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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 2978337" data-attributes="member: 41321">I heard once (I think it was in the DMG2) that the character a player comes up with is a good indication of what type of game that person wants to play.  If he creates a cleric that beefs up his turning ability with feats and a high charisma, he probably wants to fight undead.  If you create a rogue who maxes out his hide/move silently abilities and doesn't put many points into trap- and open-skills, he probably wants to play a scout and/or a sneak-attacker.  A good DM should try to give the players what they want by playing to their character's strengths.That's not to say you should always play to their strengths.  Personally, I think it's realistic that not every situation will be tailor-made for this group of PCs.  The character's weaknesses don't mean anything if they're not exploited.  Right now in our group we have an orc barbarian with something like a 24 STR, but his mental scores (all three of them!) are all 6.*  Every once and a while I try to figure out what might be the best way to bring him down, should he decide to turn around and start hacking at us due to a well-placed dominate spell.  He's got a huge chink in his armor, and he knows it.  We're running through the WLD, so the DM isn't really tailoring the campaign for us anyway, but we're all waiting for Thugdar the barbarian to start failing some really important will saves.  Were we go to through a game where we knew that wouldn't be a risk, Thugdar wouldn't be as much fun (IMO).That said, you shouldn't always play to their weaknesses, either.  Thugdar also wouldn't be as much fun if he started attacking us at every encounter because he keeps failing his save against charm and dominate spells.  Whatever you do, you have to try to maximize the fun for all involved, whether that involves charming the barbarian or letting him cleave through a pile of mooks.*The player made up the character quickly when his backup character (original charcter was killed the session before) was petrified in his first session and he didn't have a backup for the backup.  He tried to make the most absurd character he could just so he'd have something to play while the party tried to find some way to turn him and another PC back to flesh.  When the two petrified PCs were finally released, the player decided he was having fun with Thugdar and decided to keep going with him, rather than using his old PC who, like I said, never even got in a full gaming session.  I think he was petrified in the first half-hour of a three-hour game. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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