Stories of playing a Tier 1 & Sandbagging for most of the game, then letting loose?

[Gavinfoxx]

Anyone have any stories of playing a Tier 1 in a 3.5, 3.pf, or PF1 game where they played as a buffer, 'sandbagging' their actual power level to not overshadow the mundanes, until (for example, against overwhelming odds, maybe facing a TPK or something), finally letting loose and causing everyone's jaws to drop when they finally realize exactly how much you were holding back?

Secondarily, does anyone have a good 'stealth' build that is built to do exactly that, and is designed to not set off alarm bells in a group or with an inexperienced GM, where you can successfully hold back and allow others to have their fun, but still be able to do something amazing and unexpected if absolutely required and the situation calls for it?

[Gusmo]

I did that in a Red Hand of Doom campaign. The DM vastly overestimated their knowledge of 3.5 (and gaming in general) because they've been doing it for decades and therefore they know best. We were told to specifically build powerful characters, and were given an absurdly generous system to roll stats. My first character was barbarian1/fighter4/pious templarX. Myself and the other players ran into similar problems with our characters being broken, so as players we decided to just start fresh with core characters. Mine was a wizard. I had to be careful about letting loose too much when it was necessary. Any time anything because too easy, this DM would usually just rule 0 the situation somehow. Rule 0 is wonderful when used well, regardless of whether it's frequent or rare, but unfortunately that was not the situation here.

Edit: this is actually the same DM who in another game couldn't handle power attack on a core barbarian. He's a dear friend and I would answer the phone in the night for him, but he's way more fun in systems that aren't heavily rules based.

[Dimers]

Haven't done it myself, haven't tried it, don't think I have the skill. But I've seen a couple great examples -- in a high level campaign, naturally, 13th and 14th level. The cleric was openly able to tank all day, and he also wrecked an encounter here-and-there with a strong spell. The sorcerer was just a blaster. But the psion ... ahh, the psion ... He mostly did party stuff, including teleporting everyone, healing everyone and spending XP to make high-ML consumables. But when crunch time arrived, he could make drastic changes to a battle's flow using a single power. Seeing that really drove home the point for me, how a Tier 1 character* can be played in the same party as a lower-level fighter with a bad PrC.

* The psion was Tier 1, effectively, thanks to the homebrew alterations to metamorphosis. The DM had some weird ideas about balance.

[Segev]

Epic 3.5 game, and my replacement character was built as a sorcerer abusing the epic feat “staff mastery” and a magic item that let him craft using spells he didn’t know.

He was designed specifically to be almost impossible to kill, because my last PC was killed by another PC on the flimsiest IC excuse he could find. The player of said PC, upon hearing I was bringing in another full caster to replace the dead one, made a new character (retiring the old one) that was a full caster trying to be an untouchable assassin/rogue.

My character was mostly hanging back, using medium-duration spells like Thunderlance and the occasional buff or battlefield control to help out, as if being frugal with spell slots mattered.

Then the party got ambushed by plane-hopping murder-squads of high-CR monsters (I forget what, now) that has epic class levels, too.

The first hint the party got of how much he held back was a fairly simple mailman move: twin quickened sphere of ultimate destruction alongside twin sphere of ultimate destruction with his two incorporeal simulacra of himself overlaid on his position casting quickened true strikes and chain disintegrations.

With save DCs, if I remember correctly, in the low 60s. (I do not remember all the tricks to get them that high; remember, this was epic; everyone was around level 27, I think.) And a caster level that practically ignored spell resistance.

The party fled when the creatures were still standing after that.

[Psyren]

Nothing elaborate or dramatic - I often play druids, both in 3.5/PF and also in 5e, so that I can be off-tank/off-scout/off-caster/off-whatever the party may need. Most of the time I'm using wildshape to fulfill these roles, but more than once I've saved the day with a well-placed summon or battlefield control spell (dropping form if needed.) 5e returns to the 3.5 paradigm of the wildshaped creature's physical stats replacing yours, which allows you to focus on your mental stats as a Moon Druid and still be a quite capable frontliner. Pathfinder makes this harder, but you can cast while wildshaped much more easily.

[Elkad]

I like Wizards. Part of the reason I love them is selecting a different spell loadout after nearly every rest period. And then trying to make that selection fit whatever encounters come up.

Which leads to hilarity at some points, as I've chosen a massive hoard of mind control spells, and then we meet a lot of undead. (Note: Dominating the party Barbarian into actually using correct tactics instead of just charging whatever is closest or biggest is pretty damn effective. Especially when you make him use a resource he tended to underuse - his massive hitpoint pool.)

But sometimes it just all comes together where I have EXACTLY what I need, and the rest of the party is ineffectual at the same time.

Horde of mundane enemies in a hardened structure. One entrance chokepoint. All ground level, no other exits. Barb stuck his head in and immediately retreated minus 90% of his hitpoints in a single round, reporting a maze of low walls and platforms with archers on them.
No line of sight to most of them, so I can't use BFC. We are looking for a bunch of hostages.

I happened to have filled all 3 of my brand new 6th level slots with Cloudkill, and unknown to the rest of the party I was Lawful Evil.

When the screaming stopped and the vapors cleared, my poison-immune Imp had already looked around while invisible and reported back to me.
I beat the rest of the party into the structure and used an illusion to cover the pit in one corner of the building.

We never did find those hostages.

[Khedrac]

I ran a war-weaver build, not particularly optimized (I did go for Grey Elf cheese) concentrating on buffing (of course). The beauty is that you only need a few spells tuncked away to pull out the "Save or Lose and good luck making the DC" trick in emergencies - that and a number of BFC spells to back up the buffing.

My favourite moment was at the end of the adventure path when we were fighting Demogorgon with help. [Redacted] was tanking but getting hammered so a simple wall of force got the party healer next to them safely to keep them healthy while the party piled on the DPS. [Redacted] was hanging around doing nothing and I worked out that she wanted to kill-steal - so I made a guesstimate of Demogorgon's health and surprised everyone by declaring "Delay" for my action. A few people's actions later I came out of delay and threw in a quickened true casting and power word kill (the only time I cast it) and [Redacted] looked silly as she had done absolutely nothing during the fight and Big D was dead. This also meant that the party bard won the struggle for his crown, but that's another story.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I ran a war-weaver build, not particularly optimized (I did go for Grey Elf cheese) concentrating on buffing (of course).

I ended up getting stuck in the "party buffer" role a few times in a row with one particular group (since I was the most experienced player I let everyone else decide on PC concepts first), so in one high-levels-into-low-epic campaign I went with an optimized War Weaver to amuse myself. She was an Exalted LG Cleric/Hathran/Heartfire Fanner/War Weaver/[other stuff] with a few bloodline levels, able to pull off all the standard War Weaver tricks and spontaneously cast off multiple entire spell lists besides.

Most of the time she tried to fade into the background as a humble servant of the gods, only handing out two or three buffs per combat "in accordance with her gods' will" (one or two spells of which were usually randomly-chosen to go with her "detached prophet" personality), but there were two times she pulled out all the stops.

The first was when the party headed into a fight that was telegraphed pretty hard as being the "campaign miniboss battle" midway through the game. As soon as initiative was rolled, she said something to the effect of "and now I fulfill the purpose for which I was sent on this quest" and dropped over a dozen spells and several bonus feats on the whole party to basically render the entire encounter irrelevant, leaving the rest of the party to mop things up. After that, she went right back to the meek-and-humble-priestess act, giving the rest of the party all the credit for taking care of things after her "meager contribution."

The second was after the DM pulled me aside a session or two later and basically said that he couldn't come up with a final boss battle that would be able to deal with the kind of buff-power my character could put out, so would I mind retiring her somehow. I said that she wouldn't willingly abandon her divinely-mandated quest...but I'd deliberately made her very unobservant and naive to partly justify the sandbagging, so she could easily fall for a trick of some sort.

Well, the DM ended up having the BBEG trap our loot with a helm of opposite alignment disguised as a helm of teleportation, knowing that as the designated utility caster and the only PC without any magical headgear my character would end up getting that. She put it on when surrounded by a few hundred refugees the party had just saved and gathered on a remote island for secrecy, and immediately turned CE.

Since she was worshiping a pantheon allowing clerics of any alignment, she retained her casting after the alignment swap, and immediately dropped an energy immunity (fire) on the party, followed by a time stop, followed by a heavily-metamagicked erupt, followed by a delayed stone shape, followed by a plane shift. From the rest of the party's perspective, in the space of a few seconds they went from chilling on an island with a bunch of refugees to standing knee-deep in a mile-wide field of lava surrounded by immolating bystanders while newly-formed obsidian shaped itself into a message along the lines of "These weaklings get to be a sacrifice to the gods, you were nice to me so you get to live, I'm on a new mission for [evil god] now, good luck with everything, try not to die while I'm not there to watch" right in front of them.

(And while the latter event might seem kinda dickish to pull on the party, they'd been doing a lot of information gathering about the BBEG's inner circle by that point and knew that the BBEG's right-hand (wo)man was a mysterious and powerful priest(ess) of [evil god], so rather than getting pissed at the sudden reversal they thought this had been the DM's plan from the start of the campaign and everyone was cool with it.)

[Malphegor]

Heh, every time I play a wizard I do this, and tend to die mainly because I took things too far. It’s why I like overpowered classes, I get the roleplaying power to control how hard things are for my fellow players, to be their security net, their nuke in human form.

Only recent example I have is when playing a Dread Necromancer of all things. We had spent a really hard first few rounds fighting, then I realised it was getting late irl and i was tired so then I pulled out the Save or Dies I tend to avoid using. One by one, our enemies died instantly. I coulda done that from the start but you gotta let the ‘little people’ with their adorable little swords and hammers have their fun.

[False God]

Anyone have any stories of playing a Tier 1 in a 3.5, 3.pf, or PF1 game where they played as a buffer, 'sandbagging' their actual power level to not overshadow the mundanes, until (for example, against overwhelming odds, maybe facing a TPK or something), finally letting loose and causing everyone's jaws to drop when they finally realize exactly how much you were holding back?

Secondarily, does anyone have a good 'stealth' build that is built to do exactly that, and is designed to not set off alarm bells in a group or with an inexperienced GM, where you can successfully hold back and allow others to have their fun, but still be able to do something amazing and unexpected if absolutely required and the situation calls for it?

Had a level 18 cleric do the former, I dished out heals, and buffs and defenses and was pretty content to do just that. (I really wasn't into the campaign much but I was enjoying spending time with my friends). But the group ran into a really high-level enemy, a "boss" basically, some really powerful lich with a bunch of levels layered on top of it and the DM was playing him really well. The rest of the party....not so much. After about 20 minutes of "party attacks, gets nowhere, NPC attacks, party takes damage, I heal them" I got tired of it and one-shot the enemy. To my credit he did fail my saves (which were something like, DC 32 at the moment). Sun domain, greater destroy undead, yeah. POOF! Encounter over.

Everyone just kinda looked at me and I shrugged and role-played it as some yadda-yadda "with great power comes great responsibility".

[Toliudar]

I was in a PBP game here that ran for more than 2 years, with a revolving door of recruits and my character, a wizard who kept her head down, amassed significantly above WBL through timely support of DMPC's.

All along, I'd had plenty of ways to nova with this wizard, and by the end had access to the usual shenanigans - time-stops, personal planes, contingencies, etc - but almost never cast spells above 4-5 level, and focused on support spells. It was fun, it meant that I wasn't too worried about optimization levels for new colleagues, and it meant that encounters could feel challenging without risking rocket tag.

The game was a sort of epic series of fedex quests, but with the second-to-last one focusing on the rescue of a lost love interest for my wizard. In the final encounter of that chapter, we reached the area where my boyfriend McGuffin was being held, and a whole range of boss and minions were in between. I'd rolled well on initiative, and I went full nova, effectively wiping out the opposition and ending up next to his cell. One of the new players cried foul, but I claimed the power of plot - it really had been more than 2 years of play at that point.

And then she went back to quietly supporting the rest of the team and furnishing her personal plane with fun toys.

[Zanos]

Yeah, I sandbagged super hard in a 3.5 campaign where the DM allowed basically everything, so I was a StP Erudite with supernatural transformation(psionics) using an infinite power point trick. I eventually got sick of the DM making us fight an NPC drow and her retinue we had already killed and he forgot about, so I dismissed my normal polymorph and revealed that I had a long time ago used reserves of strength(yay magic mantle) to permanently polymorph any object myself into a great wyrm prismatic dragon, so my intelligence was something like 75. I proceeded to manifest supernatural wish every round until the encounter was over and all the drow were physically obliterated and their souls either destroyed or cast into some dark corner of the lower planes. DM had my full buff list, since I PM'd it to him multiple times, he just never read it. When he asked how I was doing all this stuff I just told him it was in multiple PMs I sent him months ago, and on my sheet. I originally made the character this way because the DM didn't care to intercede OOC or IC over PvP, so I had seen more than one PC summarily executed by a poorly roleplayed Paladin and an overenthusiastic pyromaniac sorcerer. So I was actually saving it for when one of the party members decided they wanted to start something and kill me for next to no reason, and then I would just wish they didn't exist or unname them.

Shockingly, I did not actually get kicked from the game for this. I was able to confirm with the DM that he did just forget the NPCs in question were dead, they weren't resurrected or anything.

In normal play I usually just spammed buffs on the party and tinkered with my constructs.