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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6297605" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  Part of the reason I'm having a hard time reconciling this is that though you are spending enormous numbers of words explaining yourself, you could have managed to be less vague in far fewer words.   So, sure I can imagine an 'epic; farmer might be useful for identifying plants, predicting the weather, tending crops, performing manual labor, perhaps lifting and carrying things, maybe tending to the animals, and so forth but the 'value added' by this sort of thing is still NPC level.  I can spend a few silvers a day to hire a common laborer or two and get the same value added.  Your the party 'Nobbin' at best.No, I'm not.  That's your assumption.  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.  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.  If your game is about anything serious at all, whether economics, philosophy, politics, or whatever you are going to find that 'we fight' is the continuation of that by other means.   About the only exception I can imagine to that is games which are entirely about small scale melodrama - something like we pretend to be husband and wife and try to overcome the ordinary challenges of living together - in which case, 'I'm a farmer' might be a perfectly good character concept.  But such games are seldom played for more than a couple of evenings, and even then games in that vein - say Fiasco or My Life with Master - often aren't played with success in mind and/or feature some sort of violence as their climax.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'.  This is the sort of statement that makes me wish I was discussing this character with your DM instead o f you.  Because it sounds like your DM pulled off an epic job of illusionism in making your character relevant to the story.   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."  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.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.  You the player being the one who always solves riddles implies you the player aren't playing with your peers, or if you the player are the one to do it because you've got epic amounts of Knowledge (Games & Enigmas) then you are no longer playing 'just a dirt farmer'.   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?).  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.  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.  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.  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.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.  Even the one campaign were we settled down and cared about agricultural production, it was a semi-tropical climate and the crops we were growing didn't require irrigation and are not normally irrigated.  And had we needed irrigation, we would have hired a low level NPC and some laborers to do it.  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?  Look, I've read 'The Hobbit' 36+ times.  And you are just entirely wrong there on so many counts. a) Bilbo had the best eyesight of any of the members of the party, and indeed besting elves at times (for example, he's the first to note the approach of the eagles).  This is repeatedly noted.   He's also got the best hearing of anyone in the party.b) Bilbo was the stealthiest member of the party.  This is repeatedly noted.c) Bilbo was the best climber of the party.  This is repeatedly noted.d) Once a situation became desperate, Bilbo had the most courage of any member of the party.  He's the only member of the party who never gave up hope.e) Bilbo is noted in the text as being one of the most deadly stone throwers in the shire, and he's capable of killing monstrous spiders with a single stone throw.  He also displays a high degree of other sorts of martial skill when fighting those same spiders.  Again, this is a situation where if Bilbo can't fight, the whole party dies.f) Bilbo is a fairly accomplished liar, and successfully tricks the dwarfs on several occasions.  He also manages to do fairly well in lying/riddle games against Gollum and the Dragon Smaug, tricking Smaug on several occasions.g) Bilbo is a startlingly accomplished diplomat, something that Thranduil and Gandalf note.  This might have something to do with coming from a family of the most noted merchants in the Shire.  He also manages on several occasions to persuade the dwarves to do something that they don't want to do.h) Bilbo even manages eventually to get his 'pick pockets' skill up from its abysmal early levels, albeit only to purloin something from a sleeping drunken guard.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.  If 'Gandalf is a 6th level wizard', then Bilbo ends up being like a 5th level thief. Indeed, in many respects Bilbo is the inspiration for Halflings having that role in D&D (see BD&D).  In 3e terms he starts out as some sort of low level rogue or aristocrat and grows into a fully competent party member.  At no point is he 'just a grocer' despite being probably a very competent grocer.  The fact that he is probably the best cook in the party never really comes up.  That is just color, and hardly where most of his skills are invested on his character sheet.  Bilbo initially tries to use his ability to cook to persuade the trolls not to eat him and his friends.  Very creative, but it doesn't work, one of the few times his bluff skill fails him.Wonderful.  I really would love to talk to your DM.  Because of all the games I've run or been in the last 30 years, and of all the games I plan to run I can only think of one where 'farming skill' would ever come up in a truly important way even once.  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).  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.  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.   In the 4 years or so real life time of the current campaign there have probably been 80 combats, and in most of those there would have been no reason to not mark you out in some way.  And in few of those would have any of the suggested courses of action been relevant, and in the event that they were you'd still have been inferior to a fully skilled PC in accomplishing the task.  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.</blockquote>

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