Why would you want to play *that*??

[Mad Mac]

People, people. The point of a Dragonball Z emulating game wouldn't be to toss out cool powers and own everything. An RPG with a Dragonball setup would involve the hapless party fighting a desperate battle against time, spending session after session getting their arses whooped by uberpowerful, completely unbeatable NPCs who crack bad jokes as they toy with the party, ripping them apart one by one, as the completely hapless pcs try desperately to live long enough for the DM NPC to finally show up and save the day while they cheer the chosen one on from the sidelines.

Oh, and just to rub it in, the first thing the DM NPC will do is kill the bad guy who's been slagging them for the last 27 sessions in under a minute, so that he can get to the real battle with the other npc, who's like 5 zillion times more powerful than the guy who's been kicking their butts. You know, in case the 2 surviving characters have the slightest shred of self esteem left in them.

Dragonball Z---Truly a DM's Show.

 

[Raven Crowking]

And which of those are or aren't acceptable reasons? Do any of them prevent the player from roleplaying the character in a believable way? Do any of them allow the player to violate rule 0? Which of them will lead to the destruction of my game, and how do I tell which is which? Why are they badfun?

Heh. Allow me to complete my heresy against the current ideation of role-playing games.

There is no such thing as "badfun". Either something is fun, or it is not. If it isn't fun for the person investing the most time (responsibility) into the game, though, that person has the option (right) to veto it. As I said earlier, there is no rational system by which responsibility does not entail the rights needed to meet that responsibility. Frankly, only a group that divides responsibilities equally should divide rights equally. They exist, and if you're in one of them, that's wonderful.

However, that doesn't mean that all means of running a game are of equal value.

Repeat: That doesn't mean that all means of running a game are of equal value.

Games and methods of running a game are subject to criticism in the same way that movies, books, or art are subject to criticism. You may like a movie that has problems from a critical standpoint, and those problems might not detract from your enjoyment one iota. That doesn't make watching the movie "badfun" nor, conversely, does your enjoyment of that movie make the criticism invalid.

The entire "badfun" argument, IMHO, is basically an attempt to prevent others from analyzing approaches to the game critically. Frankly, this is an idea that I utterly reject.

Reading is fun. No reading is badfun. However, if you are a 40-year-old whose reading consists of "See Spot Run" this is qualitiatively different than reading Jane Austin. Still not badfun, though. Better "See Spot Run" than nothing.

With the exception of number (1) which of these supports the OP's position?

If the OP's opinion is that players only choose these types of characters for crunchy phat powerz, then only (1) directly applies, but (3), (4), and (7) apply at least tangentially. (3) implies that the DM might be partially to blame for the problem, and (4) applies to the same at least tangentially.

However, I believe the OP also asked why people play these sorts of characters.

Others claimed it was due to a deep, abiding need to role play a flumph (obvious paraphrase here) or that somehow it is more imaginative to role play a flumph as a human than a human as a human.

(1) to (9), inclusively, address those contentions.

You can say "A lousy player is a lousy player whether he has a human fighter or a dwarven half-fiend favored soul knife" but this begs the question, Why let the lousy player play a dwarven half-fiend favored soul knife in your campaign in the first place? The odds are pretty good that most of us can role play a human believably. With very, very few exceptions, we are human, after all. Letting the player play such an outlandish character merely cheapens all of the components the character is made of.

That he can find a group that suits him doesn't mean its badfun. Finding that group doesn't make it goodfun, either. Neither prevents one from looking at the player, the character, the game, or the campaign dynamics with a critical eye.

 

[Seeten]

I know people fully incapable of rping a human. They cant even get it right in RL.

You know them, they smell, dont wash, and cannot even speak to others. Yeah, thats them, "Gamers."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

You can say "A lousy player is a lousy player whether he has a human fighter or a dwarven half-fiend favored soul knife" but this begs the question, Why let the lousy player play a dwarven half-fiend favored soul knife in your campaign in the first place?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

It begs the question, why let the lousy player play in your campaign in the first place?

The odds are pretty good that most of us can role play a human believably. With very, very few exceptions, we are human, after all. Letting the player play such an outlandish character merely cheapens all of the components the character is made of.

Actually, the odds that a lousy player can roleplay a human believably are, in my experience, very near 0. An exotic character at least gives the lousy player a hook he's interested in, and his alien mindset may actually explain why his actions are stupid and bizarre.

If, for some reason, you insist on playing with this loser. Does he pay for the munchies or something?

That he can find a group that suits him doesn't mean its badfun. Finding that group doesn't make it goodfun, either.

Agreed on both counts.

Neither prevents one from looking at the player, the character, the game, or the campaign dynamics with a critical eye.

Agreed.

Obviously, we draw different conclusions from that same premise.

I've run human-only games, I've run 'human and a few racial choices chosen for genre emulation purposes' games, and I've run anything goes games. I've never run a 'core only' game, because I have exactly zero desire to emulate the genre of Tolkien-clone high fantasy.

Ultimately, I place far, far more emphasis on genre emulation and gameplay than on deep immersion roleplaying. This is both a stylistic choice and one based on the playing habits of approximately 90% of the players I've met. I'm critical of a game that doesn't provide balanced gameplay because it's objectively a problem. I'm critical of a game that doesn't emulate my genre of choice because it's subjectively a problem.

I'm not critical of a game that allows non-standard characters because I've yet to see a substantive argument for allowing elves but not giants, provided both are balanced and genre-appropriate.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I know people fully incapable of rping a human. They cant even get it right in RL.

You know them, they smell, dont wash, and cannot even speak to others. Yeah, thats them, "Gamers."

You have my condolences. Very, very few of the gamers I know even come close to that stereotype.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Wrong. Dead wrong.

It begs the question, why let the lousy player play in your campaign in the first place?

LOL. The questions are linked, though. If he can't play in your campaign, he can't play a flumph in your campaign either. However, herein I concede to your superior logic.

I've run human-only games, I've run 'human and a few racial choices chosen for genre emulation purposes' games, and I've run anything goes games. I've never run a 'core only' game, because I have exactly zero desire to emulate the genre of Tolkien-clone high fantasy.

Ultimately, I place far, far more emphasis on genre emulation and gameplay than on deep immersion roleplaying. This is both a stylistic choice and one based on the playing habits of approximately 90% of the players I've met. I'm critical of a game that doesn't provide balanced gameplay because it's objectively a problem. I'm critical of a game that doesn't emulate my genre of choice because it's subjectively a problem.

I'm not critical of a game that allows non-standard characters because I've yet to see a substantive argument for allowing elves but not giants, provided both are balanced and genre-appropriate.

Hey, right now my game has tons of racial options (as mentioned in a previous post). I have both elves and giants as standard PC choices! I also give solid, in-game reasons to play a nonhuman character as nonhuman. The great failing of the current system (and previous systems) is not that it (they) allow nonhuman characters, but that it (they) do nothing within the game rules themselves to motivate players to play these characters as nonhuman.

Include rules that cause flumphs to approach things differently than a human would, and you'd see a lot fewer people wanting to play flumphs....and a lot better flumphs from those who played them.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Just because you can't think of any don't assume everyone else can't

Ah, yes...what Richard Dawkins calls "the argument from personal incredulity". Otherwise known as "I can't imagine it, therefore neither can anyone." When will this line of argument die?

Can we get a new message tag for this board, to go with General, WotC, Humour, etc.? The tag can read "badfun" and so everyone will know ahead of time that the thread is just another half-baked "role play vs. roll play" thread, so they can ignore it.

Also, kudos to everyone who points out the myriad flaws in the OP's position, notably the bit about the tautology, which is another line of argumentation that's been around since the Sophists, and also shows no sign of impending expiration.

Now that I'm done editorializing, allow me to contribute: When I play characters (I'm usually the DM), I generally pick a concept that makes me excited about playing in character. Recent ideas were:

• Whisper gnome warlock
• Really bastardly grey elf bigot wizard
• Kobold dragon disciple
• Incredibly humble and submissive fighter who is also a surprisingly ruthless murder machine
• Spoiled brat noble girl educated in the arts of warfare and magic (i.e. spellsword) so that she can someday lead the duchy, who sneaks out one night to track down the bard that she had a one-night stand with on her seventeenth birthday because she wants to be an "adventurer" like in all the stories he told her and who gets a rude awakening when she's almost raped and killed by a group of orcs but is saved at the last minute by a cleric of Hextor who finds that kind of behaviour "distasteful", which leads the girl to have an identity crisis, flirt with evil, and eventually redeem herself, becoming an adult along the way.

After I've got the concept, I work out the mechanical perspective as best I can, because I want to avoid death. Sometimes, this isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world (whisper gnome warlock is not exactly the most munchkinized character concept I can think of). But I attempt to make the most effective character I can that fits my concept. Why? Because there's no reason not to. First and foremost, D&D is a game of tactical combat. It always has been, and it always will be. D&D has always been "beer & pretzels improv night" as a secondary draw. If you really wanted to play a role-playing game that focused on the role-playing to the exclusion of tactical combat, you'd play something else; there's plenty to choose from that would suit that desire more aptly.

Given that the OP persists in playing D&D, or games like it, suggests that he might enjoy some tactical combat once or twice a session. If that's the case, there is only one sensible path of action: make characters that are good at tactical combat, within the limits of their character concepts. To do otherwise is to shoot one's self in the foot unnecessarily. Now, I'm not trying to say that the OP himself discourages making decent tactical combat characters. Specifically, he's fed up with the really weird characters because he thinks they exist entirely for mechanical maximization (they don't). But since the argument is related, I thought I'd make a generalized rebuttal, to the effect of: just because my character is good at killing things doesn't make me any less of a role-player.

Perhaps I should add that line to my signature, to remind people of how ridiculous it sounds when people suggest that there is an incommensurable divide between character concept and mechanical execution, as though this were a zero-sum game in which adding to one meant taking away from the other.

This "role-playing vs. roll-playing" shtick is a tirade that's been around since the earliest days of role-playing games, and over the years we've tried to banish it to the nether realms whence it came, but it always returns. Sometimes it comes in a slightly different form, like this thread, but at the bottom it's the same. Some guy doesn't like the way other people enjoy themselves, and goes online (or in the old days, to the letters page of Dragon) to try to get someone to justify his ire by agreeing with him. Every other week or so it sneaks onto these pages. From the look of it, it appears on RPG.net every single day. I think The Forge was designed specifically to house the argument, to protect the rest of the internet from its baleful presence, but it managed to slip out of its cage there to menace the rest of us.

While all Brits don't drink tea would it be so bad to roleplay one that did?

For the logic people: "Ah, then you're not a true Briton!"

 

[Seeten]

You have my condolences. Very, very few of the gamers I know even come close to that stereotype.

Well, alright, I admit I was being facetious. All of my friends(That I rp with) are in their 30's like me, have good jobs, educations, and wives/children.

But still, we have, over the years, had dozens of extra people sit in the "5th chair" at our table, and dozens of them have been unable to rp a human believably. Honest.

Some of them were so bad at rping, it wasnt even funny. Some just didnt care. Some were actively disruptive. I personally try hard to scale back my own bad tendencies to powergame, by trying to only equal the others at the table, and by trying to play something which isnt a druid/cleric/wizard with all the fixings. In a campaign for Nightfall of ENworld fame starting soon, I am making a cleric, but one with war/fire as domains and no hint of divine metamagic.

I try hard to stay under control. I just think Der_Kluge is barking up the wrong tree. *I'm* the bad guy. The people playing weird combos are either misguided, or doing it for some other reason.

I find it very difficult to see a big list of choices and intentionally pick something objectively worse than the other options. I dont find it hard to pick something "different" as long as its equal in its field. But I cannot just go take suboptimal options, it hurts me. When making characters, I have a concept, and I need everything to fit the concept, and the concept cannot be, "I'm a terrible fighter" because that isnt fun for me...I do see the character as a collection of numbers. It is a big collection of numbers. It is only through my imagination that it takes on any life outside those numbers. In point of fact, thats what everyones character sheet is. I am as capable as anyone else at justifying why I took what feats, what career paths I took to get the classes, and whether I was raised in a monastery to explain x y or z. They are not mutually exclusive.

What I truly do not get is the idea that somehow making a suboptimal character makes someone a better roleplayer. The two are not related in any way.

Not coincidentally, playing a half-dragon fishman with the goldfish template is suboptimal. =)

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm not critical of a game that allows non-standard characters because I've yet to see a substantive argument for allowing elves but not giants, provided both are balanced and genre-appropriate.

Do you know how happy I would be to hear a DM answer "(7) It wasn't as though the elf was anything other than a human with k3wl powerz and pointy ears anyway, and that dwarf is just a short surly Scotsman." with a shamefaced "Yeah, well I've given up on trying to get anyone to actually roleplay an elf or dwarf."

D&D (all editions) cheapened the living Helsinki out of elves, dwarves, and the rest of the core races. They can be reclaimed, but it's a lot of work.

I am with you on genre & gameplay, but I think that emulating genre requires nonhumans to be not human. Or, at least it does for the parts of the genre that I'm interested in. YMMV.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Hey, right now my game has tons of racial options (as mentioned in a previous post). I have both elves and giants as standard PC choices! I also give solid, in-game reasons to play a nonhuman character as nonhuman. The great failing of the current system (and previous systems) is not that it (they) allow nonhuman characters, but that it (they) do nothing within the game rules themselves to motivate players to play these characters as nonhuman.

I don't consider that a great failing. I consider it a design decision. "The current system" (D&D 3e, I suppose? I play as much HERO as d20.) made a design decision to give some brief roleplaying guidelines but mostly leave it in the hands of individual players and GMs. I actually agree with that design decision, because of the style of game I run. In crude Forge-ology, a gameist game with strong simulationist tendencies.

Nonetheless, I'd love to see those rules! They sound very cool.

Include rules that cause flumphs to approach things differently than a human would, and you'd see a lot fewer people wanting to play flumphs....and a lot better flumphs from those who played them.

Just an aside, I think the flumph is rather a strawman (a strawflumph?) because it's a deliberately outrageous, borderline unplayable creature only available in 3.x in a Dungeon magazine from more than six months ago, possibly more than a year.