Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xeviat" data-source="post: 8270592" data-attributes="member: 57494">Wild idea that came up while talking to my players. One of my friends, whom I've been playing with for 20 years now, was commenting someone he was playing with wasn't having fun because their character was weak. This other player is more of a casual player, but was growing disinterested because his character just couldn't do very much. My friend helped make some changes to his character, and suddenly he was much more effective, and he started having more fun with the game (and not just the pizza and beer socializing).So we got to talking about how unfortunate it is that the game makes it possible to accidentally make a weak character. We had actually been running into this issue from the very beginning of our time playing D&D, from someone rolling particularly higher stats than another player to a 3E ranger taking weapon finesse and a Str 10 since it seemed like it would be fine.There are so many unspoken "rules" of character building for making optimal characters that its easy to make a suboptimal character. You "need" a 16 in your primary stat. If you're a medium armor class, you really want a dex 14. Everyone wants a con 14. Certain feats are better than others. And so forth.Yes, you don't "have" to, thats what the air quotes are for.But, what if you didn't need to do all this? What if your level determined your offensive capability? What if, say, a level 10 rogue is deadly because they're a level 10 rogue, regardless of if they're an agile thief, a cunning mastermind, or a charming rake?What if your to hit and damage bonuses were determined by your class level? What if your ability scores contributed to skills and saves, but were also used for item and feat prerequisites? So, a high strength, high con fighter would naturally favor heavy two handed weapons, especially things in the axe/hammer groups, while a balanced str/dex fighter would favor sword and shield or long bow, or a high dex fighter may favor shortswords and crossbows?Your wizard could be an intelligent scholar, or they could be a natural and are just figuring it out (or maybe you'd want to require a mental stat prerequisite for magic for a certain flavor, up to you).But, the end result is level determines power, your ability scores determine how you flavor and differentiate your character.It would be a very different edition, but what do you think?</blockquote>

Verification