Erista:
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and Eilieen fits the bill - mostly
...But Eilieen kicks
butt! She's awesome.
This is lovely to hear. :) Eilieen is FUN...but was designed for a 'healer' role, so I'm cool if she isn't exactly a powerhouse in a fight.
The anti-Undead thing came kind of naturally as I played her.
quote:
That's a really good way to put it, though. I've played characters that have no interest or ability in combat and of course they have nothing to do when a fight breaks out. I built them that way, and it can be fun finding other ways to contribute, or not. But when I build a character who should be able to contribute then, it's discouraging when that contribution is meaningless.
This is exactly what I mean. Well-put.
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And what bothers me more, honestly, is that mages can generally trivialize the rest of the party in other circumstances too. Like, I can max out Bluff and Diplomacy, or they can cast Charm Person. I can max out Hide and Move Silently, or they can just turn Invisible.
I think D&D made some significant mistakes in its early years, like trying to balance classes over "time", and some of those mistakes are hard to fix. And have echoed into gaming broadly, though I do think game design theory has certainly improved over the de--- let's just call it years.
ahaha...
There's that, as well. Rogues and other skill-based people become largely 'lesser fighters' and 'niche use' in D&D after a point, because there's little they can do that a good spell-caster can't mimic or do better...at least once a day. And given how 'story/character-based' games run (versus complete dungeon-crawls), that's enough.
And it HAS impacted other class-based games, or even fantasy/Sci-Fi games in general (space opera with psychics can run into this problem.
Solutions? Tricky. Balancing stuff via RULES isn't easy. It can lead to very bland rules, or even where the opposite happens - earlier editions of Battlelords of the 23rd Century, for example, had Matrix Generators (mages, really) with potentially awesome powers...who would take forever to achieve them (experience-point wise), and until that point were pretty weak in most situations. :( 7th Edition (!!!) has largely solved this, I think, but it took an near-complete rewrite of the matrix rules and a lot of the core rules. D6 Star Wars - which is good - still savagely nerfs Jedi by making it ridiculously hard for them to progress (and I say this as someone who dislikes Jedi, intensely - also, this isn't a shot against Ron's game, because I'm having a BALL there and I don't really care about advancement. But someone who wants to play a similar character to Luke, who goes from Nobody to Jedi, is going to literally need to play constantly for years and years and years before they start getting even
competent).
Even Anima suffers from this to some extent, though less-so; purely skill-based characters can eventually do supernatural stuff with their skills (want to use acrobatics to 'ride a beam of light'? Sure thing!), but become almost trivial in combat situations, and mages can eventually replicate some of what they do. What keeps it from getting out of control in Anima is the fact that the setting puts a soft-stop on people trying to have their mage be everything and do everything (it's unhealthy, though this does depend on the GM being willing to make it a threat).
Maybe that's what it takes - a combination of rules AND setting. Which does hurt generic settings... :(