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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chris Parker" data-source="post: 1551725" data-attributes="member: 19575">In the end, its all about The King In YellowI have recently had a relevant experience. Good friend of mine DM's a game largely consistant of other close friends, but some who are near strangers. The Campaign has been going on for 2 years or so, on or off. Started at level 1, and more characters have been added over time. Im one of the fairly new characters, and I created at the average party level 24, but with reduced gold. Im an Iajitsu Master.Most of you know what this means.My Iajitsu skill is well into the triple digits, with a BAB in the 60's. Now, Im no doubt a PowerGamer. However... one of the original characters recently had a problem during the game. His character design is highly skill oriented... his purpose is to forsake most other things and be there when that ridiculously high check in an obscure skill was needed. This said, his highest skill (PickPocket, DM doesnt have 3.5 books) was just barely in the 40's after ability score modifiers. His BAB was a pitiful 22. Less then a third of mine.This caused some problems.Party is assaulting an epic mage tower (had an antimagic field that blocked out all nonepic magic), and after being ambushed twice before, we head up a flight of stairs. A group of glooms drop down on the party (1 for 1) and backstab us all. Some of them run away (specifically since they cant get past mine or the monk's AC [or the assassin's, had he been there that session]), however, they almost one round the skill monkey rogue, dropping him to just barely still double digit damage (good thing hes immune to criticals, elsewise hed have been dead).I yell out, in character, "Come back, come back you miserable cowards!" because I see these guys as free exp (more then half of them were dead on the first round, mage even helped out, because he had some epic staff's he had picked up).Player for the rogue starts yelling at me (the player, not the character), exclaiming he was being ganged up on, was almost dead, couldnt do anything against them, etc etc(note- each of the staffs was sufficient to fry one of them in a round). Even though he only took 1 round of attacks, not even a sneak attack, from one of them. I try reasoning with him, explaining that I had offered to help him turn his character into one that can compete at Epic, and he turned it down. He wasnt Hiding or Moving Silently (If he had been the Glooms wouldnt have seen him, incidentally). He eventually gets out of control and keeps yelling "Shut up!" like a angry mantra.Once he calmed down, he said he never got a chance to use his skills.That specific campaign has always been about the battle system, it was the one they used to get acclimated to the game as a whole. He also complained of us never RPing. While we very rarely do, we each have very flavorful characters. Our Barbarian wanted to be a unstopable Crit Machine, so decided to be a Half Orc Half Halfling (His mother was the halfling... ouch) [also, incidentally, he is a very well accomplished PlayWrite, legendary in thier home kingdom... despite his 6 Charisma], our mage is an Alienist (nuff said), the Bow Assassin has an infamous quote "Come on guys, we can take it!", and is always right (cept for that time he tried to death attack a CR31 golem at level 12...), the Monk is a HalfElf who gets a ridiculous amount of damage per round, and has an AC that resembles a zipcode. To top it off, Im a freaking evil Ferret Hengeyoki Iajitsu Master Swashbuckler Blackguard Dervish WarShaper WeaponMaster. When we do RP, all of those sides of our characters come out, and its a great fun time (what isnt amusing about a 11' tall half orc half halfling giving a speech to an auditorium of people on his two latest plays, "High Or Low, The Tragic Comedy" and "The King In Yellow" [yes, the Alienist had influences there...])In short, I learned the following lessons - If you want to RP, dont do it in a Power Gamer campaign.If you want to do something good at the cost of everything else, make sure you actually do that one thing very well.If you turn down a chance to made into a combat monster, make sure you dont care about combat.Dont ever take a D&D game in such a way that you stand up yelling at your friends. IT IS NOT THAT IMPORTANT.Always take Use Magic Device, always.~Chris.-----Moderatly more relevant side note: Seeing as how Im a poor ass college student, anyone have an online version of that book? Id love to see it [writing out those equations by hand would be tedious <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />]</blockquote>

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