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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6838452" data-attributes="member: 4937">I believe the complaint was raised by a fellow player, which means that it has in fact already reached the point of being a table concern.To some extent, yes, it is.  But if the player is purposefully playing a low survivable character to the extent that other players aren't having fun trying to keep that player alive, then you have a potential problem that you as the DM need to defuse before it creates table drama.  Exactly how you'd do that depends on the personalities of the players involved.I disagree that this is an edition specific issue.  Evidence for that - if you haven't encountered it in your own play - can be found in how 'Knights of the Dinner Table' satirizes this issue from time to time.  Many groups historically did expect that players would come to the table with a viable character and play it in an efficient manner than enhanced group success and that to do otherwise was an indication of poor play or a selfish personality.  "All for one and one for all" was the social contract, but part of that social contract was the expectation you could be there to pull their characters out of the fire.Again, this expectation existed in many groups long before 3e was around.  The expectation that each character will pull their own weight is a natural expectation when any player at the table has 'winning' as a desired aesthetic of play.  A player that has PC's that repeatedly die is violating the table's social contract in many cases.  Likewise, any suggestion that the other PC's patheticness is causing the DM to divert attack to different PCs and so threaten them more, is likely to be unwelcome by at least some players at the table.  This is really no different than having a rule like 'Don't steal from other party members' as part of the social contract.When I approve a character to enter the game, one of the things I'm looking for is a character that is very badly made and so unlikely to contribute much to the group.  I will often make suggestions to the player regarding different ways he could spend his resources more effectively.  It's ultimately up to the player to decide how he wants his character to look and what he wants to be skilled at, but I do have minimum standards of combat effectiveness in particular before I'd approve a character.  For some players, this isn't an issue.  They have high system mastery and anything they present is going to be pretty good at something.  It's precisely because you have a mix of players with different degrees of system mastery that you sometimes need to coach players on their builds.  In my opinion, these mechanical tweaks aren't taking away from the player's core concept for a character, since in my opinion what's really important about a character from a narrative perspective is 'who they are'.  A character whose core character concept was, "I'm incompetent; that's who I am", would not be approved for play unless I knew the whole group would have fun with that.</blockquote>

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