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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pickin_grinnin" data-source="post: 6297499" data-attributes="member: 6697674">I'm not going through the campaign game by game and describing everything I did to do my share, but I did pull it.  The character didn't fight much, but actually did as much as the other characters did overall.  Not every PC has to physically fight to contribute.   I figured out ways to make equal contributions without having fighting or spell-casting ability.  That was part of the challenge.  If I had not figured out how to do that, I would have retired the character.  If the DM or other players felt I wasn't pulling my load, I would have retired the character.  In fact, if he had had anything other than a positive effect on the game, I would have retired the character.</blockquote>You are assuming that battles and killing monsters is the primary part of every campaign.  That's not necessarily true.  I have been through whole campaigns where there is virtually no fighting, and what fighting did occur was minor and secondary to everything else.  I have run campaigns like that, too.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.  That's a pretty narrow definition of a "good party member."  How about a character that always figures out the secret to riddles, or has the research skills to guide the party through the challenges, or always figures out just the right questions to ask NPCs to move things along, or has figured out how to manipulate the town guards without needing to roll a skill check, or has political clout that frequently saves the party's collective hide, etc.?  There are many non-combat skills other than diplomacy, and many things a character can choose to do that doesn't rely on a skill check of any kind.  Accomplishments are not always tied to skill rolls, and not all skills are covered in any existing game.  Some skills that seem useless (ex. knowing how to irrigate farmland) might actually prove to be useful in a broad range of situations IF the player gets creative with them and manages to do so while staying in character.  Which, as I said, was part of the challenge.Here we are back to battle again.  Why do you assume that the final big challenge involves fighting at all?  Why do you assume that there is any combat at all in a given game or campaign?  Why do you assume that the only way to be really useful in a battle situation is to be one of the combatants?He did.Maybe in your campaigns, and the ones you play in.  That hasn't been true in all the campaigns I have played in or run.  In fact, being combat-oriented has been a big drawback in some of them.  Not every fantasy RPG campaign has to be run as a big hack-and-slash adventure with over-the-top archetypal heroes that fit into a narrowly defined set of classes.Look at The Hobbit.  Bilbo Baggins had neither combat skills nor any others that were particularly useful on an adventure.He had quite a bit of the former.  His skills weren't ones you would expect to be useful (most were farming related), but I found ways to make them very useful (even in urban environments), all while sticking to the character concept, because that was the challenge I had set and I worked very, very hard to make it work.  The DM didn't have to find ways to make them work.  I was just very creative, and had been thinking about how to do it for a very long time.That particular campaign didn't have long stretches of combat.  If it had, I wouldn't have run that character.  Even if it was a heavy combat campaign and I hadn't figured out any way to be useful in combat (and had, for some reason, still decided to run the character), I could have simply hung back and waited, even for many hours on end.  I'm very patient, and don't have to have the attention on me the whole time.  Since that character wasn't a drag on resources or treasure, the net effect would be that I sometimes just sat and listening in some of the games, without putting any pressure on the DM or the other players to hurry things along.  None of that was the case, though.Even when combat did occur in the games, though, the other players found it very useful to have someone drag unconscious people off the field, scare off the horses of dismounted opponents, toss arrows to people who had run out, confuse opponents with non-sequitur-ish actions, etc.  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.My character wasn't dysfunctional, it didn't affect the game negatively in any way, and he was every bit as useful as every other character.  It didn't go the way you have described because I was very, very conscious of how it could go wrong, and worked very carefully to make sure it didn't.The character's contributions didn't revolve around the discovery I  mentioned earlier.  It turned out to be a useful part of the campaign,  but most of the contributions he made (and there were many) had nothing  to do with that particular thing. I don't run characters like that all the time.  In fact, that one was an anomaly.  It was an experiment and a challenge that I knew I could pull off within that particular campaign with that particular DM and that particular set of players, and only did so after really discussing it with the DM (discussing it, not whining about it).  I only attempted it after spending a very, very long time working through how to make such a character work as a useful member of the party, how to repurpose skills in creative ways, etc.  If I were running a campaign where one of the players wanted to try an experiment of some kind, I would only approve it if I had confidence in his/her ability to do so, knew how I would handle things as a DM, and knew that the character would be a contributing part of the party.  Back then, that particular DM decided that I could pull it off, and I did.  I wouldn't have even attempted it in most other campaigns or with most other DMs.I am a good roleplayer, but I'm a well-rounded player in all ways.  I am a good DM, and can run games or whole campaigns that range from combat-light to combat-heavy, and everything in-between.  When I am playing, I keep the lessons learned from DMing in mind.  When I am DMing, I keep the player perspective in mind.  Battles are fun, but I'm just as happy doing things that don't relate to combat in any way.  I'm very adaptable.[/QUOTE]

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