Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm curious how people play their characters. With the pathfinder campaign i'm in I've been trying to strike a balance between keeping my character "fluffy", while making him as powerful as I can.

Case in point, Rise of the Runelords, my character is a human fighter(archer) whose stricken up a friendship/relationship with the local Elven Ranger. In order to get closer to her, he's gone from Fighter to Ranger, but it's impacted my ability to deliver pain down range as solidly as I would have liked. So I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to keep things within the path of roleplay that I've set him on, while still making him as powerful as I can.

So do you guys put a lot of thought into that, or do you just go pedal to the metal one way or the other?

The most relevant rule here is to make sure your character design goals fit the campaign. My group has run a mix of background-heavy story-driven games, random games (We'd been playing 3.0 for a while witht he point-buy rules, and did one campaign where we went for old-school random rolling of stats just to be different and see how it worked), and games where the goal is to make 'focused' characters (I.E. a bit munchkin-ish). Same players, same GM (mostly). It's what you and your friends want to do.

Personally, I avoid the 'character optimization' because I don't find it interesting as long as my character can accomplish something in the game and is fun to play.

I also am completely willing to give the GM some plot hooks by answering questions like "What would cause your character to break their vow, go off on their own, etc.?" I find questions like this interesting and they provide great plot-hooks to the GM that wants to use them.

 Balance wrote:
The most relevant rule here is to make sure your character design goals fit the campaign. My group has run a mix of background-heavy story-driven games, random games (We'd been playing 3.0 for a while witht he point-buy rules, and did one campaign where we went for old-school random rolling of stats just to be different and see how it worked), and games where the goal is to make 'focused' characters (I.E. a bit munchkin-ish). Same players, same GM (mostly). It's what you and your friends want to do.

Personally, I avoid the 'character optimization' because I don't find it interesting as long as my character can accomplish something in the game and is fun to play.

I also am completely willing to give the GM some plot hooks by answering questions like "What would cause your character to break their vow, go off on their own, etc.?" I find questions like this interesting and they provide great plot-hooks to the GM that wants to use them.

I like doing that as well. We're on an adventure path though, so there is less "wiggle room" that there would be in a home grown adventure. I guess that has had a large impact on how I've built my guy.

Yeah, when playing pre-made campaigns, there is not much more than "Making the best murder-hobo you can." When playing custom DMed stories, the DM can really throw wrenches into things which allow or expect well-rounded characters opposed to just a gold-grabbing murder-hobo.

Murder-hobo... always makes me giggle.

Hmmm. Like Balance, I have done both in the past, but I lean heavily towards a fairly laid back approach.

When I get a chance to play, I am all about getting into the story and enjoying the hell out of experiencing the world from a single perspective. For that reason, I am generally pretty easygoing about my character builds because I don't need to be powerful to enjoy myself- I can quite enjoy being incompetent too, every now and then. I tend to pick a theme and then take whatever fairly obvious choices exist for that theme. I don't spend much time thinking about it, generally only looking at the options on the times I level up. Sometimes a cool ability will jump out at me, and I'll grab it, a lot of the time I'll go for the obvious or straightforward choice that fits my concept.

In one way, this is something that kind of annoys me about Pathfinder. There's a huge amount of customization available, so much so that it's a bit of an impediment to me in making choices easily because I have to read over so much stuff.

All of that said, if I end up with a really nails character due to my hodge podge approach, I don't mind that at all. And I have intentionally built hard characters before, like my awfully broken Binder1/Warlock5/Hellfire Warlock. Did con damage to himself to boost eldritch blast damage, while binding a vestige that allowed him to heal all ability damage at will. Nasty! GM still caught me out easily enough though.

Take what I have to say with a grain of salt, since it comes from the perspective of someone who is "designated dungeon master" 90% of the time.

One thing I've learned is that there is absolutely 0 relation between fluff and crunch. Take that class/power/feat and explain away its mechanical benefit however the heck you feel like. The game works the same way.

Since I'm a big crunch monkey I usually dream up a character based on a combat strategy or style of fighting. This can be a cool mechanical combo I have thought up or read about (a 4e warden with a hammer that knocks people prone when he hits them) or else a character archetype (I ran a summoner druid as a Shaper from Geneforge once).

After I have a mechanical basis to work off I make the rest of the mechanical character design decisions to be as effective as possible at that particular thing I've chosen to do. Note that the thing I pick might not actually be the most optimized thing my character could be doing, but that doesn't stop me from building the character to be the best I can at it.

After that I start to rationalize out what kind of character would actually do the mechanical stuff I've built up. That's where the interesting story and character traits can come in. That said, no character of mine has actually had that deep or compelling of a backstory.

I'm just not really a deep roleplaying kind of guy. That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it or mind if other people do, it's just that I've never been that good at getting in character.

If I were put in the same situation as the OP, it would impact the roleplaying of my character far more than the mechanics of how he is build as a class, regardless of the system I am playing.

I always try to reiterate in games that the class of a character is not necessarily the only way to play that lifestyle, other than some obvious ones (Paladin, Cleric, etc). To me a Ranger class represents more of an archetypical set of skills, rather than a lifestyle. A band of rangers would very likely have members who run a large range of types, from ones that are more of a "Fighter" to others.

Honestly, there's no difference between a well roleplayed character and a well minmaxed character, if you're doing it right. For instance, one of my favorite characters in PFS that I play with is a Taldane noble who is more than a little inbred. His favorite pet is "puppy," a badger of prodigious size, and as his mother won't let him play with sharp objects he's got a rather large shield tied to each arm. Between adventures, he even helps other nobles at the lodge go out and find cute animals like puppy to play with.

Out of characters I myself play, there's a wonderful scribe for the Society named Maliq, who spends his days cataloging all the random junk the murder hobos bring him to see if there's any interesting historical artifacts therein. Unfortunately for Maliq, there was: A potent intelligent falcata named Grimflay that enslaved him to its cursed will. He now wields vast magical powers due to Grimflay's influence, and is rather confused when he periodically regains consciousness in the middle of a dungeon. Mostly, he looks at interesting carvings and the like when he does, and tries to ignore the blood covering everything.

At first glance, both of these characters are great concepts and quite well roleplayed. Looking at their character sheets, it turns out we have a sword and board Ranger with INT as his dump stat built around the Shield Mastery feat in order to remove all dual wield penalties, with a pair of bashing spiked shields that hit like greatswords. Puppy is just insult to injury, as we have what amounts to a miniature Barbarian in his pocket.

Maliq, on the other hand, is a Bladebound Hexcrafter Magus, who will shortly be crit fishing with a +5 keen falcata combined with a prodigious amount of Shocking Grasp spells (not to mention the Flight hex, Blindness/Deafness, and Bestow Curse on tap). Given his amazing INT stat, he uses Appraise as a dayjob (Qadiran faction giving some nifty bonuses there), and should regularly be topping 35 on dayjob checks by level 6.

So yeah, just because you want to maximize your effectiveness doesn't mean you can't have a great concept and roleplay it well. For the OP's example, consider just putting a few ranks into Survival or Knowledge Nature in order to reflect hanging out with Shalelu more. Heck, given you're a feat monkey already, you might even consider dipping into the Nature Soul/Animal Ally/Boon Companion feat chain.