Alt Isle
Sure it seemed like “vanilla wizard” would be fun in the beginning. But you’ve been playing for over a year in the same campaign. Progression is glacial, there’s no new campaign in sight, and the forums are chockablock full of intriguing new builds. Would it be so bad to quietly retire your dude and bring in a replacement?
But no… You mustn’t! Just think of all the stories you’ve yet to tell! Your backstory arc is nowhere close to done! Plus you’re really comfortable with the RP now, with established intraparty relationships and dangling quest hooks and such. Surely it would be disloyal to abandon your dude mid-campaign!
Such are my musing whenever I find myself tempted by this siren’s call. I find myself particularly tormented by images of my old character sitting at the campfire forever, waiting for her animating force to return and finish the tale. And it’s hard to inflict an incurable case of the listlessness on my beloved RPG brain child.
In these situations, you’ve got a couple of standard options. You stick it out, allowing your original character to linger on in perpetual mediocrity. You can bite the bullet and retire your dude, foregoing all that delicious established character development for the sake of your un-played alts. Or you can ask your GM to write you out of the story. Just set up for a heroic sacrifice and bam! Time to bring in the next guy, no strings attached.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we share some of our backup characters from our respective Alts Files? What do you wish you could play? Why are you tempted to play it? And how could you go about retiring your current dude and bringing in the new guy? Sound off with your own personal sirens down in the comments!
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Getting bored playing a wizard? Absurd! I still don’t get why anyone would play anything but a wizard or wizard type character. /s
I mean, just check the chart!
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wizardsandmelees_9442.jpg
Backs ups? I got back ups for days. Mostly due having more play time in the more lethal systems than DnD and one of my early DMs was bloodthirstier than I am. One of those I haven’t got a chance to play is a Pathfinger gunslinger, combining two classical elements, Hakkapeliitta and Sven Dufa, a dual pistol armed cavalryman with less than stellar mental faculties. Oh well he is waitibg in the great book of characters for next time pathfinder comes forth…. is the gunslinger still in 2nd ed?
Somewhere in Handbook-World, Gunslinger is beset by a sudden wave of empathy.
unless that halfpint knows how to ride and beat the crap out of opponent once he’s fired both guns during the charge he can keep soloing. Granted the finnish horse back then was relatively short in stature so it might, by very loose terms, would qualify as pony for him to ride.
I need to look into this, instead of me playing him I should make a campaing of 30 year war, and have the players be the Hackapells. Onwards to forums to look for victims!
Fired both…? I don’t understand. 😛
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/reload
Oh right, he had the magical autoreload guns… doesn’t matter doctrine is shoot and charge, if he wants to just shoot he can join the carusel of any other firearm equiped cavalry force. But Hackapells go in like bandits to a town in western movies.
My only ongoing campaign is a Scion game. We’re not even through the first adventure, and I’m already sitting on *three* backup characters.
Alexandra and her companion Mara. The monster hunter and the monster in hiding, each sure that their crush on the other is unrequited. A chance to play a ranged character that specializes in perception and tracking, and a chance to see if my roleplaying chops are actually up to handling their character arc.
The lost Scion and the lost sword. A Scion of Chang’e, Chinese goddess of the moon, separated from her divine parents on a vacation during the chaos of hurricane Katrina and forced to grow up mortal and isolated. Now she’s stumbled onto something just as cutoff from its roots as her: the sword of Freyr, and the giants that plague the Norse pantheon will stop at nothing to take it from her. Freyr’s sword attacks independently and uses the Scion’s mental stats to do so, which makes the optimization part of my brain do a happy little dance. And she’d have easy access to the Frost purview, one of the only purviews where every single power seems fun and interesting to me.
The nature spirit, out of their own time. A lesser child of the gods who refused to fight in the first war against the Titans, objecting to the unnecessary loss of life and imprisoned by the gods for their lack of contribution. But now the Titans are free again, and this time they’re bent on destroying the entire World, so this time war is genuinely necessary… and the gods are pressed enough to risk letting a wild-card loose from prison. Mechanically, a Dexterity grappler (as opposed to my current Strength grappler), sacrificing damage for control over the battlefield, augmented by healing and plant powers.
The hell of it is, I genuinely like my current character, Brand. He’s mechanically interesting, I’ve still got a lot of choices to make for how he progresses, and character-wise I enjoy how he flip-flops between gallant hero and edgy berserker. I just can’t keep myself from spawning new ideas in my free time.
Scion of the lost sword sounds fun to me. My favorite thing about the setting is allowing mix n’ match between pantheons, and this has that in spades.
Ok, keeping it to D&D, since otherwise my list of spare characters gets ridiculous…
* A tabaxi monk, by the name of Brilliant Sunbeam… likes to play with fire.
* Newgate, a goblin artificer. More than a little manic.
* Halsey, a fighter/rogue who duel-wields a scimitar and whip. A performer of sorts… always the center of attention.
* Hareth, a hobgoblin… well, not so much a sword-mage as a great-big-hammer-mage. Also likes to play with fire.
* Serafina, a paladin from a long line of paladins. A classic sword-and-board holy warrior.
* Bharbrek, a bugbear wrestler, and enthusiastic player of bagpipes.
That’s about half of the D&D section of my “character concepts” document. They’re written up in a little more detail than that in the document… usually a paragraph or two of personality and history. I have similar sections for supers, cyberpunk and steampunk concepts.
Most of them will never be played in a proper campaign, though because we never play our main campaigns when players are missing, I do get regular opportunities to try some of my ideas in one-shots and short campaigns. But really, I’m not creating them to play… I’m creating them because that’s fun.
I like to imagine the others staring in bafflement as Bharbrek bagpipes for all he’s worth.
I’d want out of the particular waiting room too.
That particular detail was purely because his 5e background gave proficiency in a musical instrument, leaving me wonder what on earth a bugbear fighter might play. Plus, I created him at about the same time as another character who was essentially a bard (technically a fey-pact warlock), and I figure that a couple of musicians might get on well.
I actually have a surprising number of musical talents among my character lists across the various genres. Not music-themed characters, apart from the odd bard… just people for whom some musical aptitude — whether a classical cellist or just a karaoke fan — is part of their background. I think I’ve talked about “hobby skills” here in the past, and I suppose music is a good one.
I looked. It doesn’t look like you commented on the relevant comic.
Maybe somewhere else, then. But broadly, I’m just thinking of how some systems offer mechanical traits that are mostly for flavour, rather than being regularly useful.
5e backgrounds, for example… you’ll generally get some non-skill proficiency like a musical instrument or a tool, and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever use that proficiency on a die roll — but granting that choice prompts some thinking about why your barbarian is a musician, or your fighter dabbles in alchemy or woodworking.
Or for another example, the game Eclipse Phase ensures that characters have a mix of both active and knowledge skills — and the latter includes an “interest” category alongside more professional skillsets. It’s unlikely to _matter_ that your character is an expert in Martian breweries or strategy games, but they’re there on the list of examples.
Since I develop my characters as I roll them up, I don’t really have many that haven’t been played at least once.
That said, the one character I always wanted to play in hubby’s Top Secret campaign was my French spy. She was a woman of passion, an ex-member of the French underground during the war (she was a child of passion too) and an Olympic sharpshooter for her new country (USA). We only played through her introductory session, but she ended up down in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria wrapped in a towel, screaming at the chief for the abuse of bottles of wine at the end of it.
That was supposed to be “chef”
Why a towel? What happened to her clothes!?
She was up in her hotel room and ordered an expensive bottle of red wine. While waiting, she took a shower and when the bellboy brought the bottle up, it had been chilled. She is a serious wine snob and sent him back for a new bottle. This went on through a couple more bottles that he abused and she finally had enough that she stormed downstairs to shout at the chef. She was perfectly comfortable in her towel, so it never occurred to her to get dressed.
Who chills red wine!? Somebody fetch me a towel and a hotel manager!
It’s easier when instead of characters you play factions. As in Blades In The Dark, have each player play a single faction, they play the leader and the other players the rest of the gang. They take turns and rotate the faction. So a four players group got four gangs and each player got a character in each one 🙂
Fun for all!!! Except the DM that needs to work and keep track on all that but then if you want fun then why would you be DMing?
Sounds like a setup ripe for PVP. I wonder how you adjudicate that sort of thing?
my problem has always been that I don’t ever have a back up character. I just have another alt I want to play.
as a functioning altaholic, I will create what might be intended as a back up, but then I will have another idea and create a different back up and another idea and etc etc the cycle continues.
and should my back up actually be needed (so far they never have), I will not even use the back up I created, I will just create a brand new character from whole new start, because I have lived with the back up for so long, that their individual back story has become its own thing and they are too involved for me to start with now.
I have created more characters than our DM has played NPCs!
More characters! MORE characters!! MORE CHARACTERS!!!
(fun fact: our DM has used a couple of my created alts as NPCs in our campaign, so at least they don’t languish in total unrealized status as another character sheet in the pile of alts)
Yep, see the list in my own comment. Creating characters is fun.
And you’re right, often you end up developing them so much that they can’t actually be fitted into any campaign… especially if you’ve then gone out to create some of the other characters around them, and before you know it, you’ve got the entire party covered.
My character-concepts document lists three entire superhero teams (4-6 characters each) plus a bunch of semi-independents, and an assortment of NPC allies and villains for each,
I’m curious how you go from “folder of alts” to “my DM uses my alts as NPCs.” Like… What’s the process? Does this DM regularly raid your folder? Do you request they use an alt that would fit well into a given setting?
if they are originally intended as a back up, and/or they have been backgrounded to such an extent that they are no longer playable in the campaign as current, then they get refiled under “alt for another day” and since I am only in one main game with one group, that DM asked me once to use one of my many many MANY many alt characters as an NPC and I felt honored because otherwise they would just remain a character sheet that sits dead like the vacant hosts standing around in the sub basement level of Delos Incorporated.
The DM knows the characters because they were originally intended as an alt, or because I just like to share my character ideas, and so if he thinks one will fit a situation, he has total permission to use one. I can always create another. And another, and another…
Note: this hasn’t happened a lot. Just three or four times so far and usually he makes an alteration or two also so my original idea is still technically a valid choice for use by me, but really I almost never use a character I created in a new game. I almost always have to be creating that character for a game about to happen or else they just get added to the pile.
I’m fortunate to be a DM, so all my character ideas trickle into games as NPCs, and I get to see them in action. If they’re really enjoyable, I might upgrade them to PC later, when the opportunity presents itself.
The downside to this, I’ve found, is that players have less respect for NPCs than PCs. They often don’t bother to remember NPC names.
That leads to this: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/notable-nobles
And it turns out that if your character gets a nickname as an NPC, they will never be able to get PC respect from the rest of the players. Once Lord What’s-his-bucket, always Lord What’s-his-bucket.
Lol… I was sure you were linking to this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/rumpel-your-siltskin
I have… way too many builds I want to try out at some point. Everything from a kobold wizard trying to reconstruct a dragon’s lost library, to a Bruce Banner-inspired scientist barbarian, to an ex-baker ratfolk swashbuckler who simply exists for a pun (they’re a pie rat). However, to spare you a novel’s worth of suggestions, I’ll instead share some times I actually got to use a backup character.
For my first long-term campaign, I started out playing Tsola Hyokiri, a firmly Lawful Good human fighter in a freewheeling, chaotic party. Between her inflexible moral standards and lack of charisma, she just couldn’t get along with her companions, so I had her leave and brought in new characters to replace her. First was the carefree elf rogue Lentri, but I lost her character sheet and ended up creating the charming but selfish halfling bard Felrin Erando to replace HER, and he remained my main character for the rest of the campaign.
In another, much later game, the party got badly overwhelmed by a bunch of earth elementals. Not wanting a TPK, the GM let us bring in new characters as backup when our first characters were out of the fight. As such, my badly-injured catfolk witch Tevania fled to get reinforcements, and once she was safe, the lizardfolk monk Vishkal ran in with fists flying to take her place alongside other fresh heroes.
This strikes me as somehow approrpriate. Who know what she’s getting up to unsupervised?
[PF1]Half-elf beastmorph/vivisectionist alchemist who’s using experimentation on their own body (and incredible violence) as an unhealthy coping mechanism for their family drama and sense of identity
– Tiefling alchemist (vanilla or chirugeon) who’s obsessed with making the biggest boom possible, then mass-producing it.
– Human bolt-ace gunslinger into alchemist. Picks up the extra arms discovery twice to be able to shoot and reload two crossbows at the same time, using the dex boost from mutagen to offset the penalties from two-weapon fighting.
– Human urban barbabarian/invulnerable rager with a hatred of casters, secret passion for dance, and odd dreams featuring a six-armed metal man screaming in anger (eventual oracle dip). She’s also a very good cook, and the idea for this character got inspired by Monster Roll back in 2012, not Dungeon Meshi.
– Human bard (vanilla or sound striker) who loves providing uplifting battle-poems from the safety of the back lines while firing arrows. May or may not be adding some inspiration from Blumineck to this one
– Dwarf daring champion cavalier seeking to perfect the art of dueling despite the physical disadvantages of his race. Fun fact: a heavy pick is a one-handed piercing weapon.
– Human cleric of Gorum seeking the art of The Perfect Strike with his deity’s favored weapon, the greatsword. Channel smite+vital strike+the damage boosts from the destruction domain and ferocity subdomain.
– Undine druid who seeks spirituality through the aspect of water. A one level dip into master of many styles monk to pick up snake style before getting wild shape. Eventually will spend all her time as a water elemental using snake style to deflect attacks while providing casting support.
– Oread cave druid with crystaline skin. A one level dip into barbarian allows combining a maximized vital strike with the powerful slam attack of the carnivorous crystal ooze shape.
– Half-orc hexcrafter magus who learned his magic from his winter witch mother. Eventually uses a combination rime spelled frostbite and the enforcer feat to apply lots of debuffs to enemies before turning his hexes on them.
– Dwarf zen-archer monk with an irrational hatred for all things that fly. Will be extremely resistant to spells and shoot out tons of arrows so his slow speed doesn’t affect his reach on the battlefield.
– Gnome heavens oracle who loves making the pretty displays with his magic. He also uses them to stun his baddies, which nicely sets them up for coups-de-grace.
– Nagaji battle oracle who was kicked out of his tribe after an accident nearly blinded him, picking up his magical abilities only later. Uses his spear for opportunity attacks while still casting on his turns. Grabbing the undeath word of power via a feat gives him a standard-action summon-like effect that can quickly swing fights in his favor. He always disposes of his animated minions after a fight, finding them useful but distasteful.
– Human paladin VMC life oracle uses life link to keep their friends alive no matter what. Through the power of fey-foundling and swift-action lay-on-hands, they can weather shocking amounts of harm.
– Twin paladins eventually find out their family tree is just super weird. Both eventually head into dragon disciple. One dips archeologist bard for extra luck, the other has racial heritage:kobold allowing scaled disciple oracle to count for DD. Then along the way of getting DD also comes eldritch heritage: abyssal. Their str scores are going to be through the roof by the end.
– Human paladin with a swashbuckler dip for dex stuff goes into shadowdancer. Play off being both the holy light along with your LG undead companion. Maybe mix in some eclipse-theming.
– Half-elf guide ranger knows [area where the game takes place] like the back of their hand. Str-based two-weapon fighting using ranger to bypass the Dex-requirements.
– Half-elf rogue ninja/scout with a 2 level dip into paladin. Charging super sneak attacks with sap adept/master. Be batman and knock out the baddies. Alternatively, be Darkwing Duck.
– race-undetermined slayer going in to horizon walker. Fights with two shields, will eventually pick up the dimensional assault line of feats so he can pinball the enemies around the battlefield by slamming them away with his shield bashes then teleporting back over to them to keep attacking.
– Kitsune sorcerer uses an archetype and race trait (not to be confused with alternate racial trait) to have all 9 tails by level 7.
– Half-elf wild-caller summoner gets ALL the summons-boosting feats plus has tons of evo points to make their eidolon the best guardian of nature possible.
– Elf wizard is the rival of the tiefling alchemist from above and focused on making the best fireballs ever. A walking fireworks show and/or artillery battery. Picking up preferred spell at 5th level means I never need to actually prepare fireball, I can spontaneously convert any spell prepared into metamagiced fireballs and still be casting as a standard action.
– Human muscle wizard only casts spells with no somatic components because they’re using VMC into battle oracle to gain heavy armor proficiency and go into eldritch knight with only wizard levels.
[5e]Half-orc barbarian/rogue who’ll be the ultimate thug and wrestler. Combining advantage on str-based rolls from rage with expertise in athletics. Also able to get sneak attack at any time by using reckless attack.
lol. This was just a quick ctrl+a, ctrl+v for you, wasn’t it? XD
I particularly appreciate the Darkwing Duck inspiration mixed in there.
I wish! That’s just summarizing what’s on each of their separate entries in my folder of builds.
I have more characters than places to play them, every time I get an idea I make one up and set the sheet aside ‘just in case’ and I have no idea how many online ones I have just sitting in limbo patiently (or impatiently) waiting their turn 🙂
Just chillin’ with Rouge no doubt.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-outer-planes-part-2-limbo
I haven’t had THIS specific bug hit me but I’ve been hit by a related one. Namely, “oooh, that would make for a fun one-shot idea.” For context, last October I did a pair of one-shots a la Treehouse of Horror. These were “hey, squishy humans, go play with the Robot Masters” and “what does Candle Cove look like in cyberspace?” And of course, immediately after that, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next year. Often to the detriment of the campaign I was supposed to be focusing on.
Hey, you’re in good company.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-spooky-season
You know this comic doesn’t miss a Halloween. 😀
In my current campaign, one of my players decided he wanted to switch from his current character (dragonborn sorcerer) to an aaracokra artificer. Luckily, the party is heading toward a boomtown built around excavating an ancient ruin full of magitek artifacts, so it makes perfect sense for an artificer to be hanging around there looking for other adventurers to help him delve into some dangerous areas.
The previous character has the merchant background, so he’s going to decide that the adventuring life is too violent for him and sign on with some riverboat traders.
There should be a multisyllabic German word for the feeling of unrealized narrative development when one of your players asks to retire a PC.
Here’s hoping the riverboat life is a fulfilling one!
You can always ask the GM to swivel that spotlight you for a bit so you can FINISH your story out or at least get the next chapter of it. GM’s are busy people, and while it might be hard to accept, they probably aren’t spending as much time thinking about YOUR CHARACTER while they right their LotR fanfiction with good, hot drow in leather pants.
They can also be timid and recalcitrant creatures. Depending on the one, you might include a Twix in your pitch, or possibly a pizza.
Shushers, man! Kineticist might be listening.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/fandom-folly
I’ve got a bunch across a few systems and some overlap (they *will* find their time in the spotlight at some point):
Seren: Fey Bastard (affectionate), either a homebrew Fey race for Pathfinder 2e (sprite just wasn’t doing it for this character, though I had to explain that multiple times to the well-meaning DM), Eladrin for 5e, or Moyishuu for Starfinder. Ranger/Wizard for the first two systems, and Witchwarper for Starfinder. Absolute magpie for anything shiny (or true names), and will attempt to con anything if not given a good reason to avoid doing so.
Alex: Human Bard for Pathfinder/5e, Dirindi Envoy for Starfinder. No proper backstory for Starfinder. In PF/5e, used to be a basically-self-aware cartoon character that got thrown into [setting] via time-travel gag. Looking for a way home due to his nemesis™ making a mess of his place Road Runner/Wile. E. Coyote style. Animator by trade, for the fun of it.
Quinn: Variant Human Archfey Warlock, 5e. Sold to the Fey as a child, was raised by their patron. Refuses to tell anyone anything about themself.
Yomi: Kitsune Wizard/Bard focusing on necromancy, PF. No backstory, created solely from music video inspiration.
Mirydain: Fleshwarp Psychic with the Reflection versatile heritage. PF. Backstory ended up as a much more comedic version of Frankenstein, with Miry as the monster. Ey’s frail as heck though.
Unnamed Strix Ranger: What it says on the tin. PF. No backstory, made to try out ranger class.
Chck-chck: Kobold Gunslinger. PF. Former deputy of whatever town fits best in the setting, cousin to my sister’s kobold Artificer.
Bryce Benner: Kobold Barbarian. PF. Turn a kobold into the Hulk and you’ve got a good idea. Cousin to Chck-chck and the aforementioned artificer.
Scrapper: Space Goblin Mechanic. Starfinder. No backstory, but built around having a very fast, very unstable junkbike.
Veils of the Quest: In progress homebrew character based around the Masters of the Bazaar in Fallen London. Rogue/Fighter. PF. Essentially giant space bat with hoarding and murder tendencies.
If we’re counting characters made for campaigns that haven’t started/have been cancelled/finished:
Marshall Lalune: 5e. That one wizard I keep mentioning from my cancelled campaign. Found new life as a Starfinder Android, Technomancer/Mechanic. In the process of being ported over to Pathfinder, and had a brief stint as a mage in Last Arc. Has kind of become the first character I ever play in a new system unless I get a better idea.
Trios: Eladrin Barbarian for a 5e campaign. Like the rest of the PCs, previously a deity (in this case, one of knowledge, willpower, and emotion). A huge reference to Pokemon’s Lake Trio of legendaries.
Prince Lukas: Homebrew Ghost Fighter/Druid. 5e. Betrayed by his fiancee and murdered, had to leave his kingdom to avoid being exorcised. Looking to return and save his people, thus finishing his unfinished business. Waterdeep Dragon Heist, when my table gets around to it.
Vientore: Elanaya Envoy for Starfinder’s Dead Suns once we’re done the current campaign. Might get replaced with one of the above. Not much of a backstory.
Quercus: Ghoran Fighter for a PF oneshot that got turned into a three-shot that got set aside for a while. Kinda miss this guy, he was comically stoic.
Sibyl: Skeleton Fighter for a PF spooky oneshot. Evil in a fun way, was the jock archetype in a horror movie team and sold out to the villain in exchange for being resurrected after dying. Proceeded to die again to the comic relief. Survived the oneshot though with a partial villain win.
Some of these characters I’ve resorted to just writing them into Situations™ because otherwise it would be ages before they saw any adventure barring unfortunate character death or retiring in quick succession.
What constitutes a Situations™? Is that like a short story outside of the campaign, or do you resort to NPCing your would-be PCs?
Going to mention mine here because of connections™️
Unplayed Characters:
Kallahan: Fleshwarp Psychic for PF. A creachur™️ in looks, but a sweet boy in personality. Magically created by an archmage couple because they wanted a biological kid (bloodline-locked artifacts or something), but didn’t have the right “equipment” and also were both ace.
Indus: Elven Druid for either D&D or PF. Born to a noble family in a mountainous northern city, he was the elven equivalent to 7 when the forces of [Insert BBEG Here] came and destroyed the city he lived in. Out of his family, he’s (supposedly) the only survivor, and ran into the wild to escape. The trauma’s blocked out most of his past and he doesn’t like getting close to people (he gets attached way too quickly, and then the nightmares he has include them). If he does meet someone who can generally survive things (like an adventuring party), he would end up as the Mom Friend™️.
Vioravan: Shimreen Precog for Starfinder. Basically what you would get if you took the manga version of Purple Link from Four Swords and gave him the ability to see through and mess with time. He’s meant for the same Dead Suns campaign as Vientore.
Kaleb Queen: Mortal character for a Chronicles of Darkness oneshot. A college student and aspiring horror writer, he and his eventual party somehow manage to outright buy a Victorian era manor. As the suspiciously low price should have warned the group, the whole place is very haunted. Kaleb has a bit of an advantage on the ghost finding with his Unseen Sense Merit making him see his breath as red mist whenever one’s nearby, but he does have some claustrophobia from a intentionally blocked out event where he was kidnapped by the Seers of the Throne and almost became a Grigori (magical security/spy camera Powered By A Forsaken Person).
On Hold Characters:
Oscar: Eldritch Knight for D&D. Also a playtest for a homebrew race, he’s the avatar of a living stronghold. Not really much to say about him really, but he’s cool.
Kade: Lashunta Mechanic for Star finder. Used to work for a group of Fixers as a roboticist, then switched to a job at EJ Corp. Currently freelancing with the rest of the party. He’s in the same campaign as Kumar’s Starfinder Marshall.
Cancelled/Retired/Finished Characters:
Gadget: Kobold Artificer for D&D. Was my first character for a Wildmount campaign, but as his backstory was very plain (and I didn’t build him that well) I ended up switching him for a different character. Chk-chk and Bryce’s cousin.
Morro: Human Storm Sorcerer for D&D. Was the first character I was playing for Oscar’s campaign, but I kind of got tired of playing him so he got retired. Very much inspired by the Ninjago villain of the same name.
Kairos Realtá: Aasimar Chronomancer. Gadget’s replacement. There hasn’t been a session for his campaign for months now, and it hadn’t been as fun as it had been, so he’s basically retired with probably no replacement.
Kasumi/Rei: Kitsune cleric from Sibyl’s campaign. Died because some noble was jealous of the large amount of time s/he was spending with his wife, and will not answer whether or not s/he spent some of that time making out with said noble’s wife. Survived the one shot.
Gary the Tax Man: Exactly what’s on the tin. He was for a Dungeon Crawl Classics one shot and was one of 2 characters to make it to level 1. Otherwise, he’s completely average.
I… think that’s everyone? I’ll reply to this if I think of any more.
If I understand correctly, Situations™ is when that person is GMing, either to use them as GMPCs or for solo (the one player is also the GM) campaigns.
Short stories, Easter eggs/cameos in oneshots, and the occasional character rewrite/alternate universe. Actually, Seren started out as that last one with Marshall as the original character and then kinda grew into his own.
I will also have to add to the list (XD):
Kevin and Knives: not sure class or race for either, but they would work with all systems. Already have a good handle on their personalities, because they’ve featured as NPCs in every campaign and oneshot I’ve run by now and Kevin was offhandedly mentioned in Sibyl’s campaign (ie the comic relief character that killed her the second time). It’s about time they had their own adventures (at some point lol)
That’s why I joined a bunch of living world groups on Discord that allow multiple characters. I can play them all!
Finding the time to actually get into a session and actually play…… that’s another story all together.
I recently applied my oracle to one of my gestalt groups. I gestalted with Fighter and what had originally taken until level 15 was now finished at level 6. So now I can give her tons of more interesting feats instead of just ones needed for her mechanics.
How are you finding the balance in gestalt? I admit to having some trouble figuring out how to challenge that party without oops-you’re-deading them.
The GM’s seem to figure it out. Levels matter a lot, of course. Each session has a level range for the characters. So you might have a level 5 and level 6 character in a party, but not a level 5 and level 10.
“Don’t start nothing you ain’t gonna finish.”
The solution, to me, is to not have “back up” characters. The very notion seems counterproductive.
When I make a character for play, I make that one character for that one campaign, period. Not that I’ve had to yet, but if I did have to retire a character mid-campaign but keep playing, I would make another character then and there, tuned to the specific circumstances of that campaign at the state it is in. Whether mid-campaign or beginning-of-campaign, making a character for a campaign is best done in consultation with the GM and other players, which will usually diminish any urge to make back up characters.
Having a generic “back up” character in storage but theoretically playable implies having a potentially playable character made in ignorance of the campaign it will be played in. That, to me, diminishes the entire point of making and playing a character. (Granted, it is more suitable for RP-light games, particularly ones where combat is the only possible form of conflict resolution. I don’t play those much, as I get that sort of energy more conveniently from certain genres of video games.)
The closest thing to back ups I make are ones not attached to any particular campaign, that are never intended for play. Sure, it can be fun to make up builds detached from any campaign – but find other venues to share those characters in. By analogy, I have made many a ship for the Traveller RPG system – where, often enough, the party’s ship can act like another character – and posted a fair number to their main wiki for anyone to use in their campaign. I don’t make “back up” ships for the campaign that I am in, even if and when it looks likely that the party’s current ship may soon be destroyed.
Why not attach one of these builds to an existing campaign? Methinks it would save some time at character gen.
Because there’s more to a player character than a build. Sure, perhaps you can start with a build, taking it as inspiration. But then – ideally – you add in the circumstances of the campaign, in particular the other player characters, to determine what would make for fun interactions.
For instance, would any of Wizard’s back ups have the same fling with Thief? That is impossible to say from the perspective of just a build, as that perspective would not take into account the specific other characters present in the campaign.
Note also that, in the situation depicted in the comic. Wizard has been generated. That means that, outside of specific circumstances calling for one player to play multiple characters (which never come up in most campaigns) or until after Wizard has been retired as a player character (which means Wizard’s plot has been resolved, one way or another), it is no longer character gen time, so there is no cause to bring up any of those other builds. It does not go the other way: merely having the opportunity to play one of those other builds is not, by itself, reason to retire Wizard.
If it seriously feels like that siren call exists, something else is going on – possibly dissatisfaction with the campaign – that should be resolved, and that merely making and playing a new character from a new build would probably not fix by itself.
“the forums are chockablock full of intriguing new builds”
I play characters, not builds. Another reason I hate D&D, it twisted back to it’s wargaming roots instead of continuing to move away from them.
But like… Are there any characters you want to play?
Nah, I don’t make alts just to hang about unplayed. If I had a game with a character shaped hole in it, I’d certainly come up with one for it… but I kinda stopped making characters to go unused a long time ago.
I do have 2 character shaped corks waiting for very specific holes to plug in a game, Box Cat and Guardian Angel.
Box Cat was originally envisioned for a Gamma World 7e game (7e is very “wild and wooly”), but the game fell apart before it even really started… in part I think because the PCs beig pitched were so very wild.y. bizarrely different. I can’t remember everyone else (we did have an MLP remake PC*), but Box Cat was a cat that lived in a box, carried it around on him, etc. When together Box and Cat were a single entity that was telepathic and fully sapient. If separated by “too great a distance”, they were a sapient box (it could sense it’s environment to a limited degree, but not move or interact) and a semi-intelligent house cat (that became less intelligent the longer they were separated). When together through the “magic of who-gives-a-fuck-it’s-a-‘D&D’-game” they were basically as capable at regular things as any humanoid PC and were telepathic.
Guardian Angel was built for a GURPS Supers game that fell apart right before I got to join (a childbirth, a new job, and few other things and suddenly everyone but me and the GM were too busy to play). She was a disembodied possessing ‘ghost’, they needed a host body to survive in, and theirs was in a coma. They preferred to use villains that they’d possessed… but you can only do that for so long before that villain really should be turned in for justicing.
Anyway, that’s why I don;t make characters to just sit on a shelf without an immediate game to play them in, they hang around, taking up brain space not being played.
.* The MLP refluff was a Dawn Spackle, a talking unicorn/pony who had powers of “dawning sunlight” and “filling over holes” – so wound care/healing, fixing holes in walls, filling hole sint he ground, restitching the very fabric of reality… (we joked about the last part).
I’m not going to share my List of Shame, but I will offer advice for anyone bitten by the chargen bug. Link their backstories to your current character as friends/family, then offer them to the GM as NPCs. That way, the GM appreciates you putting effort into their campaign world, it’s easy to bring them into the party as backups, since the party already knows them, and the GM can’t murder your character’s family for drama, since they are also your backup characters.
That’s killing -2 birds with one stone!
The GM can totally murder you family for drama, knowing how easily you can make more characters. Besides: if it has stats, it can be killed, and you gave them stats.
By every god and his mother do I suffer from this! Not a day goes by when I DON’T think of a new character concept for one of the games I have…I’ve wanted to play through ALL of Pathfinder and Starfinder’s Adventure Paths across their respective editions. They number 54 and counting…in the span of the 12 years I’ve played Paizo games and over many play-by-posts that have started with high hopes and burned out, I’ve only managed to play TWO to completion (Iron Gods and Dead Suns, for Pathfinder and Starfinder respectively).
I’m still three sessions from the end of Dead Suns. Dunno if it’s ever coming back at this point. :'(
Sending you an e-hug!
“Vanilla wizard” makes me think of of a spellcaster specialising in vanilla-based magic.
“Summon Ice Cream”, mostly.
I’m stuck with two backup-characters I’ve never quite got the chance to play. One was as a duo with my wife, a Goliath Abjuration Wizard who was a nigh-bog-standard erudite archetype who reached out into the vast collective consciousness of the multiverse when choosing a name to go down in history as for his graduating thesis. This worked about as well as asking any large group, and thus the Wizard McBoatface set out into the world and was immediately saddled with a very small Kenku who decided the hood of his robe was her new home and she was going to make that everyone’s problem.
The other idea I had started as “Oh hey, Zealot Barbs can be rezzed for free? Hahah, wouldn’t it be funny if he just got out of every Social encounter by stabbing himself knowing they’d rez him when the fights came around?”
It has since evolved with help from my roommate into a trust-fund son of some big-shot adventurer who’s out galavanting across the planes. His godparent was given full access to a sizable fortune on the condition he kept the kid from dying, or at least staying dead. So said godparent convinced the entitled brat to go down the Zealot Barb route far enough that he could be revived, stuck some poor sap priest (which my roommate wants to play) with a contract to always bring him back, and ran off with most of the fortune to fantasy tahiti.
The resulting character is Mood Apathetic, a perpetually complaining Emo-Pastiche with a “Knife Goes Here” mail slot tatoo on his chest and a dagger named ‘Naptime’ that he uses any time he doesn’t want to deal with something. Ex: “Ugggh, the desert is too hooooooot… Bring me back when we’re out of it.”
He is absolutely designed to be hated. Which sounds like a weird amount of fun to me, which is… concerning.