Is it just me, or does anyone else get bothered by the number of ridiculous...

I can attest that this has been around since the mid-90s at least. I haven't noticed it getting any more common recently.

>How is this actually fun?

Not everyone gets their fun from having a good character.

A lot of people don't care much about the setting and story, and even less about fitting into it. It's not even always the player's fault, since it's hard to get serious about some generic sword and sorcery setting full of elves, dwarves and orcs. If I still played that shit I'd probably want to make a goofy character too.

Some players believe that a gimmick is an easy route to having a distinctive character. The idea is that you can't think of anything interesting, throw in something weird. Lazy and uninspired, but it's why people do it.

Some players are strict gamists who view TTRPG as a cooperative skirmish wargame with a campaign system. Yeah I know, MUH STORMWIND FELLATIO. But regardless of whether you CAN make a character from a gamist point of view that's also interesting narratively, the fact is that a lot of hard gamist players DON'T.

You'll probably get some shitlord posting something like "Sure, let's all play le human fighter from a nice family, that'll be interesting" as if it's a binary choice between a plain boring character and a stupid as fuck character. People like that can be ignored.

>a normal, believable character
>post picture of a female knight

doubles standart

Gimmicks are okay so long as there's a solid "base" from which to found them on. It's why the male human fighter is such a staple even if he's not that efficient from a strictly mechanical perspective: he's what ties the party to reality.

On the contrary, I believe everyone /shouldn't/ be a MHF, but that a single well-played MHF adds to the party dynamic even if everyone else is a wizard that can kill 1d6 Ancient Fire Dargons a turn, or bards that insult things with vicious insult as their main means of combat. They're playing the straight man to all the weirdness (or lack of) that either the setting and/or the party provides as well as someone who is able to explain to an outsider how his troupe of freaks functions.

Megumeme best girl and I'm only saying that because it makes Darkness feel neglected

What is wrong with wanting to toss javelin endlessly?

> Or, casters that wrap their entire character around one particular spell, trying to squeeze everything possible out of it and never bothering with anything else

archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/prc/20070327

>While sorcerers and wizards consider haste one of many spells in their repertoire, swiftblades covet haste above all others. As a swiftblade, your arcane-assisted speed combined with melee skill can turn your first strike into a deadly assault. Swiftblades discover unconventional ways to utilize the haste spell, permanently augmenting their speed and fusing complimentary spell effects into each casting. In a very real sense, swiftblades bond to their chosen spell until the two become immutable.

Because it's officially endorsed

>casters that wrap their entire character around one particular spell
Except that's fine. The utility toolbox wizard is less credible as a fantasy archetype.

Because sometimes it's fun to do something different?

Honestly, I think having a gimmick is pretty low on the list of things I worry about in other characters. If they're a good, interesting character who the player has obviously put some effort into, why is it a problem that they have an unusual fighting style or focus? As long as it works, lets them contribute to the game and isn't wonky mechanically, why not?

...

Sikelgaita, Petronilla de Grandmesnil, Bradamante, The Order of the Hatchet, Order of the glorious Saint Mary etc.

There are plenty of examples from history and legends to support both women on the battlefield, women being knighted and women in armor. It's hardly a stretch to combine them.

It's not worth replying. Only trolls or idiots actually bitch about the gender of characters in a fucking RPG.

Only fuckwits bitch about anything in a fucking RPG

Nah, there are legitimate things to bitch about when it comes to RPGs. Veeky Forums just very rarely touches on any of them.

By all means, name a few!

>Only fuckwits bitch about anything in a fucking book.

>Or, casters that wrap their entire character around one particular spell, trying to squeeze everything possible out of it and never bothering with anything else.
This one for me is believable though. Megumin memes aside, it's like that don't fear the man that has practiced a 1000 different attacks, fear the man that has practiced 1 attack a thousand times.

>a barbarian who will only wield a broken wine bottle as his weapon yet insists that it needs to work the same as a zweihander
This, however, is bullshit. You want to stylize a boat oar or a lamp post to be a club, sure but the item has to sort of make sense. A broken off wine bottle could be a 1 handed sword stat wise, but to me it feels more like a dagger.

Actual 'That Guy'ism, when the actions a player take are actively harmful to the enjoyment of the group. Sure, communicating with them and discussing this is better, but there's no harm (and a lot of funny story potential) in venting and bitching on Veeky Forums. It's rarely also useful, with people asking if they/another person are That Guy/That GM. Sure, most of the time they're the asshole in the situation and trying to make someone else look bad, but I've seen a few legitimate ones.

Bad game design and designers can also be legitimately bitched about, even if it's often done wrong. Focusing on specific flaws rather than anecdotal evidence, or specific actions of designers rather than broad ad hominem.

Venting about mechanical flaws in a system is both cathartic for the one venting, and hopefully opens up discussion of how said flaw can be fixed or worked around to improve the experience of the game. This doesn't stop the system being broken, of course, but community fanpatches are a thing for every kind of game.

>fanpatches
>just replace spell slots with mana lmao
>what do you mean sphere X is so ridiculously broken a character killed a level 20 at level 3 in a dual

And this is why discussion is key. Lots of people working together, being critical of ideas and overall figuring out what works.

Even if 'what works' turns out to be 'ban it and the system works so much better'.

>dragons exist
K
> sexual dimorphism expresses itself slightly differently
HURR I DON'T BELIEB IT

t. shitty designer

The root of the double standard is clear and it kinda makes sense, but it's also obviously dumb.

The core idea which causes a lot of problems is 'Everything that is not obviously supernatural or unreal must perfectly obey the laws of the real world'.

Some settings can work by that (although some of the bullshit its used to argue still doesn't make sense), but for D&D et al it's never been true and people trying to cling to it just end up causing more and more problems for themselves.

Have you wonder why people who play very open world games, like Skyrim or Minecraft, give themselves difficult or weird restrictions on their own behavior after they played the game a few times?

It's because it gets boring, OP.

Maybe if you're new to tabletop playing a generic or 'standard' character is great, fine even, but after you've played a few standard characters you'll need something new to sustain yourself creatively. Something a little stranger.

>blaming 3.5 for this
3.5 was a symptom, not the disease. 3.5 and Pathfinder were coming out literally decades after the basic DnD formula was popular and present. Like I said, people get bored of the basic formula.

The solution is rolling all spell/equipment availability on random tables. Most roguelike games do this. You have to adapt your build to what you find.

>s it just too difficult to have a character that does normal, makes-sense-in-the-world decisions and has the capacity to use more than one single tactic? What happened to verisimilitude and the flexibility that real adventurers would need?
Because games where this happen actively reward people for specializing and actively punishes people for generalizing.

Building gimmicky characters can be fun in its own right. Like how building your deck is part of the fun of CCGs.

Powergaming in a TTRPG is asinine, because the difficulty level is merely what the DM feels that it should be. You can't out-power the DM, only the other player characters, and that's generally just being a dick.

That's bullshit. Most Dms can't balance for crap. Better be safe than sorry and make your character handle a sudden difficult situation that you have no buisness facing due to an inept dm.

>Powergaming in a TTRPG is asinine
Except when it's the only way to remain mechanically relevant past early game, or the only way to make your character idea work within the system, or when your game master is trying to make the world believable instead of putting child protectors on everything you might bump into and the rest of the party are all Stormwind Fallacying drama students who keep bringing flutes to gunfights and you constantly have to save everyone from the fire.

I have no problem playing a 'normal' character for a setting, Party of knights? i'm in. Soldiers taking down an empire? you best believe i'll the sword and board or be a normy.

However i like to have a character that's fun to play, so if i'm feeling it when it's time to create a toon i'll choose to be the strange one. I've been a super intelligent bear, who's an actual bear, wearing a party hat and levitating slightly. Played him well enough, acted well enough, that no one but one guy got butthurt over partying with a bear.

I've also played a talking noble bear who because the quartermaster (and Heavy Assault Bear) of a small sky-pirate ship. He was fun.

In my experience, when you are doing because it's fun, then you are doing TTRPGing right in general. When you are doing it to win, you should be playing video games.

don't get me wrong, the hyper specialized characters are annoying as shit, but i'm a ruthless GM who has no problems with players killing off annoying party members (they must petition in private to do so first, but for the most we do not like Powergaming), so doing shit like that only results in removal if it's not adding anything.

That just means the story ends sooner than expected in my mind. Unexpectedly hard encounters, shit that should be a one turn win turning into a slog, and geneeral shenenigins are what TTRPGing is apout to me. Nothing like swat teaming out a group of orcs, taking no damage, and felling badass, only to be killed in the next area by one lucky as fuck goblin with a crossbow.

That's fun to me.

I mean, if you can justify, in game, why a guy who can move at mach 3 can't operate basic machinery, i'm all game/ But power gaming to the point of 'i win and my party is irrelevant' has no business in TTRPG. TTRGing should be about the narrative, the story, and the characters, not the numbers and how much damage i did to the orc.

In my opinion of course.

What are the 'must have' generic classes?

If a game can be exploited it deserves to be.

For what?

Generic fantasy rpg

If you want it to be properly generic, don't use classes.

None. Play Fantasy d6

I've always used the guiding principle of 'long' (I'm over here and you arn't, now DIE!) 'Mid' (You call that a knife? this is a knife! ) and 'Short' (hitty hitty Smashy smashy).

So, to answer your question in a not autistic way, fighter (close) rouge (mid) mage (long).

Everything else is a derivative of those three really.

None. Play G.U.R.P.S.

In-Fighter, Out-Fighter, HM-Slave, Sneaker, Face

...

Face shouldn't be a class, things work so much better when every character is socially capable. It's another situation where you don't want one person playing the game while the rest of the group waits around because they aren't able to engage effectively. Every character needs to have some face aspects regardless of whether some have more than others, because it's nice to be able to do /something/ in a social situation without auto-failing.

Have you tried not playing Pathfinder.

I think she's holding that sword wrong

>d10 damage
>10 point healing

So unless the last two are of the same type, the fight will never end.

She's getting read to deliver a motherfucking, skullbreaking, helmetcrashing, armordamaging, historically accurate murder stroke

My friends refuse to play anything else.

...

Because breaking numbers can sometimes be more fun than adhering to them.

It's like video games. If cheat codes exist or if glitches in the programming may be exploited, people will often exploit it.

There's also master of the unseen hand who specialises in telekinesis culminating in throwing enemies into the sky and master of the seven-fold veil who specialises in prismatic effects and others that don't immediately spring to mind.

Even for martials, having one specialised in trips and another specialised in something else is better imo than them all just full attacking every round. A good party should be about balancing and complementing each other's abilities rather than some fictional dick-waving contest; one guy can trip and another can finish them off once they're down or something similar.

I'd love more themed mages rather than everyone looking at the meta game and aiming for all the most broken spells possible.

Hit-y guy, magic-y guy, sneaky guy, everything else is some combination thereof.

>Even for martials, having one specialised in trips and another specialised in something else is better imo than them all just full attacking every round.
True, but you don't HAVE to specialize in it in order to be able to do it. Taking an AoO is not that big of a deal and it's avoidable with several methods that don't require a feat.

Not really, well as long as it's not disruptive at least

>How is it actually fun
Some people find it fun to roleplay specific concepts, or to try and make thematic characters even if they're not as viable

There's a difference between making new and different characters and making some stupid rules-lawyer build intentionally designed to break the system, derailing everyone's verisimilitude and whatever world you guys are building together.

Which is what OP was actually talking about.

Really this thread is about the classic problem of players and DM wanting different things.

If I want to tell an interesting story and create a world, and you want to win the game, we're coming at it with very different values (And before you start, neither of them are better than the other, faggots)

If it's one player who's clearly at a disconnect with what the group wants to do, talk to him and see if a different game/group might be more his speed. If you're that one player, think about what the group wants and decide if you want that too.

If you don't, find a different group.

Just because you're playing D&D doesn't mean you can't have social skills.

>Really this thread is about the classic problem of players and DM wanting different things.

>If I want to tell an interesting story and create a world, and you want to win the game

Guys doing stupid gimmick builds don't (necessarily) want to win the game though.

They want to play a stupid gimmick build, because they thin the alcoholic dwarf barbarian who exclusively uses tankards and broken bottles as his weapons sounds, dare I say, fun.

The problem lies in the disconnect between how realistic/gritty a game the DM wants to run, and how fantastic/colorful a character the player wants to play.

You are otherwise right, talking out is almost always the best course of action (even if it ends with you two agreeing that you just won't play in this game together), I just thought it's better to not muddle things with involving powergaming in there, which is an entirely separate issue.

Why didn't anyone tell me I could take a ten level "The Flash" prestige class?

Because you are stuck in the hell that's known as "CRB only 3.5".

many systems don't let you be "the best" at 2 different things, heaven forbid 3.

and after you've been "the best" at the normal stuff, you start looking for other things to be "the best" at, and hopefully do better than your last guy.

Plus, if you can make that outlandish thing better that the standard norm, in any way, then it IS a makes-sense-in-the-world decision too.

That's why every battle mage in my Pathfinder game (that isn't hiding that they are a wizard) wears a Haramaki or Silken ceremonial armor, with a kilt. They don't want to die.

>Nothing like swat teaming out a group of orcs, taking no damage, and felling badass, only to be killed in the next area by one lucky as fuck goblin with a crossbow.
Not everyone likes CS:GO playstyles and very few like sitting out the next 60 minutes of combat because a stray arrow nailed then in the toe for 2 damage and killed their -5 con mod wizard.

So they do things like put more points In con, or specialise in a spell or maneuver so they can reliably do their action.

I mean, for martials alone in games like 3.5 if you don't specialise they do really REALLY badly in stuff like anything at all.

Fighters can't talk well compared to a face class. They can't hit people hard without getting hit people hard feats, and are in trouble if focused in ranged and someone gets close. Can't knock people without feats stopping them taking attacks, and the same goes for disarming, sundering, flipping around or even maneuvering during combat.

When trying to do varied stuff is in the game rules punished and less likely to succeed than specialising, people will specialise, because people like to succeed. And GMs tend to use the rules as given instead of houseruling too much.

If you want a game where most things are equally viable actions as adjudicated by the GM, play dungeon world.

Son, there are five types of characters players make. Some grizzled beards might make something else, but you are dealing with one of these five.
1: Powergamer. This guy makes the strongest character he can. He may or may not actually know how to optimize, but he's trying to.
2: Donutsteals. This character who is totally not from an animu or vidya uses a rough mixture of classes and skills to approximate their character. They will regularly whine to have an obscure, worthless spell or ability added to their backstory. They may or may not (usually may not) actually know how to roleplay their character properly. Expect the nuthin personal ronin to be a yes-man quest-jockey.
3: The Clown. This is the one you seem to be having the issue with.He wants to be Jackie-chan in a ladder factory. He wants to summon as many horses as he can for some reason. He wants to surfboard on his shortsword. You are either going to indulge him, or he quickly becomes character 5. A sub-variety of the clown, the Evil Clown has noticed that you can make evil characters, and thus made Brikkfukk, the Bugbear Paladin of Slaughter.
4: The OC. This guy spent a week making his alter-ego, who is a perfectly trained ascetic druid in tune with nature, and has tamed the inner beast of a dinosaur, and is level 1. He will regularly turn down your quest hooks because Thaddeus the Druid doesn't do base stuff like that, but he is still wandering the countryside with Brikkfukk the Bugbear Paladin of Slaughter.
5: Motherfucking Tordek. This guy barely knows what you are playing, and picked a pre-made character. He isn't roleplaying, he is basically a hireling that occasionally does something stupid when not murderhoboing. He is going to sit there, not doing anything except hitting things with his greatsword, or casting magic missile, or asking questions everyone else knows the answers to, and he thinks this is a great time to be had.

These are your options.

But her opponent isn't downed

or even in a vulnerable position for such an attack

Seriously, niggas just gonna slap the whole blade out of her hands now because she has no grip.

>In a world where one's power is directly proportionate to the amount of favor/currency they they have, and thus are able to afford/claim better shit than the stinking peasants, some autist will be triggered by the idea that a female managed to acquire enough favor or currency to buy good enough shit to beat the evolved form of the stinking peasant, the smelly conscript.

Some players I have met seem to be a combination of does things and some are not at all.
You don't honestly believe that all players can be categorise into x types of players, do you ?

Play a game other than dnd/PF that doesn't require people to be one-trick ponies to be competent.

It's called half-swording.

But then again, you've posted it precisely as an argument starter...

>murder stroke
>not ending thine opponent rightly
worst knight tbqh

Hey, let's telegraph way ahead of time that we're going to use a specific and quite niche technique which in itself will be quite slow to get started and easy to read. What could possible go wrong?

So she's getting ready to have her attack parried and her face stabbed.

But hey, at least she's doing so in a way which will let you show off how much you know about sword fighting by doing so with a not so intuitive but quite well known and very easily recognisable way.

New, unique and strange doesn't mean your character is a half-dragon fighter/bard/druid who fights with a chalice and a chandelier and has heterochromatic eyes.

Get better friends.

>Play a game other than dnd/PF that doesn't require people to be one-trick ponies to be competent.
What is specific about D&D/PF that requires this from characters? Can someone please explain this?

>Strict class and race system that forces player to follow specific builds to be effective, unless they want to be absolutely helpless
>Hurrr how does it one trick pony durrr

3.5 and PF often require ludicrous feat trees to be able to reliably perform things like running up to enemies and attacking at the same time, tripping, disarming, grappling, or fighting with most weapons and not be awful at it. But then most of these wind up useless anyways because of restrictions on what you can grapple, inability to disarm natural weapons or spells, flying and massive creatures being unaffected by trip, etc.
Of course, the wizard doesn't need a feat tree to prepare and cast Trip Humanoid and will have bigger slots for Magic Impenetrable Chain Prison later.

So essentially it's that certain classes have to invest heavily in certain areas in order to be competent at them throughout the game, as compared to other characters who are competent at their field by default? Wouldn't this imply that simply buffing martials would remove a lot of the munchkining?

It's worth noting that D&D 5e doesn't have this problem. "Builds" aren't really a thing unless you put them in, and a straight fighter is gonna be in the same effective ballpark as the silliest sorcerer/warlock/paladin multiclass.

Is holding the sword by the blade the autistic western version of reverse katana stance from old samurai movies?
Also
>wants believable party
>believable characters
>posts art of female knights

It's called "half-swording", apparently.

Buffing martials is by no means simple.

If you try to add extra mechanics to them (Tome of Battle/Path of War), you get endless bitchmoaning despite those systems working great.

And there was an interesting thought experiment I saw on D&D a while ago. If you give a core, single class Fighter plus infinity to attack and damage- That is, it can instantly kill anything it can successfully attack- The class still becomes irrelevant compared to casters by level 15, arguably by level 10.

The problem isn't just power, but scope, and increasing the scope of martials requires more mechanics which pisses off people who are wrapped up in the martial/magic double standard.

'Builds' are a thing in every game with meaningful character generation mechanics.

It isn't a dirty word. It's a descriptor for various ways you can construct a characters capabilities. That's all it is.

see the responses to

Half-swording, at least how I was taught to use it, is adjusting your grip on a long or two handed sword, with one hand gripping somewhere on the lower third of the blade and the other on the hilt. It shortens your reach and trades power for a greater measure of control and precision, which is useful in some situations.

I don't think I would recommend women trying to half sword then, if her opponent is male he can easily pull that from her grasp

It's a mordhau maneuver. It's how you deal with heavy armor when you have a sword. That, or half-swording.

So, we've established that you don't know what you're talking about. But you're quite confident that you know more than everyone else, and that dumb girls can't be fighters lol.

Let's imagine a world where ToB/PoW are widely accepted. Does optimizing stop? I don't think it would be the semi-necessity it currently is for certain classes, but I think people would do it regardless.

I for one enjoy playing with a system, and seeing what is possible and what is viable, which frequently means making somewhat strange characters. The GM and other players are cool with it though, and even do it themselves.

Yea I'm sure half swording was very practical outside of tournament use. I'm sure that in life or death battle your opponents wouldn't just gang bang you and take your sword. This is definitely the autistic western version of reverse katana grip

In , the guy on the left is half-swording, the guy on the right is doing mordhau. Half-swording gives you precision, so you can try to aim for joints. Mordhau gives you leverage and impact, so you can try just hammering the motherfucker.

Optimising will always exist. It's less a question of stopping it and more of whether or not a system requires the players to do it for their characters to actually function.

Buffing is hard. There are instances where later books would release new feats or classes that were straight up improvements on earlier ones, for example a Knight or Cavalier class that delivers on what Fighter is supposed to do but fails. I think those are both actual classes but I don't know if that's what they do,I don't have enough experience with the system to name the exact things I'm referencing.
The Tome of Battle added mechanics to improve martial ability, and while it helps especially earlier on, some people very vocally dislike "weaboo fightan magic" and it also fails to address some of the failures built into the system that hold martials back.
As far as rebuilding things entirely, they tried with 4e. Balance was fantastic because classes focused on doing generally 4 different things, and even then each class could fulfill the roles in different ways. Unfortunately a questionable visual design and other pitfalls led to the common misconceptions that all of the classes play the same way, and that it's an MMO and somehow encourages less roleplaying than earlier systems.
5e's bounded accuracy, streamlined mechanics, more powerful feats that come less often and so far are fewer in number, and magic items given to the DM to view but not players and not assumed to be had at given levels do away with the issue in some regards, but cause other concerns as well.

It's on par with flying tornado kick in tournament rules Tae Kwon do. You do this in a real battle and you'll will get destroyed

Woah there, what the fuck did you do with the goalposts? They were right here, on the "was this a real thing knights did" line, and now I can't find them. It's almost like you're a douchebag who got caught talking bullshit and is desperately backpedaling.