it would be sick to do an all stoner druids campaign, dm has to throw adventure at them to get them to do anything but ponder they orb
A proper DM does not allow the PCs to just sit around. Send in some ninjas with Chekov's Gun. I DM for my enjoyment as much as the players'
"basically nothing gets done except circular commentary and joking around"
Hey, that's basically every campaign I've played!
This happened with a party I was part of once but completely uncoordinated. We decided that our characters were meeting for the first time so we did all our characters separately. DM said it was set in a vague victorian-age style setting and we ended up with:
- Two identical Cowboy-themed chaotic alignment criminal gunslinger (not the class, we were using the firearm stats from the back of the DM manual, they were a rogue and a cleric) red tieflings with white hair, a habit of robbing banks, and problems with authority, named Revolution (Lou) and Anarchy (Ana) respectively.
- Human Paladin following a homebrewed Oath of the Worker (found it online back then but can't find it now, I'll come back and link it if I find it again)
- dwarf warlock who's underground home was turned into a coal mine and made a pact with a demon in an attempt to get it back
- banjo bard
DM plopped us down in a company town and we got straight to work unionizing
Oath of the Common Man is what your friend was probably playing. I'm doing a 7 intelligence half orc with that subclass. It's really fun to explain principles of labor theory as a total dumbass.
That's exactly what it was! The next time I get to play I'm
percent stealing the himbo communist ideaNot being able to read or write and reciting the tenants to a manifesto has led to some pretty funny moments. My character and I were drunk once and I riffed for a minute about the key features, about half were legit and half were jokes like "sugar, spice, and everything nice." I forget about it until we come back to the town. My DM wrote everything I said down and the dwarf labor organizer I was talking to got them tattooed on his back. It was great, 10/10 would recommend.
That sounds awesome, sadly the group I used to play with tended towards power gaming and most had no interest in roleplay (just roll play).
in a way that just knocks all the props over and pushes everyone else in the group away
Reminds me of when I assisted a DM in making this dramatic encounter that the game had been building up to for weeks; He had this boss up on a platform and was going to give the players a heck of an encounter, only for the 'researches everything' power gamer to activate his most powerful ability (4e daily power) and one shot the boss in one turn. All the players' faces fell when they were left with the task of just mopping up the minions (4e feature; these creatures have normal stats but only 1 hp) while he was proudly telling me about "this is the value of researching how to build a character". The guy completely failed to read the room.
i must admit that im kinda this sort of player. but thats also why we play pf2e, i have been incessantly trying to break the system for years yet i have not been able to. the strongest thing i was able to devise was one action magic missile spamming a single target extreme encounter boss with a psychic. but even this damage is accounted for in the system, and this is so bursty and dangerous to do for a caster.
play games that have good math! research is fun for a lot of people, including myself, i just cant help myself around forbidden knowledge so i always play 'optimally'. but it should also be noted that i enjoy rp too
honestly really cannot recommend pf2e enough. its codified, not just vibes based or an unspoken rule. if you arent setting up to help allies and do some teamwork, youre gonna fail, and theres more options to metagame jerking your buddy off so that he gets big crits than anything else. also ive dmed it some times, and the amount of work for the dm is drastically reduced, to the point that adlibbing with minimal planning is trivial to do, the monsters are mathed out and actually make sense for their levels. no guesswork involved.
if you havent tried it, id recommend the beginners box, best ttrpg product ive ever gotten. basically a prebuilt boardgame worth of stuff but its a ttrpg.
ohh youve already swapped? how youve been liking it? lmk if you need any tips, we've been playing it since 2e came out. and we bought like almost all the products for 2e after they became a union shop, we know some of the people who work at paizo personally too.
and when i say ive been trying to break the system for years, i mean it. i do almost daily research of pf2e for my games. its such a well designed system.
I'm playing a Goblin Barbarian and my friend is a Giant Alchemist (flavored as a chef with magic foods). He throws me like a weaponized chihuahua.
As a GM, I hate these sorts of gimmick campaigns. In systems with involved combat or other mechanical systems, everyone playing a variant of the same class just brings down the already tenuous encounter design system.
Honestly, if you want to run a gimmick campaign, then just do what people do on itch.io and write/adapt a PbtA hack instead. For example, the classic all-bard campaign. If you want to run a campaign where all the players are musicians, why use a system where the only mechanical support is single skill and 95% of the rules are either combat rules or spell lists (which are then 80% combat and 20% invalidating non-magical characters' skills.)
[ROLLING DICE] 
