Battle Trance
You might notice that Monk looks rather different here! Apparently a lot of folks were having trouble figuring out that he was a gnome, so we’ve adjusted his skintone and given him some oversized gnomish eyebrows for good measure. Of course, today’s comic is more than skin deep. It’s all about PC exceptionalism.
Just look at poor Monk there. Dude wants so badly for his training to feel special. To feel as if his powers set him apart from common folk, and make him something extraordinary within the fiction of the game world. When the product of your life’s worth of kung-fu montages looks like a cantrip though, it’s awfully easy to get discouraged. In my experience, it takes a group effort to make the world feel as magical as it does in your head. In other words, when it comes to feeling as cool as your character, you need buy-in from your fellow players.
I experienced this mess myself most recently in a 5e game. I forget the precise situation, but my warlock was having some kind of argument with a buddy’s eldritch knight. It might have had something to do with giving my imp companion a set of miniature bagpipes. (Imagine bagpipe music, but off-key, constant, and even higher-pitched.) In any case, I’d reached the end of my patience, and wanted to storm off from the conversation in a puff of drama.
“My eyes glow gold,” I said. “The pupils rotate to snake-like slits. His voice seems to boil up from some infernal pit when he says—”
“Yeah yeah,” interrupts my fellow tiefling. “I can cast thaumaturgy too. Big whoop.”
Now I admit, that’s not a big deal interaction on paper. It’s even a reasonable thing for a character to say in the middle of an argument. But in my own head, it felt as if I was violently ejected from the fantasy. My character wasn’t an imposing creature in league with the Fiend. I was suddenly a nerd in a basement getting too worked up over a minor spell.
This is what the drama kids mean when they talk about the “yes, and” principle. Implicit in my melodramatic bit of character description was the idea that “I’m being intimidating.” By dismissing that subtext, my buddy the eldritch knight negated and rejected the move. That’s her right of course. The way your character acts and reacts is always yours to choose. But speaking as the guy on the other side of the table, it felt like all the momentum had gone out of the conversation. If she’d popped her own thaumaturgy in turn, described an involuntary step back, or even replied with a sardonic, “No need to get upset,” it would have felt as if I’d effected the world. As it stood, I could only muster a lame, “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying,” before letting the scene peter out.
How about the rest of you guys? Do you ever struggle to make the PC in your head match the one in play? Do you feel like you’re on the same page as your buddies when you imagine what your character is like? By the same token, do you ever feel as if the impact of your mechanics doesn’t quite match up to the in-game fluff? Tell us your tale of mismatched expectations down in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
This comic reminds me of just a few days ago, when I played a 50-year-old elven illusionist. Elves physically mature at the same rate as humans, but are only psychologically considered adults around 100. So it was essentially a 10-year-old girl in the body of an adult with the power to warp reality with her arcane powers beyond comprehension of the standard mind, and also create illusions of flying rainbow kittens. (The illusory reality illusionist feature is really great for playing a reality-warping wizard, by the way. Really helps the mechanics match the fluff)
Truly, Magus is a child at heart.
Uhm, am I missing something, or did monk spontaneously change skin color/race from goblinoid green to halfling pink? You can see the difference in the linked comic.
Edit: Apparently its gnomish green. My mistake!
He is the wrong color though. He’s green in Enlightenment and Ki’d Up.
Added a belated explanation to the top of the blog.
Good call! I always thought he was a goblin (a non psycho, WoW-ish version compared to the Pathfinder version) until I read his cast description.
I had a character who was one of my typical creations, meaning her backstory made the Gm’s face go pale and him exclaim “Oh, I can use that!” in equal measure. Long story short, she was test subject in a study to see if exposure to emotional trauma could facilitate the awakening of magical potential. It was a modern fantasy-ish setting. Needless to say she was a basketcase of trust issues, freakout reactions, and due to her water magic, an unhealthy dose of bipolar. (The last part was actually setting based, all Espers had thematic mental issues in that particular setting. It was homebrew. )
So we ended up on a ship while everyone is busy shunning my character due to her single minded murder attempt on the scientist who tormented her during the project, who apparently now worked for the government group that one of the other players was a member of. My character is angry, betrayed and hurt, and I make a big scene of her leaping off the ship into the water below. The government agent(male player, female character) is like “Whatever, she’ll come back.” The other two Espers(Both guys in both contexts) assume it is a cat-fight, and go to play chess or something.
So when everyone else went out for a smoke break, I tell the GM that Aya is sinking into a mixed episode on the underside of the ship, show him my character sheet, then advise how the weather and waves just keep getting worse. He laughs and decides it is not only perfectly playing my flaw, but really in line with how he wanted powerful Espers to behave in the setting. They come back in, he starts narrating the storm, they ignore it at first, then start getting worried that the ship might capsize. None of them think to try to get ahold of Aya, though they don’t actually know where I am.
The ship capsizes, people end up in lifeboats, and Aya finally breaks the surface as she realizes she can see the top of the ship. Response from the agent was “Where were you, we could have used your help during the storm!” Aya pauses, stares hard, then just dives back under the water. Finally, after a few silent beats, the fire user looks over to her and says “Didn’t your boss say she was really emotionally unstable?” Silent Beat. Female agent facepalms. “She WAS the storm.”
Those two characters continued to not get along mainly because the agent refused to have any empathy for Aya’s situation. There were several other times where I would rp Aya just falling apart emotionally and the other PCs would just kind of ignore it. NPCs would comment about how she was being affected by her powers again, but they just had nothing for it. Ended up with me playing a lot more emotionally reserved characters for a long time cause I was wondering if I had somehow done something wrong.
Ouch. You’ve got my empathy. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
And while I’m sure it was disappointing as hell, I think I might understand where the other players could have been coming from. If you’re the typical stoic adventurer, unimpressed by monsters and danger, then extreme emotion almost belongs in a different world. It’s all about tone, and trying to get everyone on the same page.
The bit about showing your sheet to the GM is telling. You had a clear vision for the way your character interacts with the world: a powerful Dark Phoenix type whose emotional state could dramatically affect the world. The others had no way to know that, and were busy establishing their own characters in an early session. I think that talking about “what my character is like” out of game, and not just to the GM, can help get everyone on the same page. You lose the moment of discovery where PCs learn about one another simultaneous to players, but you gain the sort of insight that allows you to react appropriately to one another. I think that a little metagaming is worth the trade off.
Yes and no. I mean, the other Espers had emotional flaws on their character sheets too. The Earth Esper was stoic and emotionless (and less at fault than the rest of the players, because he was stoic.). The Fire Esper had a temper and was easily excitable, but he kinda noped out of that for that scene. The Agent (who wasn’t an Esper), had a sort of Multiple Personality thing going on that he had no problem playing up later. It was part of the game, and the GM had made a big point of forcing every Esper to have a thematic emotional flaw.
I’d have been less hurt if it didn’t feel like I was the only one playing the same game the GM was. Though, the agent may have just been a terrible person (in character). She ended up ruining her budding romance with the Fire Esper because when he had his big berserk moment and flew off, only Aya went out looking for him and helped him get back home. That player was equally shocked, and even rped the Fire Esper coming to consciousness asking for the agent before he realized the soft, feminine hands carrying him belonged to Aya. He then had this moment of shock and obvious hurt upon realizing that not only was it Aya, but it was only Aya. The other two had literally not even gone looking for him. It turned out to be a kind of terrible cute?
If you want a character to be recognized as a Gnome; give them a hat.
In Monk’s case I’d go for one of those rice paddy hats.
Yeah, right? But maybe even pointier. Sort of like a dunce cap.
Hmm, characters at odds with the mechanics / my personal vision of them? I think the closest we can get to that is my Drunken Brawler Kitsune Monk, Shinku Kyo, who I played for a few sessions of Kingmaker (alas, the game hiatus’d due to RL drama). Here’s her art:
https://www.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/9mihdh/rf_kitsune_drunken_master_monk/
She was pretty much a very punchy, very Cayden Cailean-worshiping monk lush, that frequently chugged booze for fun and actual combat benefits.
The mechanics conflict came from three places, though: Firstly, the fact that Kitsune don’t normally get the stats that most monks demand, and on such a MAD class as monk, it was debilitating. This was counteracted by the DM allowing us to use race points to alter our races.
The other point, was the actual drinking rules: Or rather, the lack of them – the only rules that existed were either 3rd party, or very newly published stuff that… wasn’t very good in practice. I was forced to utilize 3rd party rules, as the alternative made for both unrealistic and combat-debilitating effects from drinking, defeating the whole point of the class.
Finally, the raw rules of Monk demand them to be lawful… Even if they’re drunken brawlers. Which meant that my desire to play the kitsune as a chaotic neutral… Well, drunkard and Cayden zealot, was illegal by RAW. The DM assisted here once more, allowing me to ignore the alignment restriction on account of being a drunken brawler.
Luckily, I managed to wrangle the 3rd party rules and mixed them with the newly published drinking/Caydean feats to great effect – whenever the Kitsune was tipsy, she’d get a morale bonus – and thanks to having ‘Extreme Mood Swings’, she got an extra benefit/penalty from any morale bonuses. Thus, whenever she was tipsy, she was essentially a monk with rage-level bonuses.
In RP, she was a slurring, frequently cussing, emotionally unstable CN fox-woman who made friends of everyone she met – whether they appreciated her friendship or not. And chugged gallons of booze daily. And beat up bandits with about as much competence as Saitama, in spite of being tipsy. Very fun!
Dig that art! She looks like a good drinking buddy.
Weird how monks and barbarians seem to ignore alignment restrictions more easily than paladins. Funny old world, innit?
But yeah, rules standing in the way of character concept are definitely a related field for today’s comic. Only, instead of butting heads with another player over “what my character is like,” you find yourself butting heads with the designer. A designer who is seemingly under the impression that all monks are stoic Pai Mei types rather than goofy drunkards. Even more strange, you can’t argue with the designer. Instead, you’ve got to argue with a GM who might or might not place more weight on the absent dev than your own opinions.
For what it’s worth, it sounds like you guys had a pretty ideal interaction. You used the rules to construct the character you wanted collaboratively rather than bowing to absentee authority and saying that, “I guess I’ll play something else.” Well done you!
I’m curious though… Did you ever go back and rebuild the character with the drunken master archetype?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/monk/archetypes/paizo-monk-archetypes/drunken-master/
Oh, derp, that was the archetype I used, actually! I mixed up the archetypes – forgot that drunken brawler is from another class. If you are wondering, here is her sheet! And the game was fairly recent – a few months ago.
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1718128
“Oh, how special i am. Look at me, the wonderful snowflake”
Mary Sue: The black hole 🙁
We are playing a campaign, we are having a good time, we cleared the dungeon and then we manage to speak with the Oracle of the Gods. Then it says: “You are the Heroes chosen for fate/destiny/gods to make great deeds”. Our response to the DM: “F0ck 70u” 🙁
The chosen one, the special one, is something we really hate in our table. It’s a cliche at worst, a clear mark of a lack of imagination at best. Sometimes your pc takes years away of his life to endure a special training, only to find the other adventures unimpressed of his prowess and calling him nerd and loser, and he is one. A hero is not born of his training but of his actions. While any class, capable of using the spell at least, is able to cast Thaumaturgy, the real business is to be able to say “-But i am the one who will throw you into hell. Like i did with the bad baron, remember now”. Greatness must be earned, a level one pc is not among the rabble, at least until you can kill a town worth of villagers with a +0 spoon. Then you can demand respect from the peasants 🙂
On a side not. Since a lot of times you answer whatever rant people publish here. Why you remained silent to the comments of Friday?
If you’re going for Gandalf’s “do not take me for a conjurer of cheap tricks” moment, and the rest of the table calls you a nerd for your efforts, two different visions of the game world are butting heads. There’s such a thing as give and take.
Finals
Yeah, but Gandalf is in fact a Maia, he isn’t an actual “conjurer of cheap tricks”. If he were a mere wizard he would be one. Don’t try to pull a Gandalf if your class hasn’t a more standing and power than the others. If two or more players play in group they create a shared reality. When someone try to change that reality in his favor he can be successful or not. When two of this changes collide only one can become reality. It’s not your fault, it’s the horrible 5E rules of shaping combat 🙂
Poor one. Does it hurts? 🙁
Shaping combat? I have fond memories of shaping combat:
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Graceful_Wicked_Masques:_The_Fair_Folk
GWM, my favorite book of the second edition, and my second favorite splat of Exalted. There is more easy to impose your will on the game’s reality. The Ishvara surely will not have these problems 🙂
I hope your finals went well
Cheers! Eight hours of writing is a long time, but 4,000 words later I think I’ve survived.
What was the final about? If i can know.
Sure. My academic life is related to gaming after all. This is my program:
https://dm.lmc.gatech.edu/program/phd-program/
I just finished the first year, which culminates in “Qualifying Exams 1.” It’s a take-home exam. You’ve got eight hours to answer three questions, using the ~103 readings from the past two semesters to illustrate your views on various digital media concepts. Like I said, eight hours is A LONG TIME when you’ve got that much writing to do.
Interesting, and actual, up to the date course. Or maybe they just look like that because what i study is kinda a decade old at least, several centuries at worst. I wish you the best, you will be successful, i know.
Cheers, Schattensturm! Best of luck with your studies as well.
Thank you 🙂
Eldritch Knight: In the words of the great Rich Burlew, “Do you get XP for killing this dramatic moment?”
Only if you’re Fighter: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dignity
Well it’s a good thing that Eldritch Knight is a fighter than.
Can’t really remember any particular instance of that happening right now, but… say… does that hand-guard on Magus’ rapier just HAPPEN to look like a ball of yarn…?
As per Laurel: “That was not intentional, but it will be from now on.”
Making the character in my head match the character in play is easy.
Halfling Monk who is that guy in your martial arts class who is clearly only there cause they plan to start bar fights? Be surly and argumentative. Punch people in the crotch.
Halfling Bard who is every aspect of the Rock N’ Roll lifestyle? Sing classic rock songs for the various spells. Indulge in any opportunity for sex and drugs.
Dwarven Devotion Paladin who is the grumpy alcoholic responsible adult of the group? Channel Hank Hill and Uncle Phil.
Grumpy know-it-all Gnome Abjuration Wizard? Mansplain everything, condescend
Hobgoblin Mystic (Psion) hivemind? Use plural pronouns, describe various ways your character’s behavior might be off-putting to anyone in normal social situations, and use mind-whammies to bludgeon your way through social situations. (“Instead of speaking aloud, you hear a number of voices in your mind.” “They keep their face covered and you never see their eyes”)
Warforged Cavalier Fighter? Speak in a monotone, refer to everyone as (Class)-Unit (Mage-Unit, Rogue-Unit etc.), refer to self as “X Machina-Unit” as opposed to using first-person pronouns, and ask to not be referred to with gendered pronouns as “Biological gendered pronouns are not applicable to this unit. Please refer to the X Machina-Unit as “It”, “The X Machina-Unit”, or “X” for brevity.”
Honestly the only time I have difficulty conveying something is those few times I try to crossplay. People have an easier time addressing me as an object or a hive-mind then they do as a woman.
What I’m hearing from all this? Communication. You’ve got to communicate your character emphatically and unambiguously. And unfortunately, part of that communication is nonverbal. That makes it awfully hard to avoid the pronoun games when you’re crossplaying, simply because we’re all culturally presenting one way IRL while trying to convey another gender in the fiction. It’s a level of complexity that you don’t have to deal with when you’re being some inhuman entity.
To be fair, people tripped over the hive-mind’s plural pronouns a bit too, but that was less them forgetting, and more that plural pronouns are a bit awkward. (The appropriate second-person plural pronoun for a hive-mind is “Y’all” which was appropriate as I give all my Goblinoids southern accents) Cartoon southern accent “Yes, our host-body is female, but she is one of many minds in the Union, and you do not address her alone. Please address us as ‘they’, or ‘y’all. As a great mind we must think alike.”
The one time people were good aboot addressing my crossplay was my Firbolg Druid. Firbolg for the uninitiated, (In 5E anyways) are basically bigfoots. Since I rolled really lopsided stats she ended up with a 6 Charisma. Firbolgs have the ability to cast Disguise Self 1/Short Rest. As such whenever Forest went around civilization she would be “The most average looking (Whatever the dominant ethnicity is here) woman you have ever seen. Not tall or short, not skinny or fat, not ugly or pretty, no distinguishing markings whatsoever.” She’d then spend the rest of her time in wildshape to avoid social interactions. But that unremarkable description for the disguise put such a strong image in people’s head that they knew to address her as her.
Poor Monk. I know his pain.
It’s not just players who should be mindful, but the DM as well. If the players want to be overdramatic thespians, it goes a long way when the DM hands them the spotlight and provides some scenery to chew. I’ve had DMs who were great about this and also some ones who were not.
I’m not expecting a point of Inspiration for everything I do that I thought was kinda cool. But nothing takes the wind out of my sails quite like putting some real brainpower behind my action, only for the DM to recontextualize it to sound more like the punchline to a joke. Not every character can pull 20 attacks out in a round or engulf the battlefield in fire. How about a gold star for effort?
As far as other players, the only time I can recall it coming up is when they already had a script in mind and aren’t planning on deviating from it. Perhaps it’s because I like to play high wisdom characters, and therapy is toxic to drama. As much as it bothers me to have some good character lines fall on deaf ears, mindfulness is a two-way street, so I usually avoid raining on their dark and troubled parade by coming up with an IC excuse not to press the issue further.
It’s hard to talk folks out of dark and troubled when that’s what defines their character.
I’m curious though. Have any of your high-Wis therapists tried talking to the player rather than the PC? I’m talking about some kind of out-of-game interaction along the lines of, “Hey, my dude cares about your PC, and wants to help pull her back from the edge. Is there anything he could say or any gesture he could make that could help?”
More recently, yes. In earlier campaigns, I thought it was better to come by those sorts of moments organically. And even now, I hesitate to call that out as being entirely misguided, since there’s something intrinsically more thrilling about a D&D story that takes people by surprise.
But much like how it sometimes pays off to take some liberties with your character for the sake of party integrity, I’ve come to appreciate that pre-scripting some scenes will rarely make for a good anecdote, but helps the greater narrative in leaps and bounds. I’ve even started writing out actual notes for these sequences, and have even run them by another player once or twice. Why not? I’m already rehearsing some speeches in my head anyway, and the end result is usually more poignant than anything I could come up with in the heat of the moment.
I’m familiar with that struggle against feelings of inauthentic play. But hey, you’re a 21st century person pretending to be a magic monk or whatever. It’s not exactly like there aren’t a few layers of artifice here. In other words, I think you nailed the pros and cons.
Well, dang. I’d just mostly gotten used to recognizing Monk as the blue guy. Guess he walked into somebody’s Wild Magic surge by accident or something.
Coulda been worse. He could have become a chicken: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wild-magic
I’ve certainly encountered this issue before.
Sometimes with that unfortunate old “Nope” from another player as your described.
Sometimes as a concept just not being able to be fully supported by the rules. (It’s exceptionally hard to have enough skill profs/ranks/whatever for certain concepts given how things are typically split up. Like for example you want to play a “ninja” and it’s just like “Well to do this right I’d need 75%+ of the skills in the game and that’s just not happening I guess. Argh, what do I sacrifice here?”)
D&D-like systems are pretty bad for wanting to do particularly fancy out of combat stuff since what’s supported by the rules is just a random small pile of very specific things which you probably can’t get all the ones you want for one list-o-stuff and what you can get won’t often work the way you’d want for your particular cohesive theme.
But other times I’ve had concepts come together perfectly and had buy in from other players.
If there’s a skill to being able to do this right, it probably has a lot to do with understanding what character concepts you can make work well with a given system and which you’re going to wind up struggling with.
And the rest is probably communication and luck when dealing with the always unreliable meat bags you’re playing with. =P
Even more frustrating, given the flexibility of rules interpretations, sometimes the system itself is just as unreliable as the meat bags. I suppose that’s one disadvantage tabletop has in comparison to computer RPGs.
Oh man, yeah that 100%.
I cannot say the number of times I’ve looked at something for an out of combat ability and thought, “It’s incredibly annoying how this is written just specific enough about what I can and can’t do with it to prevent me from doing a lot of non-problematic interesting things and yet at the same time not specific enough for me to not have to argue with a GM it allows me to do any of the things I want it to do.”
Story of my life, man.
Most of my experiences with live-action Vampire (and other World of Darkness games, but Vampire is the worst offender) have been rife with people expecting kowtowing and overacted obeisance for using their rather standard-issue powers, and people ignoring dramatic powers from other people because heaven forbid they let their character show any kind of weakness. And yes, they’re usually same people.
You know that scene in Dorkness Rising where the monk gets dominated? I’m imagining 30 clones of that guy getting annoyed at each other in an abandoned church basement.
You’ve heard about Marrow and the Bonercycle before, I think. Try to play serious, and someone will have a jokey nickname up and running right quick.
As for struggling to make a concept work in play: Well, I enjoy converting characters from other franchises to Pathfinder, and it can be tricky. Currently I’m slowly working my way through League of Legends champions. My rule for this game is that the Pathfinder conversion of the champ needs to be able to do something mechanically to represent each of their four keyed abilities, as well as the passive ability.
Anivia: Really easy to convert. Blitzcrank: I had to jump through some serious hoops. Karma: What the heck am I even supposed to do to represent some of those abilities?!
I was googling around for the famous reddit / greentext story called “Marrow and the Bonercycler,” certain that I’d heard it somewhere before. Then I was like, “Cinnamon told you that story dumbass.”
I am very smart.
Monk just trying to ward of bleaching by trying out a different colour.