Is there a social obligation?

[Nifft]

I sort of think there's an obligation.

Agree with this post 100%.

Deliberately playing someone useless is better than deliberately playing someone who steals from his partymembers, but not by much. The player may be using social conventions to justify his anti-social behavior to the group and at the expense of the other players -- and that's not fun, even if those specific actions could be fun in another context.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Mort]

By that logic our bard is an ineffective character. We spend alot of time digging his character ou tof roleplaying trouble. IN combat he adds quite a bit. Roleplaying wise he's a headache and a handful.

Going back to my earlier post - does the character contribute to everyone's fun at the table or is he a true headache that would have been kicked out of the party long ago but for the player being friends with you guys? If the later, then that's a problem and the player is being an ass.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I don't believe that there is a social obligation to create "effective characters". There certainly hasn't been any particular need for it in the past, although I suppose it could be argued that the 4e focus on 'party' rather than 'individual' might mean that ineffective characters are a bigger detriment to the party than ever before.

However, I do believe that there is a social obligation to not be a dork. To not play a character who stabs other PCs in the back for fun, who continually tries to make secret deals with the thieves guild, who plays the game entirely for themselves and without any consideration to allowing the game to be fun for other people.

 

[ForceUser]

If one of my players was intentionally drafting an ineffective character mechanically I'd ask him why, discuss it, and if he was dead set on continuing I'd warn him that the other players might not take kindly to it. But I'd let him do it. If the same player played that PC ineptly on purpose, I'd take that into account when crafting encounters---after all, he's essentially making himself a non-entity from a combat perspective. So why penalize the whole group for that?

 

[KidSnide]

I'll echo the general sentiment that there is a social obligation, but the obligation is to create a character suitable for the game, not specifically to create an effective character. Of course, in many games (including LG, LFR, guild WoW) effectiveness is an important part of the game and, yes, an ineffective character would violate the social obligation.

But, more broadly speaking, role-playing is a social experience and everyone has an obligation to play a character that makes the game fun for everyone else at the table. What exactly that entails depends on the table.

-KS

 

[JoeGKushner]

Depends on the nature of the game.

For a standard dungeon crawling game, yes, the character should be competent. If he's not and the other characters adventure with him and survive the first encounter, they should immediately drop him from their party. You wouldn't travel with someone to have your back with a bananna.

If it's not a standard dungeon crawl and there's a lot of role playing going on, not so much so. Mind you, to me, this is more difficult in 4e than in some other editions of the game because of the methodology of how encounters were initially set up but role playing is role playing regardless of the edition. Here, a jerk character is far worse on the party than a character whose mechanical brilliance fails to spark.

 

[lin_fusan]

What if a character was too effective and detracted from the fun?

In my very first 3.0 game, a player lost a character and brought in a single-classed (Batman) wizard.

Because we were playing a very "unoptimized" campaign (everyone was duel or even triple-classed), the wizard completely outshined the rest of the party. The other players got very frustrated since it started to devolve into "wait for the wizard to do everything for us".

The game quickly fell apart after that because the player of the wizard didn't want to play his character anything less than he could, and the other players didn't like feeling "forced" to change their characters to match his play style. (He even said that wizards "should" be all-powerful and the other character classes "should" be substandard.)

So I personally feel that the ineffective-effective character business really reflects the fact that one player is playing with a completely different set of expectations than the other players. In that perspective, the one player is bound by social contract to not detract from the fun of the other players, but it doesn't have anything to do with effectiveness.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

A gaming session is a social event, so of course everyone has social obligations, just as they would at a dinner party, backyard bbq, or poker night.

For gaming, those social obligations include the normal things like "Be on time", "Don't swear around the kids" and "Shower, for pete's sake", as well as the D&D specific ones like:

- DM strives to be fair and run a game that keep everyone happy.
- Players run characters that fit the theme and setting of the campaign; as well as the play-style and goals of the group.

If that group play-style puts a premium combat effectiveness, then absolutely a player with a dangerously inept PC is violating the contract. But if the play-style is "goofball casual", then such a PC might be a perfect fit. It just depends.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No, they are under no obligation to create an "effective" character. Because nine times out of ten... the ones who claim a character isn't effective are the min-maxer powergamers who have such tunnel vision about what it means to be "effective" in the first place that they're the only ones who would readily identify someone else as being "not effective".

 

[jasonbostwick]

So far I've yet to have a player in any of my groups intentionally create a character that was (mechanically) ineffective.

I highlight intentionally because we have a few players who are new to RPGs or just don't have brains wired for tactics, and without serious handholding would have absolutely no idea how to gauge an effective build. We get around this by doing most character generation as a group activity, building the party as a whole instead of bringing together individual characters.

I'm not quite sure how I would deal with someone deliberately building an inept PC. For the time being I play 4E, and the only way to make a character that couldn't contribute at all would be to completely ignore your attack bonus.

I really can't wrap my head around how missing your attacks all the time could possibly be fun. Combat can take up a large portion of a session, so for a few hours the player would basically have nothing to do. I'd imagine the player would try to make up for that by seeking increased 'screen time' elsewhere.

Their use of the screen time could be positive and entertaining to the group (like Elan, the stereotypical bard in OoTS), but there are a lot of opportunities for disruption.

In the extreme, I can see a situation where the player of the inept PC is basically not even playing the same game as the rest of the group.