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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackinthegreen" data-source="post: 6196502" data-attributes="member: 6678119">I don't think it's at all reasonable to say that he wants his character to always succeed, or always succeed in the exact manner he wants it to.  The die roll could fail after all and he damn well knows it.  However, he does want to be able to regularly use his character for things it was built for, which in this case was with the understanding that diplomacy was almost always available to use in applicable circumstances (so not combat and such I would hope.)  The character is built on the agreement between the DM and the player that the character is not arbitrarily tossed to the side.  I'd compare it to making a specialist fighter who focuses on melee only to become entirely sidelined because a significant combat encounter prevents wading into melee and whatever backups he might have likely won't be effective since he invested more into being good at one thing and poor at another rather than being mediocre at two things.  That player is not likely going to take kindly to being made useless if he was under the impression that the character he made and got approved by the DM was going to at least be able to do something regularly.Some players play with the assumption that both the DM and player work together on creating the characters.  The DM then puts together encounters that should be enjoyable for the players with enjoyable meaning that they can contribute at least in some part in areas where they've specifically been built to be good.  The 3.5 DMG itself goes into this a bit in the Encounters section on page 48, specifically regarding tailored encounters.Some players build hoping that they'll get more tailored encounters, though of course that's not always going to be feasible because that can be a lot of work if one wants to have varied and interesting encounters.  I think one of the things to keep in mind, as a player, is that expecting the DM to always do tailored encounter is just plain silly.  However, the same could be said for "Status Quo" encounters as the DMG calls it where something simply exists and wasn't created with the party's abilities at that exact time in mind.  DMs need to let players know that, yes, there will be some stuff where you're going to feel outclassed or not useful because that's just how some encounters are.Also, the DMG has some things to say about keeping player abilities in mind.  For example, on page 35 in the Adjudicating Magic section it says:As to whether always succeeding when one has put in significant effort to do so is fun, keep in mind part of the fun of that was building the character in the first place.  Seeing one's efforts result in success (or at least progress towards one's goal) is fun, is it not?  It's not like a god mode game cheat where all you had to do was enter in the code and then trolololol about.  It takes knowledge of the game's mechanics to recognize a favored circumstance and then build towards it within the guidelines of the game itself.</blockquote>

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