While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.
Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…
I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.
That sounds like a few problems and there should at least be a discussion with the group about expectations before future campaigns.
But the inverse of a skill based build getting a lot of lucky combat rolls and outdoing the combat character is possible in the book. A good DM can and should mitigate skill crits but is kinda stuck on combat ones.
Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.
It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.
Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)
But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.
Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.
I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).
While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.
Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…
I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.
That sounds like a few problems and there should at least be a discussion with the group about expectations before future campaigns.
But the inverse of a skill based build getting a lot of lucky combat rolls and outdoing the combat character is possible in the book. A good DM can and should mitigate skill crits but is kinda stuck on combat ones.
Regardless, I’m sorry you had a crap time.
Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.
It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.
Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)
But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.
Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.
I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).