I can see your point, Marc. Power Play does give some good tips for newbies. Unfortunately, a LOT of the Power Play articles I’ve read go far beyond maximizing effectiveness, and into the realm of the ridiculous. <cursing self for not bringing PH to work for examples>
At least in my opinion, the game isn’t just about stacking bonus upon bonus until your character’s a monster at doing one particular narrow thing. It’s not just about having a +12 to hit with your bow at first level and being completely unable to do anything else. It’s also about character conception.
Then again, I’m a roleplayer – I’ll stick with the rolls I get when rolling up the character (even if they’re a little low) because to me, playing the flaws as well as the advantages of a character is half the fun.
I agree Zanshin. I like my character to have weaknesses I have to account for.
Furthermore, when you character is a walking tank that can handle anything thrown at him, what’s the fun? What do you DO in the game?
But that’s all beside my original point. It sounds like I need to check out the EN World forums if I want to discuss D&D (or gaming in general). I’ve never gotten much of any useful info from the WOTC forums, since I’m obviously not playing the same game that they are. I’m playing a game where the DM and the players are working together to create stories of heroic fantasy, they’re playing a game where the DM is out to kill the players, who are out to kill each other because they’re all crazy and evil.
And speaking of crazy and evil, one reason I’ve never been even a little interested in Vampire is the Malkavians. Everything I’ve read or heard makes me think I would end up punching someone at ever Vampire session. “Oh, look at you. You’re a Malkavian. And you’re crazy. And you carry around a doll and have MPd. OH HOW FUCKING ORIGINAL. PUNCH”
You know, I really wish I could game with you guys. I don’t have any opportunities any more because my friends are all far away.
At any rate, I’ve done my turns at both running and playing, and I always put a level of emotion into both characters and game.
I always fully develop the background for any character before I play it. What they have done, what they want to do in life and how they would react to different circumstances.
I likewise expect as much from my players - though I never get it.
I know what you mean. As a manic depressive with plenty of experience with shrinks and other patients, it amazes me how unrealistic and uninventive some players are when it comes to Malks.
A Malkavian is insane all the time, not just when the player thinks it’s convenient or funny.
A good derangement is only funny at first. When examined, it should be tragic.
EG Beth dresses as a man and wears a cheap fake beard. She carries roughly a pound of good luck charms at all times. She has a bizzare ceremony for entering and leaving rooms. She engages in a large amount of ritual behavior. This is the funny part. It should be played for laughs.
Serious Part-Beth finally convinced her sister to see a doctor about those pains. It was cancer and it was too late to do anything. She died in a month. Then, a drunk driver collided with Beth’s parents. Dad lasted 3 days. Mom is still in a coma, with no hope of recovery. Beth fell into a deep depression. A Malk found an embraced her. Now Beth sees the truth-these weren’t random accidents(because that would mean the universe is meaningless and God either doesn’t exist or just doesn’t care). These things were caused by a powerful demon. So Beth wears a disguise, carries charms, and performs rituals to keep the demon (and the knowledge that her family’s death was meaningless and random)at bay.
Before Mind’s Eye Theater, my friends and I ran a few Live-Action games for 50 of our closest buddies in Chapel Hill, NC. We took care to make the Malkavians non-MPD.
So one of them was a paranoid Revolutionary War soldier who was convinced that the Brits were still fighting the war, only doing it covertly now, and that he was the last of the true rebels. One of them was a flower child who huffed cleaning fluid one too many times and spoke in freeform poetry (kinda like Dru, from Buffy). I forget the others.
We ran another LARP in a mental institution; about a third of the characters were insane, ranging from the suicidally depressed to the psychotic genius, from the paranoid schizophrenic to the Constantly Angry. My favorite PC from that game was an ex-GM who’d started to take his Vampire game too seriously; after a particularly intense night in which one of his players got shot by the cops and another player got arrested for murder, the GM got locked away in the asylum, where he believed himself to be a trapped, undercover vampire. Recursive storytelling, anyone?
The thing is, it’s difficult to play insanity long-term. In the short term, however, characters with interesting insanities can have interesting and scary goals that can throw a wrench in people’s plans.
When crazyfolk are played mostly for laughs, it gets pretty obnoxious, I think. Keep them off-balanced and unpredictable, but plausible and internally consistent, and it can be great fun.
I honestly can’t see how you can claim this when the d20 system makes it so effortless to mulitclass. Throw in D&Ds Prestige Classes and I think your claim is baseless.
I think, to a degree, the pigeonholing complaint is valid. The following archetypes are difficult to handle in D&D:
-The absent-minded professor (who doesn’t do magic)
-The connected-to-everybody schmoozer
-The rich boy
-Indiana Jones (sure, you could do a bard – but did Indy carry a freakin lute? I think not)
All of these types are possible, but you usually end up taking stuff that’s not appropriate. Your connected-to-everybody schmoozer doesn’t necessarily need to be able to sneak attack or play the fiddle well. Your absent-minded professor has no reason to know how to cast spells. Your rich boy is just flat-out awful to do under standard rules.
Don’t get me wrong: I love D&D. But I’m also perfectly willing to house rule the hell out a campaign if I need to, and if someone has a character concept that doesn’t work well under the rules, I’m glad to work with them on it.
The class system also has some real benefits; rather than going through them myself, I’ll direct you to Monte Cook, one of the designers of 3E D&D, and his thoughts about the benefits of a class system.
See, I would call the professor an expert. It’s like some gnomes who are gods of alchemy but don’t cast spells. What are they? No need to sneak attack. I think that they almost should have given a long list of thief abilities and allowed players to pick a few for their rogue. A prof doesn’t need sneak attack, but he may need read languages or use magical object.
And you can play online. Check out Treyvan. www.treyvan.com , or, for those of you who have mushed before, treyvan.com port 4999 . It’s not a mud. It’s a fully coded OGL multiplayer D&D 3E game. At this very moment, there are 59 people online.
I used to play Vampire with a Malkavian who’s melee and dexterity rating were five, but whose favourite weapon was a broken off car aerial, making him a master of delivering stinging welts to people’s cheeks. He also came up with some great pranks against my Nosferatu.
RPGs can be great fun with the right players. Too bad they’re so rare.
Luckily (for me), my situation is exactly the opposite as the trend in this thread. My DM is moving closer to me, so I’ll get to game once or twice a month.
It’s going to be pretty cool. Only two people in the party (for now). The other guy’s a bard who relies on low-down trickery, the bluff skill and disguises. I’m a cleric of Olidammara, the god of trickery, thieves and revelry…who relies on low-down trickery, the bluff skill and disguises. Between us, we MIGHT be able to take down a single kobold.
Nuh uh! Okay, I’ll give you expert for the first one.
But aristocrat (not noble) doesn’t get any sort of bonus for holding lands, do they? They don’t start with holdings. Other game systems handle wealth and income levels much better.
And gather information is a mighty vague skill to account for knowing lots of people – compare to White Wolf’s “contacts” trait.
Indy would need, at least, to be a multiclassed expert/rogue.
Strictly speaking, however, NPC classes are just that: for NPCs. Allowing a player to play one is a minor houserule.
As is allowing one major or three minor contacts per rank in gather information, as is allowing folks to take some sort of wealth feat that gives them a non-adventuring, non-crafting income source. These are simple house rules, but without them, some character concepts are difficult to implement.
Actually, I was thinking of the Star Wars Noble class, which has contacts built into it. (I hear the revised one is better). Wheel of Time also has a noble class.
Oh, and as far as a wealth feat? Well, goodness, that’s what feats are for. It’s a bit unbalancing, true, but if you can express it, you can play it. Rule 0: You make the rules.
As far as holding lands and so on, I’d check out old Second Edition Birthright, maybe, or the upcoming Kalamak Player’s Guide.
Well, sure, there are plenty of ways to houserule D&D to make it work with other character concepts. That’s just my point. D&D out of the box doesn’t handle certain concepts very well, and you have to tweak the rules to get them to work. The tweaking is not horribly difficult, but it does need to happen.
Part of the problem, ironically, is that D&D is so well balanced that tweaking the rules can be especially hard to do. Using NPC classes instead of PC classes throws the whole CR and EL systems out of whack. A party with an 8th-level expert and an 8th-level fighter will find some situations in which each of them is completely useless; in an out-of-the-box game, all characters are almost equally useful in the one arena (combat) that the game focuses on.
Tweaking away is a good thing, and I do it all the time when I run games in order to encourage the flavor that I want. But it is worth noting that some systems don’t require tweaking to handle wealth, contacts, and other socially-oriented attributes well. That’s my point.
It is certainly an improvement over previous editions of D&D but I still think the system pigeon holes players into certain roles. In fact I think the system attempts to punish players who step outside the mold.
For example let’s say I want to make a fighter who had a classical education as a child. Some of the skills he’s going to need would probably include various knowledge skills such as history, heraldry, geography, and maybe something like diplomacy as well. The problem is all of those are cross class skills and I’d take some severe skill point penalties if I took those skills.
I suppose I might be accused of being a munchkin who wants my character to be good at everything. I’ve noticed that no other RPG that I’ve played in the past 5 years has been as restrictive as D&D when it comes to character generation. In Legend of the Five Rings I can have a strict follower of bushido who knows poetry, history, and origami without being penalized. In the non-d20 Deadlands I can make a gunslinger who got a college education and knows how to speak latin, understands some scientific principles, and maybe graduated from law school without being penalized in any way.
So compared to other RPGs out there I do think D&D pigeon holes player characters with their class system. In Legend of the Five Rings you’ve pretty much got two choices for characters you’re either a bushi or a shugenja. Yet even with L5R I feel I have more options when making a character.
I think that’s due more to just a general ignorance about mental illness. I think a lot of people don’t know (or more accurately, don’t know they know) anyone who’s mentally ill, when they hear the term “mentally ill”, they think of schizophrenic behavior, and the only mental illnesses they’ve really heard of are MPD, depression, and Attention Deficit Disorder (which, I bet if you asked a lot of people, wouldn’t be considered a mental illness by them.) So, they either do it for laughs, do it when they think of it, or make the Malk obviously over the top crazy all the time. That’s the reality of mental illness for them.
