He explains a method on how to make 2 players with the same character concept different enough so that the players will be happy and give each of them something different to explore.

Very good sugestions.

@Sarlax: That’s awesome! After seeing that half-elves can take a power from another class, I wondered why anyone would want to play anything else. Playing 4e as classless could definitely work.

I agree with Scott on that one: That’s not a system problem, it’s a social problem.

I think this becomes a problem if a campaign focuses much more on action (meaning action resolved with dice) than roleplaying. There’s only so much “room” for different powers. D&D’s got the magic to martial range. A supers game can hold a ton of power diversity, while a modern espionage game might see a lot of overlap.

To make another Firefly reference, there’s almost no niche protection among the characters. Mal, Zoe, and Jayne are basically all fighters. Wash and Kaylee have a lot of overlap with engineering. Book is a social type with a martial background, so he bridges the warriors with Inara, the pure social PC. River, although very distinct as a psychic, also happens to be the best warrior. Simon’s the only character with protected niche – the cleric.

But the shows works because the characters are completely distinct in personality.

This might completely destroy the idea of combat roles, but it really opens up character building. I think it could also help protect character concepts. IE, it’s hard to play a fast-talking fighter by the core rules, but this option would allow you to take a lot of martial powers, but throw in the Rogue utility power Master of Deceit, and be the quick-witted warrior you want to be.

Remoray: Yes, taking away a “negative” trait can really deal a blow to a character concept. Something tells me your one minute conversation would be… instructional to hear.

Rafe: We did open up the skills and while it had the positive effects you mentioned [all classes could join the light strike force] it had an unintended consequence. Everyone could be equally effective in the light strike force with their skills. Some of the traditional trade offs that would have been required for a fighter to join weren’t required because he didn’t pay cross class penalties, etc.

That said, it sounds like there was a fighter in there? One of the things that could have helped was to open up class skills. If the Fighter gets 5 class skills say a Fighter can choose 5 skills to be his/her class skills. Same with the other classes. This allows almost any class to join the “light strike force” concept. Otherwise, with more than 3 players, you’ll have too much overlap. Even with 5 players, you could have had a nice mix: Barbarian, Rogue, Ranger, Monk, Druid, Sorcerer, whatever. In a case like that, house rules would have allowed everyone to play what they’d wanted without all being heaped into 2-3 classes to be effective and thus sharing or being forced out of the spotlight.

One player designed a character which had, amongst other super-powers, the ability to permanently alter another’s appearance.

Of course, they offered to use this power on my character, nightcrawler, to give him a normal human-like form. It would be easier for me to get around, blend into the crowd, whilst on stealth and/or diplomatic type missions he said. And besides, was it not an essential part of my character concept that I resented my demonic appearance that set me apart from society? He could cure all that.

I was, to say the least, furious. In one stroke this fellow player had eliminated a large chunk of my character’s personality and motivation. Wether I accepted or refused the offer was irrelevant. One way or the other, my character would become reconciled with his appearance, and also would become more boring to play.

I explained this problem to both the fellow player and the GM, to no avail. The GM thought the other player’s character concept was valid, and that I should just role-play it out. This I did, in under a minute.

I was puzzled by this, until she told me more about her group. Their rogue apparently will refuse to fulfill his role (open locks, find traps, etc) unless everyone does as he says. Since no one else can do those things in this edition (knock ritual not available yet, takes a long time to cast, etc), the party either gets stuck, or has to cater to him.

This always happened in the old editions with “never ever piss off the cleric,” but now it applies to every class. While having defined party roles is awesome for a cohesive party, it apparently exacerbates the problems in a dysfuntional party.

I guess the flipside of the “my players hate each other and their characters do the same thing” issue is, at least you have redundancy where you’re most likely to need it.

This topic reminded me of something that can be very frustrating for a player. When talking about niche roles, there are few things that are more frustrating for a PC than when his niche is useless or meaningless to the group’s efforts as a whole. For some reason, there are DMs that don’t allow a particular class or niche to have a fulfilling place in the game. There are no opportunities to shine for some classes.

I have encountered this so much in my local games, when trying to run a rogue, that I have just about given up on the class entirely. When a GM makes everything near impossible to achieve just because they don’t want the rogue to succeed at a particular strategy or plan of action, then it becomes pointless to play the rogue in the first place.

Certainly the rogue must plan carefully and not take on things that are way out of his league, but he should be allowed to try and help the party by doing what he is good at. When a rogue is reduced to being nothing much more than a 2nd class fighter, they aren’t filling the role the PC envisioned when the rogue was created.

Tmax: Glad it was useful– and glad that they stumbled into a good solution for your new campaign.

Wild Joker: Good eye for your player’s frustration; I can barely imagine the frustration of “all the same but he’s better” over long term. Your solution sounds great. Emphasizing the other particularly druid things [like Wildshape's coolness, etc.] might help too.

Bookkeeper: Case 1> You’re right, it’s hard to design something that challenges such different focuses all at once. The rotating spotlight’s one of the few solutions I’ve seen that often works.
Case 2> Two combat monsters can work as long as they’re different in how they do it. They need different styles, abilities, or something similar or they’ll compare their damage output and whoever is consistently lower risks feeling comparatively weak.

1) The rotating spotlight: This is less of a D&D problem, but it can come up in games where PCs can be very very specialized. Take a party with a stunningly intelligent PC, a social monster PC, and a tank PC – what manner of encounter do you craft for all three of those PCs? Even more thorny is the question of keeping the other two PCs engaged while the third is playing to his or her strength. I find this happens in White Wolf’s games a lot.

2) Protection of class role: Honestly, I find it easier to cope with this problem than with the above. If two PCs want to be combat monsters, then I can up the number and difficulty of combat encounters.

The problem does come up when, as was pointed out above, a character’s concept includes the phrase “Best there is at…” Such thinking usually leads to bad things, either because they feel threatened by other PCs encroaching on their space or, worse, they feel that encounters that are honestly challenging to them in their strength are the GM undermining their character concept.

So, I gave him some leeway and sat down with him and helped him figure out some subtleties to his character; a little re-work here and a tug and pull there and he had a result that was just different enough to cause some interest.

Now the war mage blows things up while the druid works from within–casting spells that turn flesh to stone (or similar effects) working from the inside out. With the proper description from me, the DM, it can be just as spectacular (or even more so) than a fireball. And just like that, everybody’s happy.