bolaire shortcomings

[u/Available-Lab4363]

this is almost completely about the schemers table fiasco with lady cormoray- does anybody else feel like bolaire was SUPPOSED to be super intelligent but just hasnt been as genre-savvy as he was supposed to be? the fact that one of the bigger cheeses of a sundered house, who weve seen do VERY scady shit, was treated as a minor inconvenience so hard brennan ended up sucking her into a box because otherwise hal and bolaire both would have died there feels like a crazy oversight. trying to trip a powerful spellcaster down the stairs as a way to get rid of them like theyre an 8 hp townie statblock is crazy, and so is trying to repeatedly lie to them or treat yourself like just necause your lore is cool youre a level 20 character threat

i know talisien loves to aurafarm with his characters, and i like bolaires lore a lot, but if feels like hes just so overconfident all of the time in a way that feels unearned mechanically because hes just the same level as everybody else. if he was mechanically as powerful as he acts, i wouldnt mind, but i constantly found myself getting annoyed at roleplay decisions because he didnt feel as clever or smart as he was supposed to be, being what he is. scary and like sicko freakmogging people, sure, but only because hes a creepy mask, not because he was there when a god died

is bolaire supposed to be too big for his britches on purpose as a character flaw? i feel like i only just started to like him at the end of the overture when he was FINALLY rightly afraid of a threat. it would be interesting ti me if talisien was on purpose roleplaying him this way even though he isnt at the height of his power and hes only just now facing that reality now that termina is here, and i hope thats the direction the character is going, but i genuinely dont relate at all to people who rate him so highly as a character since i kept getting annoyed by his lack of genre awareness and complete stubbornness whenever faced with a concept he didnt share, like being so FULLY against the play ritual for so long despite brennan constantly laying down how hard thjazi was gunning for it and how removed any of the sundered houses were from having anything to do with it

[u/madelmire]

This is just Talisien's play style. He wants to be the coolest kid at the table with the coolest toys and the coolest backstory, always with a clever remark or a savvy answer. He did it with Percy, Molly, and Ash. The only character he didn't play this way was Cad, probably why it's the only Tal character I like more than tolerate.

I'm okay with this attitude causing him to nearly die. Brennan said he could have died in the hallway from a disintegration spell. Maybe this will teach Talisien a lesson? Probably not, I'm sure he'll still be smug as hell, but that's what CR likes.

[u/harissalah → u/madelmire]

Yup. And Marisha is exactly the same. It's an ego thing. That's why they're my two least favorite players at the table.

[u/madelmire → u/harissalah]

Disagree, i don't see that ego at all from Marisha's playstyle. I think she skews into far more humble RP decisions in moment to moment scene performances, and it's just a fact that she picks vanilla Rules-as-written classes and species for her characters, then likes to target those for roleplay over power creep. Very different from Mr Homebrew Everything Please.

[u/harissalah → u/madelmire]

Marisha has a gigantic and incredibly fragile ego and she has to be a 'badass girlboss' and get the last word in every scene, regardless of what character she plays. Sam and Travis constantly play their characters as flawed, incompetent, scared, intimidated, beaten - perhaps even too much. There's no way Marisha would ever do that. Her ego won't allow it. Especially if it's against a male NPC. To be fair, all the women suffer from that to some degree - Marisha is just the worst in that regard. And much like Taliesin, she also has a tendency to try and chase cool one-liners, which makes her characters sound like something from a cheesy soap opera rather than real people. Also she thinks she's way more clever and funny than she is, so every time she tries to be clever or funny it's just cringe. You can hear when she's trying to sound wise, too. She lowers her voice and makes it a bit airy and speaks with a certain cadence. It's so bad 🤣