Playing Apparent Losers

[Bigwilly]

I've not really played any real losers, but have had a number of deliberately disadvantaged characters including:

Laughing Weasel - 3e Sorcerer / Barbarian. Only buff spells and no armor. Actually a fairly decent first line fighter if he got his buffs up. Finally bought it in a TPK.

Silver Scales - Shadowrun troll shaman with cyberware. Possibly the worst combination of 3rd edition SR options. Cyberware and magic really don't go well together.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

I'd rather play with an entertaining "good" character.

"Good" and "interesting" are not mutually exclusive.

I'm sick of the "real roleplayers" who think that "useless character" = "not powergaming" = "superior roleplayer".

Geoff.

This.

You can have an interesting, flawed character that is at the same time useful to the whole party.

For example, in one recent game one of my buddies played an alcoholic paladin... He was hilarious in a social situation, because no one expected the smelly, scruffy warrior in rusty mail and banged-up plate to be the "famous" holy knight the church had sent... He tended to offend the ladies and enrage the lords, leaving the Warlock and the Wizard to try to salvage the social disaster (but never to the point where he intentionally screwed up a skill challenge)

 

[Sanzuo]

One of my favorite characters I ever played was a character I made for a d20 game that my friend ran. He told me to just "make a guy" without telling me what the story or setting was or anything.

So I made a everyman who had a bachelor's in psychology and worked as a professional image consultant.

This guy had absolutely no worth in combat whatsoever. If someone pointed a gun at him he would piss himself and surrender immediately. So when the game turned out to be about a secret society conspiring to instigate an open war between heaven and hell on earth it became pretty interesting.

This guy basically spend the entire campaign running around in terror from everything that came after him - killer government robots, special forces ninja-mages, demonic hyenas, you name it. One thing that he did have going for him was that he absorbed the most knowledge of any other PC in the game. So he knew what was going on and usually had the best plan of action. (Run away!)

He did eventually pick up some limited spellcasting ability, but this was towards the end of the game and were for mostly for utility. (He did cast sleep on a black helicopter once, pretty cool.) I let the other player characters handle all the combat.

This guy was a wuss - and he was awesome.

 

[EroGaki]

One of the most memorable characters I've played was a human fighter named Joe Shmoe. Joe was the human average; every one of his stats was a 10. The dice were not with me when I rolled him up, but I went with it anyway.

Joe was a challenge to play; his low stats disqualified him from many of the quintessential fighter feats (power attack, cleave, etc), and so he had many random, non-optimized feats instead. I remember he had taken Toughness 3 times, simply because there was nothing better that he could take at the time.

Despite being an average fighter (and an average everything, to tell you the truth), the gods seemed to favor him; he alone survived the entire campaign without ever dying, a feat none of the other characters could boast.

As he leveled, I ended up increasing his charisma; despite his blah nature, he grew on people.

 

[maddman75]

I'd rather play with an entertaining "good" character.

"Good" and "interesting" are not mutually exclusive.

I'm sick of the "real roleplayers" who think that "useless character" = "not powergaming" = "superior roleplayer".

Geoff.

I don't recall saying they were mutually exclusive. Just given the choice, I'd take the less optimized character.

And IME, the optimized characters tend to be less interesting. Your optimized character has something to do in every scene to apply their amazing bonus. The non optimized guy has to think on his feet more often. Agan, IME.

But I've certainly seen interesting, optimized characters. Especially if the optimizer uses their powers for good. That if his character is a champion swordsman, he's going to be the best champion swordsman the rules will allow. If he's a happy-go-lucky sidekick that gets by on wits and luck more than anything else, then the rules will reflect that. Optimizing is dependant on what you're optimizing.

Then again I prefer games where balance is essentially enforced by the GM. I mean in M&M its perfectly legal to take a PL10 character and put 140 points into Blast. The GM will beat you with the rulebook until you stop talking nonsense, but its there.