By popular request, I shall regale you with remembrances of an old campaign.Hieronymous Rex wrote:This sounds like it deserves an In the Trenches post.virgil wrote:I got lots of ranting from my DM for playing a Fighter that took archery feats, taking Skill Focus (Perception), animating a corpse with a necromancer, and bringing clubs to use for telekinesis instead of small rocks on the ground. Because the monk in the party got hasted in my campaign, everyone lost their iterative attacks in the next campaign that wasn't run by me.
This wasn't even a narrative focused group.
We played through the entirety of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, and I went through three separate characters. Only two of the original party survived from start to finish.
The two that survived were a human TWF ranger with giants as their favored enemy and a house-ruled ability to drop his animal companion for fighter bonus feats, and a dwarven fighter who specialized in AC and shield using (especially TWF with a shield).
I wanted to be a pantheistic cleric, but after nearly a week of trying to convince them that it should be allowed, I gave up. I started as a dwarven cleric of Pharasma. This was back when Golarion was so new, that we didn't even know the deity's opinion on necromancy. Since Death was part of her domain, it was deemed permissible for my character to be able to channel negative energy and be allowed to animate the dead.
There was also a halfling thief, who acted as if he were a master thief named the Red Hand. There was also a human monk.
The initial stuff was good as we fought off the various goblins, went into an underground dungeon to find Thassilonian runes everywhere. The goblin lair was frustrating, as the front entrance was covered with thorns with just enough room for all Medium creatures to be squeezing and a goblin druid literally walking through the thorn bush walls (woodland stride) and being nearly impossible to hurt because of this. Nobody listened to my suggestion of just setting the hedge maze on fire and waiting for the goblins to die, come out on fire to attack us, or sit inside to wait for us to safely enter.
We survived enough to go in and kill them all, except for the nursery, which we found last. It took a bit to make them not stab the goblin younglings, and the only way I could get them to not kill them when my back was turned was to adopt and raise the little snots; in-game, fairly frustrating since it's apparently goblin nature to be psychotic, but the DM eventually let them be conceptually acceptable. The other players are still considered good-aligned, and my character was considered borderline because of the skeleton animating.
Speaking of animation, we fought a barghest (which we thought was a demon by how the DM described it) just barely within my cleric's ability to animate in another level, so I contemplated storing it for use in a level. That was when the DM decided that it would be OP, so he banned outsiders from being targettable by animate dead.
More next time.