Build a character

>Build a character
>Finish up their build
>Settle into a grove when roleplaying them
>Rest of the group likes my character.
>Everything going good
>Get into first combat of the night
>Land one solid hit
>Enemy is damaged but still standing
>"Okay, next turn I'll j-"
>Get hit for practically all my HP in one hit
>Out of the fight
>No healer
>Waiting around for several hours while everyone else's characters gets shit done.
>Feeling like absolute trash.
>After combat, get patched up at base camp and reassured that it was "just bad luck"
>Take what I've learned
>Use it to improve my build
>Next combat
>Get shat on again anyways
>Wash
>Rinse
>Repeat
>mfw
Is there any worse feeling in tabletop gaming? I don't even want to play the character anymore but it's so far in the campaign that I'm not even sure what I'd play if I decided to retire them.

God I feel like absolute trash.

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My ogre fighter feels your pain. Majority of every session was spent unconcious.

What kind of shitty character did you dredge up?

To put it simply, he's Fighter in a sci-fi setting equipped with power armor. However, almost every other engagement he has been in.

So far he has lost an arm, part of his torso, and has early onset PTSD from watching dozens of allies get brutally murdered in front of him while he couldn't do anything to stop it from happening. The only times he has been able to hold his own was against turrets and giant vehicles.

I'm not OP, but when I made a character like that it was because I was new to that specific system and made the mistake of trying to make something other than a dex based character.

The system had an initiative system where characters declare their actions from lowest initiative to highest, then resolve them from highest to lowest. My highest possible initiative roll was lower than the lowest possible roll of two other PCs. So combats went one of the following ways:
- Enemies had an initiative that I could beat. So those other two PCs easily killed them, because high dex made those PCs good in unarmed combat.
- Enemies beat my initiative. I tried to attack on of them. He goes defensive and dodged it, because high dex made them good at dodging. Then one of the others attacks me.
- I go defensive. Nobody attacks me.
- I split between attacking and defending. So my attack is worse. If I'm lucky, my armor stops some of the damage. Then the damage gives me penalties to every single roll I make. Including initiative, which gets rerolled every turn.

Worst part is that this campaign had 5 players and 3 of us were like this.

What the hell where you playing

My cleric with the best stats out all the players got laid low by a lucky crit from a fucking goblin. Trust me, I know what it's like to deal with constant bullshit.

Talk to your GM about it
You're a foghter who gets KO'd every fight, something is going wrong
Also what game is this

It's a custom system my friend is running. The actual mechanics are solid and it's a fairly simple game to wrap your head around, it's just that while melee has a power going for it, my character usually ends up getting knocked out either before he's able to get into melee or because the damage that he's dealing isn't enough to take out the enemy before they swing back and smear him across the walls.

It sucks because everyone keeps telling me how great my character is and how most things can't survive a solid hit, yet the moment I try to get into melee to do this bullshit, I end up getting taken out of the fight while everyone else gets to do shit.

i made a fighter used a shield chainmail defensive style fucking like 19 ac level 1 im getting destroyed by rats goblins undead everything goes through my armour like its paper

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If you are getting near KOed in one hit, clearly your power armor isn't tanky enough to matter. I've played WIZARDS that have more health than you from the sounds of it.

Unless your fightery dude is some kind of glass cannon that can just shit out damage and thats supposed to be his thing, have a conversation with your GM about what you can do, and what he might have to change about the system, so you can get back in the fight.

If nothing else, at bare fucking minimum, try and steal the mech/pilot mode thing from Dva from Overwatch. If your power armor gets wrecked in the fight, fine. So be it. But let your squishy human pilot eject out of it and be able to do SOMETHING after that, even if its just a guy in a tshirt and a popgun until you can fix up your power armor.

>If you are getting near KOed in one hit, clearly your power armor isn't tanky enough to matter.
The thing is, it actually is incredibly tanky, just not against the shit that it actually needs to be tanky against. Like for reference, I can literally walk through walls, jump out of a plane at 50,000 feet, and tank a missile going off a few feet from my face and take no damage from it. Yet the moment we encounter a boss character who can slice through steel like butter or dodge bullets like an Agent from "The Matrix," I get my ass kicked.

It's a weird sorta sour spot where I'm technically stronger and weaker than most of the things we could be fighting.

That shouldn't be happening unless your DM is fudging his rolls.

This. 19 AC at lvl one means that less than 1 attack out of 4 should be hitting you.

So, question. If you are that tanky and getting destroyed, how the fuck are the rest of your party surviving anything?

From what it sounds like, everyone else on your team should be dead 5 times over. Are they all just sneaky gits, or dodgetanks?

>Fun character concept
>Fits setting well
>Really enjoy roleplaying him
>Supposedly strong in what he does

>Roll like shit all the time something dramatic happens
>System doesn't have degrees of sucess so rolling well on non-important rolls does not matter.
>Seriously, "four consecutive critfails in a row" kind of shit
>Most in need of armor/weapon repairs and healing so don't even have money
>People start throwing jokes about my character
>Because of constant fails my fun character concept gets twisted into a bumbling idiot

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I think he said he's the only melee character

I consistently play characters with decent mental defenses and always end up rolling 1s or 2s on mind control and then rolling really high on every roll after that.

It's not even annoying anymore and temporarily working with the villains is half of the development of any of my characters at this point.

Is your name Kain

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i thought that might of been the case so he screenshot the roles im a very unlucky person unless we doing something stupid like i missed a goblin 5 times in a row

rolls not roles im an idiot

>So, question. If you are that tanky and getting destroyed, how the fuck are the rest of your party surviving anything?
Because they either invested more heavily into shield/armor, ranged weaponry, special powers, or a combination thereof. Meanwhile, I try investing in shields or tech to improve the power of my melee attacks so I can go through stronger material and it never feels like it's enough.

Then to add insult to injury, one guy in the group is starting to invest in melee as well, and is actually a better melee fighter than I am, in addition to having the highest shield value out of everyone else in the party. I'm pretty sure he could tank a nuke going off in his face if he wanted to and the weapon he's using is capable of going through most materials like it was butter on top of it.

>fun
You deserve all your misfortunes and more

>Make a character who's based on illusion magic
>GM rolls out in the open and every single enemy you encounter somehow rolls amazingly to see through your tricks
>Basically you're a walking light machine that accomplishes nothing
>If you played a boring blast-wizard you wouldn't even have to worry about saving throws half the time

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At least your GM lets you roll.

>make a character who's based on illusion magic
>suddenly every random NPC, from corpsec to ganger, is a Sherlock Holmes with X-ray vision and seven MAD scanners shoved up their ass

Sorry, my bad, should have been just using broken Manipuation spells and not playing Mother-may-I with the GM.

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Sounds like you just answered your own question. If everyone invested more heavily in defense, and their doing fine, you didn't invest enough in defense. If the guy that that just now started to dip into a melee build is as good or better than you, the guy that focused on it, you didn't make optimized decisions. How is his weapon AND armor better than yours? Your build isn't optimized.

It sounds like you made a glass cannon that has to make themselves too vulnerable to work, and doesn't have a powerful enough weapon to be any kind of cannon.

You should look into how the other players made their characters and see what you did wrong. Then you learn and do better next time.

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Adventure!

The first problem anyone reading the rules would notice is that the contents page is after a bit over 100 pages of lore. It goes downhill from there.

Sounds like the system needs to have a bit of balancing work done.

It actively should be happening, all the time.
The system specifically not only allows for but encourages things to beat any ac at least 1/20 of the time.

This is why I love randomly rolling up characters.
Their personality emerges from their stats, and if they die? Who cares, I didn't spend 5 hours of my life carefully chiseling them out of formless shape of empty charsheet, I can just roll up another one!

>1/20 = 1/4
Nice math skills, fuckboy, go back to preschool.

I feel your pain. I play on roll20 with dm's who do a fair amount of public rolling and it really does feel like new armour is worthless. I bump into 24AC and enemies are routinely hitting me.

How do you pull that off? Every time I've seen it tried you end up with a bunch of characters whose personalities and gameplay are the ttrpg equivalent of the colour grey.

You just write the story backwards. You start with your character as he is and ask questions about how he got there. Once you trace your character's story back to the beginning, you play it chronologically and see what changes, how those experiences inform his personality, beliefs, etc. It's the difference between writing on a blank page and writing from a prompt.

And gameplay-wise? I guess it depends quite a lot on the system, but I usually find that a randomly-generated character is just vaguely shit at everything.

>and has early onset PTSD from watching dozens of allies get brutally murdered
So your allies are getting downed often, too? You're probably just playing a very lethal system/setting, and since you've decided to be the front of the party, you'll get the blunt of their initial attacks.

If you are getting outnumbered that's a given. 4+ attacks against you per turn will end up getting a few hits in.

>there is no such thing as a bonus to hit

Inb4 "I was just trolen"

Enemies have bonuses to hit, numbnut. Especially if they're outmaneuvering the character.

>I have never played D&D
A fucking CR 0 Goat has +3 to attack rolls, meaning rolling a nat 16 should give it the 19 it needs to break that kind of AC. Enemies designed to be an actual threat often have +5 to attack rolls.

Why the hell a goat would be as capable as 3rd level fighter?

What kind of 3rd level fighter are you playing?

Well, since you are far into the campaign and have only been in 2 fights, it seems to not be a combat focused game, so what do you care if your character isn't good at that particular thing?

But then you're in a non-combat game and one fight took "several hours", so I'm guessing you just stapled 2 copy-pastas together without considering the implications.

Normal fighter get +1 bab per level, you nigger.

Goats are pretty vicious, if you're playing a fighter with no points in strength or dex you probably would lose, tbqhfambalam

>Goats are pretty vicious,
BOARS are vicious, and they get same ab.

Irl, boars are vicious because they have big old sharp tusks they can fuck you with. Curly goat horns ain't got shit.

Also
>Expecting pathfinder of all things to have any bearing on reality

>My highest possible initiative roll was lower than the lowest possible roll of two other PCs
>Adventure!

Your Initiative is the sum of 2 stats that range from 1-5, resulting in a range of 2-10. To this, you add 1d10.

So, unless you were both cribbled and retarded AND the other characters were superhuman physically and intellectually, what you describe isn't impossible.

My suggestion is to either get a GM who knows the rules or to stop making intentionally gimped characters.

>Expecting pathfinder of all things to have any bearing on reality
This! We're talking about a system where three house cats can annihilate a village of peasants here, it's not worth getting hung up on.

>you'll get the blunt
Brunt. The word you're looking for is brunt.

I feel like you've read the book, but have never played.
That's the only way that fuck up makes any sense.

Veeky Forums the post

Unless it is a system meant to have short and brutal combat. In that case playing a melee character in scifi setting, where you can assume powerful ranged weapons exist, is suicidal.

Prove me fucking wrong.

You already have been. You're looking at just BAB with no stats or feats, like you flipped through the book to argue on the internet.

Adventure! also lets you spend your starting points directly on boosting your initiative.

Plus I think one, maybe both, of those characters took something that meant that a 1-4 on their initiative roll still counted as a 4.

Adventure! is fun. But it sounds like you guys do too much combat and not enough swashing and swooning

Lets try and recall it from memory:

- I had 3 dex and 1 wits. So +4 to the initiative roll. So my roll would be between 5-14
- The other players maxed out wits and dex, giving them +10 to the initiative roll. So an 11 to 20 range.

So there were two possible ways to get their minimum initiative roll above my maximum:
- Buy an extra +4 to initiative. Which I remember being very cheap in character creation.
- Take an ability that means that any initiative roll of less than 4 counts as 4, which one player did. Then take +1 to initiative.

Combat was never our first choice.