Casters vs Mundanes in your experience

[Savage Wombat]

But, yes they are. I'm being told, that I shouldn't pick certain options. That I should pick options based on different criteria. That it's a bad thing to always pick the most powerful option.

My point is, there should never BE a "most powerful option".

No, you're not. You are deciding that your job in the party is to be the most powerful character you can concoct. No one is requiring you to do that. If you want to pick the most powerful option every single time, that's your decision, not a requirement of the game or a demand of other players.

I just think that playing the guy that stun-locks every opponent every fight of every game sounds about as boring as playing the same character in Mortal Kombat every game. That's the ONLY point I was bringing up.

No game forces you to play a certain way. Even if some ways are more effective than others. And if you have friends who gripe at you when your character is sub-par, I'm sorry.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

No game forces you to play a certain way. Even if some ways are more effective than others. And if you have friends who gripe at you when your character is sub-par, I'm sorry.

No game forces you to play a certain way. Though I can name many, many games that when you play in a way other than the optimal way you lose.

There ARE other ways to play those games, but those ways will not help you win. And many of them are team games where the people on your team will get very mad at you if your unoptimal play causes the whole team to lose.

Take, for example, the MOBA online games(Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients). These games are often really hard to learn for new people because there are so many ways to play but most of them cause your team to lose. It can be very frustrating in all of them because the games are balanced around the high end players who have honed their item selection/skill selection/strategy to a high degree. This means that if even one player on their team plays less than optimal that gives a benefit to the opposing team.

The same thing tends to happen in D&D games. At least, that's been my experience. One player optimizes their character a lot...then the other players feel like they aren't contributing AND the DM gets frustrated because the PCs stomp over enemies the DM expected to be especially hard or even had intended the PCs to run from.

So, the DM says "That's fine, they want to powergame, I'll make the monsters harder so that there's some challenge in this game. It's more fun for me if I don't have to run constant one sided combats."

Then the other players become more and more frustrated that their characters are contributing less and less to combat because of the harder monsters. They hit less often, they require more hits to kill monsters, they get hit more often. They spend more time unconscious and waiting to be healed and less time up and fighting.

So, the inevitable happens and someone dies due to the power ramp. They roll up a new character who is better at combat and optimized since they don't want it to happen again. Now there are TWO optimized characters in the group...so combats become 1 sided again and the DM gets frustrated and increases their power.

Rinse and repeat until the entire group is pretty much as optimized as they can get. Anyone who walks into one of these groups with any character not played optimally will get criticized and downright yelled at for playing poorly because it results in the death of the entire party when things go wrong.

You aren't "forced" to play optimally, but you can expect to die if you don't. And you can expect that the rest of the group may die with you. Why shouldn't they get annoyed at you if you contribute to their death?

 

[dagger]

I think the whole discussion is this:

If no player plays Super Caster, there is no problem.

If the DM can handle Super Caster and is able to do so, there is no problem.

But if some player plays Super Caster and the DM can't, is unwilling, or is unable to deal with Super Caster; there is a good chance of having an overshadowing problem.

You can also define this further by listing the edition of the game you are playing.

 

[Neonchameleon]

No, you're not. You are deciding that your job in the party is to be the most powerful character you can concoct. No one is requiring you to do that. If you want to pick the most powerful option every single time, that's your decision, not a requirement of the game or a demand of other players.

I just think that playing the guy that stun-locks every opponent every fight of every game sounds about as boring as playing the same character in Mortal Kombat every game. That's the ONLY point I was bringing up.

No game forces you to play a certain way. Even if some ways are more effective than others. And if you have friends who gripe at you when your character is sub-par, I'm sorry.

You appear to be labouring under a misapprehension. Your misapprehension is that my wizard is playing a game. I am playing a game. My Wizard is not. He is fighting for survival in a world with the darkest power. If my wizard was playing even The Most Dangerous Game then there would be an excuse for him to be risking his life and the lives of his friends, and even his world by not trying to win. And one of the ways a wizard tries to win is by picking the best spells.

If you want me to treat D&D as a roleplaying game (as I do), kindly explain to me the psychology of someone who believes himself, those he cares about, and often the very existance of his world to be threatened - and then does not do his best to win. Because in order to follow your advice and then play a wizard, that is what I must do. Stunlocking may be boring - but isn't as boring as literally being dead. Which is what you are asking my wizard to risk. I suppose the end of the world might be exciting if you like that sort of thing.

(And before you say that my wizard doesn't have the knowledge I do, I disagree. The 3.5 rules have been out for not even ten years. Wizards have been around in the gameworld for thousands, normally. Wizards are also generally very smart and very knowledgeable.)

And for Spike to overwhelm Johnny, as Vyvian Bastard implies, is a simple matter of bad game design. If Johnny can not keep within touching distance of Spike then the game is pushing you towards playing Spike at the expense of Johnny. Because the in character alternatives are Spiking and seriously risking dying. And spell selection is an in character choice.

 

[bloodtide]

That's not entirely true though. The fighter gets used up much faster than the wizard does. His hit points are his resource and he has no way to self generate them. A fighter loses 80% of his hit points is out for a few days. A wizard who blows 100% of his resources gets them back in 8 hours.

And a fighter who uses 100% of his resources dies. A wizard doesn't.

Funny I'd think that a wizard with no spells(or scrolls) would be just as 100% dead.

Any character that loses hit points is in trouble, and fighters and wizards can't get hps back by themselves. But each could have a cleric buddy or just potions.

And can a wizard really be a walking library of scrolls? Do they have the time and money and xp to do that like twice a week? Or are they going to Scroll Mart and getting the scrolls BOGO free?

Again this comes back to another side of the '15 minute day' problem, where the wizard can scribe 'a dozen or more scrolls' in a day that gets condensed in to one hour.(''He guys I need to make some scrolls, lets just say we hang out in town for two weeks, ok?'')

And I won't bother with the 'target the scrolls', as I know most DMs ''don't think that is fair'' and it's like targeting the spellbook or component pouch.

 

[Savage Wombat]

No, I'm sorry, that's just role-playing justification for power-gaming. Which is fine if that's what you want to do. But if you're playing the same character over and over, and you're bored with it, stop blaming the game system for forcing you to.

There is never going to be a game system where every option is perfectly balanced against every other. When a game has been over-analyzed to death the way 3x has, people are going to find optimal strategies. But D&D is not chess. You can play whatever strategy you like.

And as an additional note - there is no form of role-playing that transcends your ability as the human player to make a choice. I've seen many players justify anything from productive-but-rigid behavior, like your spell preferences, to destructive-and-hostile behavior, like party-killing, because "that's what my character would do." Sorry, but you chose to play that character that way.

If a game isn't fun for you because you've "solved" it, like the guys who solved Connect 4, then you don't have to play. But that's not the game's fault.

 

[slobster]

What are these options that you are referring to because they sure as hell aren't rules? No one has said anything about needing to change a "rule" in order for the game to work.

I see what exactly what you and a few others are trying to do here. Because some of us don't use the "guidelines" in the DMG then we are essentially playing the game wrong.

Question Mark?

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The broken wizard options I was talking about could be as simple as the right spell and item selection such that encounters which should be engaged by the whole party are dealt with by a single character (as an aside, I agree with the conceit that bypassing one encounter per session is fine, as long as other encounters give other PCs the chance to shine; wizards potentially godmode the whole campaign). These options exist in core, and are expanded upon ruthlessly as you add more and more splatbooks to the mix.

For the record, I would never tell someone that their style of D&D was the wrong one. I don't see where anyone here said that either. What we are saying is that an unbalanced set of rules can lead to broken character builds, trivialized party members, hurt feelings, and in some cases excessive house-ruling and/or nausea and upset stomach.

 

[slobster]

There is never going to be a game system where every option is perfectly balanced against every other.

Truth. There isn't much we can say with certainty about DDN, but one thing is that every possible character build will not be totally balanced against every other.

You want it that way, of course. There will be synergies between certain feats, classes, equipment choices and so on, and as a player you feel that little glow of satisfaction when you discover one (or is that just me?). Smart character building should be rewarded, to some extent, so by definition some choices have to be better than others.

But it isn't a given that such a system must be as ridiculously asymmetrical as 3.X was. Prune away the character options that are so overpowered that they trivialize the rest of the party. Set as your goal the idea that everyone should have the ability to shine, and every character should have some arena where their mastery exceeds anyone else's.

When, during playtesting, you discover some character build dominating the game entirely, fix it! We don't want to have to discover the issue ourselves over and over in thousands of disparate campaigns, then separately come up with gentlemen's agreements or houserules that work around the issue.

Make the core rules as balanced as possible, as free from both choice traps and overpowering builds as you can. That frees me, the GM, to focus on crafting a campaign instead of patching a rules system when I get ready to play.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

No, you're not. You are deciding that your job in the party is to be the most powerful character you can concoct. No one is requiring you to do that. If you want to pick the most powerful option every single time, that's your decision, not a requirement of the game or a demand of other players.

I just think that playing the guy that stun-locks every opponent every fight of every game sounds about as boring as playing the same character in Mortal Kombat every game. That's the ONLY point I was bringing up.

No game forces you to play a certain way. Even if some ways are more effective than others. And if you have friends who gripe at you when your character is sub-par, I'm sorry.

I always played shang tsung... always the same character...

 

[ForeverSlayer]

Sometimes the problem is rather obvious. I bet the people with the caster problems have DM's who don't actually flex their DM muscles and stop the 15 minute work day and the hundreds of magic shops r us.

Now if the whole group wants to stop for the 15 minute work day then you just have hit them with monsters or adjust what goes on around them. Now from what I have seen through the years is the fact that the group usually doesn't want to stop and wait on the spellcasters to regain their spells.