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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 4481795" data-attributes="member: 3887">Dark, Idra and Mustrum posted most of what I was going to, but I'd like to address some points they didn't. Nor do I. But we were talking about making a swashbuckling fighter, and a fighter should be able to fight, no? A character can be both competent and well-characterized. The two things aren't mutually exclusive. Neither is a fighter with a 10 STR automatically interesting or well-characterized. Let's call this the Incompetence Fallacy; the belief that a character is inherently deeper, better rounded, and/or more interesting because they're bad at what they're supposed to good at. A dim, poor study of a wizard, a puny barbarian, etc. This is just a simple, mechanical playing-against-type. It could yield an interesting character, but no more so than a character that plays-to-type.Going along with this is the Competence Corollary; a character get less interesting the better he or she is at what they're supposed to be good at. This is nonsense, too.Good characters are more the result of the personalities and mannerisms you give them, their motivations, the non-mechanical thing they contribute during play. Sure, mechanics inform a character, but seeing as D&D is a game heroic fantasy, implicitly about larger-than-life characters, it's not surprising that there are some similarities between characters where it comes to their core competencies.</blockquote>