the Hexer, AWESOME!...oh no I take that back

[pickin_grinnin]

hey to each his own
whatever floats your boat
what counts is did you have fun with your pc, not if others liked him
my only concern would be there is only a few seats at the table, your dirt farmer coulda been a follower of your actual PC. If he was your pc then exp pts get divided. If your DM doesnt split the exp pts moneys then OK

like I was sayin its what interests you.....that being said sounds a little weird to me probably not my cup o tea

It was weird for me, too, but that's part of why I did it - to see if I could take a seemingly useless character and make him a valuable party member. It was an intellectual challenge, not something that I continued with other characters.

The other PCs decided they liked the character, so that worked out. I wouldn't have kept playing him if they didn't, or found him disruptive.

That DM awarded XPs individually, rather than splitting them among the group, so that worked out okay.

 

[pemerton]

generally, at least when reading the forums, I do not gain the impression that "unoptimized" is seen by the majority as a valid way to play the game. Instead combat power is the only or biggest focus of any character.

You seem to me to clling to this opinion even when people post counterexamples.

For instance, I routinely see you make posts that 4e is all about combat encounters, combat power etc. Then 4e players (and not just me) post examples of social skill challenges, social-only sessions, exploration and escape scenarios, etc; or PCs who are optimised for skill use, or rituals, or other non-combat options, and you simply dismiss them. (And I could give examples of such PCs from non-D&D campaigns also.)

For my part, I want the players to play PCs who are optimised to engage the mechanics of the game. That way, the game will play well when the mechanics are engaged. If optimising mechanical performance destabilises the game, then I want better mechanics!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Is there a problem when a fighter with very low charisma is part of a party that enters into negotiations in a royal court setting? He would be useless in that one type of encounter, but not useless as an overall party member.

There is a problem, but it isn't as big of a problem, statistically speaking.

In the negotiations scenario- in games, fiction and real life- it is usually 100% acceptable for members of one side or the other to remain non-participatory or even absent. It may even be wise to arrange for such. Letting one person or a subset "do all the talking" is commonplace.

If a group is in combat, a present non-participant is both a rarity and a detriment. Odds are good such a person will be targeted by his allies' foes. He could even become a human shield or hostage. Keeping that person from harm can cause his allies to act counter to their own survival in order to preserve them.

Dramatic, yes- but really a role more befitting an NPC. It is..."aheroic."

I think a lot of commenters are coming at it from this direction:

- that combat is the most important part of a game
- that characters who don't take part in fighting are useless to the party (regardless of their other skills)
- that dirt farmers or peasants are unskilled people

Well, I don't agree with the third proposition, and the first two are HIGHLY dependent on the nature of the campaign.

What I read, however, was a nebulous depiction of your PC's participation in combat when it arose. How, people asked, does someone without spells, weapons or armor contribute when combat arises? How does he avoid becoming a casualty? You simply stated things like:

"While they fought, I poked around in the bushes, or dug in the dirt."

"On top of that, do you really think that the only way to stop an ogre (or any other monster) is to attack it, stun it, teleport the party away, etc.? There are a lot of ways to effectively deal with a situation like that without needing to fight or cast spells, particularly if the monster (or human opponent) doesn't see your character as a potential threat in any way. "

"Most warriors don't pay any attention to the peasant farmer running around in the background when they are faced with an armed, dangerous opponent, and I used that to my (and my party's) advantage."


"There are a lot of ways to win fights against opponents you can't hope to defeat directly. "

...without actually explaining how you helped or how you avoided being targeted by enemies once you did. That's why Neonchameleon raised the specter of the Oberoni fallacy.

And then this:

"In that hypothetical situation, during the battle the ogre wouldn't be thinking of me at all, because he would be too busy fighting with people who were a real threat."

I'm sorry, but I agree with Celebrim- in the scenario where the ogre is looking for a meal, his best bet is to pick out the weakest target- your PC- grab it and run away, and damn the warriors. Or he could strike the weakest (your PC again) and kill it, then retreat until the corpse was abandoned by its protectors.

Both are common and successful hunting tactics of RW predators that don't have a third of the smarts of a typical ogre.

As Celebrim pointed out in the last post of the thread, even wolves are that smart.

On the previous thread, in particular, they vacillated between ignoring my clarifications to my statements and claiming that I was deluded (or lying). The amount of hostility is amazing.

Because your "clarifications" lacked clarity. Nothing directly or clearly answered the repeated questions of how you did so without DM interference. People were looking for some kind of mechanical underpinning to your assertions, specific skills, rules, etc. to look at, and you offered none.

That's why I keep saying this is a communications issue.

It's like this: you made an assertion, and a rather bold one. Others asked how you did so, looking for ways within the rules they could look at and examine and see if they could reproduce your kinds of results for themselves. But every answer about your PC was devoid of any game mechanics people could examine in the context of D&D. You couldn't even reveal what class the PC was. The PC is black boxed. Redacted.

IOW, the hostility that arose didn't arise from people making assumptions, it's that your responses didn't answer their questions with any degree of specificity.

 

[Elf Witch]

Have you read the original thread? If not, you need to do so if you are going to make blanket assumptions about that character.

There are many ways to contribute to a campaign that have nothing to do with magic or fighting, particularly if you are playing in a game that isn't just hack-and-slash. I only created that character after I had figured out how to do that, which is why the DM allowed it. I am a creative problem-solver. The character had none of the stereotypical "adventurer" skills, but that doesn't mean he had no skills at all. Farmers have to have a variety of different skills and knowledge sets to do their jobs. He also had a lot of personality quirks that are useful in various situations, if you know how to play them effectively.

The whole point in playing the character was to see if I could do it in a way that made him a valuable party member. If I wasn't able to achieve that, or he became a burden to the party, I would have dropped him.

I did read it. I don't see how your PC pulled his weight. But if your DM and the other players were okay with it in the end then that is all that matters.

I don't play hack and slash and I don't believe a character has to be a classic adventurer to be valuable to the party.

I will say I have never had a good experience with totally off the wall style characters. Most of the time lame duck characters are a drain on the party and are a pain if you are running an Adventure Path because it throws off the party level. And I have seen that when a player decides to do this as a challenge to themselves they are often thinking only of their fun not the rest of the table's fun.

I am not saying that is what you did but it has been my experience so that colors it for me.

 

[Halivar]

I will say I have never had a good experience with totally off the wall style characters. Most of the time lame duck characters are a drain on the party and are a pain if you are running an Adventure Path because it throws off the party level.

I've seen it done well, in instances where the character was a "6th wheel" and kept their game intrusion to comic relief. As long as the character is not disruptive it can work. It takes a special kind of player though, and there are only one or two people I would trust with such a character; I veto these for everyone else.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

A bit of a preface: I have not read the thread that describes the dirt farmer adventures, and as such I can't make any comment on the character's usefulness, perceived or otherwise.

However, one of the things to note is players will often want to make characters that are reasonably worthwhile on their own due to game mechanics rather than because the DM allows them to live. As @Dannyalcatraz notes, if a monster doesn't see something as a threat it could very likely see it as something to kill and eat. An ogre would certainly see some value in a defenseless humanoid either as food or as a slave perhaps, while a gargantuan dragon could see it as not being worth his time to even interact with much like we see ants as not worth interacting with.

Hoping that the enemy will just ignore the character is probably not going to believably work in a lot of situations if combat against hungry and semi-intelligent or opportunistic foes happens even once in a while unless the character has actual mechanical abilities that allow it to become the proverbial ant. That seems to be the biggest issue people have with such a character.

There's generally a game agreement where the players agree to play to the concepts of the game. In D&D, the base agreement is that a character will have meaningful and believable (within the context of the game's rules) ways to interact with and change his environment and thus the story. That's not to say a DM can't allow for something different, but having that something different allowed and played with must be stated up front in such a way that it's very clear a nonstandard play method is being used. At that point, if people are ragging on the concept it's their issue for not understanding that something different is going on from what they know as normal and effectively this person is playing a different kind of game.

So congrats to you for having fun with it, but the character concept would not be my cup of tea because I just wouldn't play with that kind of character given my style of D&D gaming.


Quite the offtopic though. lol

As far as Prestige Classes go, in actual play I'd make it clear up front that I want to know where the character plans on going so I can plan accordingly. And yes, some will be banned for reasons like they don't fit into the theme of the game, they're mechanically broken in some way, or something similar. Were I DM I'd always have the player ask if something's okay to use as-is or with a fix, and as a player I'd always ask if something can be used as-is or with a fix. And getting told no isn't the end of the real worl, although it might make things more difficult in the game world.

 

[Elf Witch]

I've seen it done well, in instances where the character was a "6th wheel" and kept their game intrusion to comic relief. As long as the character is not disruptive it can work. It takes a special kind of player though, and there are only one or two people I would trust with such a character; I veto these for everyone else.

Maybe because we usually only have small parties this is a real issue. If you have a party of four and one is a lame duck that puts a lot of the work on the other three. There is also the idea of sharing XP if you do nothing for most of the game then why should get an equal share of XP? I am not talking one session here I am talking consistently not pulling your weight.

There are a lot of ways to pull your weight beside combat skills. Back in 2E the wizard with his one spell would throw it then hide his job after that became running out and pulling fallen comrades to safety and pouring a healing potion down their throats. Later of course he ruled the table.

I just ask that a character be good at something.

 

[Eman Resu]

In my continuing search for worthy classes/prestige classes for evil pc I ran across the hexer and now Fiend Blooded. Fiend Blooded would have as dumb or ridiculous entry requirement as Hexer. Fiend Blooded asks that you have blood call blood feat and that you not be half fiend.

The Blood fur Blood feat says you have to be of fiendish decent to qualify for the feat.

SOOOO theres either a mistake here or a specific feat err race they had in mind ONCE AGAIN but just failed to mention it!

What is the way(s) one might qualify for Fiend Blooded prestige class in 3.5?

Eman

 

[Ahnehnois]

What is the way(s) one might qualify for Fiend Blooded prestige class in 3.5?

Be a tiefling (or other evil planetouched). Or simply get the DM to agree that a fiend is somewhere deep in your ancestry. The Blood Calls to Blood feat does not specify that your heritage must be manifest in terms of racial abilities; I suspect the wiggle room is intentional.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

There's also the Fiendish Heritage feat.