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Azza Bamboo posted:Turns out my party is playing a campaign called Storm King's Thunder. You know, the Zhentarim's "protection racket" is little different from the usual allegiance to a local noble.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:09
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Ok so I would appreciate some input on a character idea. Last time I got shot down for wanting to play a lazy, surly dwarf War Wizard, but whatever. The character is a Half-Orc Zealot Barbarian with the Hermit background. Dresses in simple monks clothes and carries a maul covered with religious symbols. A few physical characteristics of being a half-orc are noticeable but are subtle and his manner of speech and dress are those of a human. He may have filed down prominent front teeth and removed excess body hair. When asked he will only say that his mother was human but avoids further discussion on the topic. He is similarly vague and evasive on the topic of his monastery, which would not be a familiar one to any party members, described as only "in the north". He presents himself to the party as having been sent from his monastery to strengthen his ability to maintain focus tranquility in the outside world before returning to pass a final test. He will try to talk the party out of violent encounters if possible, but when forced to fight refers to his rages only as "focusing" or "achieving clarity". Uses his Medicine skill to heal himself and others after fights. On rare occasions party members notice signs that he is deeply angry but it is almost always covered up. So would a DM allow me to play a character like this without telling the other characters my true class, race, and alignment?
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Aug 29, 2019 20:11
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Conspiratiorist posted:You know, the Zhentarim's "protection racket" is little different from the usual allegiance to a local noble. A protection racket is actually a liability, because if there's any money in it, the racketeers will help the orcs burn the village. It's... Not a service.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:13
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Sodomy Hussein posted:A protection racket is actually a liability, because if there's any money in it, the racketeers will help the orcs burn the village. It's... Not a service. Yeah, I used quotes because the Sword Coast is a very dangerous place, and so while the Zenths are certainly up to the neck in all sorts of shady poo poo, their public face does provide a valuable and necessary service.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:22
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Smashing Link posted:So would a DM allow me to play a character like this without telling the other characters my true class, race, and alignment? I don't know the answer to this question, but players are going to wonder why you claim to be a monk yet never use ki points, and for some reason you have way more HP than you should, and you don't die in a few hits, etc. It's gonna be hard to hide that mechanically you're not what you claim to be, in other words. And once they notice that something's off and you're being evasive, they're more than likely going to keep digging and trying to figure out what your deal is, because nobody likes having secrets kept from them by an ostensible ally.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:29
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Smashing Link posted:So would a DM allow me to play a character like this without telling the other characters my true class, race, and alignment? This sounds great to me as long as the other players know what's going on but their characters don't. We obviously can't say what your DM would say about such a proposition.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I don't know the answer to this question, but players are going to wonder why you claim to be a monk yet never use ki points, and for some reason you have way more HP than you should, and you don't die in a few hits, etc. It's gonna be hard to hide that mechanically you're not what you claim to be, in other words. And once they notice that something's off and you're being evasive, they're more than likely going to keep digging and trying to figure out what your deal is, because nobody likes having secrets kept from them by an ostensible ally. Yeah I've considered those issues which make it an interesting question. On the one hand, knowing that a Monk should be using ki points is kind of metagaming. In character, why would a party member know that? Same for the HP issue. So I guess I'm assuming this would only work on an RP heavy group with a supportive DM.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:36
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Kaysette posted:This sounds great to me as long as the other players know what's going on but their characters don't. We obviously can't say what your DM would say about such a proposition. So where do you draw the line? Does each player have to know the alignment of each character in the group? In all the groups I've been the character sheets are pretty much open to everyone to look at but I'm not sure that is necessary.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:41
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Kaysette posted:This sounds great to me as long as the other players know what's going on but their characters don't. We obviously can't say what your DM would say about such a proposition. Exactly what I was going to post. If you're fine with this just being a roleplay thing I think it's fine; in-game characters shouldn't know the exact capabilities of all the classes unless they were super worldly. But if you're trying to pull a fast one on the actual physical players I would advise against it.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:41
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Do monks even use mauls? And yes players should know even if their characters don’t. These kinds of situations always remind me of the Chapelle skit about the blind white supremacist who doesn’t know he’s black. It’s like the character himself doesn’t know he isn’t a real human monk, or the place he trains isn’t a real monastery because of the way he was raised. Perhaps intelligence was his dump stat. Anyway he isn’t actively trying to hide anything he just doesn’t know any better. nelson fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 20:41
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Is there a reason you'd be so secretive to traveling companions after you've been through a few scrapes? It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me, but then again I'm playing an aarakocra monk skinned as a human with wire-fu wuxia bullshit (I get the fly speed but cannot end my turn in mid-air) with a houserule to allow acrobatics as well as athletics for grappling so we're not exactly 100% by the book.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:42
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It's also way easier to make fun character stuff happen when everyone involved knows what is going on, so they can play into your Definitely A Monk schtick instead of wasting a bunch of everybody's time going in circles trying to figure out what's up with you.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:46
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Smashing Link posted:So where do you draw the line? Does each player have to know the alignment of each character in the group? In all the groups I've been the character sheets are pretty much open to everyone to look at but I'm not sure that is necessary. The standard in every group I've even been in for vanilla D&D is open book as far as player knowledge of other PCs. Separating player knowledge from character knowledge is one of the big skills necessary to RP effectively and most people in my experience can do it well with an occasional reminder or slip up. If you want to play more secretively between players, talk it over with the DM and the group first and make sure they're on board with those different expectations.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:48
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Conspiratiorist posted:You know, the Zhentarim's "protection racket" is little different from the usual allegiance to a local noble. My character is a noble. The difference, from his perspective, is huge.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:48
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Smashing Link posted:Ok so I would appreciate some input on a character idea. Last time I got shot down for wanting to play a lazy, surly dwarf War Wizard, but whatever. My experience here is that DM's are always content to let players try things like this out (unless it explicitly clashes with the campaign setup for some reason), but regardless of whether they play along with the mystery or strive to uncover it for quite valid IC reasons, the fact is the other players will fairly quickly deduce OOC your race and class just from your mechanical interactions - and attempts to obfuscate them with vague answers or hidden rolls and under-the-table notes to the DM will only slow down the game and possibly be annoying. Plus the first time you go down they'll peel your clothes off and, if not immediately obvious, the DM will give them a roll to guess your race. And they'll probably not even care. So what I'm saying is go ahead and try it - it does actually work for one or two sessions, like when people mistakenly assume I'm playing a Fighter until I cast spells because I'm actually a Paladin, or a friend whose Dwarf "Wizard" turned out to be able to Rage and whose every "spell" involved hitting things really hard with various weapons. Just, don't expect it to be a gimmick with any staying power whatsoever. And also, you can be a Monk in the Fluff, and a Barbarian in the Mechanics. In fact, that's what people might assume you're doing.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:50
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Kaysette posted:The standard in every group I've even been in for vanilla D&D is open book as far as player knowledge of other PCs. Separating player knowledge from character knowledge is one of the big skills necessary to RP effectively and most people in my experience can do it well with an occasional reminder or slip up. If you want to play more secretively between players, talk it over with the DM and the group first and make sure they're on board with those different expectations. So I'm thinking being open about the Half-Orc Barb piece is now a good idea, for the reasons mentioned above. What I'm not sure about myself is the character's true motivations -- is he Evil, raised by monks but they slaughtered them and is now concealing that fact? Or perhaps he is LG and truly trying to overcome his anger issues but was rejected by the monks and is concealing that part. I wonder if it would be ok to leave that part undecided, along with his alignment, and just RP it for awhile and see what happens. edit: Third option mentioned above is that he is too stupid to know he isn't really a monk. That could be fun. Smashing Link fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 20:53
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Nobody actually cares about what's written on your alignment field until you decide to make it an issue.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:55
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Maybe he’s angry at orcs instead of monks. Perhaps the relationship between his father and mother wasn’t consensual. That would explain why he’s trying to look/sound more human.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:00
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When I made my tiefling vengeance paladin/rogue who's quite brutal I intentionally left the field blank so the other players would be slightly unsure of my character's intentions the first couple of games. And also because I wanted to see which direction the idea would go personally. It worked very well, and I ended up filling out chaotic good because that's the closest to what I was despite the brutality.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:03
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nelson posted:Maybe he’s angry at orcs instead of monks. Perhaps the relationship between his father and mother wasn’t consensual. That would explain why he’s trying to look/sound more human. That could be it. His mother could have come to the monastery for help after she was raped by an orc.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:05
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Why not just make him an angry halforc who really wants to be a monk but gosh darn it he's always so angry? Make the monk-barb tension a part of the character, not a gotcha for the rest of the group. Because if you lean too hard into the mystery of it, eventually (probably quite soon) that mystery is gonna come out, and you've lost half your character concept.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:07
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I dunno, secrets can be fun. Pretty much every character in our entire party in my current D&D game is hiding something from the others. Some of it we know out of character and some of it we don't know. I dunno what's up with our bard, but he's nervous about being seen around nobility for fear someone recognizes him, so there's something about that. I'm a warlock who is just doing the usual "I totally didn't get my powers from bargains with eldritch horrors" type thing, along with our paladin (who is totally not ALSO a warlock, which I didn't realize until he cast burning hands one time). Just don't make it a whole "SOMEONE PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY" thing.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:07
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Kaysette posted:The standard in every group I've even been in for vanilla D&D is open book as far as player knowledge of other PCs. Separating player knowledge from character knowledge is one of the big skills necessary to RP effectively and most people in my experience can do it well with an occasional reminder or slip up. If you want to play more secretively between players, talk it over with the DM and the group first and make sure they're on board with those different expectations. e: For another example, I appreciate that I don't know OOC whether my Eberron game's cleric of the Traveler is Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil--and that game had it clear from the get-go that there could be stuff going on with other PCs that we didn't know about out of character.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:10
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Smashing Link posted:So I'm thinking being open about the Half-Orc Barb piece is now a good idea, for the reasons mentioned above. What I'm not sure about myself is the character's true motivations -- is he Evil, raised by monks but they slaughtered them and is now concealing that fact? Or perhaps he is LG and truly trying to overcome his anger issues but was rejected by the monks and is concealing that part. I wonder if it would be ok to leave that part undecided, along with his alignment, and just RP it for awhile and see what happens. On the other hand, it could be totally reasonable that his skillset is completely normal by the standards of orcish monasticism, who value beating people to death with farming and/or construction tools and being dead 'ard to physical and spiritual pain. As for why he decided to leave the monastery, it could be that they've somehow become disillusioned towards monastic values, either because he found them corrupt and hypocritical with respect to the values they claim to have, or he's not happy with the values their doctrine actually does uphold. As a half-orc, there could be any number of reasons why he feels he doesn't fit in with full-blooded orcs.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:15
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Glagha posted:I dunno, secrets can be fun. Pretty much every character in our entire party in my current D&D game is hiding something from the others. Some of it we know out of character and some of it we don't know. I dunno what's up with our bard, but he's nervous about being seen around nobility for fear someone recognizes him, so there's something about that. I'm a warlock who is just doing the usual "I totally didn't get my powers from bargains with eldritch horrors" type thing, along with our paladin (who is totally not ALSO a warlock, which I didn't realize until he cast burning hands one time). Just don't make it a whole "SOMEONE PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY" thing. lightrook posted:On the other hand, it could be totally reasonable that his skillset is completely normal by the standards of orcish monasticism, who value beating people to death with farming and/or construction tools and being dead 'ard to physical and spiritual pain. So to avoid the PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY thing I think just making him a character who is reluctant to talk about his background (at least first few sessions) is the way to go. Players will know he is a Half-Orc Barb who is going to present himself as a Monk for as yet undeclared reasons, but I will leave alignment and the full backstory blank for now, especially since there are too many good ideas to choose from.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:20
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Smashing Link posted:So to avoid the PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY thing I think just making him a character who is reluctant to talk about his background (at least first few sessions) is the way to go. Players will know he is a Half-Orc Barb who is going to present himself as a Monk for as yet undeclared reasons, but I will leave alignment and the full backstory blank for now, especially since there are too many good ideas to choose from. That’s a great compromise.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:21
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Kaysette posted:That’s a great compromise. Thanks to the thread for the help.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:26
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Smashing Link posted:So to avoid the PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY thing I think just making him a character who is reluctant to talk about his background (at least first few sessions) is the way to go. Players will know he is a Half-Orc Barb who is going to present himself as a Monk for as yet undeclared reasons, but I will leave alignment and the full backstory blank for now, especially since there are too many good ideas to choose from. It's probably fine to have your backstory still in the air, and arguably a bit better, because it's a bit easier to work your story into the world at large once you have a better idea what the world at large is actually like. I'd still suggest figuring out his general personality, full backstory or no, and once you've settled on the general pattern of his personality you can write a backstory to justify it. Even just being able to answer simple questions like what things (i.e. foods, activities, people) your character likes/dislikes goes a long way towards fleshing them out.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:36
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Alright lads, I've been drafted to enter a formerly one-on-one game (GM and 1 PC) and spice up social interactions and combat a bit. I'm thinking i go Scourge Asamar Padlock, as a kind of Don Quixote knight-errant sort of thing. Problem is, i usually play full casters. I don't know how to build a great weapon fighter, and would appreciate any tips. I'm coming in at level 3, if i could get an idea on how to progress as an effective DPS Padlock, I'd appreciate it.
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Aug 29, 2019 22:02
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Smashing Link posted:So to avoid the PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT MY BACKSTORY thing I think just making him a character who is reluctant to talk about his background (at least first few sessions) is the way to go. Players will know he is a Half-Orc Barb who is going to present himself as a Monk for as yet undeclared reasons, but I will leave alignment and the full backstory blank for now, especially since there are too many good ideas to choose from.
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Aug 29, 2019 22:57
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Yeah I'm also of the thought that players hiding information from each other, or hiding GM manual/monster manual information from players for that matter, is a bad crutch to lean on. I've seen even new players effectively separate IC information from OOC information, and it's a skill like any other so even those who are not great at it would benefit from practicing it rather than forcing it with hidden information. And in my experience some of the most fun moments in gaming were from knowing things my character didn't and being able to see the doom my character was carelessly wandering into.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:13
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Yeah, i think the only time it's good for the other players not to know background stuff is when nobody knows this stuff. I have a harper rogue in my current group who has Harper HQ pissed off at him after he royally hosed up a job, but it's only ever referred to as "the incident" and all other harpers the party interact with refuse to talk about it for increasingly ludicrous reasons. But all the players are fully in on the idea that nobody at the table knows what happened in the incident, even if the rogue and half my NPCs do. That's what makes the secret fun!
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Aug 30, 2019 00:07
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We had a guy once who was posing as a different race, which we all knew since we helped build the character, but he never revealed it to the characters because it never came up. Anyway, we pulled off a heist after 5-6 prep games and the dude was the one to hold the bag when we split up. When we all got to the meeting spot, the player had his shiteating grin on his face. He had run with the money and shed his disguise, and we had no clue who he really was. Fucker pulled off a double-con where we were in on half the joke and the DM had planned for him to become the temporary villain while he played something else. The dude died to save our lives later down the line  Secrets aren't bad but you definitely need to get people on board, to a point.
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Aug 30, 2019 00:32
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Azza Bamboo posted:My character is a noble. The difference, from his perspective, is huge. That is generally how it is for that stuff. Good luck on not being murdered by Orcs.
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Aug 30, 2019 00:57
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It depends on your DM. I've played with a DM who banned anyone in the group relaying their class/race/etc out of character and multiple people in that group played an obfuscated race (such as me playing a kitsune who never used her natural form and was very good at pretending to be human) and it was a fun time. Generally, though, groups like to play open knowledge, so if that's what you've been doing I wouldn't bother trying to hide it from the players. Just ask them not to metagame that knowledge to their characters and let them be in on the joke that their characters don't know.
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Aug 30, 2019 01:28
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nelson posted:Do monks even use mauls? And yes players should know even if their characters don’t. That kind of setup is definitely workable and can be fun - in the game I'm running now, one of the player characters is a half-orc in a setting that normally doesn't have orcs, so everyone just assumes he's a freakishly large goblin, including him.
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Aug 30, 2019 03:14
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I once played a session where a bard was pretending to be a fighter because he was on the lam and had an amulet that gave people the illusion that he's much buffer than he really is. And there was a cleric in the party who was actually a star pact warlock and basically just using the party to get to an eldritch relic to help his masters cross over into the world. And there was an elf wizard who was hiding his religion because he was afraid of persecution, and he was also hiding that he was basically on a holy quest from his order and not just a random adventurer. Then there was a half orc barbarian, who was generally confused.
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Aug 30, 2019 03:23
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Lurdiak posted:Then there was a half orc barbarian, who was generally confused. Confusion leads to impatience. Impatience leads to rage. Thus the life of the barbarian.
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Aug 30, 2019 03:34
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Most players are OOC Barbarians - they get impatient, and rage. I myself have been guilty of this on multiple occasions.
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Aug 30, 2019 03:37
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Goddamn, what do you even do with a character like that? Isn't literal godhood somewhere around 30th level? They had fought one deity in order to restore another one to existence, but nobody in the group actually wanted to ascend. Gamers in college before the Internet had a lot of time on our hands, so I continued the campaign with them for a while longer. They did some plane traveling, then crossed a nasty mountain range that coincided with a dead magic zone to find out what was on the other side. They found a nation of beholders with some very powerful wizards, loosely based on the Taken from the Black Company series. For example, one of them was actually an illusion made real, formed by eight archmagi who merged their minds together into a gestalt form, which was capable of casting up to eight spells at once. Things wrapped when they encountered the nation on the other side of the beholder nation, which was dragons. With character levels. An ancient Red Dragon with 30 levels of wizard and magical equipment appropriate for the level is rather dangerous. I should note that the campaign was deliberately imagined as a high-level campaign to see how things played; characters started with 3 million XP, which was 18th level for wizards and higher for everyone else. I wanted to see what happened to the system if you tried breaking it. It's not hard to challenge PCs at any level, it's just a matter of imagination. I designed a one-off game where high level PCs were sent into a vault designed by a deity and defended by a mixture of magical traps and some extremely well-equipped kobolds. Normal kobolds. No character levels. Kobolds in a complex they know very well that's packed with magical traps created by a deity (that therefore work even in antimagic and are very hard to dispel or disarm) can be remarkably lethal. Telling interesting stories can be trickier, but it's not impossible.
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Aug 30, 2019 04:27
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