Favorite actual/wished for fantasy character that wouldn't work well with D&D rules
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Silvercat Moonpaw
Adventurer
Celebrim
Legend
That was my understanding.
If group consensus and not formal rules are to be the system, well, why do you need a system?
That's a lovely idea in theory and I think many role playing game strives for that, but really to get that sort of flexibility ultimately you just need 'make something up'.
I agree, and I try hard to encourage my players to not look at character creation that way. Instead, I encourage them to come to me with a concept and then work with me to come up with a way to make it work in a way that is fair to everyone at the table (including me). The concept to me is far more important than the mechanics, and its relatively easy to translate a concept into a few comparitive benefits.
But on the other hand, I very strongly disagree with this. No one in my campaign world thinks of themselves as a 'fighter'. There are plenty of mercenaries, soldiers, gladiators, bar brawlers, and just plain tough old cusses that have the fighter class mechanically, but fighter is just how we outside the game world abstract the character and adjudicate it mechanically - its not a representation of something internal and tangible in the game world.
Oddly, I think the 10 bazillion class options are the problem. In my opinion, classes should have as little fluff as possible. Classes should be so broad as to encompass a great many architypes and enumerable backgrounds. That's why I got rid of Ranger, Barbarian, Druid, Paladin, and Monk and replaced those very fluff specific classes and their mechanics with more generic classes and more flexible mechanics. You could still concievably play a Ranger, but a 'Ranger' in my game world would be a specific implementation of a class or combination of classes and not a class itself. The base class just carries too much unwanted baggage.
Right, but you've already more or less tossed the RAW out the window at this point. Why do you need to start with a uncustimized template meant to portray a specific sort of foe, when that isn't at all what you wanted? I seriously doubt that any specific implementation is going to satisfy a group with this particular of desires.
I don't personally think a campaign based on, "You are all ghosts" would be very difficult at all in D&D and concepts like 'rediscovering your former powers and learning to control them' are tailor made for D&D's advancement system.
Ok, so why doesn't he take the fighter class? Nothing prevents a fighter from being a holy warrior.
My suggestion to you is to play a system like HERO, GURPS, or even M&M for a while and get a feel for how a true point buy system works. D&D works on a slightly different paradigm. Just as it's easier to make a class based game more balanced than a point buy system, point buy systems pick up alot of player empowerment and flexibility that can be hard in a class based system. I think it would be very hard to recreate D&D on a point by basis, but you don't have to, because there are perfectly good systems out there offering a more direct route from imagined concept to implementation than I think even the best modded D&D is going to allow. That isn't to say that they are better systems, but they do offer something different. At the very least, they'd inform your design process if you did try to recreate D&D from a point buy system.
There are probably an infinite number of dreams out there. Right off the top of my head, I can't think of any that D&D can't handle that another system can, but I can think of other systems that might have higher versimilitude on some than D&D can offer. You can play a class like Wizard as a truenamer or a rune wizard or virtually any other sort of magical system just by redressing it in a different flavor suit, but the versimilitude between what you envision and the mechanical limitations might not be as good as if you built the other system from the ground up (3.5 in particular fell into the trap of trying to do this, in my opinion to its loss.) In my game, if someone wants to play a psionic, I say, "Ok, that's cool. Build a sorcerer with the magical powers you associate with psionics" (whatever those turn out to be). In terms of the narrative produced by the simulation, it might be very difficult to tell the two apart on the basis of narrative artifacts alone. Whatever systems you produce, on the basis of the fundamental rule of role-playing, that is, "You can't be good at everything.", will have limitations.
I suggested that other systems might have higher mechanical versimilitude on particular concepts than D&D, but on the other hand they might not. Because if you get into systems like GURPS, M&M, and HERO, you'll find that they achieve their flexibility in large part by dispensing with the need to have mechanics that absolutely match the concept. They'll instead offer something like a 'strike' mechanic that universally covers claws, swords, pistols, lasers, and magical bolts of energy under a single mechanic.
I could list some concepts that I find hard in D&D, like for example Shapechangers, but the truth of the matter is that Shapechanger tends to be something that is hard in every system. I'm racking my brain here for concepts that are hard in D&D particularly that aren't hard in other systems, and I'm drawing blanks. Most of the concepts I don't know what to do about in D&D to make them easy, I also don't know what to do about in any system. Alot of concepts turn out to be essentially, "I want to be like that character from one of my favorite stories who has the power of plot.", and all of those concepts are hard for every system. Virtually every fantasy wizard fits in this category. The concept of a speedster, like the Flash, is a special instance of a 'power of plot' character, who also has the additional hard problem of being out of time scale with the rest of the world - something that every system has difficulties with unless the player agrees to abide by plot tropes (consciously or unconsciously). I don't honestly know how to do a high end speedster in any system without creating problems (a problem shared with gods, characters with the ability to stop or control time or simply just time travel, and characters with large numbers of bodies).
Maybe part of the problem I have answering your question is that having played RPG's for so long, I have no inclination to play power of plot characters.
But to recap here is my list of hard PC concepts that I don't think you can do well in D&D, just to see how you do with it:
1) Speedster (by which I mean, large numbers of actions per turn, not merely 'runs fast')
2) Stops and/or Controls Time
3) Time Traveller
4) Single entity in large number of independent bodies (differs from the comparitively easy concept of a swarm in that the individuals need not stay in one place)
5) Metamorphs, and too a much less extent mental-morphs.
6) Any character based off a storybook character whose powers always scale such that they are just barely able to solve the problem, but never so much that the problem is solved easily. (Although IMO, Vancian spellcasting does a pretty decent job with this trope, as it provides for vast power and 'inexplicable' moments of weakness, but I know lots of players that disagree with this assessment.)
7) Precognition (including psuedo-science variates of this like Hari Seldon)
8) Characters with limitations imposed on them solely by story (cursed characters in fairy tales or ghost stories, for example, but also including characters that appear to have power that they consistantly refrain from using for reasons of their own, although again IMO, Vancian spellcasting does as good a job with this as anything. Gandalf is a 6th level M-U sort of thing.)
9) Characters that are mechanically witty or humerous or creative in a satisfying way.
And looking back over my list, I find I wasn't able to accomplish what I set out to do. Most of those are not hard to do mechanically. The problem with those is the side effects and game artifacts of those mechanics are generally undesirable.
Celebrim
Legend
Hmm.... that proves many of my points far more tersely than that wall of text I just summoned.
cignus_pfaccari
First Post
As an aside, I note that none of the main characters in Star Wars have any real difficulty understanding Chewie, so I'm wondering why the "you can't understand the Wookie at all" thing came in.
Obviously, Han spoke Wookie, as he'd have conversations, but IIRC the rest of the main characters could generally get what he was saying.
Brad
Dandu
First Post
This isn't a problem in KotOR either, though you have to learn the language. Neither Revan, Jolee, or Mission have trouble understanding Zaalbar nor he them.
Crusader. TOB for the win.
Silvercat Moonpaw
Adventurer
Yeah, knowing what that thing looked like is why I was only asking for the one option of getting the play a magical beast and not having the whole system blown open.
I am very fond of the characters in the various novels of Philip K. Dick.
For the most part, these are "everyman" type characters, caught up in a situation over their head. They survive by a little luck and a little brains, but mostly they are just ordinary people getting by.
Look at the characters
Frank Frink from "the man in the high castle". A secret Jew that works with creating replica Americana.
Joe Chip from "Ubik", a debt-ridden tecnician.
I could go on, but the gist of the stories is an ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances.
D&D handles this terribly, as all PCs in D&D are heroic... and I'd say that post 4E D&D is closer to a supers game than a game about ordinary folks.
For the most part, these are "everyman" type characters, caught up in a situation over their head. They survive by a little luck and a little brains, but mostly they are just ordinary people getting by.
Look at the characters
Frank Frink from "the man in the high castle". A secret Jew that works with creating replica Americana.
Joe Chip from "Ubik", a debt-ridden tecnician.
I could go on, but the gist of the stories is an ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances.
D&D handles this terribly, as all PCs in D&D are heroic... and I'd say that post 4E D&D is closer to a supers game than a game about ordinary folks.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes, and a person watching Star Wars can generally get what R2-D2 is saying by paying attention to the emotional inflection of his beeps and chirps in the context of the scene, but this by no means implies that the proper way to convey the character through role play R2-D2 is to spend alot of time talking.
I mean, last night (as DM) I did a dog barking, and everyone quickly understood it to mean, "He wants us to follow him.", but the scene would have played out very differently and the dog would have had an entirely different character and portrayal if I'd had the dog come up to the PC's and actually say it.
Dandu
First Post
A low powered 3.5 D&D campaign with NPC classes like the Expert or Aristocrat might have more of that kind of feel, though that's not quite what the system was designed for.
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