Lame-O Characters in Your Party

[ThoughtBubble]

All of my expierence with Lame characters was on the fault of the player, not the character. The first was an elven fighter/thief (2nd ed) who had a penchant for abandoning the party. The second was a cleric who would hide while a fight was going on, and only come out in the most dire of cirucmstances. The third was a fighter/rogue who complained loudly about anything, nearly got the party killed by playing with items in a wizard's lair, and never once was able to get a sneak attack off. Those were all the same person.

On the other hand, we had a sorcerer, who carried a spear, and constantly did stupid things in battle. He truely had the soul of a swashbuckler. It was only luck and a high con score that kept him alive. But he was so much fun we didn't mind much. And when one of his hairbrained plans did work, it was purely amazing. All and all, he was pretty much a lame addition to the party statwize, always getting himself nearly killed, and causing no end of trouble. But in that case we loved him for being so fun.

I guess being lame is as much about the environment as anything else.


Now, to get one last thing out of the way.

Thoughtbubble is talking out of his bubbly ass on this one. CRPGs are as diverse and varied as PnP RPGs, and lumping together everyone who plays them betrays nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the genre.

Hey, hong, read everything I wrote, k? Then process it. I'm sure you'll find that I didn't say that at all.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

• First character. 1st-level Paladin. Happened to be the lowest level PC in the group, but didn't know it. In the first combat encounter of the campaign, the party (six PCs, average level: 2rd) stumbles across an angry owlbear in the wilderness. The Paladin's player, winning the initiative, thinks to himself: "The DM would never throw a monster at us that we couldn't handle!" He charges the owlbear and misses. The creature happens to go next on initiative - claw - claw - DEAD. Go figure.
• Second character. Now the player is running a lightly-armored fighter with scimitar, buckler, and chain shirt. He's 3rd level (average party level: 4th). The party, bolstered temporarily by three NPC adventurers (total characters: 9), is attacked by a pair of trolls. The Fighter has the misfortune of happening to be in the path of one of the charging giants, which wounds him badly. Does he back off from the front lines, back to the healer? No! He heroically stands tall against the troll. Claw - claw - REND - dead fighter. Tragic

You know, that sounds exactly like what I'd have done in either of those situations. Well, ok, after the first one, I'd have been hiding, and crying like a little girl whever something violent crossed our path. The third time though, that's impressive. I hope he brought something else to the table, like cookies.

 

[the_mighty_agrippa]

We had a ranger who insisted on fighting with nunchaku and darts. He actually wasted a FEAT so he could fight with nunchaku. Yes, you heard me correctly. Why he couldn't use a real weapon and a longbow is beyond me.

In our current group, we have not one lame-o character, but two. It's so bad that our 5th level party struggles against CR 5 monsters!!!

We have a fighter with with STR 11 and CON 13 but CHA 17!! He wanted to be different. His difference is that he can't hit for $h!*, can't deal damage for $h!* (average 4.5/hit) and goes down if he gets hit by a dart!! He is supposed to be a DEX based fighter. Why, then, did he waste a feat on weapon finesse when he INSISTS ON FIGHTING WITH A LONGSWORD AND REFUSES TO USE A RAPIER EVEN AFTER OUR DM GAVE HIM A MASTERWORK RAPIER FOR FREE!!!! He left it behind!!

We also have a cleric with the following stats:

STR 11
DEX 10
CON 12
INT 16
WIS 14
CHA 10

Our DM looked at these stats and suggested the player remake the character using 32 point buy. He declined. This character does the dumbest things ever. He is human and doesn't have the blindfighting feat but memorizes darkness multiple times and then casts it on himself and tries to run around so the enemies "won't hit him." Also, as you noticed, his STR and CON is similar to our fighter, so he is useless in a fight. For some reason, he took the feat MWP: Glaive. Even though he has a strength of 11 and is known to cast darkness on himself and run around in circles.

*Tries to stop from screaming*

Oh, the humanity.

 

[wocky]

In my group we call useless characters "Wookies". That comes from this Wookie Jedi PC in Star Wars d20 who had average not-so-great rolls (still, good enough that they shouldn't be rerolled) and decided to place his racial bonuses in his lowest attributes and his racial penalizers in his highest.

The result was such a joe-average that we wondered how the heck he decided to pursue a life of adventuring, let alone, how he ever got into the Jedi academy. I think he didn't have more than one or two +1 modifiers in his attributes.

 

[Shazman]

Well, we had a player that had bad luck with PC's in our Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign. His first character was a cleric. He eventually lost interest in that PC and quit playing for a while. After a while, he came back with a black orc Brb/Ftr/Rgr shooting for the tempest PrC that got killed by an orc barbarian because he refused to step back for some healing. The same character was raised and killed again the next session. He then played an elf Ftr/OoBI that was killed by a pyro kobold sorcerer. His fourth character, a ftr/dwarven defender, ended up surviving but did have a very close call with a scarb of death.

 

[the_mighty_agrippa]

I went through a period where I lost a character every game session for nine session. But none of them were wallflowers that could not answer simple questions.

Hey, can you hit anything with that bow?
...
Have you ever shot at anything larger than a chipmunk?
...
Are you a pacifist?
...

Agh...