A Big Dwarf
There are some natural tensions built into fantasy games. The sword-jocks of the world like to pick on the nerdy, know-it-all wizards. Elves and dwarves have a long tradition of quarreling. And anyone who’s ever written Size: Small on a character sheet has heard their fair share of short jokes. Trading in-character barbs can be a lot of fun. Conflict is the foundation of good story after all. But the longer I play the more I realize that a little bickering goes a long way.
When we’re talking about dungeon-delving games like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons, the basic shape of the game dictates that you’re a group of diverse weirdos who work together to overcome obstacles. Sure you can have hidden agendas, simmering resentments, or even work in secret for the BBEG. But in the broadest sense these games are based on the concept of teamwork. The challenge rating system is designed around the idea of cooperative parties fighting against monsters. And as much as I might like to deny it, listening to another character constantly insult my own stops being “interesting RP” in a hurry. After a while, it gets to be downright annoying.
I know: shame on me for not being able to separate character from player. But I remember a simple role-play exercise I did back in high school. It was a psychology class, and I got volunteered to participate opposite another kid. We were told to simply repeat this phrase to one another: “You’re wrong.” It was silly and awkward, and I remember that we both laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Then we started. Our voices steadily rose. I felt myself getting inexplicably angry, and by the end we wound up shouting, “No, you’re wrong,” at one another. We became IRL enemies after that, and only reconciled a few weeks later thanks to a healthy dose of talking to each other like adults.
My point is this: Even if you know intellectually that you’re playing a make-believe game, it’s easy to let the appearance of negativity metamorphose into the real thing. So by all means, mock the druid for his Birkenstocks and overwhelming scent of patchouli, but consider doing so in moderation.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever let your ego creep into your character? Did it turn ugly, or did you manage to check yourself? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Not really ugly, but never really saw the appeal of Chaotic Randumb, and have little tolerance for such characters, be they PC or NPC. To this day I’ve never been able to make a character that likes slaadi, fey, eladrin, etc.
I can appreciate “shits and giggles”, but when it devolves into “diarrhea and manic laughter”, it’s time to prepare Order’s Wrath that day.
Chaotic stupid is always a weird one for me. Those characters are irritating because they don’t act like characters. They act like Grand Theft Auto avatars (or Goat Simulator avatars). They tend to be less a part of the game world than an extension of a player who wants to push boundaries for the sake of absurdity and humor. But then again, kender are a thing:
https://1d4chan.org/images/4/45/Kender_race_description_annotated.png
I’ve never read that before now. I’m glad the red text is there, because the black text makes me clench.
I understand the antipathy in earlier comics as directed at kender now.
Yah. Tasslehoff Burrfoot was cute in book form. I wouldn’t want to game with that dude though.
Bad for player characters maybe but potentially helpful for GM worldbuilding and NPCs. As in it’s the canon explanation for why some dungeons and other features in the Greyhawk setting are the way there are; various rich and/or magically powerful but very chaotic stupid characters using their wealth/magic to do things that don’t make sense to anybody but them. In particular Greyhawk Castle/Castle Zagyg and the Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad are explained this way.
I never actually got to play in Greyhawk. Care to expand on the craziness of those dungeons? You’ve got me curious.
Absolutely. I have gotten much better at recognizing when roleplaying feels are bleeding into real life, so it’s not a big issue, but i’ll be damned if I don’t feel them anyway.
Jealousy is the emotion that gets me most. One of my characters was a cute and innocent young man, a sort of androgynous Shifter. He was keenly interested in a Halfling Monk who had suffered a hard breakup with a man who left her to pursue a very unnecessary quest of vengeance. They spent a lot of time together, with him being very supportive, and they started taking steps leading them closer together. Once she started feeling better, he slowly started getting more romantic, and things seemed to be going well.
Then, the halfling’s player messages me between sessions to say that the ex is coming back, would my character mind an open/poly relationship? I calmly reply that no, he would only go for it if the third person was equally as interested in both of them, not just in it for one of them.
In my head, however, i’m thinking “OMG YOU BASTARD IF YOU BREAK MY CATBOY’S HEART I WILL EAT YOURS.” I will fully admit to being a little upset at him, being moody in general, listening to various music appropriate to the situation, and maybe even crying a little. True, it was also bad timing hormones-wise, but it was still a bit much even for me.
Since then I try to be better about it. =)
Oh bless your poor shipper heart. 😛
Being immersed in a character is one of the finest ways to experience and enjoy a game. But in order to play at all, you’ve got to sit back sometimes and take an author’s eye view of the situation. Doing both is a fantastically difficult balancing act.
I’ve gotta know though. Did emo cat ever wind up with punch munchkin?
He did indeed. Hehe, punch munchkin.
Currently playing a gnome wizard in 5e. When I first announced I was making him the other players snickered and started making short jokes, asking whether they couls use him as an improvised weapon, etc. I really didn’t want him to be a joke character, so I decided to make him CN (selfish neutral, not chaotic stupid) and a massive jerk, completely obsessed with magic and magical power and considering everyone else a meatshield to him. He also makes quite clear the disdain he has for other non-arcanists.
The trick has been balancing him to keep his personality while keeping him a team player and without the other players taking it personally. The first I solved more mechanically by prioritizing control spells over direct damage. He likes to manipulate the battlefield like a god, but is mainly buffing and debuffing and still needs others to actually lay the smack down. The latter I try to solve by being very clear that this is IC behavior. OOC I try to be good about congratulating others for a good roll or a nice play even while IC I’m scoffing at their primitive displays. I’m also open to him being humiliated IC and character development, as well as trying his best to save “his meatshields” if something bad is going down. He’s invested in them; they aren’t disposable.
I think it seems to be working ok. The other charcters don’t like him much IC, but OOC they seem to be a bit fond of him.
Well hey, you know your table better than me. If it’s all in good fun then it’s all good. That said, you did start out with the idea that, “I really didn’t want him to be a joke character.” If your buddies are trying to keep a little dignity for their characters too, then the meat shield schtick might get old.
Not everybody in the party needs to be best buddies, and a character concept that begins with “he’s a chaotic neutral massive jerk” can still be played well. But speaking for my thin-skinned self, I’d be wary of keeping that kind of PC around. Maybe your respect for the martial characters grows as they “do the sensible thing” and attain magic items…? Meh. Your character, and YMMV.
I definitely know this feeling. In my last campaign I played a bard, and while bards are awesome in 5e, this was everyones first time so a lot of mockery to my character still happened. It didn’t help that one guy had it in their backgrounds that they hated bards, though we both found that hilarious when I told him that I was a bard and he told me about that. This wouldn’t be bad by itself but I was playing a cc based bard who was the unluckiest character any of us had ever seen. He got critter constantly, never made his saves, and on death got reincarnated into a female halfling. The worst part was that every enemy always saved against his spells. While the average enemy would probably have only a 25-40% chance of saving, they saved almost every single time. It became a running joke that we all knew what would happen everytime, as only around 10 enemies failed their saves in the entire campaign of hoard of the dragon queen and till around level 9 or 10 in rise of tiamat, when it finally stopped. This of course led to a lot of mockery, and while I know it was all in character, it still irked me. Luckily after the bad luck spree ended my guy really shined and except for from one guy the jokes ended after that.
A run of bad luck is not fun. But I feel like adding insult to injury is 1) even less fun and 2) a good name for a new bard spell.
Theres a chanced I told this story on here before, but whatever, its a decent one.
My wife plays as a CN Elf Favored Soul, RPed fully to the stuck-up elven princess archetype. She, by happenstance, got 2 sets of dice that are the same, but inverse colors, for Christmas (one white with black characters, and one black with white). She came up with a fun little system that she felt made sense with her Chaotic and somewhat selfish character.
During combat she would plan two options for her turn, one of them more selfish or evil (healing/buffing herself, casting Sanctuary, summoning monsters) and the other more selfless or good (healing/buffing others, attacking or debuffing a baddie who’s attacking on of the other members, etc), then roll both d-20’s and a d6. Odd is the more selfish thing(represented by the black die), even is selfless (white die). What the options are fluctuate a lot, but we play fairly loose, and our GM is ok with it, so she’s been doing it since.
Welllll, one time we’re getting pretty beat up. I, the lone real fighter/tank of the group, is getting worn down, in need of a heal pretty bad. She, our lone healer, rolls, comes up odd, doesn’t heal me. I got a little…upset. “You don’t always have to leave it up to the dice! Your character would heal me in this situation!” She stuck to her guns, we all lived, and I felt silly and petty about it.
She still ribs me about it from time to time, and I’ve, generally learned to leave the game in the game, and let the dice fall as they may.
Just to clarify, the odds or evens roll is the roll of the d6, not the total or something.
Ooh… The old “let me roll to see what my character does” routine. I dunno man. I like the idea of dice playing a role in narrative, but that would drive me ever so slightly bonkers. It feels like an abdication of responsibility, you know? There are ways to represent a mercurial personality beyond “I may heal you, or I may risk a TPK because lol random.”
That said, I make it policy not to yell at my wife when we play games. Mostly because the treacherous harlot will wait weeks until the next game and then devote all of her resources to ganking me for “no apparent reason.” (The reason is that she likes seeing me turn that color of red.)
Going back to that first 5e game I’ve mentioned before, we rescued a human baby girl from a band of slavers in a dock town one time. My Ranger & my fiancé’s Bard took jet upon ourselves to be the surrogate parents for this poor thing, & take her to the nearest town where she would be safe. Of course, this didn’t fly with the DM’s railroad plan, & he tried every way he could think of to kill her off. He finally succeeded in a pyramid trap. We both flipped our shit, & even the other party members felt that was a dick thing for him to do. It wasn’t long after that she abandoned that game. I stuck it out a while longer, but ended up leaving when he pulled some bullshjt on me. But that’s a story for another day.
Oof. Railroading to kill a baby. Reminds me of that story about the stuffed tarrasque:
http://i.imgur.com/babf78o.jpg
Ow my emotions.
Yeah, we all were PISSED. And every attempt we made to bring the poor thing back to life got blocked. He was one of those DMs who cut his teeth DMing 2e-3e stuff, who felt that it was “DM vs PC”.
I guess it’s not a problem for either of my groups. One group, the leader is the gnome, so, no-one makes fun of his height. The other, we were going around talking speeds, and realized the group consisted of a halfling, a gnome, a dwarf, and one short human. Then shrugged and moved on.
Just you wait until a goliath joins the group. You’ll swarm that poor bastard like a pack of dad joke pirhana.
“How’s the weather up there? Do your rock ball? I bet you can pass a DC 10 climb check by standing up!”
I often got too invested in my character to the point that you are not sitting at the table with me, you are sitting with my character. I do voices (somehow I’m the only one at the table who can do it) and I often too submerged in the game that I use character’s voice to answer OOC questions. I also tend to make my characters into extreme: f.e. if I’m playing a flirt, I don’t flirt with just one person, I flirt with every NPC and PC, regardless of their gender or their player’s gender (I’m perfectly straight in real life).
So once I played a kitsune ninja girl who was very jealous of our swashbuckler elf: he managed to capture two witches that was trying to sacrifice him in some kind of ritual, and he made them his personal slaves, and he did it singlehandedly. Clearly a feat no one in party can top. So she first made a bet with him for his slave girls, but nearly avoided becoming his slave herself. That pissed her of even more, so she tried to poison him. He had immunity to this shit. She got a minor victory by accidentally letting one slave escape, but wasn’t satisfied because she didn’t plan for it. She tried to seduce him and then flirt with other people before his eyes to make him feel bad (a step down from poisoning, I realize that). Finally after the game the player came to me and asked: “What do you have against me?” And I felt very sorry for all that. But that was after the game. During the game I am she and she hates this elf prick with all her guts.
There’s nothing wrong with getting into character, but if it comes at the expense of other people’s fun, it may be time to step back. Being about to dip in and out of character is a skill, but it can be an important one when other people’s IRL feelings are on the line.
I always feel bad when this happens, so I guess there is a plus side: I don’t get mad at people for doing mean thing during the game. I can relate.
I remember a couple of times that I assured another player that, even if my character was furious at theirs for accidentally decapitating slaves while trying to free them, I thought it was hilarious.
That said, I usually know the people I’m gaming with well enough that they sometimes deliberately try to annoy me (especially my little brother), so the reverse has definitely happened—me making fun of it disliking a character because of stuff their player did. (Though it’s usually easy to find in-character justifications.)