Why is V constantly benched?

[Anarion]

V coming in at this point, with the way that V appeared and the happines that Roy expressed strongy implies that V is of significant help at this point. V being benched does have the advantage of leading to some of these cavalry moments, and V has the power to act as the cavalry, especially since OotS seems to have more armies of weak mooks than the average D&D campaign (which means fewer "bwahaha spell resistance" moments).

That said, there is the possibility that Tarquin would not have intervened, but will intervene as a result of V's intervention, in which case V could end up making things worse. Still, that kind of story puts Tarquin at personal risk and I think he has the narrative awareness to realize that he doesn't want to personally involve himself or anyone under his personal protection right now.

Things like this are what make DnD stupid.

Oh, please. That's nothing compared to munchkin tricks that take advantage of the ways D&D is a mockery of normal physics, like exploiting the ability of "everyone" to act in a given round to make a railgun out of a string of commoners, or to exploit poorly designed metamagic to destroy the planet with a third level divination spell. Munchkinry giving players ultimate power is to be expected, but the real munchkin does so in ways that make you headdesk just reading about them.

Those tricks don't work. The planar binding thing can work RAW, but it's also stupid and I see no reason why a deity wouldn't send several additional solars along to tell you "hey, don't do that."

The other two tricks actually don't work though. The railgun thing...doesn't do any additional damage. If you're going to rely on the round system, then you rely on the game rules and physics stays out of it. All that passing along an item thousands of feet in one round does is move that item thousands of feet. No lightspeed, no physics, the final handoff action is the same as the first.

On top of that, V isn't optimized to use any broken tricks like that and doesn't have teleport or any of the really breaks the entire story spells.

I honestly think that V is mostly benched at this point because the Order fights a lot of weaker enemies and an evoker wizard just throwing out the explosions takes a lot of the tension out of those fights. Stronger enemies, especially some climactic conflicts against the likes of Xykon et al later in the story will likely require a united effort by the entire party and V won't necessarily dominate a fight against a high level opponent in a way that eliminates the importance of the rest of the party.