Mother Nature
In a world full of names like Fighter and Wizard, I’ve noticed that only companions and familiars seem to get proper names. I guess that means Druid’s animal companion isn’t named Bear. Hmmm… Well then, Fluffy-Butt it is!
You can imagine Druid’s surprise and dismay when she came upon poor Fluffy-Butt half dead from Mr. Stabby wounds. If you’ll recall Druid’s first appearance, she actually took pity on something as repulsive as a Fighter/bugbear combo. She’s a soft touch, but if you mess were her fuzzy friends you’re going to catch hell.
I point this out because, if you’ve never played in an Exalted game, the concept of “intimacies” can be useful tool in your role-playing toolbox. The formal definition is “anything your character cares about enough that it changes how the character acts.” Intimacies might be a cause, an ideal, a place, a person, or a nation. Pretty much anything, really. These are important parts of character creation in Exalted, and can actually give you mechanical advantages if you’re fighting for a positive intimacy or against a negative intimacy. However, I think the concept is a good one to think about in any system.
So how about it, gang? What is something your character cares about so deeply that it would change the way they act? What is the one thing that beats the “my character wouldn’t do that” out of you?
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Well, that’s kind of a tough one to answer uniquely. “Family members” is pretty common, and it’s the one slice of Good guy that my LE wizard has. In order to keep them safe and untainted by the misadventures he’d been on, he accidentally wound up condemning a deity elect to dissolution by his patron, though he had no idea at the time.
Basically, he was host to an entity, Inquisition got on his case for something else, and if he’d gone to court with a rider…woulda been a bad game plan. Rider foretold the incredible power that was possible if he was kept, and offered to simply switch to my dude’s most magically inclined son, which turned a somewhat regretful and somewhat sympathetic me (the whole point of adventuring for my guy is to gain power, too) into a complete hardass who gleefully got a scorching holy symbol pounded into his flagellated chest by the clergymen doing the exorcising ritual, so as to for sure expel the Rider.
Once his thoughts were his own again, he started thinking that there ought to be a way that he can become a deity elect, himself. It might not be possible or safe or smart, but it…might. He has quite a bit of new perspective to process about the whole ordeal. His soul’s locked down by his god at the moment, though, so there’ll be none of that for a long time.
Oh, I dunno. I thought there were some good ones on the Reddit thread. I was a particular fan of the barbarian that loves architecture:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/5l3zal/what_are_your_characters_intimacies/
I think your example is definitely a classic of the genre though. Searching for power at the cost of the ones you love is a great evil character trope.
So I was playing one of my Summoners last night, a Chilaxian loyalist, Devil summoning caster who’s somewhat callous and heavily Lawful. We encounter a group of thugs who have an attack dog. Dog wins initiative and runs at us.
My turn is next. I look at the GM, grin, and say “I tell the dog to heel.”
The look on his face was great. Turns out that you can Handle Animal another person’s animal, since it’s already trained to respond to commands. And since Exclusive (the trick that makes the animal only listen to the owner) wasn’t listed in the statblock, the dog ended up staying by my side. With a third of the enemies now out of the picture, I was content to pet the dog whule the party mopped up. When the enemies ran off, my Summoner was content to send the dog off to reunite with his rightful owner.
After that, I grew into the impression that my Devil-Binding Summoner had a soft spot for animals. I look forward to roleplaying that in the future.
Nice! Exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I love “discovering” that sort of thing about a character.
That’s a neat scene, but I’m pretty sure that the existence of the exclusive command is not meant to imply that you can just use a Handle Animal check on a dog that is actively attacking you (considered hostile). It’s intended to protect against things like Charm Animal: “An animal with the exclusive trick does not take trick commands from others even if it is friendly or helpful toward them (such as through the result of a charm animal spell), though this does not prevent it from being controlled by other enchantment spells (such as dominate animal), and the animal still otherwise acts as a friendly or helpful creature when applicable.” If you can’t make a request using Diplomacy to a creature that isn’t friendly, I don’t see why you would assume you can give a command using Handle Animal.
I think you’ve got the right call. That said, I’d probably give this the old “I’ll allow it once” in one of my games. So many people gloss over the helpful/hostile stuff and just role Diplomacy straight up, I can see how a GM would make that call in the heat of the moment.
Please stop asking insightful questions, Past Colin. I’m trying to archive-binge without bombarding Present Colin with annoying comments. >:-|
Once again, we’re at my good Doctor. I’m relatively new to tabletop, so he really is most of my examples. You know by this point that he and magic do not mix, and he really dislikes casters as a whole. His exception is Mabel. I’m not sure why; it’s really lucky that she IS an exception, because it would have hurt party cohesion otherwise, but I just don’t know why. Maybe because she’s a patient of his now because of her heart thing, or maybe because it was magic who gave her the heart condition in the first place and she knows its dangers well. Maybe it’s because she’s adorable. I think it’s all three; Koschei never really gets to bond with the soldiers he tends to out in the field so, with his first job as the staff medic in a magic library, he’s finally getting to get to know someone who he’s treating on a personal level. Superb roleplaying on Mabel’s part only helps matters, especially since she genuinely seems to trust him while most people have to be coerced into receiving non-magical treatment. Magic hasn’t helped her so far; maybel it’s time for something more down-to-earth (and you can’t get more down-to-earth than being trained in Underdark Alchemy).
I was really uneasy about playing a magic-hating guy, and I felt like he’d probably just not mention it for the sake of not ruining the experience for others, but with Mabel on the team it can be brought to the forefront and explored as a character concept without killing the party dynamic or overshadowing anyone else. Superb roleplaying on the part of her player definitely definitely helps..
So in Exalted terms, Mabel is a positive intimacy while magic is a negative intimacy. And with them both being embodied in the same character, you’ve got CONFLICT! Them’s some good building blocks for story right there!
I guess so! I really should check out Exalted, it sounds fun and the Trope page makes a good case for it.
So does Mr. Stabby count as companion or familiar?
Or is he the character and that big blonde guy is the cohort/sheath-carrier/meat puppet?
Played what was supposed to be a fairly short Pathfinder campaign, and my alchemist was inspired by Pokemon’s ‘Hex Maniac’ and Tomoko of Watamote (It’s not my fault I’m not popular) fame. She was a Tiefling in a human-centric land, and so she spent as much time as possible in her basement lab on the overgrown farm she’d inherited.
Forced to adventure by poverty that would leave her unable to afford her favorite imported dwarven rations, she was hilariously outside her comfort zone, and just wanted to do ‘Just one more job’ so she could go back to frugal living in her little unlit basement.
When we came back and found out an army had been lead in by people from the village who were not fond of all these non-humans running things, it was almost an amusing challenge. Until she saw that they’d burned her farm and collapsed her house into the basement.
Chalcey was terrified of talking to people. But I learned on that day that when you take away her sanctuary, she was more than happy to torture someone until she found out who did it.
You had a very different “scouring of the Shire” experience than Merry and Pippin. O_O
To be fair, Merry and Pippin spent their pre-adventure downtime making merry.
Chalcey spent that time working on anti-ageing serum, a clockwork bomb-design that would let her redirect spread (how I justified the ridiculous ability to exclude spaces/allies from blasts), and also exactly how acidic WAS concentrated ooze-essence?
…That and her lab was JUST the way she wanted it, dang-it!