NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5819948" data-attributes="member: 42582">One option I suggested upthread was that PC + henchman might be a version of the "three pillars" strategy - so at the ball the player primarily plays his/her assassin, while the muscle waits outside guarding the carriage and keeping an eye out for enemy assasins, while in the dungeon the muscle takes the lead and fights the orcs, while the assassin hangs out in the middle and maybe kibbitzes with the mapper.A different option might be for the GM to tailor adventures more closely to the areas of competence of his/her players' PCs, and/or for the players to work more closely together to build a cohesive party. I think this is a big issue in D&D, because perhaps more than any other RPG it has such a strong emphasis on party play.I have seen games - mostly using 2nd ed AD&D - in which players build dapper assassins and then run them through the GM's dungeon crawls, or in which players build dumb muscle and have GMs who send them to ball after ball, but in my experience this tends to towards the dysfunctional end of the roleplaying spectrum.Perhaps. It's a matter of degree. And of mechanics - for example, it's fairly easy to envision mechanics in which the dapper assassin, caught in melee, is able to prevail through wit and deftness. Such mechanics probably would have a high metagame component, however, meaning they're probably not going to be part of core D&Dnext.But when I think of 3 pillars PCs, and especially ones that don't rely so heavily on metagame mechanics, I think of Conan, Aragorn, Merlin, The Grey Mouser, or if I go outside fantasy tropes then a slew of superheroes, James Bond, etc. Whereas dumb muscle and dapper assassins seem to me just not to be 3 pillars archetypes. If the game is really about the 3 pillars, then I'm not sure it should be going out of its way to include dapper assassins and dumb muscle among its PC build options (certainly not in the core).I agree that the occasional quirky failure can be meaningful. If these generate the best long term stories, though, then I want to have a second look at whether the RPG's mechanics are really doing a good job of supporting the sort of play it claims to be supporting.</blockquote>

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