violence in the media wrote:I'm not communicating effectively here or something. I'm not talking about just combat. Your fighter can be just as inept and useless (and probably is) in the non-combat parts of the game. By indulging in that sort of bullshit, you are dowing two things to the other players at the table:
1. You're wasting their time and ruining their enjoyment of combat. Either all fights are harder because of the weak character, or they're trivially easy for competent players because the DM has designed to the lowest common denominator.
2. You're rendering the weak character a continual focal point, or totally excluding that player, for everything else. If that character can't pull their weight in combat, and gets outclassed in most everything else, then they wind up being the center of the universe, or totally left out of the loop, because she can't contribute meaningfully in anything that isn't MTP.
As a player, I don't want the consequence of your desire to play Jar-Jar Binks to be more talky-time and a sidelining of my character's actual, quantifiable abilities. Do you even see where you are taking time and fun away from the other players in order to make the game more enjoyable for the "real" roleplayer?
Don't put words in my mouth. The goal is to make sure
everyone has fun at the table, as I clearly said.
If one player is fine with sucking in combat, then I don't need to make allowances in combat for that player as long as the combat aspects are fun for the rest. If the rest of the players can't have fun unless everyone is "pulling their weigth", despite assurances from the DM that the combat encounters do not expect every character to be effective, then the group better splits, obviously there's no trust.
I am not talking about playing Jar-Jar binks, I am talking about playing a face character concept, which pretty much works fine in Shadowrun, and has not many problems being adapted to a D&D campaign.
Also, I don't know why you assume other players would get sidelined. If we have Bob the Bard, Fritz the Fighter and Magus the mage in the group, I'll make sure Bob will get equal "spotlight time" as Fritz and Magus. How exactly that spotlight will be played out, social encounters, combat, duels, mystery solving etc. depends on the preferences of the players.
If Bob's player likes diplomacy and court intrigue, Fritz likes mounted combat, and Magus likes fireballs then I'll structure adventures where everyone can shine. They won't be facing mindless undead who are immune to fire and holed up in a tunnel system. Instead they'll have adventures with jousting tournaments, spys and assassins that need to be identified and overcome, and situations where creative and not so creative uses of fireballs are possible.
