Not fully playing a class.

[MichaelSomething]

You can always swap the abilities you don't like for some you do!

 

[Yora]

I think many of the classes in D&D are oddly designed and have some aspects that don't seem to match. I very much prefer it when players do their concept first and try to make that concept work with the option the class provides.
One of the weirdest thing in D&D is to make all priests heavy fighters. If you want to play just a priest with a robe and staff, you still got to take the cleric class and simply ignore the fact that you could wear plate armor, big shields, and warhammers.

 

[Ryujin]

I think many of the classes in D&D are oddly designed and have some aspects that don't seem to match. I very much prefer it when players do their concept first and try to make that concept work with the option the class provides.
One of the weirdest thing in D&D is to make all priests heavy fighters. If you want to play just a priest with a robe and staff, you still got to take the cleric class and simply ignore the fact that you could wear plate armor, big shields, and warhammers.

I was playing Fighters with bracers, ring, and cloak way back in 1e because my character concepts frequently didn't involve heavy armour. Works for Clerics too

... though it does tend to start arguments with the party MUs over treasure division.

 

[TwoSix]

Yes there's a reason and logic that can be applied here, but I'm more curious how it makes you feel? How do you react to it, not how do you rationally reason and understand it.

"Smh" would be our fun text abbreviation for how I feel about it. Obviously, play how you want, we're all gamers, kumbaya, etc. But it bugs the hell out of me when I have a character who doesn't have a use for a portion of his abilities, so I'm certainly projecting onto other people. It's the reason I don't play rangers, I hate having abilities like favored enemy and favored terrain be so often unusable AND out of my control.

One thing I do like about 3.X/Pathfinder is that the plethora of archetypes makes it easy for me to trade out abilities I don't like for others I do want. The 3.5 Unearthed Arcana was the first book that let me play a druid without wild shape, for example, which was great, because wild shape in 3e bugs the heck out of me.

 

[Umbran]

It says a lot more.

A regular shrug might say, "Hey, whatever," but an eloquent shrug says, "This doesn't really matter to me, and honestly, I really don't think it's anything for anyone else to get upset over, either. After all, it's not your character, and if your character and the rest of your group ends up finding that character too useless, you can always fire him or her from the party."

If you have to spend another paragraph explaining what it meant, it wasn't all that eloquent, now was it?

 

[the Jester]

If you have to spend another paragraph explaining what it meant, it wasn't all that eloquent, now was it?

Hey, man, not everyone speaks shrug.

*eloquent shrug*

 

[Alzrius]

Lets face it, classes aren't perfect and they often come with baggage. There are abilities, powers, spells, even whole features that some people simply do not like. Other than those specific features, the player in question loves the rest of the class. Perhaps it's a ranger without a pet, or without spellcasting. Maybe it's a paladin who never uses channel, a priest who doesn't take any offensive abilities, or a wizard who goes straight damage and not utility, or even only casts specific types of spells. The player may or may not RP this into their character, or just simply not use those abilities because that's not how they like to play.

So my question is to you, the rest of the party, the DM, how does that make you feel? Does it bother you when a player won't play a certain part of their class, even if it's very useful to the given situation? Even if their reasoning is as simple as "I don't want to."? Or do you care? Do you feel it's their character to gimp as much as they want? To play as they want?

Yes there's a reason and logic that can be applied here, but I'm more curious how it makes you feel? How do you react to it, not how do you rationally reason and understand it.

It makes me feel frustrated, but not because of how the player is running their character; rather, I'm frustrated on their behalf because it's about as clear an example as you can have of the game not being able to give the player the kind of character they want.

To be fair, some of my frustration is contextual. Prior to 3rd Edition, D&D was fairly unapologetic in that it wanted to be played a certain kind of way, and was set up to make constraints in that regard. That changed after 3E, when the credo became "options, not restrictions" - that was an ethos that the built-in limitations of class-level progression simply aren't cut out to handle. To be fair, the game did become more open than it had been previously, but it still wasn't anywhere near the level of dynamic flexibility in terms of what sort of (effective) character you could make that it pretended to have.

That's one of the major reasons I've been more and more enamored of point-buy character-building systems over the last few years. When I found such a system for d20-based games, I never looked back (save to mine ideas from various new books that that book could easily mimic).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You can always swap the abilities you don't like for some you do!

If you're playing an older edition (anything before Skills & Powers), then I don't mind when class abilities go un-used because they cost you nothing to gain them - a Fighter who doesn't utilize the ability to construct a stronghold is still obviously a Fighter and not a Ranger or Thief or whatever.

If you're playing an edition where you can swap out abilities you don't want for abilities that you do want, then any ability that goes un-used is a sign that the character was built incorrectly, which means the player is suffering an in-game penalty (by not having the ability they want) due to an out-of-game error (un-optimized character building). In my mind, that's poor game design.

 

[GSHamster]

I think there is a limit to this. For example, if you play a cleric who never, ever heals, expect the other players to be unhappy with you. You might see something similar with a rogue who deliberately avoids Sneak Attack.

D&D is a team game, and deliberately choosing to play in a very substandard fashion often annoys your team mates.

 

[Umbran]

If you're playing an edition where you can swap out abilities you don't want for abilities that you do want, then any ability that goes un-used is a sign that the character was built incorrectly, which means the player is suffering an in-game penalty (by not having the ability they want) due to an out-of-game error (un-optimized character building). In my mind, that's poor game design.

The player/GM can swap things around, how is it the *game* design that's at fault? The game *allows* them to not be in this position, but the game is at fault? What?