Quote from: Bill;688094I hate annoying debates over alignment, but 99 percent of those are a player justifying his chaotic evil acts, trying to claim he is actually not evil.

Well, about 49%, anyway.  The other 49% is the DM using alignment as a stick with which to beat the party: hahaha, you're Not Playing Your Alignment, so now I'm going to hose you!

I'd counter your argument re: planes, but that'd derail the thread even faster ...

I feel this post, from EW recently, exemplifies what's wrong with the murder hobo mentality 100% of the time:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340500-Sneak-Attack-optional-or-mandatory&p=6177324&viewfull=1#post6177324

Quote from: (Psi)SeveredHead;6177324There was a thread I participated in on the Paizo board a month or two ago, in which a relatively new player built a bard/something not related to a bard (level 2 total character), in other words a really weak character, and showed up at Pathfinder Society with that. This isn't an edition thing, by the way, you can easily make a weak character in 3.x (many monks) or a really weak hybrid character in 4e.

Maybe the poster was trolling, though. Many players didn't like the idea of running with a PC who couldn't contribute much and wouldn't even pass an interview to join the group (like in many organized play scenarios, the DM and players have no choice about who they play with), and many DMs didn't like the idea of trying to balance encounters for such a PC either.

Furthermore, while D&D is a flexible game where you can "play what you want", you actually don't get to do that. Not for long anyway. You need to play something that suits your adventuring group. In many cases, this could mean design a character concept, then show it to the DM ahead of time so they can tell what you need to do to have a contributing PC. (A friend of mine told me she wanted to play a "Disney princess" in a Pathfinder game, a druid/bard combo, so she was basically a bard who could talk/sing to animals. Another weak PC. She's often not serious.) I'm not a Pathfinder guru, but I told her what sort of reaction she'd face (incredibly negative) and suggested she look up archetypes for the bard (greensinger? I dunno) that could let her accomplish this.

Having an incredibly weak PC is just as bad as having a ridiculously powerful PC.

Suppose someone came to my group and told me they wanted to play a master thief. No sneak attack, just lots of social skills and Thievery. They've effectively developed a kender handler without the insanity. I would tell them they have designed a non-adventuring character and can't participate in the adventure as a PC. Naturally someone would say "you're not letting them play your character, and treating your playstyle as superior to theirs", which is fair enough. They can take their playstyle to another group, assuming they could find one that suits them. (Note: This never actually happened to me.)

Quote from: Bill;688095But was your Bard a Male Elf?



All kidding aside, that person sounds like a real asshat.

My PC was a male human. The part that really ground my gears was that I had a character concept for this guy that he was young and idealistic, having believed most of the stories and songs that he performed, and the process of adventuring would cause him to meet the reality of those fictions and grow him as a person. I had no desire to explore the sexuality of the Player Character in game. But since he was a Bard, the DM decided he had to be gay....

Yes, that DM was an asshat.

Quote from: Ravenswing;688185Well, about 49%, anyway.  The other 49% is the DM using alignment as a stick with which to beat the party: hahaha, you're Not Playing Your Alignment, so now I'm going to hose you!

I'd counter your argument re: planes, but that'd derail the thread even faster ...

I did that precisely once, I think (the other time when the player started murdering random NPCs as LG, I just thanked him for his time). The guy was a good buddy of mine and I knew he had a tendency of always playing characters that were close to (Chaotic) Evil/Treacherous Evil types, so to speak. As we were playing with pregens, I landed him Chaotic Good Kobold Barbarian... Of course he whined that he wanted to be evil, but I said "hey, pregens are pregens". I think I enforced his alignment on him to cancel out one of his decisions (probably to kill questgivers or something like that. You can see where I'm going here). After that one slap on the nose, he "suddenly" found out new depths of his roleplaying, playing quite nicely with the rest of the team, and admitted he had great fun playing a good guy for a change.

Quote from: Mistwell;688186I feel this post, from EW recently, exemplifies what's wrong with the murder hobo mentality 100% of the time:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340500-Sneak-Attack-optional-or-mandatory&p=6177324&viewfull=1#post6177324

Yeah, that's pretty lame. So you're playing D&D wrong if your character isn't optimized for combat?

Still, I don't see that as a murder-hobo thing. You can sneak around killing things and taking their shit without being an uber-optimized party of combat-jockeys. And conversely, you can be an uber-optimized party of combat-jockeys and do nothing but defend the downtrodden and save the kingdom from the bad guys.

Quote from: Ravenswing;688185Well, about 49%, anyway.  The other 49% is the DM using alignment as a stick with which to beat the party: hahaha, you're Not Playing Your Alignment, so now I'm going to hose you!

I'd counter your argument re: planes, but that'd derail the thread even faster ...

A dm doing that is an idiot; I have not seen many.

I would like to hear your counter argument about 1E dnd planes.
I think we can survive a small derailment.



I have been the idiot arguing with a player about alignment a few times over the years. So I am not tossing an idiot label around that won't also stick to me.

I saw a character once that was a fine role model for murder hobos everywhere.

In a Champions supers game, a player created a villain.

His name was Psycho. Former Viper agent that when given powers by them, murdered his way to freedom.

He had sonic powers, and essentially was fast and could blast holes in just about anything. He also could knock people out with an area sonic field to make blasting holes in them easier.

The icing on the murder hobo cake, was the Psychological Disadvantage he selected.

"Code Vs Not Killing"

You see, many heroes have "Code vs Killing".......

Quote from: Noclue;687966Okay, cool. So what's the people changing mechanic in Dogs in the Vineyard?

Stop trying to apply your "reason" and "logic" to my ill informed conspiracy rantings!  

Quote from: Mistwell;688186I feel this post, from EW recently, exemplifies what's wrong with the murder hobo mentality 100% of the time:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340500-Sneak-Attack-optional-or-mandatory&p=6177324&viewfull=1#post6177324

Wow, 10bucks says that's Sunic_Flames up to his old tricks -_-

Quote from: David Johansen;688221Stop trying to apply your "reason" and "logic" to my ill informed conspiracy rantings!  

Ah! Forgive me, I forgot where I was. Play on!

Quote from: Mistwell;688186I feel this post, from EW recently, exemplifies what's wrong with the murder hobo mentality 100% of the time:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340500-Sneak-Attack-optional-or-mandatory&p=6177324&viewfull=1#post6177324

So... "I want to play a Disney Princess singing and speaking to animals!"

DM: "Yeah, no. My CharOp buddies are going to hate on you. You better study the buildz, girl. Here's our 300-page manual, by the way."

Girl: "Oh... Hm. Well. OK. I'm going to be playing Nintendo over there while you guys play."

...

Fuck that noise.

From the same thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340500-Sneak-Attack-optional-or-mandatory&p=6177407&viewfull=1#post6177407

Quote from: Majoru OakheartI heavily disagree with this.  If I'm running the Dungeon of Ultimate DOOM that I've been spending the last year writing up in great detail filled with horrendously deadly traps and nasty monsters who want to eat your face and you show up with a character who is an 8 year old girl who spends her days picking daisies in the field and doesn't know how to wield any weapons or solve any puzzles...you should expect to have nothing to contribute to the party...and likely to die.

I'd love to see a little boy or girl, say an orphan from the city trying to survive, and having somehow impressed a group of PCs with his nimble skills, trying to make it in a dungeon exploration. A kid is always great for making stuff happen, and for group dynamics. I remember kid (and Ewok) characters in WEG Star Wars fondly.

A kid doesn't have to be annoying like a kender, mind you. A little role play in that department goes a long way.

That bullshit about the "useless character" being "likely to die" and "not being able to contribute", it's crap. This guy would be a huge PITA playing a 1st level MU in a First ed AD&D game, probably, whining all the time about how his character sucks and has no spells and only 2 HP or something.

Quote from: Benoist;688283So... "I want to play a Disney Princess singing and speaking to animals!"

DM: "Yeah, no. My CharOp buddies are going to hate on you. You better study the buildz, girl. Here's our 300-page manual, by the way."

Girl: "Oh... Hm. Well. OK. I'm going to be playing Nintendo over there while you guys play."

...

Fuck that noise.

Meanwhile, I wrote an entire character class just for my wife in my current game project, just because she had a cool idea for one and I wanted her to want to play it.

Whattya wanna bet that dude sleeps with an anime body pillow instead of a woman?

What I can't understand is how char op dweebs claim thieves/rogues are useless if they aren't strikers in combat, because D&D has lots of combat. Okay. But even in a combat-heavy game, thieves play a big role in setting up the success or failure of a combat by scouting, disarming traps, killing guards, etc.

In a dynamic adventure dynamic, a big part of the your party's effectiveness is in how you turn the context of the battle to your own advantage. A combat where you ambush the enemy has a far, far better chance of PC victory than one where the PCs are ambushed. And a character who may be weak in combat itself can play a big role in gaining advantage in the context of those combats. It's the same way that combatants in the real world gain huge advantages by effective intelligence and reconnaissance.

Disregarding that role means that these guys aren't only char op freaks, but they only understand encountardized D&D, where every combat is a frozen, prescribed, calibrated challenge. I'd point out how dumb they are, but I can't be bothered with ENWorld's onerous registration process.

I understand about premise relevance, and organized play is something else... That said my sympathies with their argument is very slim. My bigger beef is with the limitations upon organized play in the first place.

I remember asking organizers how flexible GMs can be if the party composition favors alternate answers. They said there was some leeway, but extremely little. Outside of End Encounter trumps, like "diplomancing," used on the encounter directly, there was little in the way of alternate solutions: scouting, rumor-gathering, espionage, mob rallying, etc. all seemed off the table. The module environment and "path" was mostly static.

With such a construction and GM time limitation, where combat encounters (often in order, in set areas) are taken as a given, a party's combat DPR rates becomes the default premise. There are no other meaningful solutions because there is a metagame context that overrides the standard RPG contexts. The overlaid structure is too confined to entertain the full expression available to the base game.