Things to do in a tabletop rpg that are not combat related?

[Celebrim]

I don't recall for certain, but I think I just played him using the stats, skills, etc. that you would normally associate with an NPC farmer.

So you are saying you were playing a 0th level fighter with 1d4 hit points that couldn't gain XP?

Only if you are a slave to the charts and don't follow Gygax's original advice.

You realize that I've been playing since about 1981? You keep saying that I'm making assumptions, but that blade cuts two ways. I know enough about irrigation that I can show you a few golf courses in Alabama I designed. I know enough about poor farmers that my mother picked cotton as a girl to help feed the family, and I didn't exactly grow up wealthy either. And if you think my table works on, "I talk to them and use my diplomacy skill.", then you aren't nearly as prescient as you think you are.

There are no required rules in any game, and there is nothing that says that you need to make unnecessary rolls or give the same weight to every chart. Though 3.5 had a lot of differences, it's still a fantasy rpg, and the way I played the character made him much less dependent on having particular stats. I could have run the same basic character in Ars Magica, Runequest, Fate, or just about any other game, because I played him in a way that wasn't heavily tied to a particular ruleset.

Let me tell you what I, as a RPG GM with 30 odd years of experience, am hearing in this. What your GM did was secretly and without telling you replace your character sheet with a character sheet from the game Toon. And the other players in your game where playing D&D while you were - quite unwittingly - playing Toon. And figuratively written on your secret character sheet was your characters one pertinent ability and rule, "If it would be funny, it works."

When the rules don't apply to you, of course you can succeed. What you keep describing as you being clever isn't you being clever, and for the most part isn't even particularly clever. It's your DM being clever and playing along with the joke in a carefully tamed scenario versus carefully tamed foes. What you describe as the DM not letting you win, is your DM playing a really smart game of player empowerment with a sidekick type character he figures inherently can't steal too much spotlight, so what the hay (a pun, get it), why not?

Think of it this way. If you had a character encounter a sphinx and it required you to solve a riddle (or be eaten), the DM could have you roll to see if you solved it, or could state the riddle and see if you can figure it out and answer it correctly.

Yeah, but here's the deal: the rest of the players don't need you to do that unless you really aren't playing with your peers. The rest of the players can solve riddles quite well without you, roleplay just fine without you, come up with plans themselves, etc. You aren't adding anything particular to the party unless the other players are like 11 and lack experience, knowledge, intelligence, creativity and so forth themselves. Player skill is great, but its rather my experience that every player can contribute that. What you can't do regardless of player skill is use that 0th level fighter/1st level commoner to pull weight.

You keep talking like you just grabbed this 0th level fighter and contributed to the party because you were just so clever. But really all you've been doing is praising your DM's patience and cleverness, because what's coming through loud and clear is all the things you aren't saying that I associate with normal D&D play that somehow you don't have happen to you. All your examples involve foils rather than foes, and stupid cartoonish foils at that. Even so much as a pack of starving wolves breaks you concept and examples of how you contributed all to heck, because the wolf pack isn't like, "Let's go after the big healthy one with the pointy sword." The wolf pack is like, "Let's cull the weak!! Food!!" And that's just like standard, "Hey we are first level", fare. Granted, wolves maybe can be legitimately evaded with the old 'let's take a flock of sheep with us into the dungeon/wilderness', which is funny but is a trope as old as Tomb of Horrors at the least, but that's not been your examples so far and really it also has its limits. Any progression past 3rd level or so would have surely meant gaze attacks, breath weapons, fireballs and the like. But you were playing with a friendly DM with his kid gloves on who was happily interpreting everything you did in the best of lights. I don't think you did much to confuse ghouls into thinking you were harmless and should be left alone no matter how clever you were, and hiding at a distance in the dark in a dungeon (particularly a Gygaxian dungeon, were reinforcements might arrive from any angle) is a good way to get munched on. I guarantee you didn't have, "Oh no ghouls! But it's a good thing we've got a farmer here instead of a cleric!"

Of course, I by this point don't believe for a second you were playing a by the rules common dirt farmer in 1st edition or any other version of the game (or any version of any RPG). What it sounds like is you were playing a by the rules standard Fighter in 1e - a game where ability scores generally had little impact, monster AC stays pretty level, and PC hit points quickly outstrip monsters ability to do anything but abrade incrementally, and there is no assumption of difficulty and challenge. And even then I wouldn't be too surprised to find this 'dirt farmer' had a pitchfork that was treated as a military fork, or a hoe that was treated as a glaive or something of that sort - for just in case. Not that you'd remember anything about that. It's all so vague and such a long time ago.