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Morpheus posted:I like the idea of goodberries being, like, 3000 calories (as each provides enough nourishment for a day which, for an adventurer, has to be quite a lot) so after you eat two or three of them, you start to feel a little ill. I like this idea. If you're going to nerf Capt. Goodberry, do it non-mechanically. Make the berries nasty, or make each one like eating a whole tube of cookie dough. Make their teeth fuzzy all day, or have that greasy, McBrick feeling in their guts, all the time. None of this affects them mechanically, but lean hard into description to make it nasty as gently caress. Man with Hat posted:I saw someone talk about goodberries once and how they're boring not because of the healing but because of the food thing. You cannot make a scenario where food is scarce in in DnD if someone just learns how to make infinite food at lvl 1. Their solution was to change the spell into instead of making berries out of nothing you transformed berries before picking them and after that they worked for 24 hours. This way a DM can sort of manage it. I thought that was clever! I get this. I ran a survival dungeon crawl in 5e a couple years ago. The party was trapped in a giant dungeon trying to find their way out. I had this whole system for scavenging for and rationing food/water. Then one of my players made a druid. Sure, Goodberry and Create Food/Water hosed up the balance of the survival system, but it did so at the cost of combat. The Druid had less casting to use in combats because he spent some of his castings keeping the party healthy. I let the party get used to leaning on the druid to bypass the survival system. Then the druid got separated from the group. Half a session and five days of in-game time went by. By the time the druid rejoined the group, the fighter had eaten a freshly-killed Roper out of desperation. (The rest of the group was content to suffer the mechanical consequences of being exhausted from hunger.)
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Jul 7, 2020 13:34
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Yeah, we just had this come up in-game and took a similar view - 'goodberries' are an ironic name for a common fruit which, while revitalising, tastes absolutely foul and can only be eaten with immense difficulty. It allows for some fun roleplaying as everyone reluctantly chokes a berry down after a battle. If you want to give the players more flexibility, you could even allow players to eat additional berries, but require a Constitution saving throw - if they fail it, they throw up the lot and fail to regain any hit points.
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Jul 7, 2020 13:49
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Like a Murlynd's Spoon
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Jul 7, 2020 14:45
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So I'm getting ready to run....not my first campaign, but the first one in quite some time Using the Eberron setting as I adore it. I made hand outs that i emailed ahead of time to make sure people have a general overview of what their characters would know history, region and race wise First real mission will be a Changling who has infiltrated house Ghallanda(the hospitality house) they are poisoning patrons to make them basically feral and attack others on site. They'll be hired to try and keep things quite. I figure that will have some intrigue, politics of some houses or regions to give the RP people some TLC and keep the murderhobos happy. Party will be Rogue, 2x Rangers, Cleric(Order note life Domain), Fighter who is working towards Gunslinger and a Paladin Does my idea sound completely stupid? Should I stick with the "classic" train robbery or protect a train from a Warforged Heist? Lastly looking for ideas on how to help the fighter build their first gun but keep some RP with it instead of just dropping coin? Tie in house Cannith to have it manufactured via quest? Track down parts? Big Baddie has a weapon he'll need to kill him for?
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Jul 8, 2020 04:22
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I love Eberron, and that sounds pretty drat cool to me. As to the gunslinger, they had a buddy who was in house Cannith. Maybe during the war the fighter is stationed on a queit front so the buddy sneaks out to do some quiet weapon tests, but they end up getting hurt. They obviously can't/won't try this doing it themselves thing again (man, even if I got this cool warforged arm getting it blown off sucked, I'm staying in the lab now). Their friend asks then to take the iteration and field test it in the most likely conditions at various locations. Come back every once in a while to give feedback and maybe some slight upgrades they came up with since last time. sleepy.eyes fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 16:28
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sebmojo posted:I love this so much. That being said I do keep coming across details that could have used an editing pass. I'm not talking about monsters and NPCs occasionally having different names in different paragraphs, that's not a big deal at all. But for a lot of encounters the solution for larger or higher level parties is just "eh, more of every enemy type" and, sure, that does bump things up to the right amount of enemies mathematically speaking, but I'm looking at fights where there are supposed to be, say, five enemy casters that each can attack all characters for 10 ongoing damage, which stacks in 13th Age. Even apart from potentially getting hit with 50 ongoing, that's just gonna be a lot of rolling when their initiative comes around, and then on each PC's turn for saving throws. e: I mean, that's a managable amount of damage still. But it's gonna be tedious to resolve if I run it this way. Probably gonna think of a way to consolidate a few enemy rolls.
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Jul 8, 2020 17:05
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of course from a slightly grognard GM perspective there's some appeal to the idea of saying "the sorcerers join in an improptu ritual" and slowly adding one d20 after another to the dice cup
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Jul 8, 2020 17:13
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Hey I have the problem of not having any interesting ideas for fleshing out adventures, even when I think they're really cool. I know I could ask in here for advice, but I feel like that would be you guys "giving me a fish instead of teaching me to fish so I can provide for myself" Here's one example but this happens basically every week and it's led to me just sorta winging it every session. I know how the adventure starts, with the players entering the city of brass on the elemental plane of fire because the fire genasi wants to become an earth genie pact warlock and thinks she can network to one though her own parent. I know that I want the ending to be a cool boss fight against an out of control earth elemental to settle it down, involving a bunch of telegraphed aoes and knockbacks on a steadily shrinking platform where falling off does a bit of fall damage. If you've played the mmo final fantasy xiv, I'm directly ripping off a boss fight (Titan) and I think the players will like it. I have a basic narrative thread of "meet your genie parent, who knows somebody in the plane of earth who needs help with an out of control earth elemental and that would certainly endear you to them if you helped them out" but I don't know how to like fill in the gap between the two without making it just a walk in the park or having it be just me explaining stuff at them with little interactivity. And this happens a ton, I get a cool adventure idea and have a cool boss fight but it always feels super linear and I hate that, the players don't have meaningful choices to engage with.
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Jul 8, 2020 18:28
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Jinh posted:Hey I have the problem of not having any interesting ideas for fleshing out adventures, even when I think they're really cool. I know I could ask in here for advice, but I feel like that would be you guys "giving me a fish instead of teaching me to fish so I can provide for myself" if the players like linear, keep doing linear. the anti railroading brigade online is way too overzealous and thinks anything short of "you are in a small town with no directions or objectives" is an authoritative dm. if the players , and you, like it, you are doing fine. but, if you want more dynamic elements: always add more branches that lead to the same tree. then grow a second tree behind it. the genie parent knows how to get that information, but they are not on speaking terms. instead, they give two leads.... there are three factions that can help the player find the genie. the first two leads should be undesirable in some way, or introduce some complications. the third lead is something the players must find on their own. for example, "i can get you in contact with someone in the plane of earth, but we need this guy whacked" or "yes i can get you in contact with someone in the plane of earth, but first i need the last part is the other thing you want to do. out of control earth elemental? neat. why is it out of control? the players may not find out in awhile. plant seeds and give them time to sprout, so as a result of their choices 3 sessions later when they are finally ready to get that earth genie juice... a group of knights assaults the castle! or something like that. make the players choices matter but later on, and give multiple options for how to get to the same place. (also, you can plant seeds like that and have no idea what exactly is going to come out of it. just have an idea what it is vaguely leading towards and figure out the specifics later.)
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Jul 8, 2020 20:00
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pog boyfriend posted:if the players like linear, keep doing linear. the anti railroading brigade online is way too overzealous and thinks anything short of "you are in a small town with no directions or objectives" is an authoritative dm. if the players , and you, like it, you are doing fine. but, if you want more dynamic elements: I know the players are ok with railroading since i try to make stories about them or their NPC allies as much as possible, so they try to be invested in whatever i put in front of them. i just really want things to be more interactive instead of me telling them the story, it really feels like im just reading a book at them and i know some of them are zoning out for it. pog boyfriend posted:
This is the good poo poo. I've been wanting to use adventure hook tables but have been having a hard time figuring out how to implement them. so i wanna break down "meet your genie parent" "genie parent knows somebody in the plane of earth" "BUT they need help with an earth elemental" and basically add more BUTs in there until it feels good. decide whether a given part could use a second branch, which would allow for more than one option so that players can pick their But. pog boyfriend posted:
That's just embarrassing, i didn't even consider why it was out of control. I'll make sure to get the "whys" of each story beat and use those as well. maybe the reason it's out of control ties in with other problems in the city, or another overarching plot reason. Thanks for the response, i should be able to create a better prep workflow with those things in mind!
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Jul 8, 2020 21:43
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Jinh posted:Cogent response to suggestions. If you haven't checked them out, the lazy dm guide and these ten year old suggestions are always good to read up on: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach In my opinion, it sounds like you're doing fine, but maybe you're giving the characters too much story rather than letting them create the story. If there's a backstory dump, make them ask for it through an NPC. Otherwise, let your history/secret-evil-DM-plans play out while your characters ignore them/do other things, and have consequences spill into their attention. There's a vendor they like who has an item they want and ask for a discount. After they're done with the fetch quest, they get back to a changed city and shopkeeper because X did Y. Having a way to instill urgency or the concept of passing time will help you combat the appearance of arbitrary context. Seed story context into character backstories. Extra valuable opportunities exist when players make side characters or new characters - you can get them involved in the exposition so it's not just you telling the story. ILL Machina fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 23:24
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Glory to Italia!
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My Lovely Horse posted:I don't read a lot of premade adventures but even so, Stone Thief is amazing for its built-in nonlinearity, room for your own adventures and inspirational asides that serve as plot hooks. For example, we ran with the little throwaway line that the Ossuary doors are protected with a bioweapon mold and spun it into a subquest, and so much more. It's great and everyone should have it; even if you're not running it as a campaign each floor can serve as a standalone dungeon in its own right. The level charts felt weak at the beginning and I routinely gave my party encounters for larger or higher level parties but towards the end I ran it by the book and the fights were all really well tuned. There's also the nasty fight modifiers if you don't want to bump up the numbers.
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Jul 8, 2020 23:31
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One critique is how inescapable he makes it to be thoroughly compromised by the end, hanrahan can be over fond of the railroad
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Jul 8, 2020 23:33
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ILL Machina posted:Otherwise, let your history/secret-evil-DM-plans play out while your characters ignore them/do other things, and have consequences spill into their attention. ILL's example does this really well but I think it's important to spell out: this is a really good thing to do but you need to make sure that the consequences of the antagonist's plans are big and visible, not just something you quietly tick off in your DM notes. So, like, if Stage 2 is "get hold of the forbidden tome" then don't have that tome be in a library on the other side of the continent somewhere, have the players run into the aftermath of the antagonist's successful attempt to take it by force, where the city is burning and the goblin horde they used to take the city are just hanging out and chilling now that their leader has taken what he needs and gone.
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Jul 9, 2020 08:22
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sebmojo posted:One critique is how inescapable he makes it to be thoroughly compromised by the end, hanrahan can be over fond of the railroad
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Jul 9, 2020 08:28
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Whybird posted:ILL's example does this really well but I think it's important to spell out: this is a really good thing to do but you need to make sure that the consequences of the antagonist's plans are big and visible, not just something you quietly tick off in your DM notes. Yeah definitely. There's no point in this approach if it's not actually happening in front of the screen. The shift doesn't necessarily have to be part of the main BBEG's scheme, though that gets a little into "then why even bother with those details" territory. Could be there's a war going on and, after the players sail away for a couple weeks, the balance of power shifts. I always like a popular uprising to throw a wrench in an otherwise seemingly stable police state. Or when the a City Guard fights the City Watch and something important catches fire.
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Jul 9, 2020 08:48
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Anyone ever switched systems mid-campaign and have any advice/suggestions/warnings about doing that? I'm DMing a 5e campaign that's lvl 9 now, and am pretty sick of 5e. I've never loved it, and the 'CR is useless and lol at any guidance on encounter building' has gotten more frustrating as they have leveled and all the WOTC/5e bad karma has me ready to jump ship to PF2e. We did a sort of 'playtest' with PF2e a few months ago up to maybe 5th/6th lvl and mostly really really liked it, and with the APG coming out this month and better Roll20 support, I think most of our problems with it are going away. As the DM, encounter building was super easy and the math just worked. We might lose a player over it, but he's always been a little flaky and is pretty likely to drop when/if quarantine goes away, and I wouldn't be heartbroken if he did. All the other players really love their characters and we are all pretty invested in the story of the campaign and want to stick with it. If it matters, players are Barbarian 9, Druid 9 (the one likely to drop), Fighter 5/War Wizard 4, Paladin 7/Warlock 2, Warlock 8/Rogue 1. My biggest concern is that jumping into new 9th lvl characters in a different system is going to be too big a jump, and I'm not really sure how to ease that transition. Starting at high level is always hard because you don't really know all your characters abilities if you haven't grown into them. I'm sure there are other traps I'm missing too. Jinh posted:Thanks for the response, i should be able to create a better prep workflow with those things in mind! e.g. My players were defending the city from an army of hobgoblins, and after the battle they learned drow had attacked from underneath the city during the battle but local guards repelled them. They'd seen drow and hobgoblins fighting each other before but didn't think much of it and I didn't really know what the drow were doing there either. As the story has grown, the drow have become a more important part of it, and now it has become clear to me (and eventually the players) that the drow were after the same mcguffin that was in the city as the hobgoblins, and there was a great moment when the players realized that of 'ohhhhhh, so that's why they were attacking the city.' It equally could have turned into the drow and hobgoblins being allies or complete coincidence, and in other cases stuff like that has been a throwaway and never gone anywhere.
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Jul 9, 2020 14:25
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:We might lose a player over it, but he's always been a little flaky and is pretty likely to drop when/if quarantine goes away, and I wouldn't be heartbroken if he did. All the other players really love their characters and we are all pretty invested in the story of the campaign and want to stick with it. If it matters, players are Barbarian 9, Druid 9 (the one likely to drop), Fighter 5/War Wizard 4, Paladin 7/Warlock 2, Warlock 8/Rogue 1. 1) pf2e is radically different than 5e in terms of character design, but i am sure you are aware. pf2e is an extremely restrictive system of choosing feats down a preselected path with multiclassing only allowing for certain spells and key abilities able to transition over. these character builds are not going to translate 1 to 1, and just make that really clear to the players that they are going to end up losing something in the transition. they might gain something, but to make the characters feel the same is impossible. 2) pf2e is not the hardest to do in terms of power level switching(i simply could not transition out of my pathfinder 1e campaign because pathfinder 1e has way too much item power with players expected to have magic items) but switching from 5e to pf2e should not be impossible, depending on how many magic items you do have. 3) you can always make some sort of dramatic world event that makes everything all weird in story to justify the players having slightly different power. has it been done before? yes. it still works though. after you actually work over this transition please hold a new session 0 explaining what is going on and giving people time to work out their new characters, and ramifications in the lore. you are probably going to have to homebrew some poo poo into the game... it happens 4) once you make this transition you have to immediately drop the difficulty level down 2 notches because the players(per 1) are going to be on dramatically different characters than they were playing, and what they think they can do is now different and they are basically back on training wheels for the next few sessions. give it time and they will get there.
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Jul 9, 2020 14:38
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Well, for starters, definitely work out/ask some knowledgable people if Level 9 in PF2e is actually comparable to Level 9 in D&D 5, in terms of the options it offers players, the kind of abilities it grants access to (especially those that are directly comparable), and the kind of creatures and challenges you're expected to go up against. Everyone should probably be prepared to rebuild their characters rather than convert them, to lose or gain stuff in the process, and to explore different character classes if it turns out that, say, the "barbarian" archetype goes by a different name in the new one. Especially multiclass characters may run into a bit of trouble. Basically rebuild core concepts and ideas, not specific builds or combinations.
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Jul 9, 2020 14:42
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:One of my favorite tricks I think I learned in this thread is to just have little things happen/drop little details in the moment that the players don't take much note of or go 'huh, that's wierd, why is he telling us that?' You don't have to have any idea what is going on either, but it gives you stuff later in the campaign to come back to and makes it look like you've been crafting this elaborate plot the entire time. The trick is to never let your players know you do this. Throw out lots of bait, follow up on the things they bite on, but don't forget about all those other hooks in the water. I was just thinking that the OP could really set things up simply for the elemental fight with a single bit of foreshadowing like that - and the fact that they're entering a new city allows for that kind of description that takes place at a chokepoint. 'As you enter the City of Brass, you see a construction site. Colossal earth elementals are breaking down the masonry of a derelict tower, controlled by a cadre of genasi mages, their elemental-binding collars glowing bright blue as they smash walls and rooftops to smithereens with their gigantic fists...' Boom. That's in the bank, they'll remember it. At your convenience, you can come back to the city entrance and get that 'oh poo poo' moment as the elemental goes rogue (and the 'why' could be pretty much anything. A recurring villain stabs one of the mages in an effort to take the party down, a MacGuffin one of the players has been carrying shortcircuits all nearby magic...)
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Jul 9, 2020 15:22
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ILL Machina posted:Yeah definitely. There's no point in this approach if it's not actually happening in front of the screen. The shift doesn't necessarily have to be part of the main BBEG's scheme, though that gets a little into "then why even bother with those details" territory. That's being handled fairly well I think. This campaign started out as 5e's "Out Of The Abyss" and anytime the players move on without dealing with the Big Demon Problems brewing everywhere then things start going south Real Fast behind them and it catches up to them. Multiple cities have been annihilated in their wake. There are definitely reactions to choices the players make that they can clearly see. If I think a scene would come out of nowhere, I usually foreshadow it in game or with a quick cliffhanger "somewhere else... Due to your actions, A crime boss has to answer to his evil master. The trembling man kneels at the gargoyle statue. Its mouth opens and a scream causes him to clasp his ears in pain. The statue's eyes glow a deep crimson, and the crime boss becomes dust." cutscene at the start or end of a session. Most of my issues come from trying to create my own content for the first time. It's an intermission in the campaign that's broadened the scope of things way beyond what the module intends (I gave them a spelljammer spaceship lol), and now I've got to rein it in and refocus things back on the main problem of the campaign. I also want to do fully homebrew campaigns one day, once I've gotten a solid adventure prepping framework. Jinh fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jul 9, 2020 |
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Jul 9, 2020 15:59
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drunkencarp posted:I've never managed to get this to work out. Either the PCs quickly come up with a workaround that allows them to communicate freely, or else everyone stops having fun pretty much immediately. Or they just avoid that NPC, anyway. We are doing 1920s Berlin in Call of Cthulhu with English speaking characters we imported from our Arkham Mass modules and we have been completely unable to square that circle. We found a bunch of books in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, and one of the PC's was an ex-Catholic Priest, from the 1920s, FROM ITALY, who was literally high enough up in the Curia that he was used as a Sam Fisher-type exorcist. It took all of us ten minutes to explain why this guy should be allowed to read the latin essentially fluently and why it would be very likely he could at least get the sense of the Hebrew and/or Greek, despite the player not having put all those langauges on his character sheet. I'm literally playing a mute illiterate modeled after Harpo Marx in silent (heh) protest of this dumb mechanic. Any time we're about to go into a five minute discussion as to who can speak to this critical NPC and how much we're able to get out of him because of fluency levels, I just gently caress off and grab a new beer. We had to go to a synagogue and since he's Jewish he speaks Yiddish so they brought him along. Or, rather, as I told them "he doesn't 'speak, read or write' Yiddish, but he hears it just fine and he's willing to act it out for you, does that help?" PipHelix fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jul 12, 2020 |
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Jul 12, 2020 19:24
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I'm getting the most delightful image of him involved in one of Harpo's extended games of charades trying to convey "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young"
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Jul 12, 2020 21:16
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CHICO: "Oh it had young! How many young?" HARPO: *honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk ho-* GROUCHO: "This could go on for a while." A Night in Arkham is a vastly better crossover concept than What Ho, Gods Of The Abyss
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Jul 12, 2020 21:20
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Three of us in the game are big fans of Marx Brothers in general. One literally majored in Film in college. The module we're running has us interacting with the (actually really into occult poo poo) producer of Nosferatu, and the Film guy caught the DM flatfooted by knowing all about not only his occult ties but also the history of his movies and the people he was connected to (who are also npcs that were supposed to be revealed). ANYWAY the DM is not a Marx brothers fan and had a scene where we all stare into haunted mirrors, and asked us what we saw in turn, and the other two people who knew what was coming just immediately started groaning. e: this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT-sy0aLg except the devilmirror version was a lot nicer. Chumpo's shenanigans are cruel and tragic. He got introduced to the group doing a magic show where he pulled a dove out of his hat, shoved it in his mouth and chewed and then puked raw egg, shells and all, down the front of one PC's dress. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jul 12, 2020 |
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Jul 12, 2020 22:01
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Update on the White Plume Mountain group who uses life cleric goodberries to cheese their heal ups between encounters They polymorphed the huge giant crab and walked out with Wave  BUT.... I had Keraptis send additional patrols out and I made it through a lot of their goodberries this way. I didn't allow an attempted long rest (the tiny hut was dispelled by an encounter that had priests and veterans) and they are now heading into the western third with the floating river and the ziggurat with a lot of slots and features-per-LR gone. Anyway thanks for the ideas and thoughts on them, turns out burning their spell slots over time will probably work out.
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Jul 13, 2020 07:40
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Welp, I gave my PCs control of a prepaid hobgoblin mercenary army for 90 days. Their first plan was to go sack the city that pissed them off when they were 3rd level. Funny how quickly they turn evil. At the start of the session they were trying to figure out how to save the world from this army, by the end they were trying to figure out how to rule the world with it. PCs gonna PC.
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Jul 13, 2020 13:30
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Oh man there's all sorts of twists you could put on that, from extra services not included in the initial prepayment but performed without prompting to employment of the army renewing automatically after a certain period shorter than 90 days.
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Jul 13, 2020 13:41
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My Lovely Horse posted:Oh man there's all sorts of twists you could put on that, from extra services not included in the initial prepayment but performed without prompting to employment of the army renewing automatically after a certain period shorter than 90 days. Yeah I am pretty excited about it. They had killed the wizard who was the army's former employer, but by some odd contract, the army is bound to the possessor of two of the wizard's rings, not the man himself. Funny how those fantasy mercenary contracts get worded.... It was great watching the PCs go from hiding from the army (and there was every chance the army would march on by, never to be seen again), to terrified that they had been captured, to figuring out how to escape/what to do after the TPK they caused while trying to escape, to answering as evasively as possible when the mercenary general started asking what of the wizard's property they had taken, to 'oh poo poo wtf do we do with this army.' Their second plan was 'use this army against the dragon and steal his horde so we can continue to pay this army.' I half jokingly said I didn't think that would work because fantasy mercenary contracts always have a 'dragon clause (claws?)' that explicitly states that in the event of combat with a dragon occurring under any circumstances, the company is immediately released from its duties to its employer in order to defend itself, and that any draconic horde seized as a result of the company's actions shall be property of the company etc etc etc. I think they got the picture that this is a powerful tool to help solve some of their problems, but it wasn't going to instantly solve all of them.
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Jul 13, 2020 14:06
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How many rings did the wizard own and what counts as a ring for the purpose of the ownership clause? What happens if someone owns more of the wizard's rings than someone else? Picturing a guy rolling up all smug with the wizard's chainmail and crowning himself new hobgoblin general
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Jul 13, 2020 14:23
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In my party I have a half-orc (we are not playing DnD for context) that is dumb and a social outcast due to being a half-orc. That is why the player almost always hangs back in social situations - be that with party members or NPCs. This makes it a real challenge to include him in roleplaying - and I know for a fact that the issue is not the player being "shy". Do you guys have advice how to give him roleplaying opportunites? Due to lack of backstory the best I have is to make some allied NPC fearful of him or discriminate him due to being a half-orc - but my feeling is that this is neither compelling nor a good roleplaying opportunity.
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Jul 17, 2020 20:26
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It sounds like the problem is getting the player to speak up more. So, what is that character's specialty? What are they an expert on? What parts of their backstory can you pull into the story? All of that is suddenly relevant in the party's next adventure; they need that character's insight in order to come up with an effective plan. You can make it a social interaction with just the party; I imagine that would probably feel less threatening if the player has any social anxiety.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:19
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Qwan posted:In my party I have a half-orc (we are not playing DnD for context) that is dumb and a social outcast due to being a half-orc. That is why the player almost always hangs back in social situations - be that with party members or NPCs. This makes it a real challenge to include him in roleplaying - and I know for a fact that the issue is not the player being "shy". Do you guys have advice how to give him roleplaying opportunites? Due to lack of backstory the best I have is to make some allied NPC fearful of him or discriminate him due to being a half-orc - but my feeling is that this is neither compelling nor a good roleplaying opportunity. how much connection does he have with his orc side? making him an expert/mediator on some orc related issue is a good way to bring him into the fold. in a city have a half orc child character who is afraid of everyone except the half orc party member due to discrimination be a good source of information, etc.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:43
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Qwan posted:In my party I have a half-orc (we are not playing DnD for context) that is dumb and a social outcast due to being a half-orc. That is why the player almost always hangs back in social situations - be that with party members or NPCs. The first question to ask is "is the player okay with this?" They created the character knowing that they would be mute and socially outcast, that says to me that they don't want to be involved in social situations. I could be wrong of course -- maybe they wanted to create a mute outcast who engages in social stuff some other way -- but your first port of call should always be asking the player "hey, do you mind that you aren't interacting much when the party is talking? Where did you plan on taking this character?"
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Jul 17, 2020 23:21
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I probably should have posted a bit more detail: The module I run is pretty essentialistic and orcs are basically all wild savages. The character (like virtually all half-orcs) was most probably born due to his mother getting raped during an orc raid (which is why he was always a social outcast) and he was sold into slavery as a child (so he also had no contact with orcs whatsoever). He stayed a slave until he ran away and has since worked in menial labor. That is why I am so lost because unlike all my other PCs' backstory there is no starting point for anything there.Whybird posted:The first question to ask is "is the player okay with this?" They created the character knowing that they would be mute and socially outcast, that says to me that they don't want to be involved in social situations. That is a good question and I talked with the player about that, but we punted the issue due to the player being busy in RL and not really having time to flesh out his backstory/think of a direction. I should press the issue once he has more time again. But irregardless of the player being ok with that or not I as the GM am not ok with that. Like what is the point of playing a TTRPG if you do not interact with the worlds save for swinging a blade once in a while? And I think as a GM it is *mostly* my resposibility to provide all the players with stuff they can engage with - especially since I have quite a large party so I have to make an effort to move the "spotlight" around. Qwan fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 23:26
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Qwan posted:Like what is the point of playing a TTRPG if you do not interact with the worlds save for swinging a blade once in a while? There are players who do it for the social activity, or they enjoy imagining stories without having to contribute to those stories, or they enjoy the combat.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:38
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There are players who do it for the social activity, or they enjoy imagining stories without having to contribute to those stories, or they enjoy the combat. Yes, but that player is not one of those types. He is not passive in RL at all and in another TTRPG I played with him he played an involved socialite character with verve. He is 100% holding back "because thats what his character would do".
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Jul 17, 2020 23:43
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Qwan posted:The character (like virtually all half-orcs) was most probably born due to his mother getting raped during an orc raid (which is why he was always a social outcast) and he was sold into slavery as a child (so he also had no contact with orcs whatsoever). He stayed a slave until he ran away and has since worked in menial labor. That is why I am so lost because unlike all my other PCs' backstory there is no starting point for anything there. Are you sure that there's nothing there at all to build a story on?
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Jul 18, 2020 00:01
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Qwan posted:I probably should have posted a bit more detail: The module I run is pretty essentialistic and orcs are basically all wild savages. The character (like virtually all half-orcs) was most probably born due to his mother getting raped during an orc raid (which is why he was always a social outcast) and he was sold into slavery as a child (so he also had no contact with orcs whatsoever). He stayed a slave until he ran away and has since worked in menial labor. That is why I am so lost because unlike all my other PCs' backstory there is no starting point for anything there. not a fan of modules, or any setting really, that does that ... but if that is the premise you have plenty to work with. the group of slavers is a glaringly obvious backstory hook to me
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Jul 18, 2020 00:07
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| # ? May 23, 2024 16:24 |
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Qwan posted:I probably should have posted a bit more detail: The module I run is pretty essentialistic and orcs are basically all wild savages. The character (like virtually all half-orcs) was most probably born due to his mother getting raped during an orc raid (which is why he was always a social outcast) and he was sold into slavery as a child (so he also had no contact with orcs whatsoever). He stayed a slave until he ran away and has since worked in menial labor. That is why I am so lost because unlike all my other PCs' backstory there is no starting point for anything there. That's uh, quite the setting you have there. I disagree with you that the premise doesn't have room to expand. My first thoughts:
Edit: basically, just give the player some deeper connection with the world and show that it has more complexity than a stereotype and learned helplessness. Tenik fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 00:26
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