Sup /tg/, ever played a game where the party's power levels were all over the place? How'd it work out?
Did the weaker party members find their own ways to be helpful or was it just one or two guys carrying the team?
How would you make a campaign where certain player characters are weaker than others by design?
>Did the weaker party members find their own ways to be helpful or was it just one or two guys carrying the team?
Yes.
How would you make a campaign where certain player characters are weaker than others by design?
Make a campaign where Combat isn't always the best, or even a viable, option for resolving conflict.
True story, whenever I play wizards in DnD/Pathfinder, despite how broken they are in such systems, I always play a character who's alot weaker than the rest of the rest of the party, even the melee fighters. I'm useful because those melee fighters are smashing things with a magic lightning hammer that *I* made. I'm useful because when we're fighting a monster nobody has ever seen before, I'm the one who researches it's weaknesses. I'm useful because, even though I can't take much of a hit or put out much damage, I know what to do and say to make sure everyone else can take a ton of hits and put out a ton of damage.
Of course, support-mage isn't the only option for weak characters being helpful. I've also been involved in all-thief games and Shadowrun-esque things where stealth or charisma or skills with certain types of technology are just as important as combat... where combat still has it's uses, sure... but it's something that has to be used and planned around carefully. If you have a guy that's a walking armory, for example, it's easy to overwhelm half-trained security guards at a museum, but you're going to have 5 minutes tops to finish up your heist and get out before the SWAT team shows up... maybe 10 minutes if your tech guy can delay the security systems.
So yeah, it's easy to do... just make combat not always be an option for resolving conflicts on it's own.
Current game we're playing, there's another race in the setting besides humans, which is incomparably stronger than them. As in like, not even a hundred humans could defeat one. It kind-of poorly balances out though because the other race seem really poorly adjusted to average tasks and living, so us human characters ended up being skill monkeys and have a general competency as well as much better socially. There are still cased where there's a massive imbalance like in fights (which have proven to be extremely lethal) and my character for example always just runs away. The DM though has done a really nice job of mixing gameplay up to have lots of things like puzzles and problems that require clever or quick thinking and skills, which is similarly unbalanced against the other race in our favor. Overall it's kind of janky and takes getting used to, but has proven to be quite interesting and fun, and great for role playing.
>>46607303
Any GURPS game. Particularly superheroes.
You always have a dude who just makes Hawkeye and another dude who is practically invulnerable to physical harm and shoots laser beams out of his eyes that melt tanks.
GURPS is the best.
>>46607303
Play a system like FATE. Abilities have equal narrative power, so one person can say "I have super strength" and another can say "I am good at research" and in theory they'll be equally useful.
Also, while having more signature traits lets you do more stuff, you generate the game's main resource by coming up with situations where your traits get you into trouble or make things more difficult, and the more traits you have the smaller your resource pool. Meaning that an "everyman" character with few abilities also has fewer restrictions and is capable of spamming situational bonuses.
Yes, currently in one.
I'm physically the weakest party member by far and have less skills than the other party members and have roughly half their hitpoints due to chargen rolls (for the rolemaster system), and I rolled good...
I was supposed to be the party frontliner but my character is physically nothing compared to the others who rolled 6'8+ giants with massive strength.
I'm pretty much useless but I am a way better acrobat than them. I've also managed to not die despite still frontlining which is impressive.
That's kinda of my characters schtick just now, he want's to become an adventurer and explore the big wide world. All the characters are from the same dark age village that just happens to have a few giant men in it. My character has the most room for improvement and I'm interested to see what the future holds for him.
Dragon Ball Z is pretty much a textbook example of a campaign getting ruined by an extreme min/maxer.
>>46608644
>De Facto party leader is a massive min-maxing munchkin.
>Only shit he ever wants to do is fight all the fucking time which the GM doesn't really know how to deal with.
>Whenever he's around, the campaign turns into a glorified dungeon crawler where he's the only character who can ever do shit because all the encounters were cranked to such stupid high levels just to try and deal with him.
>He's also flaky as fuck, sometimes not even showing up for weeks at the time so the GM has to come up with increasingly stupid and convoluted reasons to explain why he's not around and why the PCs aren't getting immediately slaughtered by the planned encounters and then derail his own sessions into blatant filler, which ironically turns out to be the only time where the rest of the party gets to roleplay a bit and have fun with their characters.
>To top it all off whenever that guy does show up and attempt to roleplay he always makes the stupidest fucking calls at the expanse of literally everybody including himself because "that's what his character would do".
>>46609630
Not to mention the other players getting fed up and getting drawn into his faggotry. I'm 100% convinced Kuririn's player switched his character to the NPC Vegeta, because "Yamcha was allowed to switch to Piccolo too after the timeskip!"
>>46608530
Sounds like a pretty fun campaign anon. You're character sounds like a young shounen protag.
>>46609886
I was more under the impression that Krillin and Piccolo were the only PCs who bothered staying after all the bullshit.
Bulma's player obviously left a while ago and got downgraded to blatant NPC.
Yamcha switched into Vegeta the old BBEG after That Guy decided to spare him for no reason at the end of the last campaign and then hooked up with his now NPC girlfriend again.
Tien Shinhan got pretty fed up after the GM made his originally optimized combat oriented character completely worthless and murdered him and his NPC best buddy. Got over it. Came back as Dende so he could be the Cleric instead just to get abruptly one-shotted by the new BBEG. Got even more pissed off and then came back as his original character Trunks who is Vegeta and Bulma's kid and can turn SSJ and is a time traveler and does Naruto shit and carries a sword that cuts the BBEG in half.
>>46607617
>Caster
>Weak than martials
>Stealth and Charisma treated like there're weak stats
>Thinking straight up stabbing shit till it dies in the aforementioned systems is "strong"
Good job, dude, I totally fell for this, damn you're good at this
>>46607617
Support mage is like the strongest shit you can find in DnD/PF the fuck are you talking about? you basically stay behind the meat shields while you fucking control what's happening, your whole post is like saying "You can be good as Warblade even if those Monks are strongest class", it makes no sense.
>>46610297
looks like you just booked a ride on the ruse cruise, he's blatantly trolling
>>46607303
It blew ass.
Every encounter was a pendulum swing between being nigh impossible for everyone but the optimized characters or were so easy that the rest of us never got a turn because the power gamers steam rolled everything.
You'd think a guy who knows how to fight would be able to pull his own weight considering FIGHT comprises most of his class's name but lo' and behold, a holy man in a fucking dress and a goddamn bear are capable doing the exact same bullshit with the added bonus of armor and spells.
