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Calthropstu
2018-09-20, 11:12 AM
I am watching an anime called Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo.

In it, the protagnist dies and is given the opportunity to go to another world to help fight "the demon king." The goddess telling him this says he is allowed to take any one thing he wants. He can pick powerful items and artifacts... Anything he wants.

So of course he picks the goddess herself. He is quickly joined by a wizard with one horrendously op spell per day... And nothing else. And a fighter who can't hit the broad side of a barn, but can definitely take a hit.

The goddess herself is vietually useless except for healing magic. The whole party is pretty much terrible.

Anyways, I write about all this because it got me to thinkng. How many of you have played in such a party? Where the entire team was virtually useless?

How'd it go? Did you get far?

Nifft
2018-09-20, 12:00 PM
*one google later*

They've got an awful lot of volumes of surviving what appears to be adversity, with no irreversible character deaths. And they do beat the antagonist in the end.

I'd expect that they're reasonably well calibrated for their setting's genre, which appears to be comedy. (Unless of course the series gets grim later on past the spoilers which I read.)

16bearswutIdo
2018-09-20, 12:47 PM
The first time I played with my current group, the party was 3 rogues and a bard with no points in Perform. Their first combat went really well!!!

Jay R
2018-09-20, 01:15 PM
The terrible party I almost played: in a 2e game, we arrived for the first game with a Fighter, Ranger, Paladin, and my Thief.

[I quickly re-arranged my character sheet and made the Thief an elven multi-class Thief / Wizard.]

Quertus
2018-09-20, 01:28 PM
Quertus, my signature tactically inept academia mage, for whom this account is named, is nearly useless. I'd say any time he adventures solo would qualify. :smallwink:

Beyond that? Hmmm... A kid in his PJs, a madman, and a small fluffy cat? That group (which was occasionally joined by others, including some sentient nuclear waste) is the first one to come to mind. My character quite literally popped popcorn & ate it while watching the final boss fight from the sidelines.

EDIT; oh, right, how did they do? Well, with his original party, my character burned down their shared space, and died. And that was just session 0. It was downhill from there. That group managed to doom the world, and all but kill Imagination. They had so much fun, they set about killing Joy while they were at it.

Quertus, OTOH, hid behind as many meat shields as possible, publishing books of the many places here been and things he's seen, researched enough custom spells to open a library, and founded an interplanetary Adventurers' Guild. And incidentally saved over 100 world from "end of world" scenarios. While going massively into debt.

Calthropstu
2018-09-20, 01:40 PM
*one google later*

They've got an awful lot of volumes of surviving what appears to be adversity, with no irreversible character deaths. And they do beat the antagonist in the end.

I'd expect that they're reasonably well calibrated for their setting's genre, which appears to be comedy. (Unless of course the series gets grim later on past the spoilers which I read.)

Yes, it is quite comedic. The main character has high luck and intelligence, and nothing else. Good strategist, and he works with what he has. A recurring theme is feeding his party to giant frogs, and killing the frogs while they are sluggish trying to swallow them.

Personally, I've never played characters that were absurdly useless, nor with characters that were. The closest I got is a crossbow wielding ranged disarm specialist.

JeenLeen
2018-09-20, 02:50 PM
My first oWoD Mage party might qualify, as a mix of poorly understanding the system and PC conflict. (OOC, we were mostly enjoying it, but it stunk IC.)

My character dumped Dexterity and Stamina. I didn't know how important those were, so I stunk at combat. None of my Spheres really compensated, either, so he wound up fairly useless most of the time.

We have another who was built decently well, but got blood-bound early on and wasn't trusted by the other PCs. Also kept making dumb moves which annoyed us. Part of it was us moving from D&D to WoD and not realizing some of the consequences of actions...

Like when our third PC killed thugs in the street in broad daylight. Which I think got some Hunters after us. He was actually really great in combat (gunner using Entropy to boost accuracy) and compensated a lot for my poor build and the other's play style.

At least we TPKed together. Frightfully terrible tactics during a fight led to our capture. (We were losing a fight against the minions, and for some reason proceeded to the boss' chamber. It seemed like a good idea at the time.*) We eventually escaped from prison but died of injuries in the aftermath.

*When my character saw the boss, he bluffed, saying something to the effect that we were winning against his minions and he better surrender. His response was just something like, "...it sounds like you're not." then blasting me with a fireball.

Legato Endless
2018-09-20, 10:41 PM
This was from a DnD party a few years ago.

Bobby wanted to play a scholar who investigated evil. An elderly scholar. So he decided he'd play the cleric. But the aging rules weren't enough, he dumped strength and his constitution to really get into senior citizen pastor mode. This would might not have been crippling, if he hadn't also decided to never cast spells in battle. Ever.

Instead, he's charge the enemy with his cane sword. Remember those ability scores I just mentioned? No, he didn't buff himself either beforehand. He spend half the fights unconscious unless someone managed to heal the healer.

Sid died far less. She played a monk character with awesome saves and good defenses and further invested in those whenever possible. Then she'd run around the battlefield attempting to demoralize the enemy by exhausting the hostile monsters' attacks of opportunity against her iron skin, before finishing with an ineffectual flurry in someone's face. Exactly how that contributed to winning proved elusive.

Mandy, our blaster caster, did damage the enemy. She'd drown our foes in elemental bombardments-and us along with them. There was no opportunity for friendly fire she didn't take. She was crazy and chaotic. Whenever she needed healing and the enemies looked adequately resistant, she'd just drain the health from her fellow party members. On a good day, she's tear out more from the enemy than us. On a bad one, it'd be several turns of oops, turns out the enemy was immune to that storm I conjured but you weren't. Ouch I got hit, gonna need some health from one you stockier types in front. Admittedly this made Sid quasi-useful as a heal pack. Yet sometimes she targeted me, the Paladin. Or Bobby, with his Con 7.

Dave, the summoner, actually had a decent build. If he'd known how to use it. More often, he'd select the wrong tool for the wrong job. Oh dear, we're getting attacked by a ghostly noble. Dave summoned a wolf pack to surround him...but the mundane fangs and claws can't actually hit the ghost's flesh. They did however block the melee characters who could hit the undead effectively for a turn. The Ghost meanwhile, cracked its ethereal whip with immunity right through the pack in our faces.

The DM ran this campaign for two simultaneous groups. After we wiped, I sat in to help with a session where our peers, a three man party, proved far more effective than the five of us had.

Drascin
2018-09-21, 03:23 AM
The thing with the Konosuba characters, far as I know, is that they're overspecialized to the point of near-uselessness. From how my friends describe it, they DO have strengths, they just lack so much basic human functionality that they constantly have to bumble and panic and try to engineer situations where their skills actually matter.

Darkness is a masochist crusader that couldn't hit a building, but she has enough HP to facetank more or less anything short of a meteor impact. Megumin is an absolutist evoker wizard that believes doing anything other than spend all her mana (to the point of instantly fainting on cast) in the single biggest explosion she can muster is the worst thing you could do, but said explosion is basically the fantasy equivalent of a literal nuke. Aqua has the intelligence score of a hamster and the forward thinking and sense of empathy of a three year old, but she has enough anti-undead mojo to make even powerful liches basically implode on contact. And Kazuma is a sadistic pervert and an ***hole with low enough strength and dexterity that he's outclassed by aforementioned fainting wizard in basically all physical stats, but has a wide smattering of minor utility skills from a bunch of classes and an outrageous luck score that makes his skills work when by all rights they shouldn't.

So they do things like get Megumin to cast her nuke on the villain's castle every day until he comes out because he's sick of them breaking his stuff (since they are entirely cognizant they could never take on all the minions and traps inside it), or throw Darkness as a flail and bait, and so on.

oxybe
2018-09-21, 06:57 AM
I am watching an anime called Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo.

In it, the protagnist dies and is given the opportunity to go to another world to help fight "the demon king." The goddess telling him this says he is allowed to take any one thing he wants. He can pick powerful items and artifacts... Anything he wants.

So of course he picks the goddess herself. He is quickly joined by a wizard with one horrendously op spell per day... And nothing else. And a fighter who can't hit the broad side of a barn, but can definitely take a hit.

The goddess herself is vietually useless except for healing magic. The whole party is pretty much terrible.

Anyways, I write about all this because it got me to thinkng. How many of you have played in such a party? Where the entire team was virtually useless?

How'd it go? Did you get far?

Note that, as others have said, Kazuma and Co's main flaws are their overspecialization and simply being horrible people.

Ideally a party that consists of an Archmage, a High Priest and a Paladin is a thing to be envied but when your Archmage only knows Meteor Swarm, your High Priest has the planning capabilities and empathy of an angry hamster and your Paladin's inept combat mixed with masochism is high enough to endanger the rest, it doesn't help.

If Megumin would only pickup even a handfull of advanced magic spells like Yunyun did, she'd have no problems. But it's her focus on her one spell and optimizing the bloody **** out of it, to the detriment of all else, that causes her problems... even if she has character reasons for doing so.

If Aqua would actually stop being trash for a moment, she could make good use of her wide array of divine abilities. But trashwife is trashwife: she's got her neck cranked back so far looking down her nose at everyone she can only see the blue sky. If she'd stop being as selfish and self-centered she'd be a really respectable priest. Instead she just does party tricks at the bar for drinks. When... she's not stealing party funds to get sloshed and puking rainbows.

If Darkness could focus on her swordsmanship and presenting herself as a threat, enemies would actually focus her. Instead she just kinda creeps them out by being all hot and bothered over getting punched, cursed, captured or yelled at.

Kazuma is legit doing the best he can with a bad bunch. The dude himself is a pretty selfish and kinda perverted *******, but he's an effective one. He's the party's leader, their face/skillmonkey and he just points his glass cannon, meat shield and useless goddess in the direction they're best suited while using his wide array of low-level skills to cover up the party deficiencies.

This is even shown in-universe when Kazuma and someone who was jealous of his party makeup swap parties. The jealous guy was just dumbfounded at how Megumin, Darkness & Aqua managed to tie their shoelaces without falling apart while the other party was impressed at Kazuma's ability to scout ahead, plan and setup contingencies, improvise on the fly when the plan didn't work or hit a snag, could make good use of their individual skills and doubling up when necessary.

The thing with the Konosuba crew is that while they're all horrible people on top of being horribly specialized, they are still friends who care for each other at the end of the day so you still want to see them succeed and when placed in situations where they can be pointed at and let loose, they can absolutely run roughshod on their enemies.

It's basically the Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Seinfeld of animes: they're all horrible people, but they're our friends.

sorta.

And that's probably the point of a game with a crew akin to the Konosuba gang: it's about the adventure and personalities and making the best of a bad situation over racking up the flawless victories.

Anonymouswizard
2018-09-21, 07:00 AM
I was once in a party that consisted of a nun, a trainee nun, an ex-cultist with a fear of weapons (me), a private investigator, and a ninja. The ninja was the only one who hadn't poured all their skill points into investigation and talking (proving that we'd learnt nothing from the previous campaign, where our party of noncombatant characters almost got TPKed twice). Although we turned out to not be terrible due to having so many points in social skills we once convinced a group of armed cultists that outnumbered us something like five to one to just leave, although we had just bound their demon into a notepad. We somehow also managed to have every last required skill for our profession except the ability to use Google.

The next party consisted of a Warrior Priest of Sigmar, a dwarf engineer, a human alchemist, a Shadowdancer, and a Skaven ex-officier (army). Now skills-wise we were completely fine, but we couldn't have been a more dysfunctional group. The skaven and dwarf were the voices of reason, my character was as overconfident as possible (to the point where I never had to roll for the disad) and unobservant, the alchemist was crazy and nearly got us thrown out of the guild of engineers via blowing up their new plane, the shadowdancer had no clue as to how to act in polite society, and one of our voices of reason suffered from serious PTSD. I'm shocked the police didn't fire us after the first session.

Ornithologist
2018-09-21, 09:06 AM
So in a scifi game setting we played a group as:

A Lela (Futurama) clone
A Ninja-cook
a fairy


There was one more I cannot remember, but was similarly awful. We all knew it was scifi and all went absolutley not on theme (except one obviously).

It was a fun campaign regardless, as the GM somehow found a way for all of us to get on the ship and working on it. He did a good job.

I'll leave it as an excercise of the reader to figure out which of the three I was.

Anonymouswizard
2018-09-21, 09:30 AM
I'll leave it as an excercise of the reader to figure out which of the three I was.

Shouldn't have posted the answer in the 'Things I May No Longer Doing While Playing' thread.

How was playing the full conversion borg by the way?