Seeing some gm advice I'm reminded of a campaign I had where I got to play a bard.
Back in 3e, which this was, I didn't get to play charismatic characters often - because I didn't play characters very often, and I was usually building towards doing something busted with the character building limits. But this time, I had made my boy, he was basically Sexy Anime Ed Elric But Secretly Armin Tanzarian, and he was a cool dude whose big thing was obligatory 3e combat broknenness, but really his big thing was astronomical bluff and diplomacy checks.
Now I've complained about this in the past, but back in the day, 3e made diplomacy a skill you could absurd numbers on, and then made it so the outcome of those numbers had to be completely narrative breaking for any sensible GM. I was a level 9 character who could quite reasonably convince a total stranger who was there to kill me that they were my best friend, and have them act on it. Diplomacy was dumb. And this was a half-elf, an underpowered heritage option, that meant that in exchange for Getting Nothing out of the character building process, I had access to a sort of short-sharp-shock calming effect that could let me force the diplomacy check.
I literally never used that ability in the entire campaign. I came close to using it, once, but the GM saw me preparing to do it, and just had the non human animals that were nearby just leave. I had to rely on backup of Just Being Really Good At Fighting.
In the course of this campaign we were hunting down a big bad business boss who was collecting our old allies and bringing the band back together to pilot a cool interplanar skyship because those are cool. And, intent on playing with the idea of my bard as being socially very dangerous, I had the bright idea of, in the course of these raids, doing things that made the boss' insurance pay out. My bard destroyed debt records, saved valuables from the fires we started and kept them hidden on-site, and made absolutely sure every site was marked as our work.
Eventually, the DM asks me what I'm doing, and I explain that I'm trying to make the boss convinced that we were something he had organised, that this was his idea and it was all an elaborate ruse. I was attempting to gaslight the villain of our campaign and I put a lot of work into it.
Anyway, DM said it wouldn't work and we just had a big fight at the end.
I was tempted to tell you an ending about how it SHOULD have gone, and then maybe tacked on an Everyone Clapped kinda ending. But nah, the DM heard my requests, saw what I was doing and just let me go on it, before resolving that sure, he knew what I was aiming for and trying, but he couldn't do anything with it so nothing came of it.
I'm not even mad about it, I don't think badly of that DM. He's a beloved friend, someone I would help move bodies. I feel like if I'd handed this to other people, now, they'd probably think that is cool as hell? Or we'd have more of a negotiation on it? But the thing that keeps coming up in my mind is that this is an instance where I, without realising it, was being failed by the system.
The system was telling me 'I can have these things.' But the thing is, like... having those things would be really stupid? Those things clearly could not work in the kind of campaign the rest of the game was built around? And when I tried to strike out in my own direction with it, the system had nothing to accommodate that, or even accommodate something similar.
Anyway what I'm saying is 4th ed D&D is the best D&D
