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Which character concepts are less cool to play than they seems ? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/rpg@ttrpg.network
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What about the idea which at first looks pretty cool but end-up at worst not bringing anything to the game at worst being boring to play ?

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[–] 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

As a GM, basically any artificer / inventor. They only fit into very specific settings, so they’re very out of place in most games. If the system has light rules for inventions, the player thinks they can create anything, and I have to constantly fight them to stop trying to one-up the other characters. If the system has robust invention rules, these characters don’t generally get to invent anything since so much downtime and resources are required.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    From the player's perspective this is a rough one as well. There's nothing more disappointing than to roll up a crafty character only to discover that the campaign has break-neck pacing to prevent rest spam, but also incidentally preventing any downtime for crafts.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    @HipsterTenZero @DrakeRichards

    Very much this. It's basically the "hacker movie" problem in tabletop form. Actual making involves a ton of time and most of it is boring (even if the results are amazing). It's very difficult to translate this into the pace of a story while still making it interesting. To do so you often have to engage in flights of complete fancy, like the competitive code writing scenes in hacker movies.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Shadowrun does this right.
    The hacker sees a virtual representation of what the group faces, can interact with it in real time, and is in actual mortal danger along with everyone else, even while sitting at home.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    It's especially bad in D&D5e, where the artificer can create any common magical item, but it has to be selected at level up and can't be changed, and since the game is so focused on High Fantasy, all of the common magic items are completely worthless, since the interesting stuff happens at higher rarety. In the end the system makes the Artificer a reskinned magic user where everything is worse than a plain sourcerer.

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