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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1996217" data-attributes="member: 16936">Until this thread, it never even occurred to me that 'niche protection' was some kind of dirty word.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Maybe to be safe we should be talking about "character spotlights" or something along those lines: an area in which a character is really good, so the spotlight is on them when it's time to do something related to that area of expertise.Some people don't care if they have to share a particular spotlight.  For that matter, some people don't care if they don't have any spotlight that is theirs and theirs alone.  They're fine with being second-best at everything, and don't care whether the margin between them and first place is tiny or if it's absolutely huge.  If an entire campaign goes by without their character being the person who has everyone's attention and gets to do the Cool Thing that saves the day, they don't even notice.  They don't mind if everything their character does can be done by someone else in the party, only those other characters can do it faster and better and with more style.But, in my experience, those people are very rare.  Most of the folks I've played with like to have at least one thing that their character can be better at than everyone else, so that they can step forward and make the difference when that talent is needed.  And all emotionally-laced jargon like 'niche protection' aside, that seems like the problem which might be looming with this rogue-versus-fighter situation.My sympathies are divided on this.  I like playing the talky characters, and I can see resenting it if someone else came along and tried to usurp that spotlight.  At the same time, I've played uncharismatic characters and been so tremendously unhappy about it (both by the limited opportunities to interact with NPCs and by the agonizing second-guessing of NPC interactions as handled by other players) that I can totally see why the guy playing the fighter would be interested in seeing his character branch out in that direction.At some point, it might be helpful for both of them to talk about what they have planned for their characters, what kinds of things they think are fun to do in the game, and whether they need some kind of gentleman's agreement about how to handle this area of overlapping skills.  At the very least, it would help to know whether this is going to be the fun kind of intraparty conflict (where both players are laughing and conspiring with each other about how their characters can try to undercut the other's position) or the evil kind (where the players stop talking to each other in real life and the entire game collapses under an avalanche of drama).And it's worth pointing out that this doesn't have to be a bad situation at all: they can play good-cop/bad-cop now, they can negotiate with two separate groups simultaneously, and so on.  There's no reason why this has to all be about one of them displacing the other entirely, right?  There are plenty of ways that they can make this overlap work to their advantage.(Besides, the rogue still gets the "traps and stealth" spotlight, and the fighter still has the "deal out and take huge fistfuls of damage" spotlight.)--good luckryan</blockquote>

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