A Cowardly Character With A Heart Of Gold

[Bartmanhomer]

I'm thinking of roleplaying a Chaotic Good Male Human Bard who really afraid to spill blood in his hands. He's really afraid of fighting but has a pure heart of gold. How can I roleplay this type of character? :smile:

[Crake]

You don't really have a heart of gold if you aren't willing to follow through in your beliefs due to cowardice. Bit of an oxymoron.

[Particle_Man]

You could take the flaws shaky and non-combatant. It would make you -2 on all attack rolls but give you two feats. Otherwise, stay in the back, sing and cast spells. You don’t need to go toe to toe with the bad guys to help the party.

[Bartmanhomer]

You could take the flaws shaky and non-combatant. It would make you -2 on all attack rolls but give you two feats. Otherwise, stay in the back, sing and cast spells. You don’t need to go toe to toe with the bad guys to help the party.

Ok. He doesn't like fighting and he's really a pacifist.

[Mechalich]

D&D is a poor fit for characters who are cowardly, pacifistic, or otherwise unwilling to deploy lethal force in combat, largely because the game tends to be primarily about fighting other beings, and because many of those beings are utterly implacable creatures that cannot be reasoned with and/or have a clear moral imperative mandating their destruction. As such, characters of this nature tend to aggravate other players. So if you're going to do this you need to make certain to get pre-approval from everyone else in the group beforehand.

[mucat]

What is the setting and campaign flavor like? D&D does lend itself to a "combat simulator" style of play, but I've certainly been involved in a lot of campaigns where we would talk, negotiate, or scheme, and fight only as a last resort. A mostly-kinda-pacifist would fit in fine in those campaigns.

The other thing to consider is this: does your character simply hate to get in direct fights himself, or does he object to violence on principle? In the former case, I see no real problem; he can function quite well in a support role, even if he's terrified to actually strike a blow himself. If he actively objects to violence, though, then the rest of the group needs to be on board as well; otherwise the very fact that they all work together will strain suspension of disbelief. Like I said, I've been in plenty of games where fighting was a rare last resort, but you'll want to clear that question up in advance.

[rel]

How important is bard the class in all this?
The beguiler is a good fit for archetypes that are commonly made using the bard class (minstrels, thieves, musketeers, etc).
You can probably achieve whatever you wanted the character to do using a beguiler.

Further, the beguiler is decently powerful (Tier 3 if you care for such things) and really struggles to actually hurt people. The class is focused on enchantment and illusion, What little actual damage you can do is all subdual.

[Particle_Man]

Although it will make the optimizers howl with rage, the book of exalted deeds has exalted feats. One of them is vow of peace, which could be for pacifists. You could either take just it or get it as a bonus fear for a bard prestige class in that book or even as a bonus feat from first taking vow of poverty (hear the howls from the optimizers yet? I did say it would happen). :smalltongue:

But if you go that route your heart of gold better be 24 karat goody two shoes paladinesque good aligned. You otherwise lose the benefit of the exalted feat(s).

[Arcanist]

Ok. He doesn't like fighting and he's really a pacifist.

Pacifism is complicated. Are you looking for Mahatma Gandhi levels of pacifism? Or are we talking Vash The Stampede levels of pacifism? Both figures are pacifists in the strictest sense, the key difference is that Vash is forced to fight and defend himself against a world that wants him dead. He doesn't want to fight, he just accepts that the alternative of him not fighting puts more people at risk than if he were to actively try and achieve a peaceful solution.

My advice? Don't play a pacifist; Experience tells me that you will 100% end up turning your weekly game into a discussion on morality at best, and your group fighting you the entire time at worst and this is without you ever having taken Vow of Peace (don't take that feat). Baring that? Take the Half-Elf racial substitution for Bard from Races of Destiny and if that fails, take Subduing Strike and hope that nobody dies TOO badly.

[Bartmanhomer]

Pacifism is complicated. Are you looking for Mahatma Gandhi levels of pacifism? Or are we talking Vash The Stampede levels of pacifism? Both figures are pacifists in the strictest sense, the key difference is that Vash is forced to fight and defend himself against a world that wants him dead. He doesn't want to fight, he just accepts that the alternative of him not fighting puts more people at risk than if he were to actively try and achieve a peaceful solution.

My advice? Don't play a pacifist; Experience tells me that you will 100% end up turning your weekly game into a discussion on morality at best, and your group fighting you the entire time at worst and this is without you ever having taken Vow of Peace (don't take that feat). Baring that? Take the Half-Elf racial substitution for Bard from Races of Destiny and if that fails, take Subduing Strike and hope that nobody dies TOO badly.
I didn't realized that being a pacifist was that horrific. :eek:

[Particle_Man]

It is not; just clear it with your party and dm beforehand.

[Arcanist]

I didn't realized that being a pacifist was that horrific. :eek:

It's not that horrific. It's just very disjointing to a lot of players when the default view is that every encounter, every challenge, and every fight is a nail that you need to hammer down when this is strictly speaking not the case. Sometimes you can talk things out with most monsters because they are often smart enough to understand at least common.

I can honestly only speak for myself, but pacifism in D&D should be viewed more as a challenge in and of itself than you're primary character gimmick. Sometimes it's easy, most of the times? Not so much. It varies depending on the maturity level of your group, a cop out statement, yes, but that is really all that matters.

Now for the topic of cowardice? Cowardice has about as much a place on a D&D character sheet as it does in the Imperial Guard and they have people that respond in kind to cowards.

http://i67.tinypic.com/fvv23b.jpg

[Alucard 109]

I have a potential solution, but fair warning, everyone (your dm especially) might hate it. Diplomancers are unbelievably broken in 3.5
A well built diplomacy build can befriend almost anyone by lvl 2

[DeTess]

Traits like pacifism are really something you need to discuss with your group and tailor to the campaign. if your campaign is about fighting the unbelievably evil demon horde, or clearing out a megadungeon filled with encounters, pacifism will not make the game fun for you, because the game is about fighting.

On the other hand, if you're playing in a political intrigue or kingdom builder style game, pacifism can be an interesting challenge,e specially if the rest of the group is willing to work with you on this.

Likewise, cowardice almost never has a place, unless it's a very combat-light, RP heavy campaign. Something you need to take into account is that, if your character is no use to your party, or even a detriment because of a tendency to get in the way of combat or leave the party to die, there's no good in-character reason for the rest of the party to travel with you. If there's no good IC-reason, either some unrealistic forcing event needs to happen, or the party will abandon you at the next city and hire that big half-ogre fighter instead.

[Recherché]

I actually have a semi-pacifist cleric that works out reasonably well. She will not do lethal damage to living sentients but she's fine using magic that's not lethal such as Hold Person or Bestow Curse to make an aggressive person stop hurting other people and she's perfectly okay with killing animals and destroying undead. It's really an exercise in creative use of the cleric spell list. Our GM loves it because he can almost always keep bringing bad guys back if he wants to. Also we actually try to talk to defeated bad guys a lot of the time and understand their motivations.

[tiercel]

Likewise, cowardice almost never has a place, unless it's a very combat-light, RP heavy campaign.

Except, mechanically speaking, for many sneak attack builds (since the Craven feat literally gives you a tasty boost to sneak attack, that doesn't depend on your investment in sneak attack, at the price of weakening Will saves vs fear).

----

Having said that, though, yes: to the extent that cowardice and/or pacifism are going to be major character traits, it's something you want to check with the campaign/other players first. If it's more just your character not wanting to get his hands bloody personally, then lots of buffing/support/charms/skillmonkeying can still be very useful to your party even if you hardly ever swing a blade.

(But if your character would flee a battle to leave his companions to die -- without a blown Fear save -- or if your character is going to harangue against or even try to prevent the use of deadly force in a dungeon crawl, then your party is likely to have little reason to want to keep you around.)