When someone plays something you don't like

[Nebulous]

Except for shifters. Those guys annoy me.

I didn't particularly like them either until a player changed the concept for his character to a half-werepanther whose mother was raped when he was still unborn. Then i gave him the rakasha assassin mini to use and grafted a bloody falchion to his wrist. NOW i like shifters too.

 

[Betote]

The problem when you say "I ban this class/race/whatever because it's meant only for silliness and disruption" is that you're in a situation with a player who planned (in your POW) to inject silliness and disruption in your campaign.
That same player, with a straight-up, premade by you, human fighter, is going to inject silliness and disruption anyway.

Adapt your DMing style or ban that player. Banning their tools is just a plaster where surgery would be needed.

 

[Barastrondo]

Except for shifters. Those guys annoy me.

Hee hee! I am entertained, because last time I actually got to play D&D, my wife's character was a shifter druid mechanically. In-character, she was an actual werewolf, but one that had felt regrets and undergone a ritual to more or less reduce her shifting ability but put it under her control. Sort of like being on medication, but with the more dramatic focus of her silver wedding ring being the thing ritually keeping her lycanthropy in check.

I wound up playing a human for that game, but my initial idea was using shifter mechanics to do something similar, only representing an ordinary human who'd been savaged by a werewolf attack but had been only partially infected. I wound up keeping the "attacked by werewolf" concept and just going human, though, so we wouldn't have too many shifters in the party. (And of course, the werewolf that had mauled him was my wife's character.)

I like shifters. I wouldn't use them with the existing fluff, but mechanically they're great for building interesting character concepts.


Back on topic, it's rarely the actual mechanics of a race or class that I have a problem with, it's generally the twist on it. Playing a half-elf from elven stock that just really doesn't make sense, or European-style eladrin with references to a Seelie Court in a scimitars-and-sorcery game. But it's always best to be gracious. If there are actual problems with that choice, such as stepping on another player's toes or bringing undue social troubles on the group, I'll talk with the player about it. Otherwise, though, I just smile and let them do as they please. If it's an idea that works, they'll convince me; if my gut feeling was more on target, they'll probably feel it themselves and change out.

 

[hong]

So, um, now I wanna play a werewolf. With crinos form and all.

How would you do that in D&D 4E? Please help, Barastrondo, you're my only hope!

 

[Barastrondo]

So, um, now I wanna play a werewolf. With crinos form and all.

How would you do that in D&D 4E? Please help, Barastrondo, you're my only hope!

Okay, we only did it up to 3rd level (it was a town militia game, albeit for a town with... history). But I'd probably treat it as a shifter/druid anyway (and predator druid at that; guardian druids can be Beorns if they like), like so:

Wild shape can be used to represent Crinos, Hispo or Lupus form. In Crinos form you can still manipulate objects to some degree, like a gorilla could (I don't think they ban gorilla forms, do they?), but you probably feel the primal rage strongly enough that you don't do it very often. I would consider visually attaching certain attacks to "forms," thus saying that Pounce was something you temporarily shift to Hispo for, while Savage Rend is more a Crinos thing.

The shifter aspect can account for Homid/Glabro. Since I'd keep the idea of the separate forms not really having stat modifiers, to keep things 4e-simple, I'd let the player shift as they like as a free action. When you're bloodied, you probably go Glabro if you aren't already.

The odd man out, of course, is the non-Beast Form druid powers. But if we're borrowing from Werewolf: The Apocalypse (or Forsaken) anyway, why not have a player character be able to call on wolf-ancestors to manipulate the weather or call on nature in other ways? Or you can take the "master werewolf" approach, and assume that these kind of powers are as natural to a big, truly tough werewolf as calling the children of the night is to a master vampire. (Since NPCs have fewer class powers, you could build an NPC shifter/druid "werewolf" with exclusively beast form powers.) Edit: And I guess there are options to choose only beast form powers beyond 1st level, so this isn't even too much of a problem. If you relax the "no more than two of your at-wills can be beast form" restriction, you can avoid this entirely.

The Berserker's Fury (multiclass barbarian) feat would seem to be a must. If we're talking something more daring than simple reskinning, I would probably experiment with letting the player substitute druid "caster" powers with barbarian powers, and letting the barbarian powers use beast form rather than a weapon as a focus.

That's off the top of my head. I'd be astonished if you couldn't refine this even further, though, hong. You have a knack for this kind of tinkering.

 

[roguerouge]

... she built her own Rod of Wonder. The rest was history - and so was she, after she via the Rod fireballed the party once too often and they killed her for it.

After reading a page of debate on this point, I'd like to remind people that the effects of a rod of wonder are randomly determined. The player is not deliberately fireballing the inn; he is activating the rod and that random result occurred rather than grass growing in a 160 sq. ft. radius.

Rods :: d20srd.org

 

[Arnwyn]

Have you ever been in a game where one of the players is running a class or a race that gets on your nerves? Or that, for whatever reason, you think it's boring, has stupid fluff, stupid powers, or is otherwise just lame.

We're not talking about mechanics. We're not talking about ability combos that ruin the fun. Nothing that you would ban or curtail because it's overpowered. Nor are we talking about something that breaks the tone of the genre for you (say, psionics in fantasy).

I speak purely from a perspective of taste. For whatever reason, you don't like that class or that race. And your player - for whatever reason - wants to play it, and plays it all the time, and you just don't like it.

To use an example, let's take the bard. Some just find them ridiculous, and do not see a guy with a lute having a place in an adventuring party.

Have you been in that situation? And, what'd you do? How do you handle this situation?

Hmmm... given your parameters, I might have been in that situation some time long in the past, but certainly not in recent memory.

As a DM, if I don't like it on a mechanics basis (for whatever reason), it'll have long since been banned before my players enter the game. So no issues there.

If I don't like it based on fluff, it'll either be banned if the fluff is unfixable, or the fluff will be re-written to better suit my tastes while still (hopefully) satisfying the player.

If I don't like the character based on how the player plays him/her (annoying personality or whatever), then I have some decisions to make. Generally, how the character is played is the player's domain, and as DM it's not for me to intercede unless it's wrecking the game for others. If it annoys me, well, too bad for me... but there are still consequences to that, as I'm only human. If it's so incredibly bad that it's affecting my enjoyment of the game so much that I just want to quit DMing (I can't think offhand as what it would take for it to come to that), I'll first talk with the player to let him/her know what my issues are. If this doesn't result in change, then I'll ask to hand over the DMing to someone else. If nobody wants me to do this (which is the usual state of affairs with my group), then the annoying character simply gets ignored within the game world. NPCs won't interact with them except for the simplest one-word answers, no stories will be built around the annoying character, etc. So sure - be annoying. Hopefully that'll be enough fun for you, as you won't get much else from the game.

Note that the above is entirely theoretical, as I my players/friends and I have the same tastes. One of the reasons why they're my players and friends...

 

[Raven Crowking]

I look it at this way.....

If I'm a player and the DM doesn't want somethiing in the game, and I want to play it, to hell with the DM. Who does he think he is, banning stuff anyway? I don't care how much effort he puts into the game, or how good he is otherwise. If I can't play a mecha-telletubby in his LotR I am so gone.

Then I go online and trash him for imagining that he knows what fits in the game better than I do.

Some people, eh?

RC

















I kid, if it wasn't obvious.

 

[GlassJaw]

A couple of campaigns, one guy played a character and took a level of monk, ranger, and druid as his first 3 levels. Everyone was like "dude, seriously?".

Yeah, it was a pretty useless character.

 

[Kask]

Have you ever been in a game where one of the players is running a class or a race that gets on your nerves? Or that, for whatever reason, you think it's boring, has stupid fluff, stupid powers, or is otherwise just lame.

Well given that a player can only use a PC approved by the DM, I just like it if the player is having a good time.