the other, and you've had some good advice; most of what I'd be inclined to say has been said, so I'll keep the points already covered to a summary:
1) Ask your DM to let you rebuild. A DM who makes a first-time player stick with a character that's clearly only going to fall further and further behind the rest of the party is not being fair. This goes double for the fact that you were actually asked to create a melee damage-dealer in a party that already contained a Ranger, a Rogue, another Fighter, a Cleric and a Sorceror. Consider my mind boggling.
2) If you can't make the character over, retire it and take another one.
3) If you can't make the character over or retire it, find something else to do with your free time, whether that's playing D&D with a different group, playing something different with another group or taking up basketweaving. Seriously. You asked in the other thread "will this pass?" and the answer - I'm sorry to say - is "no". Not with this character. A game is supposed to be fun, and if you can't contribute meaningfully to a majority of encounters, it isn't going to be fun.
4) As Thanael said, try cool n' crazy combat manoeuvers: if your DM likes the feel of them enough, it's amazing what you can get away with
5) Enjoy the role-playing bits. You seem to have this well-covered, so hats off to you
And now the thing that I don't think has been covered. I sincerely admire the dedication to role-playing that you've displayed by turning down magical items and whatnot that don't fit your character concept, but - as I mentioned earlier - D&D notoriously allows concepts to be created that don't work very well in D&D. The levels of crazy in the game tilt sharply skywards as you reach mid levels and they never go down again. This tendency can just flat-out leave some character concepts behind, no matter how good they were at levels 1-6.
I'm not for a moment trying to talk you out of your focus on role-playing as I genuinely think it's great, but - with regard to turning down items - I would invite you to look at it in a slightly different way...
You've got a character concept of a greek warrior-type with a shortsword. (Incidentally, you can't use Power Attack with a shortsword, so you should get your DM to let you change at least that much). The thing is, unless you're aiming for "greek mythology" rather than "greek history", you're scuppered before you start because mid-to-high-level D&D is not a system that supports "an historical greek warrior" as a useful entity. Not without some - ahem - "stretching" of the idea.
You can do it, sure, the system will let you: you can be a guy with a shortsword and shield, with javelins and a throwing net for backup, in just a few levels. Once you're there, what then? You live in a world where giant face-eating bears hang out with a guy who can change himself into a huge frickin' tiger on a whim, who in turn is best pals with someone who can set your trousers on fire with his mind or twist the space-time continuum into a pretzel and swallow it. Without chewing.
In the face of all that, if you want to advance in a meaningful way once the basic character has been realised, you're pretty much going to have to expand the concept to include some of the crazy or you'll start to look a bit... Well, if you haven't seen it yet, watch "Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit" on YouTube to put the problem into context for you.
(Hilarious video tip thanks to Dandu: I'd have given XP for this and several other of his recent posts if I hadn't been prevented by the props-allocating system... and for some reason, I can't post the link without it embedding the video in the page!)
D&D can be moulded into a gritty, low-magic game where men in leather skirts wielding bits of sharp metal can make a big contribution... but that's not the default game and it's not the game you're playing. I'm not at all sure what type of "greek-ish warrior" you're aiming for so I'll illustrate with another example: Conan.
D&D lets a Robert E. Howard fan play Conan, no problem. Take a level or two of Barbarian, a few levels of Rogue, and a few levels of Fighter. Pick up Leadership as you go and use the odd Fighter bonus feats to dabble in a few combat styles: big swords, fisticuffs, grappling and a bit of archery. Buy some stat-boosting items to make up any deficiencies in your ability scores so you're strong, agile and tough. There, you're done. You've got mighty thews, you can take a lot of punishment, you can climb like a monkey with Velcro hands, you can avoid most mundane and some magical traps, you can run like the wind, you can pick pockets and locks with equal facility, your rage is a fearful thing to behold... and nobody will ever care because you're not playing the same game as everyone else.
Conan's original world is one where there are badass magic-users, but they're rare, and they generally have to take a lot of time, effort and concentration to achieve significant magical results. For all but the mightiest wizards, magic is unreliable, hard to do, and dangerous to the practitioner. It also often depends for its more spectacular effects on conveniently vulnerable items like the "Serpent Ring of Set" that can be smashed, stolen or subverted by a hero with sufficient strength of mind (or mightiness of thew, never forget that). Despite these confounding factors, Conan routinely gets nearly trounced by magically-proficient bad guys, only to be saved by Howard (or whichever author is perpetuating the franchise this time) inserting another character or event (or sheer good luck) on Conan's side that distracts the evil wizard just long enough for Conan to get his barbarian mad on.
It's a gritty, relatively-low-magic world where the normal run of enemies are either melee brutes or cultist schemers who play by the Evil Villain rules: taking time out to monologue and cackle madly at the appropriate juncture, or just tying the hero to a pole and leaving him to the giant spiders. Conan bestrides such a world like a colossus, and rightly so.
Having the author on his side couldn't have hurt, either.
So our hypothetical roleplayer brings the giant Cimmerian to D&Dland... and Conan is royally screwed. Our roleplayer turned down the Wings of Flying because Conan couldn't fly, so D&D Conan can't fight the flying monsters. On the few occasions Conan ever tangled with immaterial monsters in the books he had to rely on outside intervention, so nary a ghost-touch weapon will our hero accept and is consequently not much use against incorporeal creatures either. Conan was always scathing about magic versus muscles so there's no way he'd dip a spellcasting class for a few buffs... so now he's relying on the rest of the party just to stay in the game. Adding insult to injury, the bumbling, nerdy, book-obssessed sidekick he had tagging along for plot-critical information and comedy relief in the novels can now turn himself into a 15-ft high, 12-headed monster for no good reason, which can make our barbarian hero feel just a little superfluous at times.
And when he finally reaches the lair of the Evil Wizard, Conan doesn't get drugged and chained to an altar whilst the Slowly Lowering Stone Ceiling of Doom descends at a rate designed to allow maximum numbers of saving throws and Escape Artist checks. Instead, he gets slapped upside the head with a Maximized, Empowered, Twinned Enervation from 20 yards away, and he can't even use his cat-like reflexes to dodge because he's got a Spiked Tentacle of Forced Intrusion jammed where the sun doesn't shine and if he doesn't roll a 20 on his next grapple check, the last thing he will ever see will be his own spleen on its way out of the window...
Thing is, the game system itself doesn't care about your character concept, so your character concept pretty much has to care about the game system... or you have to be resigned to not mattering terribly much once the spellcasters drive a horse and cart into Crazy Town and start running for office.
Please don't think that I'm in any way accusing you of being short-sighted like the non-existent Conan player - all that stuff was for illustration purposes - but I am inviting you to consider that if your concept and the system are at odds, something has got to give... and unless the DM and the rest of your group group are all up for the same thing, it won't be the game system.
In the face of this, you either really need to persuade your DM into redesigning your character to be as mechanically effective as possible (which may involve you bending a little as to which items you're prepared to accept), take a different character altogether, stop playing the game or just resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be consistently outclassed until the end of the campaign. You can multiclass and so on from here on in, but that's really not ideal without fixing some of what's already there.
I think that if you were to post a somewhat more detailed idea of what you want your character concept to be and what you will and won't accept, we'd be only too happy to help with a build
What I got was a big pile of suck with a rapier, who spent most of his time in combat failing to matter because:
a) the things we were fighting were immune to some or all of the heap of d6's he could theoretically generate on a hit, or...
b) he couldn't get to the fight in time to contribute, or...
c) when he did get to the fight he couldn't hit anything, or...
d) he was incapacitated by an area screw-you effect, or...
e) all of the above.
Compared to the rest of the party he was an absolute waste of space, sucking up a share of the experience points for an overall negative contribution to most encounters: and boy, did that sting.
Three sessions in, by agreement with the DM, said character gave a whole bunch of ill-advised back-talk to a powerful NPC who eventually petrified him and used him as a hatstand.
I generated a new character that could actually work in the context of the game we were playing, and never looked back. What I learned from this debacle is that D&D allows you to do lots and lots of things that simply aren't effective. There are traps for the unwary - like "being a Fighter" - built in to the very fabric of the game.
I've read this thread and the other, and you've had some good advice; most of what I'd be inclined to say has been said, so I'll keep the points already covered to a summary:
1) Ask your DM to let you rebuild. A DM who makes a first-time player stick with a character that's clearly only going to fall further and further behind the rest of the party is not being fair. This goes double for the fact that you were actually asked to create a melee damage-dealer in a party that already contained a Ranger, a Rogue, another Fighter, a Cleric and a Sorceror. Consider my mind boggling.
2) If you can't make the character over, retire it and take another one.
3) If you can't make the character over or retire it, find something else to do with your free time, whether that's playing D&D with a different group, playing something different with another group or taking up basketweaving. Seriously. You asked in the other thread "will this pass?" and the answer - I'm sorry to say - is "no". Not with this character. A game is supposed to be fun, and if you can't contribute meaningfully to a majority of encounters, it isn't going to be fun.
4) As Thanael said, try cool n' crazy combat manoeuvers: if your DM likes the feel of them enough, it's amazing what you can get away with
5) Enjoy the role-playing bits. You seem to have this well-covered, so hats off to you
And now the thing that I don't think has been covered. I sincerely admire the dedication to role-playing that you've displayed by turning down magical items and whatnot that don't fit your character concept, but - as I mentioned earlier - D&D notoriously allows concepts to be created that don't work very well in D&D. The levels of crazy in the game tilt sharply skywards as you reach mid levels and they never go down again. This tendency can just flat-out leave some character concepts behind, no matter how good they were at levels 1-6.
I'm not for a moment trying to talk you out of your focus on role-playing as I genuinely think it's great, but - with regard to turning down items - I would invite you to look at it in a slightly different way...
You've got a character concept of a greek warrior-type with a shortsword. (Incidentally, you can't use Power Attack with a shortsword, so you should get your DM to let you change at least that much). The thing is, unless you're aiming for "greek mythology" rather than "greek history", you're scuppered before you start because mid-to-high-level D&D is not a system that supports "an historical greek warrior" as a useful entity. Not without some - ahem - "stretching" of the idea.
You can do it, sure, the system will let you: you can be a guy with a shortsword and shield, with javelins and a throwing net for backup, in just a few levels. Once you're there, what then? You live in a world where giant face-eating bears hang out with a guy who can change himself into a huge frickin' tiger on a whim, who in turn is best pals with someone who can set your trousers on fire with his mind or twist the space-time continuum into a pretzel and swallow it. Without chewing.
In the face of all that, if you want to advance in a meaningful way once the basic character has been realised, you're pretty much going to have to expand the concept to include some of the crazy or you'll start to look a bit... Well, if you haven't seen it yet, watch "Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit" on YouTube to put the problem into context for you.
(Hilarious video tip thanks to Dandu: I'd have given XP for this and several other of his recent posts if I hadn't been prevented by the props-allocating system... and for some reason, I can't post the link without it embedding the video in the page!)
D&D can be moulded into a gritty, low-magic game where men in leather skirts wielding bits of sharp metal can make a big contribution... but that's not the default game and it's not the game you're playing. I'm not at all sure what type of "greek-ish warrior" you're aiming for so I'll illustrate with another example: Conan.
D&D lets a Robert E. Howard fan play Conan, no problem. Take a level or two of Barbarian, a few levels of Rogue, and a few levels of Fighter. Pick up Leadership as you go and use the odd Fighter bonus feats to dabble in a few combat styles: big swords, fisticuffs, grappling and a bit of archery. Buy some stat-boosting items to make up any deficiencies in your ability scores so you're strong, agile and tough. There, you're done. You've got mighty thews, you can take a lot of punishment, you can climb like a monkey with Velcro hands, you can avoid most mundane and some magical traps, you can run like the wind, you can pick pockets and locks with equal facility, your rage is a fearful thing to behold... and nobody will ever care because you're not playing the same game as everyone else.
Conan's original world is one where there are badass magic-users, but they're rare, and they generally have to take a lot of time, effort and concentration to achieve significant magical results. For all but the mightiest wizards, magic is unreliable, hard to do, and dangerous to the practitioner. It also often depends for its more spectacular effects on conveniently vulnerable items like the "Serpent Ring of Set" that can be smashed, stolen or subverted by a hero with sufficient strength of mind (or mightiness of thew, never forget that). Despite these confounding factors, Conan routinely gets nearly trounced by magically-proficient bad guys, only to be saved by Howard (or whichever author is perpetuating the franchise this time) inserting another character or event (or sheer good luck) on Conan's side that distracts the evil wizard just long enough for Conan to get his barbarian mad on.
It's a gritty, relatively-low-magic world where the normal run of enemies are either melee brutes or cultist schemers who play by the Evil Villain rules: taking time out to monologue and cackle madly at the appropriate juncture, or just tying the hero to a pole and leaving him to the giant spiders. Conan bestrides such a world like a colossus, and rightly so.
Having the author on his side couldn't have hurt, either.
So our hypothetical roleplayer brings the giant Cimmerian to D&Dland... and Conan is royally screwed. Our roleplayer turned down the Wings of Flying because Conan couldn't fly, so D&D Conan can't fight the flying monsters. On the few occasions Conan ever tangled with immaterial monsters in the books he had to rely on outside intervention, so nary a ghost-touch weapon will our hero accept and is consequently not much use against incorporeal creatures either. Conan was always scathing about magic versus muscles so there's no way he'd dip a spellcasting class for a few buffs... so now he's relying on the rest of the party just to stay in the game. Adding insult to injury, the bumbling, nerdy, book-obssessed sidekick he had tagging along for plot-critical information and comedy relief in the novels can now turn himself into a 15-ft high, 12-headed monster for no good reason, which can make our barbarian hero feel just a little superfluous at times.
And when he finally reaches the lair of the Evil Wizard, Conan doesn't get drugged and chained to an altar whilst the Slowly Lowering Stone Ceiling of Doom descends at a rate designed to allow maximum numbers of saving throws and Escape Artist checks. Instead, he gets slapped upside the head with a Maximized, Empowered, Twinned Enervation from 20 yards away, and he can't even use his cat-like reflexes to dodge because he's got a Spiked Tentacle of Forced Intrusion jammed where the sun doesn't shine and if he doesn't roll a 20 on his next grapple check, the last thing he will ever see will be his own spleen on its way out of the window...
Thing is, the game system itself doesn't care about your character concept, so your character concept pretty much has to care about the game system... or you have to be resigned to not mattering terribly much once the spellcasters drive a horse and cart into Crazy Town and start running for office.
Please don't think that I'm in any way accusing you of being short-sighted like the non-existent Conan player - all that stuff was for illustration purposes - but I am inviting you to consider that if your concept and the system are at odds, something has got to give... and unless the DM and the rest of your group group are all up for the same thing, it won't be the game system.
In the face of this, you either really need to persuade your DM into redesigning your character to be as mechanically effective as possible (which may involve you bending a little as to which items you're prepared to accept), take a different character altogether, stop playing the game or just resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be consistently outclassed until the end of the campaign. You can multiclass and so on from here on in, but that's really not ideal without fixing some of what's already there.
I think that if you were to post a somewhat more detailed idea of what you want your character concept to be and what you will and won't accept, we'd be only too happy to help with a build
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