That Fucking Guy

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

You gamed with Matt Ward?

I know, right? It was a little surreal gaming with this guy, then discovering 1d4chan's article on That Guy and Matt Ward around the same time.

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Pathfinder Fighters are disgustingly ultraviolent. I'd say they fixed up the power discrepancy between casters and Fighters but good. I've been having to throw increasingly disproportionate CRs on enemies at my long-time D&D group (different group than the one mentioned above) just to slow down the damn Fighter/Paladin tag-team they have going on. I made them run a gauntlet of traps, hazards, and mazes while being pelted with spells from a super end-boss Lich, and they still annihilated it in a single turn once they finally got to him (they were about level 12 at the time, and I run damn near the opposite of a Monty Haul. They have to bow and scrape and scrounge together everything they can just to get their hands on the occasional +2 item). The Fighter did something like 120 damage in one round, with the Paladin doing around 70.

[Rogue 9]

Nerfing a very few bad spells does not make up for doubling the feat tax on melee feat trees and nerfing power attack and pretty much every method of buffing ever. Pathfinder's minor buffs to fighters are pretty negligible, especially with power attack set on fire.

Power Attack is straight up better. Sure, you can't dump your entire base attack bonus into damage, but if you do that in 3.5 you'll never hit anything anyway. Under the old PA I'd never take much more of a penalty than Pathfinder limits you to anyway barring extreme cases like unarmored giants, and the accuracy penalty:damage ratio is twice as good. My only complaint is that you can't choose to take a lower penalty once you get into higher levels.

What melee feat trees had their "feat tax" doubled? Because I'm not seeing any looking through my Core Rulebook and 3.5 Player's Handbook side by side as I type this. Pathfinder tacked more stuff onto the end of some of the feat trees, but the Weapon Focus tree, Two-Weapon Fighting tree, and Mounted Combat tree are all basically the same.

If you mean the various combat maneuver feats, there are two other factors at work there: First, the combat maneuver system is one of the few core mechanics to drastically change between Pathfinder and 3.5, so frankly you shouldn't expect them to work the same. Second, the second feat (that rounds out the +4 to whatever maneuver that the old feats got) also gives other benefits that the old feats simply didn't have; stacking all that into one (say, Improved Trip gives +4 to CMB to trip, negates the attack of opportunity, and makes the poor victim provoke opportunity attacks from all and sundry) makes the feat incredibly valuable, especially since Pathfinder gives feats away like candy with both the increased base feat progression and the bonus feats liberally scattered throughout the various classes.

[Erik von Nein]

Doing damage was never a problem for fighters in D&D, and quite frankly is still a terrible option when facing off against a great many threats. Making CMB/CMD apply to everything made it easier to keep track of one number (not that the maneuvers were ever difficult to track) but it also screwed the balance between the people using them and the things they were used on. With janking a perennial favorite of control or lock-down builds like Stand Still it stuck fighters further into the "do lots of damage" niche more than they were before. They still can't handle magic very well, and flight is just silly.

But if you want edition wars there's plenty of space for it.

Just check out this thread for it:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283132

[Rogue 9]

Pathfinder Fighters are disgustingly ultraviolent. I'd say they fixed up the power discrepancy between casters and Fighters but good. I've been having to throw increasingly disproportionate CRs on enemies at my long-time D&D group (different group than the one mentioned above) just to slow down the damn Fighter/Paladin tag-team they have going on. I made them run a gauntlet of traps, hazards, and mazes while being pelted with spells from a super end-boss Lich, and they still annihilated it in a single turn once they finally got to him (they were about level 12 at the time, and I run damn near the opposite of a Monty Haul. They have to bow and scrape and scrounge together everything they can just to get their hands on the occasional +2 item). The Fighter did something like 120 damage in one round, with the Paladin doing around 70.

3.5 fighters are ultraviolent too, but Pathfinder ones are better with Weapon Training. (Free Weapon Focus and half of Weapon Specialization every four levels in addition to actually getting Focus and Specialization? Yes please!) But if the lich was where the fighter and paladin could get their swords into him, he was doing it wrong, unless he was a cleric rather than wizard lich.

I tend to run in and play urban and NPC humanoid-centric campaigns with the occasional dragon thrown in (remember what game we're playing, here ), so I haven't really noticed the supposed difference between old combat maneuvers and new against large monsters (and nobody actually expects to be able to out-grapple a dragon anyway).

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

3.5 fighters are ultraviolent too, but Pathfinder ones are better with Weapon Training. (Free Weapon Focus and half of Weapon Specialization every four levels in addition to actually getting Focus and Specialization? Yes please!) But if the lich was where the fighter and paladin could get their swords into him, he was doing it wrong, unless he was a cleric rather than wizard lich.

Despite the show I often like to put on, I am not actually a party-murdering sadist. The lich cast levitate as the party got to him and floated out of reach, but I let them jump in time to grab his ankles and pull him back to the ground.

[LadyTevar]

Guys, on topic, please. That Guy, not Pathfinder v AD&D

[Tanasinn]

What, no topic drift? It's not a traditional gaming discussion unless we start up discussing elf slave wat do and end up debating the Bolshevik revolution and the relative merits of NEP-era Russia versus the tsarist regime.

Er. Ahem.

Honestly no that guy feature ruins a game faster than the guy who thinks the game is some sort of competition. Man I hate that asshole.

[mercury01]

Not exactly sure how this thread got turned into Pathfinder vs 4th Ed.

I'm pretty sure there's a law of thermodynamics which states that every discussion about tabletop gaming will eventually break down into an edition war.

But getting back to the original topic. How do Sore Loser and That Guy overlap on the venn diagram of gaming archetypes?

[Kuja]

That Guy is a rather all-encompassing concept. Any person that routinely (this part is important) makes the rest of the group angry or uncomfortable at the table is That Guy. As in "oh God, That Guy. I hate That Guy."

Everybody has routine quirks and foibles - arguing about rules, arguing about loot, injecting inappropriate humor, etc. Most people keep it reasonable of course, otherwise gaming groups wouldn't exist.

That Guy takes that quirk that bugs people and pushes it up to 11. Powergaming to the extreme, "STOP HAVING FUN GUYS," oversexualized characters, bad smell, or fuzzy math. One That Guy can be a clean-cut athletic type that fudges his numbers and argues constantly with the DM about combat minutae. Another That Guy can be laid back but smell of sour milk and appear forever wrapped in a layer of sweat. Or maybe That Guy constantly rolls lesbians - and don't worry, you'll know they're lesbians, because he'll bring it up.

Basically, if you want to picture of That Guy-ism, picture a boot stamping on a human face forever a big circle labeled 'THAT GUY' ringed with many, many interlocking little circles of all those annoying traits.

[lance]

I never had somebody have all of those traits. I think I hit every permutation of all but one of those traits with the additions of one being a thief stealing entire magic decks and over a hundred dollars(Which was a lot in high school), and one not shutting up even though i have headphones on and haven't responded to him in an hour about shit nobody cares about while being just close enough to me where its getting just a little bit uncomfortable but he has class soon so i can put up with it for a little bit. Half hour later Me Don't you have class? Him oh i forgot guess its too late. Me you'd be 2 minutes late Him I don't want to bother... Next week he will be complaining that his class is too hard and he's failing it and I will glare at him

Edition war stuff if you guys want to continue I will make a new thread in gaming

Power Attack is straight up better. Sure, you can't dump your entire base attack bonus into damage, but if you do that in 3.5 you'll never hit anything anyway. Under the old PA I'd never take much more of a penalty than Pathfinder limits you to anyway barring extreme cases like unarmored giants, and the accuracy penalty:damage ratio is twice as good. My only complaint is that you can't choose to take a lower penalty once you get into higher levels.

Its not straight up better, in 3.5 you can do -2 for 4 at level 2, and at level 20 you can move and make 1 attack while power attacking for over 10 and still have a good chance at hitting. Plus in 3.5 it could be used with touch attacks. Pathfinder is better on full attacks outside of shocktrooper and wraithstrike.

What melee feat trees had their "feat tax" doubled? Because I'm not seeing any looking through my Core Rulebook and 3.5 Player's Handbook side by side as I type this. Pathfinder tacked more stuff onto the end of some of the feat trees, but the Weapon Focus tree, Two-Weapon Fighting tree, and Mounted Combat tree are all basically the same.

Improved trip and bull rush. Though they only kinda doubled. For the most part its 2:3 but pathfinders improved trip arguably requires combat reflexes and your going to take power attack any way for the other.

If you mean the various combat maneuver feats, there are two other factors at work there: First, the combat maneuver system is one of the few core mechanics to drastically change between Pathfinder and 3.5, so frankly you shouldn't expect them to work the same. Second, the second feat (that rounds out the +4 to whatever maneuver that the old feats got) also gives other benefits that the old feats simply didn't have; stacking all that into one (say, Improved Trip gives +4 to CMB to trip, negates the attack of opportunity, and makes the poor victim provoke opportunity attacks from all and sundry) makes the feat incredibly valuable, especially since Pathfinder gives feats away like candy with both the increased base feat progression and the bonus feats liberally scattered throughout the various classes.

The aoo is pretty much a wash up or worse than the free hit given in third. I think bull rushing movement provokes in 3rd so that was just a nerf.

...human...
They can each expect to face Goblins at this level. The PF Goblin has an extra Hit Point, bonus to AC, and Bonus to Ref Saves. The PF fighter comes out very slightly ahead due to dealing more damage per hit against his expected foe as well as getting hit less often.



I'll add more once I refresh my knowledge of fighter builds.

1 Humans in pathfinder are better, but the orcs are a better choice for fighters due to the human bonus feat not being worth much. Pathfinders orcs have but so do enemy orcs! Otherwise about they are pretty much the same

2 The pathfinders extra hp and ac are barely going to make up for pathfinders super cats getting +5 to hit and full strength on their 4 claws.

3 You might want to look at lockdown builds. Standstill went from super awesome to why bother?

Looking at things I think the base fighter was pretty much a wash between a number of more dangerous monsters and feats being either nerfed or not included.

[Elfdart]

So, as someone who is getting interested in pen and paper RPGs, and is considering joining an RPG group at school next semester, I have to ask. How common is "that fucking guy" anyways? Should I be stocking hand sanitizer just in case?

There has always been a percentage of gamers with poor social skills, complete lack of self-awareness and bad hygiene. Tim Kask, one of the original creators of D&D, points out that That Guy has been around from the very beginning:

No, it is not true that none of us understood personal hygiene. Many didn’t, but most of us did remember to bathe or shower frequently enough so as to not offend too many people around us. But some of those old cons could get ripe enough. I guess it is from that old perception that the term for a group of gamers, like a murder of crows, a sleuth of bears or a bevy of quail, would be stink; how elegant-a stink of gamers.

In other interviews, Kask, Gygax, Kuntz and other old-timers talk about how they quit accepting material mailed to them because so much of it was sick and perverted.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I've met people who gamed with Gygax, definatly a That Guy, I think the most fun I've ever had gaming at a con was with Greenwood in a game being run by R.Talsorian's own Mike Pondsmith. (Never laughed so hard until I met Cerebrus the aardvark and Sailor V as characters in a pen and paper game together.) (actually I forgot which celeb gamer was playing the Ardvark, but Elimenster was playing the Senshi)

[andrewgpaul]

Apologies if these have already been discussed, but another form of That Guy is the guy who deliberately creates a disruptive character background because "it's good for roleplaying". Nothing mechanically over powered, just someone that hogs the limelight every session, or plays a character with a compulsion to attack city guardsmen when you're trying to meet a contact in a pub.

And all of these go double when you're stuck with them in a public forum. I've helped run participation games at shows for the last couple of years and there's nothing worse than That guy from the games club coming up, hanging round the table and ruining the atmosphere (literally and metaphorically). Meanwhile, you can see parents carefully shepherding their children away from the creepy fuckwit.

[bilateralrope]

If a character is that disruptive, then it seems that the response should also be through roleplaying. Your character is a big problem, so our characters no longer want to work with you. Depending on the setting that might be killing the disruptive character, or just telling his character to fuck off. Either way That Guy needs a new character, unless the GM is so spineless that he effectively runs two games: One for That Guy, the other for everyone else.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Disruptive character background shouldn't happen. Backstories need to be approved by the GM, you can't say 'I'm the lost son of ____' without his say-so.

[bilateralrope]

Backgrounds weren't the problem. It's how the character is played once the sessions begin.

[Tanasinn]

The classic "Chaotic Stupid" being the most common example, but I also reserve special hatred for the "lawful" "good" paladin who is really Iosef Stalin wearing plate.

[Mr Bean]

The classic "Chaotic Stupid" being the most common example, but I also reserve special hatred for the "lawful" "good" paladin who is really Iosef Stalin wearing plate.

People seem to forget unless your playing a evil campaign the Paladin is supposed to be a hero. There can be different types of hero, you can have your Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, your Tony Stark or Steve Rogers, heck Hulk is a hero. Hans Gruber is not a hero, nor is the Joker. Nothing spells terrible like someone who wants to play a Chaotic Psycho. If you enjoy cutting on people... your not exactly hero material.

But the DM also has to beware, you might create That Guy if you contentiously punish your players for trying to be a hero. What Hero is going to rescues someone in trouble after the last four times someone has asked for help it's been a trap? I played a Cleric who tried and tried to do good but never could, every time I tried the DM would turn it against me. And not in the sense of trying to do good uh oh you did bad... no instead if I wanted to stop and help peasants or heal the sick or perhaps do some clerical rah-rah my god is best god... well guess it's time for me to be robbed, or mugged or poisoned or punished for doing anything but the plot and nothing else. At some point after being thrown in a jail for a crime I had not committed after I tried again to do some good in the downtime while the rest of the party was doing something else. It was only the local jail so the idea of magical restraints and the like don't come into it, and a 8th level Cleric can do... lot of damage if you put your mind to it.

[Purple]

Whilst I can appreciate the annoyance you have experience I would also like to add a bit of thematic concern. A hero is a hero not because he does good things. But because he does them in spite of the entire world. What makes a hero is not good deeds but the will to do them when all others would have looked at the world and decided that it's not worth it any more. So technically your character was newer hero material.

[Lord Revan]

Whilst I can appreciate the annoyance you have experience I would also like to add a bit of thematic concern. A hero is a hero not because he does good things. But because he does them in spite of the entire world. What makes a hero is not good deeds but the will to do them when all others would have looked at the world and decided that it's not worth it any more. So technically your character was newer hero material.

there's a reason a "fallen hero" is a story device that can be used, after all even if you character has patience and virtue of a saint, there's only so many times he do good even if the whole world seems to punish him for it before something gives and the character (or the player outside of the game world) desides "fuck it, let the world burn for all I care, now tell me where my loot is before I rearange your face with this mace".

a good DM would give the occational glimmer of hope no matter how crapsack the world is suppose to be otherwise and they also give the players room to play the "role" they choose (or was chosen for them) and not punish them for doing things outside the main plot.

[The Cooler King]

I used to run convention games for a small-press company (I did some artwork for them, too). There used to be paired local conventions in the DC area: CastleCon (around the 4th of July) and EveCon (right around New Year's Eve). There was one guy who used to show up to both cons: he was fat, which was to be expected. He always wore these insanely short, tight shorts, an extremely tight, short tank top that left his belly exposed, and flip-flops. He was a regular, and he seemingly never washed himself for the duration of each con he attended. He shone from grease and sweat, and was always sucking in drool, as if he couldn't close his mouth.

Anyway, I was running GURPS Traveller, and the game information in the program (and at the table) clearly stated that there were pregenerated characters. This guy showed up and asked if he could play. I had a nearly full complement of players, but I figured, what the hell. He immediately pulled out an elaborately decorated notebook and showed me a character, built on nearly ten times the points of the characters I had pregenerated. He launched into an explanation that it wasn't really an uber-powerful character, and my eyes widened at multiple things on the sheet before me.

First were the images. He had pulled photos of some busty Hustler model (the Hustler logo was visible on the printouts) playing with herself to act as the character. Then I noticed his character's skills: most of them were sexually-related. Add to that the jaw-dropping character age of 13 (?!?) and I just kind of tossed the notebook back in disgust. He tried to explain the character's backstory in elaborate sexual detail (she was some sort of lesbian sexual assassin), which caused the guy running the gaming room to glare at me. I held my hands up in a "what the hell do I do?" motion; after all, the guy had paid to be at the table. It took me almost ten minutes to explain why his lolita lesbian sexual assassin wasn't appropriate at my (or any) table. Almost none of it got through; he constantly squinted, mouth wide, through Coke-bottle glasses, occasionally wiping sweat and grease from his face. Worst of all was his voice; it reminded me of "Pat', from Saturday Night Live, peppered with the omnipresent slurping sound as he sucked drool through his teeth. Unsurprisingly, he smelled like he hadn't bathed in several days.

Ultimately, I had to kick him out about half an hour into the game after he tried (and failed) to seduce every other party member. He simply wandered to another gaming room and tried to pull the same crap until he was kicked out of the con, apparently for good.

[Borgholio]

It's difficult to accept the idea that people like that actually exist. It's a stereotype from hell that gives us (relatively) normal D&D players a bad rep.

[Kuja]

It's difficult to accept the idea that people like that actually exist. It's a stereotype from hell that gives us (relatively) normal D&D players a bad rep.

It's the unfortunate result of taking a majority of people that are somewhat socially awkward (maybe a bit shy or slightly alternative) and mixing them in with a handful of people that are immensely socially awkward, in a setting where everyone seems to accept that everyone else is at least somewhat socially awkward and thus, any level of social awkwardness is acceptable.

This brings down the walls and lets us see the monster (or, in the case of the worst kind of grognard, the daikaiju) inside our fellow man. What follows can be quite horrifying.

Whilst I can appreciate the annoyance you have experience I would also like to add a bit of thematic concern. A hero is a hero not because he does good things.

An incredibly subjective statement.

But because he does them in spite of the entire world. What makes a hero is not good deeds but the will to do them when all others would have looked at the world and decided that it's not worth it any more. So technically your character was newer hero material.

Okay. I can kind of see where you're coming from with this statement? But this is the kind of mindset that eventually leads to the Dead Baby Dilemma.

In case anyone happens to be browsing the thread that doesn't know what I'm taking about, the Dead Baby Dilemma is a test set up by DMs who either just want to fuck with their players, or as the result of constant escalation between a DM and his players that makes the players jump through increasingly contrived (often metagaming) hoops to 'prove' how good they are.

Eventually, this culminates in the following setup: somehow, through whatever circumstances (the DM will always handwave the circumstances) an innocent child, usually a baby, has become tied to the imminent outbreak of some vast, overpowering dark threat. A demon being born into the world, a rift to an evil plane, etc. It's all tied to the baby. Somehow.

The player or team is then given the following choice: kill the baby, or let certain evil be unleashed. No, there's no third choice. Trust me, there's never a third choice once things have progressed to the Dead Baby Dilemma. Wards, antimagic zones, planeshifting, timestop, it won't work. It's always kill the baby or permit evil to rise.

The Dead Baby Dilemma is usually something used by particularly bad or vengeful DMs to get at a paladin player, because in 3rd Edition D&D, paladins have the following restriction as a class feature: knowingly committing an evil act will cause the paladin to lose all class features, or "fall." (Killing a defenceless old man can do the trick, for example.) So, the DM uses the Dead Baby Dilemma to force an impossible choice:

Kill the innocent baby to prevent evil from rising? Evil act. You fall, lose your powers.

Refuse to kill an innocent baby? You knowingly permit evil to infest the world. You fall, lose your powers.

Naturally, this is the kind of DMing that should be rewarded with a pipe wrench to the head. It's pure fuck-the-players attitude, running to the extreme end of the idea that goodness is overrated by the kind of people who think that "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" is great advice.

Now, heroes do need to be tested - that's how heroic deeds emerge, after all. But in the context of a D&D game, they need to be tested fairly. Not by the DM unloading on them endlessly whilst holding them to some impossible standard. I can't tell, entirely, by the content of your post whether you're that kind of DM, but whenever I see someone espousing the idea that characters aren't heros by necessity because they haven't met some arbitrary standard of goodness, I get twitchy because I have been placed in the Dead Baby Dilemma before.
Spoiler

Our group shared an exasperated glance and then suddenly the paladin described his character as stepping up to the altar and lifting his weapon before saying "it is the truth. The child heralds the birth of great evil into the world." Then he brought his sword down and added "Mine." describing his character's armor shifting to black and sprouting crimson sigils, his eyes glowing with demonic power. All of us jumped into it, and over the DM's objections described our characters as becoming corrupt versions of themselves before departing to reduce the whole of the world to a boneyard, throwing minions at each other for fun and living atop the heap as immortal lich-kings and paragons of darkness. When the DM complained we were wrecking his setting our druid looked at him and said "screw you, you got what you wanted."

[White Haven]

...Is...Kuja, have you just described the Powder Keg of Injustice?

[Kuja]

Yes. Pretty much. Our druid later dubbed it the Perfect Storm of Asshole.
Spoiler

We all talked over each other while our hapless DM tried in vain to stop us. Everyone kept overlapping each other with further discriptions of the depravities our characters were sinking to. I'll spare most of the gruesome details, but suffice to say no major crime went unloved. We even took out our pencils and scribbled over the continental map as he described the parts of it we were putting to the torch.

Our DM's last attempt to stop us was "an army of golems shows up and fucking kills you" And without missing a beat our wizard player threw his hands up in the air and cackled "just when our phylacteries were complete!" That was also the beginning of our own war, as once we'd regenerated our newly minted blackguard hauled off and punched the wizard in the face for attempting to steal his soul from his rightful master Orcus, and also 'just to see the dust of his undead blood on my gauntlets.' My previously humble and soft-spoken generic cleric of Pelor hefted his doom scythe and roared that they would all feel the cold bite of Death's Fang.

We only stayed together long enough to bitchslap that army of pesky golems because our blight-lich (the once-upon-a-time druid) reminded us that they would probably get in our way if we didn't do that. Once that was done my cleric waved and said "right. well. Death's Fang and all. Later." and walked off.

By the time we were finished we were in tears from laughing so hard. Our poor DM looked close to tears as well, though not so much from laughter. Fortunately he later shaped up thanks in large part to this incident and became a good player, and somewhat of a better DM.