Courtly Dress
Last time we touched on fantasy fashion, I regaled you with the story of my wizard’s dating faux pas. I’ve since learned to appreciate the finer points of fashion. This was not intentional.
Generally you see, I try to avoid crossplaying. Props to you guys that can pull it off, but since I’m a socially inept white dude blessed with an amount of body hair that can only be described as a ‘gamer pelt,’ I’ve always felt like I’d fail to do the PC justice. Visions of myself doing the SPAM voice rose like specters before me, and I would inevitably check the “M” box next to my character’s gender. Recently however, I decided that enough was enough. I’m a good roleplayer dammit. It was high time for me to bite the bullet, stretch myself as a gamer, and try a female PC.
It was a 5e game. I rolled for random backgrounds. I got the following personality trait:
I take great pains to always look my best and follow the latest fashions.
So there I was all set to try for super serious, non-stereotypical role-playing, and the dice tell me that my rich noblewoman PC likes shopping. MFW.
I’d rolled in the open like an idiot, the table erupted in laughter, and I resigned myself to a campaign full of “OMG there’s a sale” jokes. But a funny thing happened on the way to Castle Ravenloft. First my treacherous cousin and I traded barbs over interplanar style. Then I realized that high heel boots make for great thieves’ tools secret compartments. And then fancy dress meant that the mayor would see us now. And pretending to be a useless fop was a great way to set up a sneak attack. And by the time we finally got a little bit of spare coin I found myself asking if the shops had anything in the family colors, and insisting that I pay extra for the gold and whalebone buttons on my new frock coat.
What I learned is this: Playing a game that takes place in the imagination, it’s easy to overlook the details. I mean, who cares what you’re wearing? You still hit for 1d6+3, right? As it turns out though, having a strong mental image of your character is a huge help in portraying them. What kind of presence do they have when they walk into a room? What kind of social circles would accept them? I was afraid that I would be consigned to the role of “fashion-obsessed ditz,” but that random personality trait turned out to be the defining feature of my new favorite social rogue.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever turned “minor aesthetic detail” into a plot-relevant character trait? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Of Oracles and Curses…. Turning the Legalistic curse negative effect into something that sounds quite a bit more debilitating than “Oh, you get a -2 to most of your rolls” from being sickened.
There’s a reason my character keeps one of her eyes wrapped in bandages at all times. For whenever the curse decides to punish this poor, unfortunate, damned soul, she gets struck down with mind breaking pain, holding her head, screaming in dire agony as blood pours from where the curse originates: Her eye. From there, we could say she’s sort of in a “confused” state, higly prone to taking irrational actions, delivering harm to whoever the first person to approach her would be. Cursing them, killing them, or leaving them “branded” as but one of her many victims of insanity.
Haven’t had the chance to do so yet in my current group.
Good on ya for playing up the curse. That seems like the kind of “drawback” that will never come up unless you choose to make it a large part of your character.
As a Cleric or Paladin, a Holy Symbol is your ticket to getting into places. Clergy are ubiquitous and inscrutable, and nobody wants to offend your deity in a world where it is very well known that the gods can, in fact, smite them.
You say, “As a Cleric or Paladin,” but I hear, “As a rogue with 1 rank in Knowledge (religion).”
So long as nobody uses detect of almost any kind on you 😛
“Hold there, Brother…?”
“Smith. John Smith. And it’s Father Smith, actually. Very senior in the ministry.”
“Right then. Father Smith. Would you please put all evil aligned objects in the tray and step through the church doors again?”
Had a tradesman dwarf who was used to dressing to impress. He had the two traits:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/equipment-traits/extremely-fashionable/
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/magic-traits/magical-talent/
I chose Pestiditation for magical talent
That way he could always look his best if need be.
Prestidigitation*
Argh, phone why you do this
So now I gotta know. What does an extremely fashionable dwarven tradesman dress like?
Not very plot-relevant, but there is a detail like that in my poorly optimized Mary Sue of a first character.
He was a cleric and as such needed a holy symbol. The DM decided that the attack penalty for wearing a buckler is negligable when two-handing a one-handed weapon, and the cleric procured a fancy new holy crest shield. In one stroke I’d gotten a holy symbol and +1 to AC, while still having a free hand to cast with.
Later on in the adventure the DM mentioned how a demon’s claw scraped my character’s shield while he fought. It wasn’t damaged, but I decided in character that it would be disrespectful to his goddess to have it take such a beating. It was soon repurposed as a shoulder guard – still in a prominent enough position to act as a holy symbol with a hand free, but at the cost of that one AC.
Pretty much the first time I’d put roleplay ahead of rollplay.
Naw man, that’s good gaming, Mary Sue or no. I bet you were all the time mentioning the thing and using it like a badge of office. Like MSK said up above, a holy symbol is an easy ticket to respectability in most civilized places.
Oh lord I remember Turlug. A charismatic chump with a grand total of 5 int and 8 wis, but a staggering 16 charisma. Also built like an ox.
How I always imagined him was this childlike figure, a huge goliath of a man with the head of a 12 year old.
This is actually when I figured out that role playing a stupid person is *really* hard. As in you can’t be intuitive and you have to purposefully miss really easy to figure clues, essentially you have to throw your logic out the window but still come up with simplistic solutions.
Such as we were trying to sneak in but Turlug, being a child pretty much, doesn’t actually understand the concept of staying hidden. One creaky footstep later and the guards shout “WHO GOES THERE”
Turlug immediately stands and says “I’m here mr. officer!”
The poor bastards felt bad for me (with a duper high diplo, cause barbarians with ranks in diplomacy) and invited me in while they tried to contact the inn I was staying at fearing I was the disabled relative of someone there.
…Then the party messaged me to knock them all out and Turlug *loves* punchy time so yeah, 3 guards cold cocked and let the party in.
Laurel tells the story of a Lunar exalt named “Long Cat.” Dude was dumb as a box of rocks, but he had max ranks in Lore. Apparently he was raised in a library. It gave rise to moments like this.
Frustrated PC: “Umm, guys? The magitech terminal says we have 30 seconds before it sounds the alarm.”
Long Cat: “Maybe try rerouting the black jade conduit through the third crystal matrix?”
*machine whirs to life*
Less Frustrated PC: “How could you possibly know that?”
Long Cat: “My learnins.”
I like the idea of the dumb bruiser with absurd intuition. That way you get the classic moment of, “Mongo just pawn, in great game of life.”
In my 3E exalted game, I had my Dawn cast almost fully built but had one more favored ability to choose. Based on the Freebie points left, this would get 2 points unless I made something else much higher. I was a farmer with Int 1 so I didn’t want to do anything too mental but I was out of options. I took Investigation, figuring “hey, he might be dumb but maybe he’s good at seeing what’s out of place.”
It turns out the roll for 3E investigation is Wits+Investigation, not Int. Since I gave him a 5 Wits, he was amazing at investigation, even if he couldn’t explain what he knew very well. By this points it’s his best stat line and he is the direct aid to the top investigator of Southwatch.
Columbo the farmer. Nice.
Oh, come on Fighter. At least let Wizard cast Prestidigitation and/or Mending on you or something.
Fighter has read Wizard’s spellbook:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dangerously-cheesy
He knows the horrors that lurk within. What’s more, he’s been pranked before:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-adventurers-new-clothes
I wouldn’t trust him to cast gods-know-what on me either.
We are lucky enough to have an artist as a player in my One Piece themed group, so we get at least one or two pictures of our characters for each campaign.
While I pictured Lance Biers to dress brightly and be open and charismatic, I did NOT expect to get drafted into a pirate crew because, ‘Any man who can wear purple shorts in public without shame is a FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH!’ Without that image in play, he might’ve ended up like my last attempt at a face character: Entirely remembered for the series of botched rolls that ended with a confused, “I, uh… I saw a deer.”
Well you can’t just say that and then not provide a link to the pictures. 🙂
I am just now going back through to all the posts I commented on (‘Notify me of new posts by email’ my foot!).
Happy to provide! Only sad I never got a group shot of the whole crew together.
https://imgur.com/a/nflRvSl
OP delivers!
It’s funny, but I looked at the link before I re-read you’re original comment. As I scrolled through I found myself thinking, “Huh. Dude’s got kind of a One Piece feel going on.” Nailed it. 🙂
I’ll make sure to tell the artist! I also linked him the compilation, and he was happy with looking at how his style has changed over the years. He’s also always super giddy to hear that he’s got the style down right!
On the face of it, Victorian womens clothing has very little to do with practicality — until you realise just how easily things can be concealed within your petticoats. My “delicate flower of English aristocracy” was generally packing a couple of large-caliber pistols…
Nothing says, “A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can,” quite like a shotgun to the dome.
Thanks, Jane Austen!
I do try to enforce sensible dress on my party. Too often players clomp around armed and armoured just in case trouble rears its head. Practical, maybe, but often implausible, and personally as a player I’ll always take the penalty of being unarmoured if it helps me fit the scene. Plus, it pleases the barbarians, monks, and mage-armour uses among us.
I often put a lot of detail into describing my characters’ clothing – I find it as fun as desdribing any other element of their appearance. As an aside, I also crossplay a lot. I don’t try putting on a falsetto, though I do change my voice slightly for female roles. I suppose, though I’ve never felt uncertain of my being male, it’s never been a very core part of my identity.
Let’s be honest, we’re all human, and that’s much more a core part of our identity than the existence or lack of a y chromosone. So if one can play a lizardfolk or a catperson, why not a woman?
Lizardfolk and catpersons aren’t endemic to our culture. Gender is. There’s bleed between worlds, which makes playing against your gender presentation more culturally disruptive than playing a dwarf. That’s a very real difference.
Hm, I’ve never felt that way myself. Maybe other players around the table did, and my many female PCs have been more off-putting than I knew!
It’s also the case that players often play other races as if they were psychologicay human, which I personally try to avoid. Of course since we don’t have many resources on the psychology of non-humans, there’s nothing to say they aren’t all just reskinned humans!
I’ve heard this problem termed the “dragon costume.” Picking out some aspect of non-human psychology to stress — the malice of drow; the acquisitiveness of dragons; the logic of Vulcans — tends to be a go-to solution for me.
It’s when you’re GMing with really alien ideas, say the hive brain of illithids, that you’ve got to go really inhuman. “Protect the hive at all costs” is an insectile trope, and a good way to make those dudes feel inhuman.
But as far as gender goes, I think there’s more at play in an anthropological sense than “we’re all human.” I’m thinking in particular of a fan who wrote into the GCP podcast to ask if a male player who usually plays females is trans. You don’t get the question so often asking “do you identify as a dwarf?”
Handled well, crossplaying isn’t a negative. Certainly it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. But given the realities of gender studies, feminism, and performance practices like drag, there’s plenty in there set it apart from, “I also pretend to be dragons. What’s the difference?”
Well, I can’t speak to the underlying social and cultural aspects of it. But I can speak from personal experience that I have never felt inhibited to play female characters.
On the other hand, I’d never want to dress as a woman in real life – with this body? I would look simply atrocious! I have a very conventional sense of aesthetics.
As stated earlier, I’m a fairly straight, and totally cisgender, man. But I identify as easily with female characters as I do with male ones – even putting aside issues of other races, there are aspects of humankind beyond gender that I find much more prohibitive (I have never been able to play an evil character for long, for example – I find it too upsetting). So I really think that gender is not a high barrier for everyone.