Make my character to be very good at a few specific tasks

>Make my character to be very good at a few specific tasks
>DM does not ever have situations where those tasks are possible
>Character is useless

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Next time make sure one of those tasks is combat.

>GM bro, it looks like I misunderstood the concept of the campaign. Can I make a new character that fits in better with what we will be doing?
Yes
>Cool! I'll have it done by next session.
No
>leave game
No, but you'll get your time to shine later
>decide if it's worth to stay until then.

Underwater basketweaving is no way to be heroic.

unless you can weave really big baskets and capture dangerous sea creatures in them

and then fill those same baskets with mud, sealing the monsters away. then build a city on top of said mud/monster filled baskets.

nothing could possibly go wrong here

I’ll take you one better
Give character max points in specific task, when he attempts said task he has a 96% chance of success. Useless in everything else, literally an escort quest for my character.
Finally get to the end, my time to shine, go to do said task. Botch the roll.
It’s funny now and we all laugh and I’ve learnt to generalise but at the time

Damn it, Dave, I told you putting all your skill points into underwater basket weaving was not a good idea.

Useless characters are fun, too.
I’m playing an undead seamstress right now. Stitching people together is a useful enough skill, but it doesn’t apply when you’re getting dragged away by ten foot gorillas and all you can do is bang on its back with a dull shovel.

>Make character really good at a few specific tasks, make it his specialty.
>Rolls related to that always fail.
>Character sucks at what he's specialized at but does average in everything else.
Send help.

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I feel you bro. Made a rogue with 20+ passive wis and 11+ investigation. Never rolled above a 5 when I needed to.

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How did you guys go through the character creation process?

> I try to hack the door's control! *Roll d20* 36!
> You've beaten the DC by a margin of 21, the door opens instantly revealing 3 mildly surprised gamorheans armed, but unable to act this round[...]

He'd been warned min-maxing that much was close to useless in my games. Threw unnecessary mini-games with self-imposed scalable DCs his way to occupy him while other players advanced the plot (he was basically illegally mining bitcoins), and gave him a very inefficient way to hack enemy droids (Hacking vs. Will Defense +10, target has only one action next turn, Will defense +20, you choose that action).

Turns out he had fun playing that droid and coming up with fake money to bribe less than honest / completely paranoid NPCs. Had to balance every encounter as if he wasn't there tho.

Pretty much real life for me.

That's what you fucking get for not making a well balanced, well rounded character.

This so fucking much.
>+5 animal handling, survival, insight
>always get shit rolls even with

Sounds like a problem with the rule system you're using.

Specialization is for insects.

Serves you right, minmaxing faggot. Characters should be rennaissance men.

I'm just imagining the Johnny Bravo of rangers.

Man, that's a great idea for a new character. I'm a 75-year old human cleric, though.

>Specs into specific things
>Has no use outside of these few things
>user is mad the GM won't do only what he's good at
This vexes me.

>Make a character good at social skills and not combat
>Nothing but combat, other players dont want to do any rp or pacifist stuff
Okay.

>Next campaign
>Make a character for combat and little else
>Everyone else is a pacifist adn we rarely fight

Am I retarded?

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I made a world of darkness character with a 5-point flaw that says, basically, you're going to die. I was like sweet this is some stranger things type rift investigation shit and my character will be the dumb scientist from the beginning of Prometheus or any movie like that who sticks his face in the goo and dies from curiosity and a lack of safety precautions.

Except the dm never fucking kills me. In the LAST session I proc my paradox when I have like.... 13? And he does damage to me and knocks me out- I was already at like 4 wounds- and it even does aoe damage to everyone around me. But I don't die. Session is practically over. It was fucking bullshit, at least let me EXPLODE.

Might be. Did the group actually talk with one another before starting the game, or did everyone show up blind? Talking won't help if the DM changes their mind about the tone of the game mid-way through though.

At least twice I've been burned by a DM that had no idea what to do with their campaign, and ended up invalidating builds he told us to use.

>Player makes his character be very good at a few specific tasks
>Every time I don't make the solution one of those tasks, he's left useless
>Every time I do make the solution one of those tasks, everyone else is left useless
>Either way it's hard to integrate him and the rest of the party in a way that's mutually fun and engaging for everyone
>I hate that fucker for putting me in a lose-lose situation because he had to be too fucking special to just have a generally applicable niche

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I mean what tasks are we talking about here? If your character is ONLY good at forging documents like, wtf do you want? That'll come up hopefully once or twice. But it's not happening every session.

>Make my character somewhat good at a wide range of tasks
>DM sets DC's so high they can only be beaten by Touhou-tier munchkinry
>Character is useless

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Shitposting is not really considered a legitimate character focus.

The problem with having an over-specialized character built around one specific technique or gimmick isn't just that you don't have anything to do the other 95% of the time.

It's that the 5% of the time your exact thing is useful, it's equally boring. There's no or little risk because you've stacked every possible advantage, so you usually end up rolling some low-risk roll and immediately resolving it, then going back to doing nothing. Or alternatively the GM ramps up the difficulty just to stand a chance and still have some risk, which leaves out everyone else AND gets rid of the very point of the character to begin with.

Either way, it's not worthwhile. Pick a general archetype with more than one application or focus on something more broadly applicable.

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>Useless characters are fun, too.

If the party plays along, maybe.
If you're playing with a bunch of hyper-competitive optimization cunts, you're better off dropping from the game.
that's what I did anyway

>Make a character to be very good at a few specific tasks.
>DM does have situation where those tasks are useful
>DM doesn't let you use those skills and instead railroads events.
>Character is useless

THIS EXACT SHIT
>Last campaign
>Make charisma build specifically to talk his way out of fights
>DM vetos every attempt at trying to talk to enemies
>Every other player is dedicated to being murder hobos
>Eventually become bitter at this shit
>Level up character specifically around combat
>Still have high social skills
>Tell DM in secret chat that I want to kill off the rest of the party
>He loves it
>Start secretly picking off murder hobo teammates in clandestine ways without even the party knowing I'm responsible in character or out.
>Once all the munchkins are dead and I'm the most powerful party member and calling the shots we will become a more diplomatic party whether they like it or not.

>not having a session zero
>GM not taking what you spec your character in as a hint to what you want to be doing in game
well that's just a failure to communicate and/or a mediocre GM right there

>everyone always needs to be equally useful in every situation
>what is niche
>what is spotlight

>Dark Heresy
>Make a ballistic combat focused character
>GM has done 3 adventures in a row where players aren't allowed to bring along equipment
>FFS

>what is strawman

Last session I was able to set up a situation where all I needed was a 4.
>3
>2
>3 again
This is why I keep making characters that never have to touch dice.

You have to specialise or there's no real point in taking any specialisation in most systems.

Some degree of specialization is desirable and, usually, necessary. Too much is undesirable.

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OSR fixes this.

It might if you're playing magical rare book dealers.

My character is one of the greatest scribes in the world, he has a great handwriting style that is very readable and he can write with speed whilst still keeping his writing neat and tidy.
His job as an adventurer is chiefly to find old ancient books and copy them dozens of times, to then sell on the rare books for a profit.

So far we've played 12 sessions and not found a single book.

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He should still be able to help with general knowledge checks because of the vast amount of books he's perused through his career. You don't have the social skills to be the party face, not enough martial skills to become the party bruiser. Just accept your fate and become the party Google.

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He's illiterate. He copies the symbols but does not understand them.

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You're your own worst enemy, user.

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Where the hell can I get a hoodie like that

I made a ranger who's never been out of a city before. I was nominated to make a nature check and got a 5
>"yep, those are tracks all right"

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>His job as an adventurer is chiefly to find old ancient books and copy them dozens of times, to then sell on the rare books for a profit.

>Good DM: Finds and builds scene for your character.
>Bad DM: Ignores the player character to railroad his own story.
>Bad Player: Pigeonholes his character's skills so hard, not in concept, but in use, that the character can not function outside certain tasks.

>Make a character who's really good at disguises and lying
>Campaign is 99% exploration and combat
>It's fine, I'm decent enough at other stuff
>End up undercover in fey plane for several sessions
>Oh shit, maybe I can actually use my deception skills
>DM no sells every single attempt at lying

He only asked for a single deception roll the whole time.

>Some fey lord didn't buy my magic disguise
>Try to bullshit him, but DM doesn't let me roll
>Fey lord tells me to dispel the disguise or die
>Try to make a new disguise while making it look like I was dispelling the old one
>Make up some excuse for the original disguise
>DM actually asks me to roll deception for once
>Pass by a huge margin
>Fey lord "just" stabs me for being disguised in the first place before leaving

Aren't fey known for coating themselves in illusions? Like what the fuck man.

In certain games like shadowrun you have to make an specialized character. One mission I just sat in the car twiddling my thumbs cause it was a stealth mission and my character was a troll.

I was given my own time to shine in later missions though where I went full luchadore and started an impromptu wrestling match with some other runners

I voiced I was gonna make a Shadow Origin Sorcerer (picking mainly illusion spells) the PF game the player in my 5e game decided to run on off weeks. The player normally states he is an avid roleplayer and brags about his RP prowess but then maximises his character for combat. So, I was a bit nervous to play a non-combat optimized character in this game, even though the GM said it would be RP heavy.

Thankfully, even though he's a terrible DM (in the way he gives the players way too much power, I'll explain later) the one thing he does well is give me opportunities to use my character's skills. I'm leaning towards having my character make forgeries and such to "steal" items. I've learned a high ranking officer's signature and next session I'm gonna do some research on the guy to figure out how best to use it.

Anyway, the point is, I hope you guys finally get to use your non-combat characters in a game. It's fun.

Ps: what I meant before is he gave me a knife that allows me to choose a poison from a list and switch it out on a rest. The poison applies everytime I use the knife, meaning as long as I get the dagger back I can dose every combatant.

The bard got a ring that allows him to cast any water spell he has the slots for, but without impacting his spells for the day.

We're level 2.

>session 0

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Most common offender is Lockpicking and thievery

>be other player
>want to focus on combat this campaign
>notice that user is not having fun
>decide to throw him a bone and make a more roleplay oriented character next campaign
>he made a barbarian

I have exactly this issue

>Playing a westmarches like campaign hosted by a relatively new DM.
>Am one of the only experienced players in the entire group. (It's session based mix n match so about 30 different players in total)
>let the DM roll, he rolls absolute shit stats no biggie i can still have fun with it.
>some munchkinning druid who "rolled" his own stats 18 17 16 16 13 and a token 9 keeps boasting and trying to replace other peoples niche to get his peepee hard.
>he also transfoms into homebrewed monsters with flying on level 3

It's still fun but I make sure to not play on days when that tool is playing.

Just make more two-tier challenges.
He needs to do something that'll make the task for the rest of the team much easier.

I don't think that's a good character concept.
Do you just give the books to a contact of yours and he sells them off? How do you know you're getting a good deal when you have no idea what book you're selling?

see

If you know your DM pretty much only runs commercially available modules with very little home brew setting or adventure material, do not build a character that specializes in mounted combat.

Every adventure will be an exercise in figuring out how to leave the horse outside yet another dungeon while you run around on foot not doing what you built your character to do.

>PC is alright at most things, good at some things
>Only negative modifier is -1CHA
>DM makes me roll Charisma checks for interacting with an NPC in ANY capacity
>"I go and introduce myself"
>"Roll Charisma"
>"7"
>"You startle her and now she doesn't want to talk to you"

If you don't want me to talk to your NPCs just say so, there's no need for this passive aggressive bullshit

One thing you gotta realize about fey: They are assho- VERY GOOOOOD NEIGHBORS. YES VERY NICE AND GRACEFUL,

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Do you think this is a bad way of the DM to play the game, putting it all behind one roll? I'm thinking if I'm going to DM, which I might do in the fall then especially where characters specialize I might ask for multiple rolls. So maybe they slip or whatever, but if they roll well on the second try then they recover. Because often times those crucial story moments you've been waiting for where you designated undead-hunter finally gets to kill some undead after 10 sessions, then you kind of want to shine and it's actually rather lame to have you fail, even if the people around the table always laugh and go "aaaaaw", in actuality it isn't very hype.

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Dunno, it's kinda unfair to the other PCs who don't get free rerolls.
Even with systems that supports rerolls though, there's no guarantee you'll end up with a win. If the GM just asks you to reroll until you win, why bother asking for a roll in the first place?

Stop avatarfagging nerd

not until you win, but maybe 2 rolls for a chance of recovery is something to consider?
It's like in a movie where the hero almost gets spotted because he kicks a bucket a bit, but then manages to recover and slip out of sight right before the guard sees him, sort ofthing. If however he doesn't make the 2nd roll then he fails.

I'm just using reaction images from my reaction image folder. It's not avatarfagging if I all my hundreds of reaction images are 1 character.