Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5904060" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've never encountered quite this phenomenon.I have a player who is a little notorious for building underpowered PCs. His wizard uses a Tome of Readiness, is an Invoker multi-class/paragon path despite starting with a 20/14 INT/WIS split, and has among his feats Skill Training (Dungeoneering) and Deep Sage. On the other hand, this PC also has Wall of Fire, Arcane Gate and use to have Flaming Sphere until he recently levelled up to a 15th level daily Domination attack from Heroes of the Feywild. And he also has Action Surge and Superior Will as feats.In our previous (Rolemaster) campaign the same player had a samurai artisan - he spent quite a bit of PC building resources on weapon and armour smithing skills that rarely came into play. But he also had very strong melee combat capabilities that definitely did not go unnoticed in a fight, even though there were 2 or 3 other PCs who were overall stronger in melee.That is definitely how I prefer my quirky PCs - still able to pull their weight sufficiently that they are not just irrelevant anytime the mechanics are turned to for resolution purposes.In the same RM campaign there was a PC shaman/druid type who was on the cusp of uselessness, but not quite over it. Rolemaster puts enough weight on non-combat sites of conflict that his abilities as a diviner, spirit summoner/speaker and nature guru came into play, and at higher levels he could create walls of stone and summon elephants or rhinoceroses into combat, which from time to time made a real difference. Rolemaster also has much less steep scaling that 3E or 4e: I've never GMed a game with the sorts of functional disparities between attack and defence that you two describe in these posts (I've GMed RM wizards who will be dropped by any hit, but they've always had strong active/aggressive abilities, as well as a range of defences to prevent that hit being taken).I guess in the end I want to GM players who are interested in engaging the game via the mechanics, rather than building a PC whom the mechanics can't touch, but who can't actually do anything him-/herself. What does it even mean to talk about "playing" that PC (except perhaps in a purely freeform context)?</blockquote>

Verification