HELP.
Lately, I've found a much more bearable group of roleplayers. Most of the players are several years my superiors, but that's not the issue. The issue is as follows:
It's a hack-n-slash DnD campaign and I hate the combat. Forty to eighty percent of any session is spent killing things, which means we have to sit around for two hours while our characters slowly attack the enemies.
Of course, that's just DnD, and you have to kill things at some point to make the game fun, but this is the problem:
I had to create a Meat Shield character, because the party seemed to lack one. I wanted my nature-loving super-warrior to have some flaw, so I made sure he was willing to put the life of the forest ahead of anything else and also made him slightly naive and distrusting of magic and machinery. However, when time came for an encounter, I didn't know what to do, and then the other players sort-of directed me where I needed to go and told me what to do. The slaver people are defeated with just a couple of fires left over ihn the town. End session one.
Wait, fires? If the wooden houses are destroyed, the townsfolk will cut down more trees and cause deforestation! Start session two, where I run up a mountain, grab some seeds and an item whose effect is random, and run back down. I proclaim that sdeforestation is bad and propose to turn these seeds into might trees in order to spare the forest. Of course, since the effects are random, I actually got a giant Venus Flytrap. When the party had managed to burn it to death, they removed my random-power item priveleges and said that my character shouldn't be doing that because he had a high intelligence, and he wasn't supposed to be evil.
Now, there's the problem (sorry that I anecdoted along the way): none of my characters work. My character was flawed and had a skewed perception of good and evil based on his own experiences, and that made him an evil idiot.
I suggested a rogue who wanted to be psionic and so ate the brains of all of his foes (and friends) in case they might be telepathic. It was too evil, and this was a completely good campaign.
I suggested a negotiator, and it didn't work. This character didn't have a name, a race, or a class, and he still didn't work. The very idea of not killing something wouldn't work in this campaign.
I even thought up a cleric who worshipped himself and granted himself spells per day like "drink water" and "do jumping jacks", but I doubt he would even be allowed.
So, in the end, that's how this plays out: whatever character I make has to be based on killing things, and I hate killing things in 4e DnD. An attempt to combine the roleplaying and the fighting into one character produced an evil idiot who's not allowed to use the magical items.
Not to say that this group is bad, all of them have been very welcoming and it's the very nature of the game, and not them, that I'm struggling against.
So, how do I make a fun character without breaking the rules of the campaign or incurring the wrath of the other players?
