Role playing with NOT SO PERFECT character or party

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Well, it's very popular among role players to have long and traditional disputes about perfect stats, most effective attributes, best combos and whole that "better, more productive , best builds and playstyles" , hence even developers favours some specific playstyles and class / skills combinations. But hey , does anyone remember how funny it was to play character with intelligence around 1, years ago in Fallouts ?
Being perfect is boring as fuck.
My point is , it's really worth to roleplay and experience crpg titles with disfunctional and misfits characters of all kind. Instead perfect stats, they have interesting and challenging background stories plus often very demanding playstyle close to impossible.
Example? How about leading party of mentally ill characters that recently run away from nearby asylum. In Baldurs Gate for example i ve created human wizard with intellect stats near 1 or 2, and imagine he had his left hand cut off in orc attack on his parents caravan when he was an infant. What a blast , my char decides to switch from wizard/mage to kind of warrior with only one hand effective and most of stats that will give most of statwise players heart attack. But once again what a great playthrough it was.
Almost every older or newer crpg title give us oportunity to play [with some self discipline of course] any kind of weak character we want. Now i prepare to give both Divinty 2 and some other crpgs, playthrough based on various mental diseases and some phobia from real world. It so great to play with a dwarf that gets paralyzed with sight of spider or rat etc. Or having elven mage in party that has periodic schizophrenia attacks and sometimes can kill whole shop with shopkeepers leaving only burning shelves becouse voices told him to do so.

How many of You ever tried to play i.e. Gothic 3 or any other cprg with kind of limited, harmed by life kind of character?

 

[Lemming42]

Fallout New Vegas dumbass run:
-Put all your points into combat skills, none into non-combat/civil skills.
-Put no points in Intelligence.
-Attempt to play the game as peacefully as possible.
-Whenever you see a failed dialogue check where your character says something counterproductive or stupid, you MUST select it.

That's it. I've done this run and in addition to being very funny, it teaches you something about RPG design. Having everything backfire on you, having most quests end in unsatisfactory and negative ways and having nothing go the way you want is a pretty weird experience in an RPG and makes you realise just how much most games tend to suck your dick.

 

[Butter]

There's an optimal build, and then there are varying degrees of sub-optimal builds. The question is whether a particular game provides any sort of incentive to build sub-optimal characters. Fallout 1 and 2 have the low intelligence dialogues, but Fallout 3 doesn't. In fact, Fallout 3 doesn't provide any incentive to play a sub-optimal character. If you gimp yourself in Fallout 3, the best you can do is pretend you're playing a better game that rewards such a choice.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Yes and as Butter says , this kind of perspective is cool way to check real roleplaying value of given title. Interesting thing is , that best of titles really let you play not only optimal or perfect builds but also completely oposite ones. And on other side large ammount of AAA crpgs shows how shallow they are when you want to roleplay weakling character. No special dialogues or even mechanics that let you progress.

 

[Daemongar]

I tried to play Arcanum with a less than optimal build. That is, a char with low Int, high Charisma, and minimal combat skills. Something like a Dark Elf Beauty Queen. It was brutal. You want a lesson in horror, create a Char with no attack and dodge. It took me forever to make level 10 and in the process, I ended up putting all points into combat skills/dex. You can't avoid combat, and the only way out is death! The only thing that would have made this build worth it would be Dread Armor, which I didn't play long enough to find.

 

[deama]

I usually don't try to play the most perfect build, I just build whatever seems interesting or am in the mood for and roll with it.

 

[Yosharian]

What if the 'best build' IS the 1 INT character?

 

[Voids]

I remember playing the Fallout games with really low INT just for laughs.

 

[PapaPetro]

That's why companions exist. You're trading optimal party builds for story and narrative (and difficulty).
Optimal builds are liking saying "I think I'll roleplay a god this run... again". Which can be fun sometimes; rolling as a deity with 25 in all stats in BG on your xth playthrough. You're pretty much omniscient about the game at the point, why not get a lil taste of omnipotency.

 

[gunman]

In my opinion, the ideal RPG should not have you "win" the game, but offer you different paths in the "journey" that drives you whatever the ending is. Having to max your stats to play fast towards the end of the game is a flaw of the principle.

 

[Yosharian]

That's why companions exist. You're trading optimal party builds for story and narrative for no reason other than the developers insisting on making companions with shit stats. It's perfectly possible to make companions with very good stats, but developers refuse to do it, out of the misguided notion that companions have to have shit stats otherwise they're not 'role-playing' right.

 

[Agame]

I think there is somewhere between 'Meta OP autist build' and purposefully making the worst build you can which is the impression I get from the OP, really you are just reinforcing the concept that there is only good/bad builds, right/wrong etc. And choosing to not optimize is just a 'lolrandom low IQ derp build'...

The main reason I have replayed F1/2 more than any other game is due to the flexibility of its character system combined with the game systems. I regularly do a playthrough almost yearly, and when I do I pick a character concept, often a trope like: 'Dr Evil/Mad scientist' and then I will pick all skills and stats to perfectly fit that character, but not specifically to gimp the build, just the choices that make sense. So in this case it would be energy weapon focus, and then maybe high Charisma (an evil genius always has minions). So you rely on NPC companions to help in early game till you finally get energy weapons to dominate.

 

[Delterius]

I try to learn how the game works for min-maxing so that I can come up with curious and entertaining ways to make my way through it all once more. I do try to hold myself back though, which is something of an acquired taste.

Kid-me would outright cheat all the time.

That's why companions exist. You're trading optimal party builds for story and narrative for no reason other than the developers insisting on making companions with shit stats. It's perfectly possible to make companions with very good stats, but developers refuse to do it, out of the misguided notion that companions have to have shit stats otherwise they're not 'role-playing' right.

or in the case of pathfinder, beyond godly stats that are shittily arranged

 

[PapaPetro]

That's why companions exist. You're trading optimal party builds for story and narrative for no reason other than the developers insisting on making companions with shit stats. It's perfectly possible to make companions with very good stats, but developers refuse to do it, out of the misguided notion that companions have to have shit stats otherwise they're not 'role-playing' right.

If Minsc had 17 strength, would you still put him in the party?

 

[pomenitul]

Min-maxing is for wusses who can't handle REAL adventurers.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Minsc in my playthrough suffers from anemia and some strange venereal disease after meeting with few elven ladies. His strentgh is 3 and dext. around 2 . Im glad he still has his hamster around.

 

[Egosphere]

A melee build in Fallout 1 can be counted as suboptimal, since it's a lot harder to complete quests in comparison to guns. I did a chemical+energy pistol build in Underrail as well, which was awful compared to psi or melee or guns, but never finished the game with it. It's fun though. Playing with the PERFECT build kind of defeats the point of the rpg, really.

 

[V_K]

Almost every older or newer crpg title give us oportunity to play [with some self discipline of course] any kind of weak character we want. Now i prepare to give both Divinty 2 and some other crpgs, playthrough based on various mental diseases and some phobia from real world. It so great to play with a dwarf that gets paralyzed with sight of spider or rat etc. Or having elven mage in party that has periodic schizophrenia attacks and sometimes can kill whole shop with shopkeepers leaving only burning shelves becouse voices told him to do so.

Realms of Arkania is a perfect series for you - the game has a whole of seven negative stats like necrophobia, superstition or violent temper.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

BTW does anyone of you have any experience with RoA: Startrail remake on steam? What your opinions? I played first remake on Steam lately with dlcs and it was great game after all patches.

 

[Shadenuat]

After a while the actual great/broken options in systems become extremely obvious even if you're not good at math as you begin grasping this stuff even on pure intuition. All the meta and "op" stuff becomes just banality and if you only play that you will never have any fun. It's anecdotal that I'm not even good at some games but then some rules come up, I read them and look at something and think "huh, they will probably go full limit with this option on tournaments and take max of this" and then I see some meta lists and hey, there is that thing spammed to the limit I thought would be.
When everything is so extremely obvious, what's the point of playing then?

I just play things which I want to play because of fun.