Choose Abilities Differently
At a certain point in your TTRPG career, you are going to get burned by picking abilities that sound cool from their summary. Your going to get frustrated and angry with the unfairness of it all when they don’t do what you expect. But how you move on from here changes what kind of player you’ll be at the table, and how well you’ll work with your group.
Usually, what you realize is the abilities you chose… suck. And then it is time to dive in on the rules to make ABSOLUTELY SURE that they don’t suck next time. That’s when you level up to 1.
Level 1: Choosing your abilities for power
Unfortunately, the name or the short description for abilities and spells in TTRPGs don’t fully encompass the rules. Your 5e Sorcerer gets really excited for Quickened Metamagic ability, until they realize they can’t cast 2 fireballs in a turn. WTF? Your Pathfinder Necromancer gets excited to summon skeletons, until they realize the only skeletons they can summon have fewer hit points than their familiar does. Really useful.
So you read all the abilities. You start to see the patterns where some abilities are just better than all the others. They may deal more damage, or deny a saving throw. Regardless of why, they are just the best option. You select the best abilities. Your damage goes through the roof. If you’re growing with a group of friends, so does everyone else’s. You walk in a room and and even-difficulty fight melts before you. It feels great.
Until you eventually get bored. There is always a right answer. You can find it, and the game isn’t challenging. Maybe you re-roll a different class, but then you optimize the fun out of it again. How do you bring the fun back?
Level 2: Choosing your abilities for the bit
You bring the fun back by purposely letting some of your abilities suck. Not so many that your character is unplayable, but you start to have a mix of “real abilities” vs “fun abilities.” You choose ventriloquism so that you can make your fancy wizard fart every time they sit down. You choose an ice spell because you “always want a cold drink on hand.”
You’ll bring the fun back to your scenes. Social encounters are no longer just skill checks or standalone dialogue. You can start building in your weird ability choices and explore how they interact with scenes. Or how they interact with your party. Sometimes these abilities let you impact other characters, which you find out impacts the other players at your table. Interesting!
A lot of players are perfectly happy here. But once you feel like you’ve explored your options, you may notice that your “fun abilities” become antagonistic to other players. They’re a way for you to exert power over others, and not necessarily a way to really interact with the world in a meaningful way. It gets even worse when others are doing the same to you, and every scene becomes like a three-stooges parody of messing with each other. Some groups like that lighthearted style, but others don’t. If you don’t, how do you bring meaning back to it all?
Level 3: Choosing your abilities for the fit
Now that you’ve become comfortable with the crunch of ability rules as well as the flavor of ability rules, you can focus on the fit of your abilities for your group and the world overall. If your allies already selected a powerful attack ability, maybe you fill in the gap elsewhere. You can choose a less powerful healing or support ability with more flavor, because it will fit in well with your party composition.
Or maybe you’ve met some interesting people in your travels, and you choose your “fun” abilities to reflect who you’ve met and where you’ve been. Suddenly your fun abilities are no longer antagonistic, they’re markers of a campaign well spent.’
It changes your experience of ability selection from seeking pure novelty. You start to seek satisfaction, seeking payoff. You walk away from an Undead adventure path with some undead specific abilities. And that weakness of a “wasted ability” when you go to fight elementals isn’t a mistake. It isn’t a gag. It is a reflection of your campaign.
How you choose abilities depends on what you want out of them
As you grow in TTRPGs, the things you’ll want out of your play will change. The choices you make will, too. Don’t worry about where you are on this path, but know that the path is there. Level 3 here isn’t even necessarily better than the other levels. But you’ll need to reach frustration with the earlier levels to be prompted to move on.