Thank you. Cliches get old. I used to play a wild elf barbarian who was a silent deadly killer. No yelling, war cries, just rage induced silent killing sprees lol.
This video partly inspired my Dwarf Bard who rides a flying shield like a hoverboard and performs tricks, writing about wherever he travels. Great videos!
Its a good method.. I prefer finding some things that i would bring to every character, you know, stuff thats so ingrained in mke that i can imagine being without it... Like caring extra for children, prioritizing myself, etc... And ill take those things and try to do them very different from how i would do it... I have a cleric that refuses to wait.. I dont want to be a bother or a problem, but he is the goddess holy warrior, he wont waste his time waiting... He also often runs into melee, because i want to be safe and play battles very meta and optimized.. he wants glory and a part of the fun, he does not consider cantrips and crossbows fun, even tho its more powerful... I have another farmer type character that hates animals.. he likes cows and shit, but if he sees a wolf, he will hunt it down... He and the party druid has had some discussions about that :p I like animals and i want every living creature to have a good life, he does too, but he considers anything not civilized or useful to civilixzation as a monster that should be destroyed :) I have a couple "me" Characters aswell tho... I like naming them as an anagram for my own name... Herman Tinny, Ren Mayninth, etc...
Hey D6; I wanted to know when you are able to find the time if you would be able to do a video on the Rogue class. Or preferably the Unchained Rogue; maybe even a build video would be super nice. Perhaps even a video on the Unchained classes. I ended up going through the rest of your vids and you have no idea how happy I am to get some inspiration from each of them. You and your friends keep up the amazing work because you are one of the few Pathfinder videos I actually get alot of information out of. My friends and I in the Bahamas enjoy your content.
That's a good idea. The Rogue is one of the most complicated Marshal classes with lots of ways to utilize their abilities. I'm glad you're enjoying our videos.
After playing for a year I totally understand what the concept don't be that guy . A lot of times a game manager throws alignment out the window and its just people strategizing pieces on a board and people love role-playing but too much role-playing can grind down a game for those who love the action aspect.
To the paladin attacking the village: It is equally as evil to murder male villagers as it is to murder women and children. How would you come to the conclusion that it'd be okay for a paladin to murder people as long as they are male? If a single character doesn't agree with the actions of the group then either a) the group isn't set up right. If 3 people are chaotic evil thugs and you are a lawful good paladin or vice versa and it isn't planned how this is supposed to work out in this campaign ... it might be that the party is doomed to fail. You can create all sorts of cool characters but that doesn't mean that they will get along. If they can't get along in any way shape or form without being somebody they aren't - they aren't compatible. b) the group needs to decide on a different course of action or deal with that character not involving him/herself. If you tell my good natured priest that you are going to murder some person because he is alone and has valuable stuff, then you can either deal with my priest at the very least trying to protect that NPC in a non-violent way or cease what you are doing. Yes, depending on the players that might lead to tensions IRL but Pathfinder is an RPG and if we take out the 'R' we end up with a 'playing game' and that sucks. If the group can deal with this disagreement or find a conclusion, fine. Otherwise see a) c) the single character could look at the situation differently. I list this as the last option because I think that usually players know what their character is about best. In some situations players might go too far with this and be way too stiff but I think that isn't the case most of the time. The concept of the character might not fit the group or campaign but that doesn't mean that they should necessarily bend it and pretend that all is good. At least that's how I see it. A good-natured, semi-intelligent character telling himself that it is okay to murder somebody because he is male or that it is okay to leave somebody to their fate because the group doesn't like his face just to stick with the group in all situations is a poor way to play the character.
First thing I do is give my character a goal outside of the campaign. My current half orc fighter plans to retire and open an inn for adventurers in the future.
I always play my character as being second-pick. I have an alchemist who has to use alchemy in place of magic to do forensic investigation, in order to detect misuse of magic. He's not very good, just good and that leaves room for mistakes. From there, you can get a lot of background features out of your character.
i think the easiest way to make an intresting character is to give him an obsession. Our party currently has a Druid (me) that is obsessed with parasites and just discovered the existence of walking worms (and ofc wants to become one); a Bard that is trying to fuck any humanoid that attractive enough (we use 10+CH+DEX against a Will saving throw) and a necromancer that is also a skull collector (he proudly wears the skulls on his robe). For the rest, they are pretty average, but every time there's something slightly related to their obsessions things get REALLY funny
When playing a lawful character, i always think about eisenhorn when he was a alamanthian. Heck his story is a good display of how to play a lawful good character and how he evolves into a chaotic neutral character.
question: dou you guys think that the abillity-points need to show up in the way of a characters personality? I heard the Idea of an "intelligent Barbarian" in the first minutes of the Video and its a cool one, but only if you dont need to give him a lot of Int. Hes a glass-cannon at all, even if you play with high-fantasy and a nice archetype. The same is with other untypical charakter-personality-class-mixes. A Wizard will need Int to be usefull in battle, even if you want to play him as a Idiot in RP. There are guys out there who see the Abillity-Points as a mirrir of the charakters personality and i realy want to know what do you think.
I think ability points should be reflected in the character's personality, but I don't think that should be the only consideration. To use the Intelligent Barbarian example, a character with an intelligence score of 12 is still smarter than average. You could make him a talented blacksmith by putting skill points into smithing or you could give him a higher than average wisdom score and make him good at a profession. Even a small mechanical bonus and skill points can help you do a lot in RP with your character.
Does that include: A) watching everything burn in a blissful inferno B) I had another thing that would be equally worrying for a person to ask IRL but I forgot it.
The whole role playing as what you are roll playing always pesters me. www.giantitp.com/articles/tll307KmEm4H9k6efFP.html was always to me a good example of how you should play a character. If the others have to change their characters or the dm has to change the adventure to make it so you can join in your character is not being played right. I had one player have a major freakout on me because he was playing a crafter and increasingly I had been working with him on it as downtime out of session, because he had started taking up nearly full sessions with it. When I delivered a plot hook to the party they went to his shop and went "hey man we heard about this thing quite a ways away and there is no real rush so we're gonna spend a month planning our route and getting ready. But this can wait quite a bit so if there is a project you need to work on or finish we can delay for a bit." 'No' "Wait wat" 'I'm not going you guys keep trying to force me into adventures and I'm not playing that type of character so I am not going.' "Dude you're not gonna have much to do while we are gone" 'I'll be crafting.' "but you'd basically just be sitting out the session" 'DM is required to split time for me." Me: Dude I'm not spending time during the session for you to say "I craft this for this npc and make this much gold" every couple minutes. If you want to handle all the crafting you want to do, I'll host an out of game session just me and you but no, I'm not going to stop the game just for you. 'That's not fair I'm rping as a crafter' Me: Yes you are roll-playing a crafting wizard and roleplaying a business but why are you not a party member or adventurer? I give you downtime, I've run 1 on 1 with you to do your roll-playing and roleplaying with customers but you won't roleplay what the point of the game is now? Then again I tend to play very similar characters in at least 1 facet or another.
+D6Damage however i played a character who (by coincidence) never harmed anyone or anything, that is, untill he sacrified his soul, and the souls of 6 innocent childs to a devil... hmh... his defenition of "good" was that he sacrificed himself for his rather stupid friends...
I've played pacifist characters before, running around buffing and dodging attacks. But refusing to play with others or go on adventures and wanting to take up the rest of the groups time for excessive periods, mostly of him arguing with himself as to exactly what to craft is not something I've done.
I know this was a year ago... but I just discovered these videos. I have a player that is (sort of) like this, though he's down to kick butt as well. I also have a player who plays to fight and loot. We play remotely via Virtual Table Top and Forums. We use the forums between "live games" for RP, downtime, and development like this and its understood that "live games" that we schedule to all be on hangouts and our VTT; is reserved for more action or at least heavy in the moment RP sessions. Maybe a good solution for a group that has a player or two who want to dedicate a lot of time to crafting, business building etc... In essence, the forum has us regularly moving forward or building towards events where things get crazy and we schedule a live game for the fights, etc... What's interesting is when we started doing this, even the player who originally only was interested in adventure sessions and combat/loot would start to find things to do in his downtime in the forum. (Everyone likes to be involved in all aspects :) ) He started training his own small guild of fighters and getting involved with the local militias to lend support because he became invested in helping bolster the defenses of his people. He also started raising a family. Admittedly, my game is very RP heavy with combat getting more spread out as they get higher level due to the fact that I don't prep battlemaps and stat out enemies unless its at least a moderate challenge.
I am running a sorcerer with the pestilence bloodline. She is a half-elf and she has the personality of poison ivy from batman with the nutural alignment.
I noticed as you guys were both explaining concepts pertaining to Alignment, you didn't mention anything pertaining to "Chaotic Evil". This makes me believe that your topic is based off of PFS (Pathfinder Society) - view's / D&D Guild - view's... Chaotic Evil Character's could, vs. "preaching", work effectively with a party. I mean if I'm going to play CE - I sure wouldn't blare it out that I am (if nothing else because of Player / DM Bias) and I would work with a Group of Lawful Good "Paladin's" just so I could achieve my personal goal's.... What your thought's pertaining to this issue / subject, D6Damage??
I generally don't allow players to go CE unless I feel that I can trust the player to not derail the game, betray the party or make things unfun. For people that I've played with and trust, I don't usually worry about alignments too much.
If u barbarian and int is ure dump stat and its like -2, so how could u be intelligent. And if u have a lot int u are playing kinda geneus, and how many geneuses in history was not hungry for knowlege, or some kind of new experience, or perfection. If players want just play dumb character, they take barbarian, becose they can do not give a fuck about civil world, and be silly and borderline offencive, but its feels natural if u are barbarian, its given in ure name.
uhm as i understand it being true to your personal convictions is chaotic...NOT lawfull....lawfull indeed means respecting the given law of society NOT your own moral compass - thats chaotic Lawfull evil characters also dont work against the law - they try to maximise their personal gain WITHOUT violating the law. that greedy merchant who fools his customers? he will never actually break a law cause he fears inprisonment but he will do whatever he can to benefit AS LONG AS it doesnt actually violate any law. grey area? sure actual criminality? no.
A lot of it comes down to personal interpretation. All monks, for example, are lawful but may not obey the laws of the land they are currently in. I agree that in order to be lawful, one's own opinions or feelings at the moment cannot be the justification for his actions.
Thank you. Cliches get old. I used to play a wild elf barbarian who was a silent deadly killer. No yelling, war cries, just rage induced silent killing sprees lol.
Sounds like a scary character.
This video partly inspired my Dwarf Bard who rides a flying shield like a hoverboard and performs tricks, writing about wherever he travels. Great videos!
That sounds like a pretty amazing dwarf.
My method has always been "be yourself if this was you" it's not perfect but it does come more naturally
Its a good method.. I prefer finding some things that i would bring to every character, you know, stuff thats so ingrained in mke that i can imagine being without it... Like caring extra for children, prioritizing myself, etc... And ill take those things and try to do them very different from how i would do it...
I have a cleric that refuses to wait.. I dont want to be a bother or a problem, but he is the goddess holy warrior, he wont waste his time waiting... He also often runs into melee, because i want to be safe and play battles very meta and optimized.. he wants glory and a part of the fun, he does not consider cantrips and crossbows fun, even tho its more powerful...
I have another farmer type character that hates animals.. he likes cows and shit, but if he sees a wolf, he will hunt it down... He and the party druid has had some discussions about that :p
I like animals and i want every living creature to have a good life, he does too, but he considers anything not civilized or useful to civilixzation as a monster that should be destroyed :)
I have a couple "me" Characters aswell tho... I like naming them as an anagram for my own name...
Herman Tinny, Ren Mayninth, etc...
Hey D6; I wanted to know when you are able to find the time if you would be able to do a video on the Rogue class. Or preferably the Unchained Rogue; maybe even a build video would be super nice. Perhaps even a video on the Unchained classes. I ended up going through the rest of your vids and you have no idea how happy I am to get some inspiration from each of them. You and your friends keep up the amazing work because you are one of the few Pathfinder videos I actually get alot of information out of. My friends and I in the Bahamas enjoy your content.
That's a good idea. The Rogue is one of the most complicated Marshal classes with lots of ways to utilize their abilities. I'm glad you're enjoying our videos.
After playing for a year I totally understand what the concept don't be that guy . A lot of times a game manager throws alignment out the window and its just people strategizing pieces on a board and people love role-playing but too much role-playing can grind down a game for those who love the action aspect.
Be you, if you had your class' abilities and skills. That was my first character, human fighter.
I love coming up with backstories for my character. A backstory gives me a good idea how my characters will act in most situations.
To the paladin attacking the village: It is equally as evil to murder male villagers as it is to murder women and children. How would you come to the conclusion that it'd be okay for a paladin to murder people as long as they are male?
If a single character doesn't agree with the actions of the group then either
a) the group isn't set up right. If 3 people are chaotic evil thugs and you are a lawful good paladin or vice versa and it isn't planned how this is supposed to work out in this campaign ... it might be that the party is doomed to fail. You can create all sorts of cool characters but that doesn't mean that they will get along. If they can't get along in any way shape or form without being somebody they aren't - they aren't compatible.
b) the group needs to decide on a different course of action or deal with that character not involving him/herself. If you tell my good natured priest that you are going to murder some person because he is alone and has valuable stuff, then you can either deal with my priest at the very least trying to protect that NPC in a non-violent way or cease what you are doing. Yes, depending on the players that might lead to tensions IRL but Pathfinder is an RPG and if we take out the 'R' we end up with a 'playing game' and that sucks.
If the group can deal with this disagreement or find a conclusion, fine. Otherwise see a)
c) the single character could look at the situation differently. I list this as the last option because I think that usually players know what their character is about best. In some situations players might go too far with this and be way too stiff but I think that isn't the case most of the time. The concept of the character might not fit the group or campaign but that doesn't mean that they should necessarily bend it and pretend that all is good. At least that's how I see it. A good-natured, semi-intelligent character telling himself that it is okay to murder somebody because he is male or that it is okay to leave somebody to their fate because the group doesn't like his face just to stick with the group in all situations is a poor way to play the character.
First thing I do is give my character a goal outside of the campaign. My current half orc fighter plans to retire and open an inn for adventurers in the future.
LOL Nice.
I always play my character as being second-pick. I have an alchemist who has to use alchemy in place of magic to do forensic investigation, in order to detect misuse of magic. He's not very good, just good and that leaves room for mistakes.
From there, you can get a lot of background features out of your character.
i think the easiest way to make an intresting character is to give him an obsession. Our party currently has a Druid (me) that is obsessed with parasites and just discovered the existence of walking worms (and ofc wants to become one); a Bard that is trying to fuck any humanoid that attractive enough (we use 10+CH+DEX against a Will saving throw) and a necromancer that is also a skull collector (he proudly wears the skulls on his robe). For the rest, they are pretty average, but every time there's something slightly related to their obsessions things get REALLY funny
When playing a lawful character, i always think about eisenhorn when he was a alamanthian. Heck his story is a good display of how to play a lawful good character and how he evolves into a chaotic neutral character.
I made a ranger whose life goal is to eliminate all goblins from existence
That's a big job. They breed quick.
question: dou you guys think that the abillity-points need to show up in the way of a characters personality? I heard the Idea of an "intelligent Barbarian" in the first minutes of the Video and its a cool one, but only if you dont need to give him a lot of Int. Hes a glass-cannon at all, even if you play with high-fantasy and a nice archetype. The same is with other untypical charakter-personality-class-mixes. A Wizard will need Int to be usefull in battle, even if you want to play him as a Idiot in RP.
There are guys out there who see the Abillity-Points as a mirrir of the charakters personality and i realy want to know what do you think.
I think ability points should be reflected in the character's personality, but I don't think that should be the only consideration. To use the Intelligent Barbarian example, a character with an intelligence score of 12 is still smarter than average. You could make him a talented blacksmith by putting skill points into smithing or you could give him a higher than average wisdom score and make him good at a profession. Even a small mechanical bonus and skill points can help you do a lot in RP with your character.
Step one: do whatever comes naturally
+Nolan Evans Damn Straight.
Does that include:
A) watching everything burn in a blissful inferno
B) I had another thing that would be equally worrying for a person to ask IRL but I forgot it.
The whole role playing as what you are roll playing always pesters me. www.giantitp.com/articles/tll307KmEm4H9k6efFP.html
was always to me a good example of how you should play a character. If the others have to change their characters or the dm has to change the adventure to make it so you can join in your character is not being played right.
I had one player have a major freakout on me because he was playing a crafter and increasingly I had been working with him on it as downtime out of session, because he had started taking up nearly full sessions with it. When I delivered a plot hook to the party they went to his shop and went
"hey man we heard about this thing quite a ways away and there is no real rush so we're gonna spend a month planning our route and getting ready. But this can wait quite a bit so if there is a project you need to work on or finish we can delay for a bit."
'No'
"Wait wat"
'I'm not going you guys keep trying to force me into adventures and I'm not playing that type of character so I am not going.'
"Dude you're not gonna have much to do while we are gone"
'I'll be crafting.'
"but you'd basically just be sitting out the session"
'DM is required to split time for me."
Me: Dude I'm not spending time during the session for you to say "I craft this for this npc and make this much gold" every couple minutes. If you want to handle all the crafting you want to do, I'll host an out of game session just me and you but no, I'm not going to stop the game just for you.
'That's not fair I'm rping as a crafter'
Me: Yes you are roll-playing a crafting wizard and roleplaying a business but why are you not a party member or adventurer? I give you downtime, I've run 1 on 1 with you to do your roll-playing and roleplaying with customers but you won't roleplay what the point of the game is now?
Then again I tend to play very similar characters in at least 1 facet or another.
+Alex Kuefner That certainly is an interesting problem. I've never had a player that didn't want to kill anything, before.
+D6Damage however i played a character who (by coincidence) never harmed anyone or anything, that is, untill he sacrified his soul, and the souls of 6 innocent childs to a devil... hmh... his defenition of "good" was that he sacrificed himself for his rather stupid friends...
I've played pacifist characters before, running around buffing and dodging attacks. But refusing to play with others or go on adventures and wanting to take up the rest of the groups time for excessive periods, mostly of him arguing with himself as to exactly what to craft is not something I've done.
I know this was a year ago... but I just discovered these videos. I have a player that is (sort of) like this, though he's down to kick butt as well. I also have a player who plays to fight and loot. We play remotely via Virtual Table Top and Forums. We use the forums between "live games" for RP, downtime, and development like this and its understood that "live games" that we schedule to all be on hangouts and our VTT; is reserved for more action or at least heavy in the moment RP sessions. Maybe a good solution for a group that has a player or two who want to dedicate a lot of time to crafting, business building etc... In essence, the forum has us regularly moving forward or building towards events where things get crazy and we schedule a live game for the fights, etc...
What's interesting is when we started doing this, even the player who originally only was interested in adventure sessions and combat/loot would start to find things to do in his downtime in the forum. (Everyone likes to be involved in all aspects :) ) He started training his own small guild of fighters and getting involved with the local militias to lend support because he became invested in helping bolster the defenses of his people. He also started raising a family.
Admittedly, my game is very RP heavy with combat getting more spread out as they get higher level due to the fact that I don't prep battlemaps and stat out enemies unless its at least a moderate challenge.
I have played a "Bro" frat-pop collar type paladin. It was fun!
Nice.
I am running a sorcerer with the pestilence bloodline. She is a half-elf and she has the personality of poison ivy from batman with the nutural alignment.
Dwarven Sorcerer, sub-optimal? Hell yes! Polite and proper? Check, Dragon Bloodline for claws and breath weapon? Dat onion breath is rough! Lol
I wish everyone would watch this video before playing with me lmao
I noticed as you guys were both explaining concepts pertaining to Alignment, you didn't mention anything pertaining to "Chaotic Evil". This makes me believe that your topic is based off of PFS (Pathfinder Society) - view's / D&D Guild - view's... Chaotic Evil Character's could, vs. "preaching", work effectively with a party. I mean if I'm going to play CE - I sure wouldn't blare it out that I am (if nothing else because of Player / DM Bias) and I would work with a Group of Lawful Good "Paladin's" just so I could achieve my personal goal's.... What your thought's pertaining to this issue / subject, D6Damage??
I generally don't allow players to go CE unless I feel that I can trust the player to not derail the game, betray the party or make things unfun. For people that I've played with and trust, I don't usually worry about alignments too much.
If u barbarian and int is ure dump stat and its like -2, so how could u be intelligent. And if u have a lot int u are playing kinda geneus, and how many geneuses in history was not hungry for knowlege, or some kind of new experience, or perfection. If players want just play dumb character, they take barbarian, becose they can do not give a fuck about civil world, and be silly and borderline offencive, but its feels natural if u are barbarian, its given in ure name.
uhm as i understand it being true to your personal convictions is chaotic...NOT lawfull....lawfull indeed means respecting the given law of society NOT your own moral compass - thats chaotic
Lawfull evil characters also dont work against the law - they try to maximise their personal gain WITHOUT violating the law. that greedy merchant who fools his customers? he will never actually break a law cause he fears inprisonment but he will do whatever he can to benefit AS LONG AS it doesnt actually violate any law. grey area? sure actual criminality? no.
A lot of it comes down to personal interpretation. All monks, for example, are lawful but may not obey the laws of the land they are currently in. I agree that in order to be lawful, one's own opinions or feelings at the moment cannot be the justification for his actions.