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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6297447" data-attributes="member: 4937">Perhaps.  You aren't doing much to dispel them.In general, there is an expectation by the other players and by the DM that regardless of your character concept, you can pull your share.  That when the going gets tough, and various player's PC's are lying on the ground bleeding out and that ogre is about to squish them to jelly or those ghouls are about to pull a coup de grace action, that the PC still standing is a reliable aid in such a circumstance and will present a stout obstacle to having your character retired.  So not having a character that matches these capabilities is in fact neither sustainable, nor viable, nor a good party member.  A good party member is one that regularly saves other party member's butts with incredible displays of skill - that DC 35 diplomacy check, or disarming that CR 10 trap, or dishing out 40 points of damage to turn around a challenging combat.  A good party member is the one where people say, "Awesome!!  I thought we were finished."  Your not describing a good party member.  You're describing an NPC retainer who is occasionally useful and gets that one shining unexpected moment of awesome reserved for the NPC retainer.  I've seen that moment before.  It's when your fighting Seige of Starmantle with 80000 combatants among both sides forming 8000 Battlesystem Tokens, and the city is laid out to scale across a two car garage with too scale fortifications, and the campaign has been leading to this moment for years and everyone is hugely invested in the outcome.  And the allied force breeches the outer walls behind a spearhead of Treants, only to have the Queen's wizards start conjuring fire elements in the streets and the Queen's huntman to appear unexpectedly in the upper stories of the buildings to either side, and in the middle of this huge epic battle is one of the PC's retainers.  And it comes time for his unit to move, and the PC looks at the NPC's character sheet and realizes years ago he gave the retainer a Wand of Quench Fires because it was a fairly useless item and it improved the NPC's loyalty checks, and now, suddenly the fact that the NPC has that wand is going to decide the battle.  That's that moment where the NPC gets his moment of awesome, but that's not a good party member.  That's an NPC retainer getting that unexpected moment of awesome.It's perfectly fine to have a PC whose primary motivations are not wealth, weapons or power - but he better well be able to pull his share in some fashion.  It doesn't matter if the PC's goals are spiritual, personal, philosophical, social or material.  In general, I find that means that you have at least some amount of both non-combat and combat utility.  The character you describe appears to have little of the former and none of the latter.  It would therefore have not been approved, even if I had known you to have the maturity and intention to refuse healing, wealth, or other drains on party resources.  As a DM having one player in the party who can't pull his share puts a huge burden on me to try to balance the game as if that player was missing.  It removes a safety net.  It means if an encounter goes awry by bad luck, poor planning by the players or my own overestimation of the players chances your character is a liability to the whole group.  Even if I think you are going to be good about doing nothing for that occasional 4 hour session of nothing but combat, it's just not worth the risks.I've been doing this since about 1980 myself, and I have to say its always the good RPers that are most prone to do this sort of thing.   In fact, the defining moment on this for me was when I did it unintentionally as a player, realized that every other really good talented RPer in the group had unintentionally done the same thing, and that in doing so we'd wrecked the GM's game.  We'd all picked characters that were so filled with unique personality and were so novel and memorable, that in the context of the adventure we were dysfunctional.</blockquote>

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