so lets look at my example again: 10 Str, 14 Dex, 13 Con 15 Int, 14 Wis 18 Cha
you want to make the swashbuckler with charm and smarts what do you do with those numbers?
Make him. And accept that the stats you've posited make you a lot better at talking people than fighting them. If you want to make a swashbuckler who is actually good at combat, put that 18 in Dex.
10,13,14,14,15,18? those are awesome stats
They are, but only a little bit above average physical stats. The 18 in Charisma is essentially irrelevant to the character's combat ability, as it is meant to be. They are awesome if you want to be socially impressive.
how do you generate stats in 3e?
In ways that result in something better than the standard array. I don't see a lot of 15 Str fighters in actual play. Do you?
The save, mostly.
yes because when you play a fighter and someone else plays a cleric that can match you in combat AND heal AND cast misc spells and the 'team' asks why they want a fighter and not a second cleric it is them not being team players...
They probably want a fighter because they want someone with the best attack bonus and armor profs that the rest of the party is built around. That's the archetypical D&D group anyway. Fighter up in front trading blows, rogue sneaking around to flank with him. Spellcasters buffing/healing said fighter and maybe attempting to supplement his attacks. Replace the fighter with the second cleric and you of course have a viable party, but a tad less optimal.
I'm not sure where you are getting this from... lets take that rouge as an example, lets get him to level 6 (I think that is when you can take leadership) name a feat that gives better returns then grabbing a cohort of level 4?
Improved Initiative? Seriously, any remotely useful feat is better. Trying to protect an NPC who is not as powerful as you is a net loss. If you don't protect them, you lose them and followers start avoiding you. It's not a great feat.
And of course, there's the obvious option to go out and get the same follower without taking the feat, just by being you. Of course, that presumes the DM is on board with that, but then again, the Leadership feat also requires special permission, so it's really a pointless feat.
OK, then listen to this, we were in a game where we were all trying to save the world and when he hit 12th level we had just as a group made an alliance with a druid circle, so since we needed a bit more healing, I picked up leadership and a druid cohort. I picked a Dire wolf companion... the very first fight was with these 2 giants, everyone was buffing, so I cast bit of the weresomethingorother and wildshaped. the giants moved into us, and on my next turn me and the dire wolf each killed a giant.
I was shocked that a character that was made in twenty mins with 3d6 place as you get them (house rule for how to make cohorts) and was 2 levels lower then the party could do what the rest of the party could not... when the player of the party paliden pointed out the wolf did more damage then he did I asked the DM if I could swap the feat... The druid went giant hunting alone, and I picked up a less disrupteive feat.
I have seen animal compainions be forgotten like familiars, and I have seen them be died and ressed, and I have seen them dominate combat
...
...after that the DM of that game still to this day talks about the companion of a cohort who out shined the rest of the party.
So what I've read is that you've seen a spread of outcomes ranging from poor to great. Sounds like the animal companion is balanced perfectly. Sometimes powerful, sometimes weak, so it averages out. Unless you're suggesting that the animal companion occasionally becoming dominant should never happen.
All of which kind of goes back to the OP. You've basically admitted that the characters in question are balanced. The druid and his pet are great on occasion, suboptimal in some cases, and decent overall. The fighter is usually pretty good, and becomes really good when supported by teammates, creating a unit that is better than any of them alone. The game is dynamic and diverse, rendering every option meaningful and creating interesting dynamics between them.
And yet you're complaining about the end of the bell curve, the non-average druid animal companion that becomes really good. Not much to complain about.
Your games sound so odd to me, you have druids that have sucky animal compainions, but you think that 10,13,14,14,15,18 are bad stats... how can you have such power that those are weak AND not play up the best parts of the compainion??
10, 13, 14 are bad stats for a melee fighting character. Remember that an NPC warrior with the non-heroic array (say 13, 11, 12, 9, 10, 8) is almost as good. And this character is supposed to be heroic. And those animal companions I'm referring to weren't "sucky" they were just typical animal companions. They have high base stats, but don't get a lot of the useful add-ons that PCs typically do. Sort of like summoned creatures. To wit, a druid with all 18's still has the same animal companion as one with all 10's, but a fighter with all 18's is much better than one with all 10's. Since the typical PC is closer to the former than the latter (at least with regards to relevant ability scores, CHA notwithstanding), advantage fighter.
