I will force these powergaming assholes to roleplay emotional connections

Anyone can say "I love you" and not mean it user. Do you think a group of murderhobos is really going to give a shit about their "loved ones" if they didn't have a mechanical effect that made them marginally better at killing things.

Hell, there was an edgy manga floating around that operated on a similar premise, a sociopath joining parties just to gain their levels once they died (assuming he didn't kill them off himself).

And challenges will be ramped up accordingly. This is supposed to be a decent story, with some tension and conflict.

I guarantee it won't suddenly become a cakewalk thanks to some bonuses and a cool new henchman. You have dangerous interactions with dangerous creatures, people and even environment. You will be hurt. Your 'loved ones' will be hurt. You will need to make tough calls and nothing is ever guaranteed 'safe'.

That's a compelling adventure for me to run. Nut up or shut up.

They'll not really get a emotional connection. They will just use said NPC as a tool.

You can't force people to become attached, it doesn't work like that

It's a thin line to walk, there's a lot of satifaction in having enough system mastery to achieve something above what you could normally do, but if the character solves issues trivially, there's a large power disparity in the group, or the character has no traits beyond being the best at [thing] then that can be bad

Again, their motivations don't matter all that much. I can't read minds. I don't want to.

I'm not there to just be an entertainer. I want to be entertained, too. And what would entertain me is a story with characters that BEHAVE at least marginally as if they're human beings with emotion.

>And challenges will be ramped up accordingly.
Which will only encourage the power gamers to gain more "loved ones" to get bigger bonuses to take on bigger challenges.
>You have dangerous interactions with dangerous creatures, people and even environment. You will be hurt. Your 'loved ones' will be hurt. You will need to make tough calls and nothing is ever guaranteed 'safe'.
"What was that GM? I was too busy calculating my bonuses to hear you. Is the monster dead yet?" Also, see >That's a compelling adventure for me to run. Nut up or shut up.
It seems as though this whole thread was started because you couldn't nut up in the first place.

>I'm not there to just be an entertainer. I want to be entertained, too. And what would entertain me is a story with characters that BEHAVE at least marginally as if they're human beings with emotion.
Well that's not going to happen by boiling down every social interaction into numbers and modifiers. In fact, it's going to be even more barebones and uninteresting since now, they'll give even less of a shit about the campaign unless you attach a random modifier that they can use to game the system even harder.

Not to mention, having hirelings with class levels is a boon in and of itself.

Are the practical hurdles to having a horde of faceless mooks tag along for the sake of bonuses still not apparent to you?

It's been explained twice. Do you have brain problems?

OP has some pretty okay ideas, just executed rather poorly. What he should do is talk to his group about the expectations he has about the game, and he should explain that there are a bit more rigorous qualifications to be counted as a loved one to someone, and that it should be on a case by case basis.

>Are the practical hurdles to having a horde of faceless mooks tag along for the sake of bonuses still not apparent to you?
They wouldn't be faceless mooks though, they'd be "loved ones." No reason why a character's loved one can't be a Level X [Class] in addition to giving him a reacharound on the weekends and holidays.
>It's been explained twice. Do you have brain problems?
Do you? Because you'd have to be somewhere on the spectrum to think that boiling down human emotion to straight modifiers to get power gamers to focus on emotion would be a good idea.

If getting competent hirelings has been easy and cheap for your characters, your DMs were shit at DMing.

That's not even considering the DM 'voices' NPCs, including henchmen, and is under no obligation to reciprocate or acknowledge your character professing a deep emotional attachment within five seconds of hiring a complete stranger.

OP is clearly autistic, so "talking it out" is already a difficult prospect for him to grasp.

>OP is clearly autistic
Well where the fuck do you think we are?

You never said anything about their feelings needing to be reciprocated. You just said that they needed to be someone who your character considers a "loved one."

A stealth "problems with 3.PF" thread where OP is trying to give the tin man a heart when all he wants is a +5 belt of giant's strength?

That could have been formulated better, given that we're all autismos.

It's not unilateral. Both of the people involved need to claim a connection.

Why does no one on tg understand this

Okay, why can't our character's loved ones just so happen to have class levels then? There's no reason why my character's brother couldn't also be a Fighter or my Wive be a Cleric of equal level.

Hell, if anything, everyone's loved ones should be capable of defending themselves somehow.

You don't get to create your own tailor-made NPCs without input from the DM. That is a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of the player, here.

Why shouldn't we be allowed to design our character's loved ones then? Is the DM in this situation that much of a control freak?

>implying this is only a problem in one system
10/10 bait, senpai.

You get to create one character at a time: your PC. Every other character is under the purview of the DM. That's the nature of the game. If you can't handle that, most RPGs aren't for you.

So the GM expects us to just gravitate towards random NPC's who we don't even know and yet is bitching about how little fucks the group is giving when it comes to his story?

Man, I had OP pegged all along, he was part of the problem the entire fucking time.

Here's a thought: get to know NPCs.

I had my players try that. I forced them to go look for, talk to, and acquire them.

With minimal rolling.

The result was they actually became invested in those NPCs because they spent valuable time, effort and money into acquiring them. The NPcs didn't immediately like them either, with two exceptions. The paladin collected an orphan as a squire, and said orphan was so grateful he would have let the paladin have sex with him even if the paladin was so inclined (he was not). But the paladin did become attached to the boy. The other was a broken storm-blooded sorceress who became the party mascot; she was brain damaged and unless controlled, a threat to anything around her that she found vaguely threatening until she was taught otherwise by long, hard effort on the part of the druid.

Otherwise, they had to work to instill loyalty and affection. And they became better roleplayers when they realized if they didn't work to make these people happy and spend time and effort, they could get betrayed, the NPC could leave, (in one memorable instance the NPCs fell in love and eloped), or they could find themselves getting robbed after their near party weipe by making bad choices and talking in seedy taverns about their jobs, wealth, and skills.

Players choosing to make their own NPCs is just another method of number crunching and should be discouraged, unless you're an autistic GM who can't imagine anything.

Why? We're a band of adventurers traveling from place to place, fighting monsters and risking death every other hour on the hour.

At best, we might exchange pleasantries with the barkeep or shag someone down at the local brothel but at the end of the day, we're adventurers who rarely stay in one place for long enough to generate a connection to anyone and even if we did, there's no way they'd want to join us on such a dangerous quest when they already have a life worth living.

Also, from a meta-standpoint, we as players already understand that loved ones are going to be killed off once it's convenient for the DM's plot, and OP already seems like the type of shitter who would murder-fuck your character's family just to generate drama.

Here's the important question.

Did you offer mechanical rewards for doing this or was it just something you did to get them invested in your setting?

There were mechanical awards, in the form of morale bonuses and free teamwork feats. But they only worked if the NPC was as invested as the PC. Mind you I had 90% of said NPCs start as neutral or indifferent - how the PCs acted and their general alignment compared to the NPCs mattered. Even the LE warlord was able to win over a companion once he figured out that evil=/=edgelord.

So what happens when you stop offering those awards to your players?

>Your 'loved ones' will be hurt.
Oh my god, you're actually serious. That title was the funniest thing I've read on here since the Skinner meme. First they enter your anime fanfic, next they're singing ballads, ERPing each other, and eventually showing up in schoolgirl outfits. DMing for humiliation, why has no one done this yet? I can't wait to try this.

Surprisingly, they still roleplayed. They started treating NPCs like people, and even enemies started being more than experience on the hoof. They started trying to learn about motivations and situations. And they learned that they could gain experience by roleplaying as well as by killing things, in amounts that made the effort worthwhile. they also learned that people knowing things could be used to gert more information about where things they could just kill and loot existed, and treasures that were more than just randomized loot might be.

It's hard work, but gratifying....when it works. It doesn't work all the time.

Pass. If I'd actually need those bonuses, there's a high chance of being punished for having them so the optimal strategy is to never form any emotional bonds.

>DM complained that I put very little effort into my characters, usually just doing wandering murderers that happen to be friendly with the rest of the party
>Take marginal offense to that, as I've engaged in just as much teamkilling as everyone else in the group
>Spend some off-time cobbling together character sheets, all with the same 15,14,13,12,11,10 array of stats assigned as needed
>End up with a twenty-five member extended family, including a warforged butler and a human druid that habitually posed as the family's abnormally large guard dog because of a portentous dream involving this family
>Come up with backstories and motives for them all
>Arrange them in a binder, along with the overview and some of the minutiae
>New campaign finally rolls around
>Gravely state that I have awaited this day
>Drop the binder on the table and scoot it at the DM
>"Choose wisely."

Kudos user. You managed to turn a ho into a housewife.

It takes away the role-playing in a role-playing game. The whole point of D&D is to immerse yourself in the world and act as if you are there.

Wouldn't it be easier to penalize players by having their murder hobo-ing bite the party in the ass by either getting them into trouble or having their "loved ones" sell them out or turn their backs on them because they didn't give half a fuck about them?

D&D hasn't been about roleplaying since AD&D.

I wish i could disagree, though PF is doing okay. 4e, on the other hand....yeah, nah.

>I wish i could disagree, though PF is doing okay.
3.PF is the reason WHY we have so many power gamers in D&D in the first place. I hope you meant to say "5e" so I know you aren't actually that stupid.

>being this retarded
What makes a fighter with 18 Str and Power Attack less role-playable than a fighter with 7 Strength and Skill Focus basket weaving? This is one o the oldest fucking fallacies in the book, and honestly the people that preach it tend to be shit at the game AND roleplaying in my experience.

>This is one o the oldest fucking fallacies in the book, and honestly the people that preach it tend to be shit at the game AND roleplaying in my experience.
This, there's no reason why a character can't have good numbers and a personality unless you're someone who lacks both.

It's usually a case of these kinds of players, who make weird-ass statements like these, being surrounded by players who deliberately step out of the spotlight to let these unlucky souls shine when they have bad stats.

I do it all the time. I avoid outright stating what I'm doing, because the player doesn't need shitty rolls rubbed in his face. Perhaps the players who continue to think "bad decisions and stats = gud roleplayer" never sat back and thought about why they end up the center of attention when they make bad choices or have bad luck.

And maybe I'm just using a lot of words to describe the same stupid junk we're all tired of seeing: People who suffer from the Dunning-Kreuger Effect making the rest of the world suffer with them.

>What makes a fighter with 18 Str and Power Attack less role-playable than a fighter with 7 Strength and Skill Focus basket weaving?

Nothing, but that's beside the point. It's irrefutable that (the majority of) players who love to minmaxing are not slightly interested in the roleplay aspect: minmaxing is their game.
While players who priorize the roleplay aspect can be confortable by either playing a mixmaxed charater or a feeble one.
Sure there will be overlaps in the two categories but mainly it's that the way it is acknowledged.

> It's irrefutable that (the majority of) players who love to minmaxing are not slightly interested in the roleplay aspect:
Except it's not because you have no fucking way of verifying this one way or the other outside of anecdotes.

>It's irrefutable that (the majority of) players who love to minmaxing are not slightly interested in the roleplay aspect
It's irrefutable that you're full of shit.

>the death of those characters will confer severe penalties, to be removed by an impossible save that grows easier over time
Yeah, no. This alone invalidates your entire system. No minmaxer worth his salt would risk this sort of bullshit.

Lots of people have the same same anecdotal evidences about the argument, so much that it's become assumed an stuck in the jergon of the hobby (munchkin, powerplayer, thatguy, etc..).

You're just projecting

>Lots of people have the same same anecdotal evidences about the argument
There are very few anecdotes of good players, that doesn't mean they're non-existent or rare, it just means that "This guy is a good player, he always speeds the story along" doesn't make for a good story.

>There are very few anecdotes of good players, that doesn't mean they're non-existent or rare

Correct but that's beside the point either: the anecdotal evidences about the good players share a pattern about how they play (they all love the roleplay element). Trying to figure out their spread based on the frequency of the story is unrelatanle.

>Nothing, but that's beside the point. It's irrefutable that (the majority of) players who love to minmaxing are not slightly interested in the roleplay aspect: minmaxing is their game.
What if, bare with me now, but what if...they were just shit players who had no desire of being immersed in the campaign in the first place?
>While players who priorize the roleplay aspect can be confortable by either playing a mixmaxed charater or a feeble one.
What are you smoking? Most storyfags from my experience try to use game as a means of gaining a captive audience and are just as self-centered and uninterested in the game as the minmaxer who uses the game to show off how powerful their character(s) are.

>the anecdotal evidences about the good players share a pattern about how they play (they all love the roleplay element).
Source: your ass

Baseline is better then negative. I'll ignore your mongrel attempt to force me because consistent performance trumps the spikes up and down

>the anecdotal evidences about the good players share a pattern about how they play (they all love the roleplay element)
Again: You're full of shit.

>What if, bare with me now, but what if...they were just shit players who had no desire of being immersed in the campaign in the first place?
That is correct, so it is the fact that bad players share most traits with powerplayers (or storyfag, see below)

>What are you smoking? Most storyfags from my experience try to use game as a means of gaining a captive audience and are just as self-centered and uninterested in the game as the minmaxer who uses the game to show off how powerful their character(s) are.

Correct again: powerplayers and storyfags share the same trait that make them potentially bad players: they are interested in aspects of the game that are besides the game itsef. While a role player plays a game of roles the story fag plays a powerfantasy that disconnects from the game.

So it has nothing to do with being a power gamer and it has everything to do with the player being an asshole.

You can be optimized, yet not be a minmaxing faggot. You can interested in roleplay, yet not be a storyfag who needs to warp the spotlight around themselves to have fun.

Overall, it boils down to not being a dick who steps on other people's toes for shits and giggles.

HA! Jokes on you! In my game I killed my loved one, who was acting like a coward, to get a morale bonus!

>So it has nothing to do with being a power gamer
...or a storyfag, but being one may really be the case of a bad player:
Good players CAN be powerplayers (or storyfags) but bad players can't avoid being munchkins or primadonna.

>Lots of people have the same same anecdotal evidences about the argument,
And lots of people have anecdotal evidence about how 3.PF is totally balanced and core only monks are overpowered too. Does that mean they're correct?

>Does that mean they're correct?
That's a fallacius statement: the powerplayer argument is way older then 3.5e and 3.5e is surely not unanimously (or by the major part) regarded as a banced system (quite the opposite in fact), while the powerplayer argument was so pervasive and acknowledged that it is struck in the hobby's jergon.

You're using anecdotal evidence for your argument yet are tying to argue how someone else is making fallacious statements?

Oh the irony.

>You're using anecdotal evidence for your argument
I'm not, i'm stating that the fact that the powerplayer = potential bad player argument is backed off by evidences that, while anecdotal, share the same traits by lots of people, from a long time in the story of the hobby (thus the jergon).

>yet are tying to argue how someone else is making fallacious statements?
But you are doing so. While there's people that love 3.5 the majority in the hobby still think it sucks for varius anecdotal arguments. You are actually reinforcing my statement.

>Oh the irony.
Yeah, especially when it's not seen.

>I'm not, i'm stating that the fact that the powerplayer = potential bad player argument is backed off by evidences that, while anecdotal, share the same traits by lots of people, from a long time in the story of the hobby (thus the jergon).
It's still anecdotal no matter how you try and dance around it user.

>It's still anecdotal no matter how you try and dance around it user.

The fact that's anecdotal doesn't invalidate the argument since it's the fact that is SHARED by lots of people by the course of a long time, and that such anecdotal evidences SHERED so many traits that the pawerplayer person was passed down by generation of gamers by the jergon.

If you are implying that is a meme, well then it is a very old one.

The fact that's anecdotal doesn't invalidate the argument since it's the fact that is SHARED by lots of people by the course of a long time, and that such anecdotal evidences SHERED so many traits that the evil white male version was passed down by generation of women by the jergon.
>If you are implying that is a meme, well then it is a very old one.

Yeah sure, keep strawmaning, that would do the trick.

The plural of anecdote is not "data".

>The fact that's anecdotal doesn't invalidate the argument
Um sweetie, yes it does. If anecdotal evidence was valid, I could say that every 3.PF player on the planet was an unwashed, overweight sexual deviant who throws their dice across the room whenever they roll absolute trash based on my own experience with THAT GUYS from my days playing at my local community college, which would somehow be correct since my DM has similar stories from back when he ran 3.PF for his friends back in college.

Everyone is going to have a different experience from one another, and pretending that your experience is more valid than others just because some people had similar experiences is what ultimately makes it a fallacy.

Actually, it is. When you label it self-reporting.

Thanks.

>Everyone is going to have a different experience from one another.
Of course, but still a definitiom of a munchkin player exists (from a long time). How the hell was formed then?

>and pretending that your experience is more valid than others just because some people had similar experiences is what ultimately makes it a fallacy.
I'm not doing so, i'm merely stating the obvious: if there wasn't people with so similar experiences about the powerplayer argument at this day we wouldn't even have the word to define it.

>How the hell was formed then?
The same way every other word, phrase, or term was formed. People began using a word to describe something, other people liked the term and began using it themselves, until the term hit the mainstream and now every started using it to describe that thing.

Even so, it has nothing to do with this argument, nor does it make your argument any less flawed from its inception.

I mean, if your argument is good because a non-zero portion of the community uses the term "minmaxer" then I guess my argument that all 3.PF players are garbage is relevant too since a non-zero portion of the community uses the term "3aboo"

>People began using a word to describe something, other people liked the term and began using it themselves, until the term hit the mainstream and now every started using it to describe that thing.

And that implies there is the thing to witch the definition applies.

It doesn't mean that the term is correct, it just means that a lot of people used the term to describe a particular thing.

I mean, people called science witchcraft in the past, even though it's obvious nowadays that science has practically nothing to do with magic.

>It doesn't mean that the term is correct, it just means that a lot of people used the term to describe a particular thing.

Neithertheless while the definition may be broader or narrow it contain the same thing we have experienced. So it's irrelevant if we end calling such players munchkins or dicefaggots, we both know to who we are referring to.

>it's obvious nowadays that science has practically nothing to do with magic.
Totally true, particle accelerators have nothing to do with magic. It's only simple equations anyone could understand if they just tried.

You are literally arguing semantics when it has nothing to do with the argument user.
>Totally true, particle accelerators have nothing to do with magic. It's only simple equations anyone could understand if they just tried.
Exactly

>You are literally arguing semantics when it has nothing to do with the argument user.

Well excuuuuse me if there are anons in this thread who needed an obviuos101 review.

>Well excuuuuse me if there are anons in this thread who needed an obviuos101 review.
Is English your second language?

>Is English your second language?
And this is relevant because...?

Because you keep misspelling words and your shitty grammar makes it to understand what you're trying to say.

I'll take that as a yes btw

>misspelling words and your shitty grammar

Yes i don't speak english and i'm also phoneposting (so the autocorrect keeps fucking with me).

Do they completely lack self-awareness or do they just not understand the concept of what you are trying to do?

Honestly, you're a more patient man than I. At that point, I would have just declared that seeing all of their loved ones die drove them to suicidal depression and they all offed themselves.

Because even if you find it fun, both the DM and the other players need to enjoy it and be on board with everything it entails for it to work.

As a narrative DM, running for powergamers is hell. Running for powergamers who genuinely don't understand that there are other ways to play is the only thing worse.

>Badass npcs
Look who's getting attached