Being useless in combat is a personal choice that can absolutely be avoided without hampering your ability to be a skillmonkey. You won’t be obliterating the enemy en masse, but that’s what the casters are for.
Play a Thief rogue and have a blast with fast hands when initiative is rolled, or be almost any bard and hand out bardic inspiration while you stand as a mild speedbump of meat between the wizard and the enemy.
Or maybe chat with your DM about game expectations prior to playing? I know it’s an impossible ask for the internet at large.
Chat with the whole party. Some of them might not be happy with you avoiding all the combat.
Absolutely, there should be some level of “okay who stands in front of the skeletons, who fireballs the skeletons, who puts the fighter back together after they get fireball’d too, and who stops the whole party from getting killed by a trap before they even reach the battle”. If you’re gasp optimizing, you might even tailor your skillmonkey around the gaps in your party’s abilities - you probably don’t need the world’s best arcana checks with a wizard in the party, but it would be nice to grab face skills if you don’t have any other charismatic fellows around.
That is a lot more optimization than I’m used to. In my group people just come up with characters they want to play and the GM works with that.
Mind you, we do discuss what kind of game we’re playing so we don’t end up with four pure noncombatants doing a dungeon crawl. But ending up with four wizards? Yeah, that might happen or even be encouraged.
I really don’t wanna have to discuss who has to change their character concept because we need a healer or our party composition won’t be optimal.
The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.
I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.
Yeah ime players tell the gm what they’ve decided to play when they know and the understanding is they pick something that works with everything else. Or we all decide what we’re playing collaboratively, that way if we’re all squishy controllers at least it’s on purpose
True in pathfinder, not so true in DnD 5ed
