This sort of reasoning has its own perils. Thinking back to every other treave LP, our strongest skills often led to our most spectacular feats (sneaking into Miss Bai's quarters, defeating Ahura and becoming the new Firelord, bullshitting basically everybody, and standing up to Yang Xue and Super Shun). Meanwhile, a generalist would not have had access to the same options as our specialists had. I am not arguing that generalists are always better or worse than specialists, only that their generalist skill set can be just as limiting as that of the specialist, and I think that your claim that it can not is unfair.
The Archer said:
The Virgin said:
Hey, you're the one voting Fish over Archer (not that I particularly mind, water mutability is probably my favorite astra, although any mutability sounds decent to me).
In Legend near the end we were able to break 10 in stats across the board, but the point isn't to become all-around superman. It's precisely to have a "the sum is greater than the parts" type of character where we get creative and have options in every direction.
Jing was also a generalist. Because we dumped Luck we had high stats across the board in the rest of the field, and we just developed specialties along the road, as I expect we will do in this CYOA as well. Jing wouldn't've been Jing if he didn't have the charisma and int he did on top of his strong martial prowess and stealth skills. We had medicine skills, stealth skills, sleight of hand skills, speech skills (which we used with our high mental stats to BS our way into the black dragon fort), scholarly skills, unarmed skills, pressure point skills, sword skills, and ridiculous neigong and solid qinggong on that guy. Seriously, Jing is not a good example of a specialist. If Jing had charisma below 5, int below 5, and was just stealth and martial skills, he would've been a much less interesting/entertaining character.
You give Codex too much credit if you think we haven't done some spectacularly braindead votes. And there are times when the working options are pretty straightforward options, given our proficiencies.Furthermore, I think you aren't giving treave enough credit as a GM. When has he ever, and I mean ever, gave us scenarios where we didn't actually have to think how to apply our skills..
Tbh serving girl was an obvious road to success on that vote. Since she was being harassed by a bunch of drunks it would've been easy to make her favorably inclined to us so she'd tell us who would pilot our armor.
)
Now there's an interesting idea!
idk, I like my retard playthroughs of Arcanum as much as the next guy, but having "because you're a fucking moron" be treave's explanation for why we failed happens often enough without our character being an actual retard.
I was interested in Fish, he wouldn’t have been retarded. What I’m envisioning is some imposing, nigh-unkillable asshole a la Killer Physician going around and dispensing shamanic wisdom by transmuting tyrants into puddles of water. If nothing else, he’d also be durable to survive our screwups.
We learn him his manners and a mediocre sense of grooming on par with the everyman at the expense of that edge in shamanic mastery and a hide like bark. Frankly, I’d consider frothing about the wisdom the barley whispered in his ears or what have you a plus over the most average possible charisma.
