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BiblioRook
2016-04-26, 09:05 PM
A huge pet-peeve I have in games is when other players think of me strictly by my class regardless of my character's class regardless of who or what the character was like. This is especially a point because I play a lot of Rogues but I very rarely, if ever, actually play 'rogues'. I play investigators, curious scholars, sometimes wayward youths, but almost never have I ever played an outright criminal, yet sure enough the first time we come across a lock needing picked or when picking a person to sneak ahead to scout I'm always the first person people point to dispite never showing any indication my character would be savvy in such things before that point. It's all a matter of Role Playing not lining up with mechanics I guess.

Anyways, this isn't really about me complaining about that as much as wondering how often others might deal with the same situation.
(I only recently got into my first 5th ed. game but Backgrounds feel like they really help with this sort of thing, because now I'm not mechanically 'just' a 'rogue' but also a 'sage' or a 'sailor'.)

SirBellias
2016-04-26, 09:31 PM
Yeah, 5e backgrounds are nice in that respect. That's what I was going to point out until you mentioned it. I typically deal with this by trying to get my players to describe who their character is before telling them the options for mechanics (if possible) or without referencing mechanics. It's easier with some groups than others, but I don't ask the groups where it's difficult.

Answering the question in the title, my character I've last played is Sir Bellias, whimsical Knight (Pendragon). He is an incredibly modest soul, believing inwardly that he is not above anyone else in the land. This has lead to him second guessing his claim for knighthood, and as such he always strives to perform his best and earn the title granted to him. He is fond of poetry, song, and the spoken word, traits that other Knights have flaunted their disregard for, though he does not blame them for thinking he is unknightly.

My next 5e character will be a Druid with the Soldier background. He thinks of himself as the heavy artillery, and is looking to impress a childhood friend he has fallen in love with by gathering fame and fortune en masse. He served in a mercenary group for many years, and is now looking to set up a post for the band in a dangerous Frontier town... (West Marches style game, should be fun).

BiblioRook
2016-04-26, 10:28 PM
My current character is a (Gnome Rogue, Sage Background) wizard apprentice that went AWOL to try his hand at being an adventurer for a bit before he went back to the monotony of being a librarian. He has stats that would make an optimizer weep with his 19 Int and utterly average everything else. Thankfully I managed to get to 3rd level so he could actually cast spells (aside from the Gnomish Minor Illusion, which up to that point he definitely got millage out of) to round out the character... ironically he was the last person in the party to learn actual spells!


Man, the Pathfinder game I was in before the 5th ed game was especially bad with this though. I was trying to play a version of Tangled's Rapunzel (Human Rogue/Witch) who was taught a few 'life skills' after being freed from her tower by a thief but mostly was just a scared naive girl who was exploring the world for the first time and liked to hit things with a frying pan. What she wasn't was the kind of person to let it widely known she knew how to pick locks or to rush into combat...

I actually get a lot of grief with this because I like to play as non-combat savvy characters (scholars and skill-monkeys mainly) who like to stay out of combat when they can, but most of the people I play with see gaming as just a mechanical bottom-line and in combat if you can fight you should fight regardless of personal motivations...