Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5580002" data-attributes="member: 21169">It's a very interesting question. Looking back over all my PCs, I've tended to have more fun when my character performed up to certain levels of 'kickassitude'. And power relative to the other PCs is definitely a factor, too.In my first game of 3e D&D, we used an unholy combination of Savage Species and the Grim n Gritty rules. This basically meant that if you took monsterish powers that avoided all the nasty stuff the GnG rules do, such as a troll's regeneration, your PC would be much more effective. I failed to do this, my monster had a bad Fort save, which meant that I frequently got knocked unconscious in the first round of every fight. While I rather liked the PC's concept and enjoyed playing the character, my lack of combat optimisation definitely made the game less fun. The flaw really was with the rules, though. Savage Species is very unbalanced to begin with, and the Grim n Gritty rules exacerbated this problem.In another, later Savage Species game, I played a drider sorcerer which I felt basically worked mechanically. I could do some cool stuff but I wasn't crazy good. However there were two other PCs in that game that were incorrectly optimised imo. The full caster druid with spells from Spell Compendium and other splatbook powers was simply far too good compared to the Savage Species PCs. I remember in ranged combat, I'd be doing like 10 points with my magic missiles, he'd be doing 50 with some acid blast power. Too much of a disparity. Otoh there was a stone giant who consistently rolled terribly for his hit points. The low hit points led to the player having him act in such a cowardly fashion that he often contributed nothing to a fight, running away, or doing no damage. (I believe the PC didn't yet have the stone throwing ability at this point.) This group were very beholden to the rules, so if the rules said one PC was ineffective compared to the others, then he was. My feeling, even at the time, was that we should've said 'screw the rules' and brought the stone giant up to the average party power level, even if it meant giving him powers the rules said he shouldn't have. Again, as with the the first campaign, the rules weren't doing the job, they weren't bringing the fun.</blockquote>

Verification