I'm having a difficult time understanding how to reconcile 'I pulled weight' with your early claim that all your PC knew how to do was farm. Generally speaking, farming is a slow laborious activity that occurs in a single location over the course of a large portion of the year and is ill suited to most anything that a campaign could be about except farming.
That's all he knew how to do. When he went out adventuring, he figured out ways to use farming skills in other contexts.
The same happens in the real world. I have known people who come from fairly isolated background with particular skill sets (sometimes third world countries) who quickly learn how to use that knowledge effectively when they end up immigrating or having to move to a new area.
the 'value added' by this sort of thing is still NPC level
What is "NPC level?" You could easily hire mercenaries to accompany your party who are better fighters than any party member. They are still NPCs.
I'm assuming that 90% of the campaign isn't farming by your own description of the rest of the party as being more normally oriented to acquiring power and wealth.
There is a difference between the act of farming and the skills acquired by doing so.
One of the problems with 'this isn't a fighting game' is that even when the game isn't primarily about fighting, 'we fight' is still a powerful trump card than a rival, foil, or foe can play. If you can't answer it, you lose.
Do you think that the only way to deal with a foe who decides to physically attack you is to directly fight back? There are a lot of ways to win fights against opponents you can't hope to defeat directly.
When you move back to the early editions of D&D, clerics and thieves were virtually useless in any real fight. They were still contributing members of their parties who pulled their weight, though, because they brought along skills that the other players didn't have.
No. But I think that the other ways to effectively deal with it beyond violence require epic social skills not normally associated with just 'I'm only good at growing crops'.
Epic social skills don't have to be determined by dice rolls. They can come directly from the way the player handles the character.
There are also ways to play a character that has a strong social/psychological effect on NPCs that doesn't require epic level negotiation, diplomacy, etc. skills. When played right, a character who is a living non-sequitur can be very useful in distracting NPCs and throwing them off guard. There are a lot of examples of that in literature, film, and TV.
To pick just one example, the character Columbo (from the TV show of the same name) was eccentric and did everything in a way that seemed nonsensical to people around him. He was almost a jester of sorts. In the end, though, his approach to things threw people off guard and annoyed them, which often led to them saying things (and hence revealing clues) that they normally wouldn't. They didn't expect a detective to act the way he did, and suspected he might be a little mentally off, so he either became a goofy non-threat to them or an annoyance they just wanted to get rid of. That's what made him so effective.
The character I was playing often served in the same capacity. Some NPCs found him to be a charming country bumpkin and let their guard down. Some found him annoying and were distracted by him, which made it easier for other player characters to do other things (steal items, get them to agree to better terms just to get rid of us, etc.). Some saw him as a helpless non-threatening background figure, which let him get away with doing a lot of things while they watched the more stereotypical characters carefully. I was able to help them avoid fights they didn't want to get into, steal things the thief couldn't get to, etc. etc.
This is the sort of statement that makes me wish I was discussing this character with your DM instead of you. Because it sounds like your DM pulled off an epic job of illusionism in making your character relevant to the story.
He didn't have to. I was an experienced player by then who approached a lot of things with a GM mentality. He knew that I would make the character relevant. He didn't need to do anything but his job.
You see, when I think of "ogre doesn't think of you as a potential threat", my first thought in answer to the question, "well what does he think of you as then", is in fact "food". And the ogre, while stupid, is not so stupid as to make the bargain, "I'll give you these 6 sheep if you'll let me and my friends go."
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.
After the battle, I would keep him confused, lead him away, etc.
Because the answer to that is, "Me eat you first and keep sheep too." So unless your character who is only good at farming is also an epic liar and trickster, the ogre just eats you and your friends BECAUSE you are not a threat, and not despite it.
That character wouldn't do something so obvious.
Any character can act as a trickster without needing to have hard trickster skills on the character sheet. You just have to have a smart, resourceful player with trickster skills who can play the character in a way that takes advantage of that while staying within character. That particular farmer character wasn't a conscious liar or trickster - I was. He was highly eccentric and made strange choices because of it. I made sure that the choices he made provided trickster-like effects, but still fit within the stated character concept.
None of that has anything to do with what is on the character sheet, and particular none of that has anything to do with the character 'I'm just a dirt farmer'. Research skills aren't something I normally associate with dirt farmers
I didn't say he had those skills. I said those are examples of non-combat skills that can make a non-fighter useful in a campaign. That had nothing to do with the farmer character.
Always being the one to ask the right questions again either involves you not playing with your peers (because apparently they can't ask the right questions on their own), or else epic amounts of 'notice' or 'sense motive' which again means you aren't just 'a dirt farmer' (since when is being a psychoanalyst of anything other than sheep associated with being a farmer?).
He asked the right questions when his peers didn't because he didn't know any better.
In the real world, one of the hardest audiences to fool in a magic show are children, because they haven't yet learned where they are "supposed" to look and how they are "supposed" to respond. That makes the job of a magician much harder, because so much of magic depends on taking advantage of blind spots in human perception, some of which are culturally learned.
The farmer character was something of a child in many ways. I consciously played him that way, and he ended up seeing and hearing things that the other player characters didn't, just as children do in the real world.
And as for 'figuring out how to manipulate the town guards without needing to roll a skill check', that's just DM illusionism providing for your success because the DM needs or wants you to succeed.
Not at all. He didn't need to roll skill checks because the character wasn't doing things that directly related to common social skills (like diplomacy). When he distracted town guards, he generally wasn't setting out to do so. He was just doing the strange things that he did, and the guards would sometimes react to them. Since he was completely harmless, they often didn't act aggressively - they acted the way they would if a child or mentally ill person was doing something strange in front of them. Most would just try to shoo him off, but that provided enough distraction.
Your character may well develop a line of argumentation that grants a bonus to a social skill check, but if it is forgone altogether in despite your lack of social skills on the character sheet then that's DM fiat recognition of player skill rather than character skill - and again implies you aren't playing with peers because they need you the player to do everything for them.
Now we're getting to the root of where we disagree. Player skill enacted within the bounds of the character concept is just as important as numeric skills used in rolls. That's a big part of it being a roleplaying game, rather than a wargame. You can run two groups of players through the exact same adventure with the same set of pre-gen characters. The person playing the fighter (or whatever) in one group may run the character in a way that turns him into the hero of the day. The other player may run the same character in a way where he ends up being the worst character in the party. None of that has to do with stats - it has to do with the skill of the player. That was the big part of my challenge to myself - to run a relevant character who was useful to his party, but without the apparent skills to be able to do so. It worked. It might not have, but it did.
And again, political clout isn't something that is associated with 'I'm just a dirt farmer' nor is it something that baring deus ex machina plots like 'Being There' is it something that dirt farmers are notably good at acquiring.
How many poor farmers do you know in real life? One side of my family is full of them. Being poor and being a farmer doesn't mean you have a limited amount of skills. Far from it - farmers tend to be very skilled at a wide variety of things. None of those things may seem to be useful outside of a farming context, but that's the challenge - finding ways to make them so.
Again, political clout is hard to acquire lacking a skill beyond knowing how to farm. You pretty much are always going to lose to the guy that knows how to farm and how to offer bribes, how to persuade people, how to give grand oration, how to figure out how to manipulate people, has a certain magnetism that makes people want to be near them, and seems really interesting to talk to at a cocktail parties to people who aren't interested in curing pig ailments but are interested in markers of status.
Those aren't the skills that character used. I played him along the lines of the eccentric, harmless person who would normally seem like a background figure, and hence irrelevant or a source of disdainful humor to his "betters." Some reacted to him as a sort of Forrest Gump character, some in other ways. The DM varied the reactions of the NPCs quite a bit.
I'm trying to think of any game I'd run or played in during 30 years where irrigating farmland was so critical that having that skill at a 'heroic' level immediately at hand was needed and I'm drawing a blank.
At it's base, successful irrigation of farmland involves a good knowledge of how to route and control flowing water, absorption rates, spotting environmental issues by looking at the rate of plant growth, etc. It's not a single skill - it's a set of skills. I have been in any number of campaigns where knowing how to expertly control the flow of a liquid or semi-liquid would have been useful (redirecting lava towards and enemy, for example).
You can run a game where everything revolves around rolling dice against stats and skills. You can also run a game where you only do that when there is a real reason to do so. This was not a heavily mechanistic game.
One reason that I was confident that I could run a character like that is because I use similar strategies in real life. I am a non-physically-imposing, short little guy with a lot of hobbies, interests, and opinions that some people find threatening or confusing. Half my hobbies are stereotypically "female" in nature. I'm into BDSM and am bisexual. My political persuasion is in the minority in the area I live in. I'm an atheist. Etc. etc. Nonetheless, I don't face much discrimination, hostility, etc., even when very conservative people figure some of these things out. That's because I work hard to make sure that people see me as eccentric but utterly harmless, friendly, and interesting. When people see you as an eccentric but harmless and friendly entertaining outsider it lets you get away with all sorts of things that would be serious social drawbacks otherwise. I'm very good at doing that, and transferred that knowledge to the way I ran that particular character.
These are your assumptions, but I'd ask the reverse: how can you _know_ that the challenge doesn't involve fighting? Why do you assume that there won't be constant combat in any campaign? Why do you assume that you wont' be put into situations where the only thing that really matters is whether you can physically stop something from happening?
I knew how that GM ran his games. When discussing the possibility of running such an odd character, I asked him how combat-focused that campaign would be, and he told me, because it was relevant to the decision on whether to run that type of character or not.
Look, I've read 'The Hobbit' 36+ times. And you are just entirely wrong there on so many counts.
In short, Bilbo can be easily thought of as actually being a peer or near peer level 'rogue' or 'thief' as his party role would imply.
He was neither a trained fighter nor and experienced thief. He learned to use his natural skills in ways that made him relevant to the party.
So did my character. His skills didn't translate into a stereotypical party class or role, but that didn't make them any less useful. When you look at his overall contributions and daily usefulness to the party, he was a peer, but in a way that nobody but me expected him to be.
And in 3e terms, any PC classed character with Craft(agriculture) would still be a superior character than a commoner or expert with Craft(agriculture).
You're thinking in mechanistic terms, and viewing real world skills as single things, rather than collections of smaller skills that can be used independently of the obvious one. Farmers have to have a complex set of skills made up of smaller skills. When you "unbundle" them (as in the irrigation example above), you can start to see a lot of additional uses for them.
Again, unless your character had some sort of uncanny power not to be noticed, this is your DM granting you agency because he needs to, and not some logical outcome of the situation.
No, it was logical. Servants, peasants, etc. wouldn't normally register as dangerous opponents, and if they aren't doing anything threatening, often (though not always) fall beneath the notice of PCs who see themselves as their "betters."
There is no reason in particular why the opposite wouldn't regularly be true - foes prefer to tackle the peasant farmer than the clearly armed and dangerous ones, or foes simply lack the discernment to prioritize, or that there are more than enough foes that everyone gets their share.
People are more likely in combat to focus on the ones they view as dangerous foes, not the harmless ones in the background. That's true in real life battle situations, too.
In other words, I think you just think that you creatively found ways to be useful. My impression is your DM creatively found ways to let you be useful.
That's a very big assumption, and not true in the least. The DM didn't have to find ways for me to be useful. I found ways, and often surprised him with them. He was very vocal about how fascinated he was with the way I was able to do that without needing a lot of DM help.
As I said before, that character - and the way I ran him - would not have worked with all DMs and players in all campaigns. When I found myself in a campaign where it would work, I tried it out, and it went well. It wasn't some grand discovery about how to run characters in any campaign. I had a situationally-dependent opportunity, and went for it.
They types of stereotypical characters that you generally see in D&D and Pathfinder come about largely because the games are designed to favor that type of design. They favor things like fighters, thieves, rangers, etc. because Gygax and Arneson were wargamers (hence all the fighting) who were in love with Tolkien (hence the most common classes and races). Most fantasy rpgs since then have been direct ripoffs of D&D, which was a direct ripoff of Tolkien and a few other high fantasy literary worlds.
A lot of people think that the standard classes are there because they are the best or most powerful way to play a character in a high fantasy world. They aren't, necessarily - they're the most common, but that doesn't mean they are superior to other ones.
The same goes for skills. Certain ones are seen as superior because they tend to work best within a given system if you use them as-is. Creative use of seemingly inferior skills can trump standard use of seemingly superior skills, though. It's not the most common way to do things, but it can be highly effective with a player who knows what (s)he is doing. That's true in the real world, too.
Not everyone plays rpgs in highly mechanistic ways - a wargame with some roleplaying interspersed. For example, you don't need to roll for diplomacy in every situation where diplomacy is used. If the player is doing a good job of roleplaying the diplomacy, there is often no need to roll. Rolling on something like that becomes more important when you have a mechanistic player who says "I talk to them and use my diplomacy skill."
I have met people in real life who are far, far out in left field in almost every way, yet are beloved by their neighbors and important in their communities. The British in particular are know for "loving their eccentrics." As a librarian, I work with children daily, and have seen many instances where a young child asks a question that makes an adult totally rethink the way something is being done. The child didn't know what (s)he was supposed to ask or look for, and came up with something that was brilliantly insightful. There is no reason that rpgs can reflect things like that.
