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Apr 5, 2010 -- 2:59PM, Andrelai wrote:

On the other hand, players who choose character options based more on RP reasons don't get much in the way of tangible rewards.

Great question! How to best approach the situation will probably depend largely on the individual RP choices made by the player. 

For example, if a player chose the Linguist feat for RP reasons rather than going with a combat-related feat, a good way to reward that player might be to introduce an important NPC who doesn't speak common yet does speak one of player's chosen languages. Alternatively, you could have an NPC who does speak common, yet is impressed with the character's education, and favors that character as a result. Or the party might discover a long lost tome which written in one of the chosen languages, or a magic weapon with properties that are invoked by speaking in that language.

For a second example, imagine a player took Skill Training to become trained in History, or some other skill that isn't generally considered a combat skill. Imagine if that character's knowledge of history allowed him certain insights while viewing ruins of an ancient city, like "it was said the deceased King had a love of grapes," and other odd tidbits of information. Later, when the players are picking through the ruin, a faded still-life painting of grapes might stand out to the player trained in history. Further investigation might reveal an hidden passage behind the painting, apparently undiscovered and undisturbed. What lies within?

The problem with such characters is that since they're not optimized for combat, there are rarely good opportunities for you as a DM to make them useful in combat. While you can sometimes find exceptions, this is just a natural outgrowth of the choices the player has made when building their character. So the trick becomes to make them shine outside of combat, as a direct result of those same RP choices. This way everyone gets their turn in the spotlight.

At least that's my take. I'll be curious to hear how others deal with situations like this.

Apr 6, 2010 -- 8:37AM, warrl wrote:

Apr 5, 2010 -- 5:28PM, EasyT wrote:

The problem with such characters is that since they're not optimized for combat, there are rarely good opportunities for you as a DM to make them useful in combat.

Hey wait a minute - there's a difference between "not optimized for combat as much as he could be" and "not useful in combat"!

Very true. I got a little loose with my phrasing there. I really only meant to say that it can be tricky for a DM to single-handedly make a combat-weak character shine in combat.

I in no way meant to suggest that characters who are not optimized for combat are not useful, or in any way imply that only combat-optimized characters are worth playing. I've made my share of characters who aren't optimized for combat, including one I'm playing now: a low-level changeling rogue|wizard hybrid who took Linguist as his first feat.

In general it's not always clear when a feat or power is chosen for role play vs combat reasons.

When I originally built my half-orc ranger, I started with a back story. That back story included being a slave and stealing items to make a weapon he used to escape the slaver city. The most logical weapon he could make while living as the slave of a blacksmith, which he could reasonably hide between the blacksmith's drunken binges, was a spiked chain, which could hide in plain sight in a pile of blacksmithing "trash".

So, two things came out of that backstory that were purely role-play, the ranger was proficient with a spiked chain, and he had a background of "criminal" since he was a practiced and accomplished thief.

Of course that background opened up some options for powers, so he took fast hands. Also for role playing reasons he chose the feat "exotic fighting style" which allowed him to shift one square between twin strike attacks while using a double weapon. This was taken because he was a "shifty" character.

Normally optimized rangers don't take fast hands, exotic fighting style and spiked chain. So should he be rewarded for those choices?

Well, it turns out that particular set of choices creates an extremely powerful melee combatant who is very difficult to pin down and hit, plus it allows him to draw and throw a dagger without using a minor action, so he is nearly equally effective with ranged and melee attacks. In the end he turned out to be a very survivable damage producing machine. Now, was I anticipating that these "role play" choices might potentially produce such a melee monster? Well... yes, yes I was...

So if you take this approach, be aware that someone could easily game this by appearing to take non-optimized choices to gain whatever benefit you might want to bestow, while actually having a very nicely stealth optimized character to boot.