Reflavoring
“You see, all you primitive fantasy PCs probably think of me as ‘smug.’ But I’ve reflavored that to ‘better than you.'”
For those of you who haven’t stumbled across the term before, I’m using “reflavoring” to denote the re-fluffing of game mechanics. Instead of rage my barbarian gets possessed by ancestor spirits. Instead of a sword my fighter uses a macuahuitl. Instead of a bow that shoots enchanted arrows my weapon is a glove that throws enchanted rocks. In game terms these things may be identical, but the flavor is distinct.
Now that we’re clear on terminology, let me hit you with the op-ed. I may like the freedom offered by reflavoring, but the less I have to rely on it the better. Here’s where I’m coming from.
Once, many moons ago, I was asked what I enjoyed more when rolling up a new dude: building the PC’s background or building their actual mechanics. I honestly couldn’t pick. That’s because I love watching the feedback loop between the two. Here’s an example of the thought process.
“OK. I want to play an occultist. He needs special objects to focus his powers. What if one of them was a weapon? Cool, I’ll go with transmutation and choose… What haven’t I used before? Bardiche looks cool. Maybe he can be a traveling executioner. Cool! So with all those dead people in his past, he probably has some ties to necromancy. Maybe this ‘necromantic servant’ power calls upon the spirits of the people he’s beheaded? Neat! OK then, what kind of object do you need for necromancy? This ‘ferryman’s slug’ sacred implement sounds interesting. How did my guy meet the boatman on the river of death then…?”
That’s the most fun for me, watching rules cascade into story and back into rules again. It’s a symbiotic relationship, but it’s one that dead-ends on contact with a shallow game system. If I don’t have enough mechanically-distinct options to draw on, the machine that drives my creativity stops turning. In other words, when I’m obliged to reflavor “melee +2” as anything from expert judo to medieval jousting, my characters begin to feel samey. It’s a charge that often gets leveled at Savage Worlds, for example, and it’s one that I’ve never been able to shake. I can roleplay my PCs’ unique identities all I want, but I prefer when the mechanics of the game help tell the story of the world.
So help me out here guys. For today’s discussion, why don’t we try and figure out the limits of reflavoring? Comment with an example of successful reflavoring that you’ve used in a game. And if you’ve got an example of “reflavoring gone too far,” shout that out as well. With any luck, we can all walk away with a broader understanding of the pros and cons of the technique. Ready? Go!
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I”m guessing this was timed for the release of Eberron, when everyone’s reflavouring artificer spells as their brand of tinkering. I’m currently trying to create a non-magical artificer, reflavouring spells as advanced science, and it turns out it’s hard to replicate magic without, well, magic.
I’ve got a sad lack of 5e in my life at the moment. It is a coincidence.
It is also, however, a great example. Artificer is going to be working this reflavoring thing hard in the next couple of months.
I think Reflavoring can work if it is the point of the system. Examples include both Fate and Scion 2E. Fate has its various bits and bobs with Aspects and Scion tends to abstract everything from a magical Titan Killing Katana to a particularly good set-up from your friend into a flat +2 Enhancement.
Pros: Characters are free to be described as interestingly as they want. I played a Scion of Loki whose every attack was a series of quick slashes in a street fighting style with a shard of never melting ice from the frozen Norse Underworld. Another character used celestial kung fu and training from the Monkey King to leap about the battlefield, knocking enemies around like a superhero due to his Epic Strength. I didn’t have to comb through five different books, make multiple hard race choices and take just the correct series of feats to make my finesse based fighting work. It just did. When I came up with an awesome con that kicked off an entire subplot, the GM just told me to roll with +2 Enhancement and went with it. When I decided I wanted to run up and tussle with the combat monster and use my heritage of mischief to steal the magic ring the enemy had been banking on as his getaway, the GM just gave me a dirty look and told me to roll a Subterfuge to make it look good. It allowed for a level of Freedom and improvisation that was really easy to work with, because there wasn’t a lot of worry of “But that triggers five Attacks of Opportunity.” No, you were a Demi-god and you felt like it.
Cons: As you said, it gets Samey. When the entire system boils down to “Roll a die and add a modifier” and there aren’t even a lot of details to the modifiers, it can get tough to keep players from phoning it in. It gets worse for quieter players who are not used to being the center of attention as much, because now they are expected to do all this narrative flourishing that gets glossed over in a more complex system. It’s also rough on players who have trouble getting a good idea for a character. When there isn’t any pre-made skeleton to hang your character ideas off of, some people have trouble actually figuring out what to play and how things should work. If you tell them “build a fighter in Pathfinder”; They know they need the Fighter class, the Power Attack Feat, their favorite assortment of weapons, so on. You tell them “Tell me how your Child of Tyr interacts with the world” outside of that class-based specific framework, and they have trouble coming up with anything.
I’m a fiction writer, and this feels an awful lot like a writing prompt to me. If you don’t do fiction, this can be a lot of fun as a fresh exercise. But my personal style — my attraction to character building — is the fun of “coauthoring” my guy with the mechanical system.
In that sense, I wonder if there are more or fewer authors in “storytelling” systems than in crunchy ones?
My personal experience is that more story oriented players lean toward lighter mechanical systems like World of Darkness, Powered by the Apocalypse and other similar systems whereas more “kick in the door” style players prefer systems with more mechanical bits and bobs to move around, but that’s only one woman’s experience.
I also can’t speak to how much of that is genre as opposed to mechanics, since kick in the door style players tend to prefer stories of action, adventure and danger rather than calm court intrigues with character development, pathos and angst as their centerpoints.
And I am also a fiction writer, and I have found that I view every character as a writing prompt. Sometimes I’ve explored the prompt myself, sometimes I just hand them to other people to see what they come up with. I find it gets mixed results from GMs, who are not always fiction writers.
One difficulty is when the reflavouring brings the ability far enough away that, logically, it should have different abilities. While it’s quite easy to simply declare that no, you won’t give the flavour any different abilities from the original, some extreme reflavours can strain credibility. For instance, in the comic above, what if someone tried to counterspell that “scorching ray”? It isn’t a spell, so logically, it should be affected; however, that inherently give it a boost. I guess what I’m trying to say is, a reflavour can, at some point, lead to what should logically be different abilities to the original, so it’s up to the DM and players as to whether make home-brew changes, or whether to come up with some alternative explanation for why the flavour doesn’t have extra abilities. (For instance, the scorching ray may utilise some small, but critical, amount of magic)
Or technology may be a form of magic. Or some universal sensor translates one form of power to the other world. Explanations can work, but you might wind up in a spiral of increasingly bizarre justifications. Depending on your perspective, that can be a fun resource for riffing or a suspension of disbelief killer.
It draws on energy through different means, one via willpower, mediums and invocation and the other through circuits and programming. Maybe similar materials can be refined for magic and magi-tech.
My general feeling is that “mechanical reflavours” like that are ok, provided that they aren’t strictly better than the original. So it’s one thing to say “my cleric worships the moon goddess, so her Flame Strike is a Frost Strike and deals cold and holy damage rather than fire and holy”, because the changed damage type will make the spell more effective against some enemies but less effective against others. It’s another to say “my character has an attack that is exactly like scorching ray except it’s non-magical and so can’t be counterspelled or blocked by AMF”. Unless there is some way in which the “scorching ray” being non-magical is likely to be a disadvantage, then the character needs to pay extra character resources for the extra utility.
I don’t have many interesting examples of reflavoring for my own stuff besides with backgrounds as i usually like to have the mechanics help guide things as well. I do however have some good examples for other people’s stuff though, with my favorite being helping a player in a game i was dming make a masked luchador wielding a folding chair, which ended up being a zeal barbarian with a warhammer statwise, and helping a guy flavor his warforged eldritch knight spells as stuff like lazer eyes for searing rays, a hardlight barrier for shield, or a magic finger machine gun for magic missile.
Magic finger machine gun: it offers a relaxing back massage and then shoots you.
https://media.spokesman.com/photos/2012/10/16/1016_fingers.jpg
Most reflavour’s I’ve experienced have been minor, such as dual searing lights being eye rays, monk attacks being described as a mix of martial arts and street fighting, and other such slightly minor descriptive changes. I think that the issue is when the flavour is when something magical is reflavoured as non-magical, or vice versa, as the two use very different systems. A fighter can swap a longsword out for a spiked chain, or macuahuitl, or nunchucks, or a drone on a small chain that smacks people in the face; as long as it does 1d8 damage, it’s fine. However, the moment that level 1 weapon becomes magical, it’s got a whole different rules system behind it. The same goes for if a bard wants to be a master of the art of good cooking; how would his coffee of haste on the fighter get broken because the bard to damage, or how do you counterspell someone eating a really nutritious sandwich of cure wounds? What I suppose I’m saying is that magic is complicated, counterspell is weird and that some reflavours require stretch of imagination to remain within the rules they were designed for, especially if they happen to infringe upon other rules systems.
As it happens, I had a party with a character who did the magic cook thing. Mechanically, he was a Pathfinder Alchemist, so it really wasn’t that difficult to reflavor his potions into foods. And he had an archetype that replaced his bombs with breath weapon attacks, so that fit as well (“I EAT THE MAGICAL GHOST CHILE PEPPER!”).
I do have a 2e character who is a doctor who doesn’t like magic (he just heals the party with the power of the Medicine skill), but through race stuff he has two cantrips: Detect Magic and Telekinetic Projectile. Both of those I found pretty easy to flavor as not really magic (his Detect Magic is just senses trained to notice magical energy, and Telekinetic Projectile is just him throwing stuff better, so he adds INT to damage instead of STR). So I guess it is all a matter of degree. Some spells you can reflavor as non-magical, but teleportation is hard.
But I was given to understand the any sufficiently advanced form of cooking was indistinguishable from magic.
I am generally very much a fan, and will allow players to reflavour with quite wide amounts of freedom. Where I drop the boundaries is when reflavouring is used as a means to leverage additional rules benefits under the guise of it not applying to the particular reflavour.
One example that I have mentioned elsewhere before (but which never ended up occuring at the table), which actually is eerily relevant to this particular comic, was a Elven Arcane Archer (this was before the Arcane Archers subclass was a thing). My player wanted an Elven Archer who fired spell arrows. The idea we came down on was a reflavoured Wizard – instead of a staff he used a bow as his Arcane implement, and his spells all took the form of arrows of arcane energy fired from said bow. Fit the idea perfectly (even if it was a bit weird using int as a bow-firing stat!). However, I had to be clear that to all rule functions he was still a Wizard casting spells, not a Ranger firing arrows, so he couldn’t use the Sharpshooter Feat with his spell arrows, and he could have his arrows Counterspelled.
That counterspell thing seems like a real sticking point here. I’ve seen a couple of people mention magic/non magic as a deal breaker.
My wizard has a reflavored mount! He is a ratfolk with the racial trait that makes him meticous about cleanliness (instead of being a pagueboi), giving him benefits versus diseases. And as a ratfolk, it is natural for him to have access to a trained dire rat mount. Unfortunately, the dire rat has, by default, a disease and is generally unsavory looking / monstrous, so it would clash with his cleanliness. So I reflavored the rat into a giantic Jerboa, losing the (fairly useless) disease attack in favor of having a socially acceptable (as in, not attacked on sight) and adorable mount.
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/014/061/480/large/alena-busygina-rat-mount3.jpg?1562755731
Yup. That’s cute. Holy shit that’s cute.
I think the best example I have is re-flavouring the playable Yuan-ti for 5th edition D&D as playable Medusa (who’ve obviously lost their petrifying gaze)
The poison spray cantrip becomes the head-snakes spitting poison.
Here’s a question: would you let anti-poison techniques apply to the save vs that form of color spray?
I think you misread that.
Poison Spray is a cantrip in 5th edition D&D which has no relation to the first level spell Color Spray.
The reflavoring lies in turning the visual description of the spell from the caster extending their hand and projecting some poison gas to the casters head-snakes spitting some poison at the target.
I’ve never really reflavoured weapons or abilities in a major way.
In a PbP game I’m playing a Modron cleric, so I’m flavouring his spells in a slightly technological kind of way – Shield of Faith looks like a force field emitter for example, and purify food and water uses tiny mechanical insects to clean the food. Being a PbP I get a lot more time to add spell flavour than I would in a live game.
As I say it’s not a major reflavouring though, as it’s very clear that he is casting spells, which are gifted to him by a deity. It’s just that they manifest in a way that suits his nature.
I think someone else mentioned the “additional advantage” thing. Imagine if you wanted to use the “flavor insects” from your purify food and water example to replicate the cleaning function of prestidigitation. I think that’s where you can get into trouble.
Love your examples though. Modron magic offers a lot of fuel for this kind of thing.
I think my most successful bit of reflavouring was when I showed up with a Pathfinder character one day, and was told that we’d made a last-minute change and would be playing 5e. Oh, and I had 30 minutes to redo my character. Not normally too much of a problem since classes are usually pretty similar between the two games, but I had come in with an Alchemist. 5e just didn’t have one of those.
…I made it work though. I didn’t want to abandon the smooth-talking trickster with an extract for every occasion that I’d created, so I set about finding a way that I could keep the mechanical feel of the character without an actual alchemist class to help me.
As it turns out, a Cleric of Light works wonders! Healing spells reflavoured as rushing to someone’s side with an extract, divine fire reflavoured as flung bombs, and the versatile arsenal of a cleric reflavoured as an extract for all occasions, just like my original concept!
And that’s how Darton Vonvarius the alchemist survived an edition change in-tact.
Did you ever run into issues with the flavor interacting with mechanics? Like… Could your “spell” get knocked out of your hand or anything?
The person asking the question was in the logic of the “Stormwind fallacy”: the belief that roleplaying and optimizing are exclusive things rather than informing each other.
In my Paladin example from last week, in addition to the standard Paladin stat spread of Strength/Constitution/Charisma he also had an abnormally high Intelligence, and he had the Resilient: Constitution feat. This all informed his backstory. He was made an officer because of his mix of martial prowess, combined with intellect and charm. He didn’t break under Drow torture because of his high con saves combined with natural Dwarven stubbornness. His disdain for subtlety came from his low Dex making stealth a poor choice for him, combined with Devo’s inability to lie.
Devo? I was unaware of their propensity for truthiness. Did your guy use a whip?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QLzthSkfM
“DevoPal” is Devotion Paladin. Are we not men? Devotion Paladins cannot lie. We are Devo.
ConniePal is Conquest Paladin, VengePal is Vengeance, AnniePal is Ancients, RedPal is Redemption, etc. Crown is the only one that doesn’t get shortened since it is one syllable.
Oh, I get it. So you’re basically a paladin in a stepped pyramid hat: https://www.amazon.com/Devo-DEVO-Energy-Dome-Red/dp/B014VS92FK
As far as reflavouring characters goes, I haven’t seen much use of it beyond renaming the occasional weapon. Where I do get use of it is reflavouring combat. I had a mental breakthrough one day when I realized that while mechanically everyone’s standing perfectly still and taking turns to take single swipes at each other, the flavour text of the combat can be anything you want. So instead of “You take a swing at the baddie and land a hit” it’s “Amidst a flurry of clashing blades, one lucky strike manages to slip through the baddie’s whirling assault.” I’m still struggling to break out of the mindset of treating every roll as a single attack instead of part of a larger combat, but when it works it makes fight scenes much more engaging.
I run into the opposite problem, where over-describing the scene can sometimes confuse my players.
“Wait… You mean it stumbles after I hit it? Is it prone now?”
“Well no… I mean yes… It’s flavor prone.”
It’s interesting, because coming from mostly playing games that I cobbled together in my garage from The Fallout PnP Game and a lot of duct tape, a lot of what I’ve had to do is reflavouring.
Whether it’s figuring out relevant stats, attributes, perks and skills that fit the new setting (“‘I have a bad feeling about this’: you’ve been around your share of ambushes, and whether from latent Force abilities or honed smuggler senses, you get a warning when you’re about to step into a dangerous area. Req Level 12, Luck 7”); creating stat blocks that feel right for the game world (“here’s how we can make Stormtrooper armour relevant while keeping what we see in the films”); and representing the unique items and feel of the game world.
What I notice is that people who mostly play the well-served games with tonnes of content will say the advantage is as you say: a huge depth of material which crucially can more or less be relied upon to play nicely with everything else. That makes sense.
I think it’s a really fundamental decision of how you want to play the game. One that needs to be a conversation between the DM and players because it really does affect so much. I had never considered the perspective you raise above.
I’m beginning to suspect that an important conversation is the one that always remains unspoken: the conversation between designers and players. It’s a bizarre game of telephone when intent is translated via mechanics. You can only hope that you interpretation yields an interesting experience.
“Instead of a bow that shoots enchanted arrows my weapon is a glove that throws enchanted rocks. In game terms these things may be identical, but the flavor is distinct.”
In game terms shouldn’t the rocks do bludgeoning damage instead of piercing damage? Or is it like a thing where the “rocks” are stone arrowheads minus the arrow, or something like that?
That’s exactly the problem that keeps coming up with the popular “magic” example on this thread. The new metaphor demands a change in the mechanics, and all you can do is make a case-by-case argument about which is more important: sticking to the original or letting the new mechanic work in a sensible way.
I like to reflavor Righteous Might so that the instead of just becoming bigger, the spell’s energy envelops the caster and forms an oversized suit of armor. Like piloting a magical divine mech. And of course, each deity has its own motif.
Isn’t that a Teen Titans thing? I feel like I’ve seen “translucent armor energy mech” in a cartoon somewhere….
Of course, if you decide to go with that interpretation, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to disguise yourself as a giant.
Colin, no offense, you are a good guy, but using a Macuahuitl in place of a sword? A Macuahuitl is a club!!! How could you do that? Good think i like the comic, i have just finishing re-reading it, i wanted to be up-to-date with the complex plot, other wise for things like that is that people stop reading 😛
But V just lost the contest, you must try your marksmanship on the target, not breaking it down up to molecular level 🙂
But a Macuahuitl would deal slashing damage! Fight me!
Irrelevant, even doing slashing damage it would be used as a club, not as a sword. Even in the link of Wikipedia you put says it’s a club. And be very sure i will fight you 😛
Little red goblin games seams to have my back on this one:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/3rd-party-equipment/3rd-party-weapons/little-red-goblin-games/macuahuitl/
That’s a straight up long sword with the fragile quality.
I, for one, don’t recognize the authority of Little red goblin in matters archaeological, historical or related in any way with any of the Aztec, Maya, Inca, or any other people, region, kingdom or empire of the pre-columbine Americas. Therefore i must unacknowledged any kind of stat, guide, tip or information they would provide in the case before said.
That moment when you recurre to legal language to gain an argument on internet 😛
You need fellowship.
Ibid:
Every single player in Fellowship has a ton of narrative control, taking some of the burden off of the typical game master’s job. You are playing as a hero, a champion of your people, and you are the truth in all things related to your people. When you play as the Elf, you decide what the Elves are, what their culture is like, what they value and care about, what their relationship is with the rest of the world. When someone asks about the Elves, all eyes will turn to you for the answer.
“[In our game], our world is an Archipelago with Hawaiian Kobolds and Germanic Barbarian Halflings. The Empire is a far flung London-expy, the mer-elves control the sea lanes from their underwater Greco-Roman city states, and the Dwarves were created by the God of Battle. Unfortunately, the God made them too well; they ate him and live on the island of his hollowed-out scorpion body.”
What are you quoting?
My current go-to example for reflavouring would be a Rogue in a PbP game. It started before then UN-Rogue was a thing, so to aid the rather lacking martial prowess of the base Rogue, he took a level of Warder at 2nd. Because this is the Dawning of the Age of Worms campaign, the characters start out at this lovely mess of a town called Diamond Lake, and are supposed to be down-on-their-luck 1st level noobs.
Soo… not only do rogues have some skills that, honestly, some oppressed miner isn’t supposed to have, but also Warders get some pretty neat martial training all things considered, how comes? Well… apparetly the guy is a surplus son of some minor noble family, who got sent off to join the empire’s armed forces as an officer (because noble), but since his stat array happens to be a tad low on strength, but okay on DEX, INT, and WIS, he was instead chosen to become an Agent of the Empire, a.k.a. a spy. And his posting in Diamond lake is his ‘trial run’. So he had to hide his ‘real’ martial skill until ‘things got real’, see…
Of course, with the whole ‘spy’ theme established, the next key word was ‘gadgets’. So, to aid a Rogue’s ailing AC, he is using a buckler. Which, as a Warder with the right stance, he can still shield-bash with. And since there exist feats that do the same thing, he is ‘actually’ wearing a gauntlet he just uses to block and punch with as necessary.
Of course, it would be sweet to be able to throw stuff to make use of the sneak attack damage in the surprise round at range. Soo… use a feat to become proficient in shurikens? Multiclass monk? Or… after leaving Diamond Lake, get into contact with your handler in the empire’s intelligence agency and meet your very own ‘Q’, who upgrades your ‘gauntlet’ with a multi-shot dart launcher.
So mechanically it is a Wayfinder with a cracked Opalescent White Pyramid (Ioun Stone) installed, so he gets proficiency with shurikens, so he can draw them as ammunition and throw them as often as his two-weapon-fighting allows. Of course, as a limitation he can only ‘shoot’ 5 darts in a row before the thing needs reloading (like a repeating crossbow), accuracy is terrible and it sucks as a ranged weapon outside of sneak attacks. But it is a nifty little spy gadget and fun to use.
Heh. That’s a pretty slick take on Bond you’ve got there. Love me some gadgets!
Of course, starting out as the ‘resident’ spy in the town (after his predecessor was ‘retired’ by an opposing faction), it occurred to me that he’d rather be the guy who paves the way and supplies the intel for when the ‘real Bond’ arrives.
Which would make him Felix Leiter…
This? This right here? This is why I play and run GURPS. Don;t even have to reflavor anything, the system is designed to flavor to your taste as you build the character.
So gimme an example. What’s a re-flavor that GURPS does that would suck ti deal with in D&D?
Yeah that’s pretty much how I make characters for games 99% of the time too.
Hmmm, well I’ve re-flavored races pretty often but I can’t think of one that makes for a particularly good story.
I’ve reflavored a Cleric as a Magical Blacksmith. And a Bard into a Magical Chef. My homebrew final fantasy classes as things that fit into the setting.
Rapiers as Arming Swords (had to change Piercing to Slashing damage but if that matters in a 5e game ever, it’ll only be one time and even that’s unlikely).
I fairly commonly re-flavor spells. Like Fire Bolt into a blast of boiling water and steam. Vicious Mockery into a super fast offensive dicing of onions.
A wolf animal companion as a juvenile winter wolf (I mean, not a stretch there conceptually but it’s still an important difference in character).
And so on and so forth.
I can probably reflavor just about anything as anything else. Which is why I’m constantly annoyed with the types of players/GMs who are completely inflexible with things. sigh
I seem to recall your dislike of racial ability score modifiers. Did PF2e make a meaningful contribution to that argument, or would you still prefer complete stat freedom?
My reflavorings tend to be rather small. When I made a Pathfinder version of DC Comics’ Captain Cold, I used a Gun Chemist and took Frost Bullet (actually Bomb but the archetype applies them to your bullets) at level 2 and Tanglefoot Bullet at level 4. The flavoring was he was icing peoples’ feet to the floor.
Could you melt the ice, or would that be considered poor form in terms of changing mechanics?
I’m actually working on something like that right now. An artificer, even.
His shtick is that, as a UA Archivist, he’s actually a soul mage, and binding souls to objects instead of “awakening” them.
The soul in question is actually someone from his backstory, his mentor. He works as the “intelligence” (or maybe “charisma”, I haven’t yet decided) option; hopefully, I’ll get others as I level, so I can have a different soul for each of the three options.
Also, the infusions are non-humanoid souls; as we start at level three, I’m going with a loyal dog, Argos, and a crow, Jeremy, as pets who “willingly” gave their souls to be able to continue to aid me.
Neat! I always liked that as a method for explaining sentient artifacts in general.
I had a pretty heavily reflavoured character once. On paper, she was a Tetori, one of those monks who focus on grappling. But her character history had absolutely no monastic involvement. She was just really over-eager and physically friendly. An over-enthusiastic hugger, really. She was a blast to play. I specifically didn’t use many of her abilities, so there were probably other ways I could have built her, but it was such fun anyway.
So wait… You reflavor-nerfed yourself?
I mean… Basically? I basically just didn’t use ki, but I enjoyed the other benefits of being a monk/clean living.
Well a healthy lifestyle is its own superpower.
I’m personally fond of the idea of associating certain powers with personality rather than some external sources: for my Pathfinder oracle, her curses, reclusive and powerless prophecy, are a manifestation of her trust issues and disdain of arcane magic (she is forced to save against every spell and her allies have to make attack rolls to cast touch spells on her and she loses an action at the beginning of every encounter, but she gains bonuses against harmful spells and the rogue’s uncanny dodge class feature).
Re: Savage Worlds:
It is true, Savage Worlds isn’t terribly varied when it comes to its “Powers” section. That Bolt spell, whether its a swarm of bees or a magic missile, still works the exact same way.
However, the system DOES have a “Trappings” system, where your flavoring of the spell actually matters if its narratively relevant. For example, if your bolt power is a dart of holy magic, and you’re hitting a creature that’s particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing, then it could do more damage, or debilitate the creature, or so on.
I sort of like this compromise. Its just enough reflavoring where it can be mechanically satisfying, but not so much that it needs to dramatically work differently altogether.
Generally speaking, I’d rather not reflavor, but I don’t consider it a deal breaker. I view it more as providing grease to the sometimes sticky cogs of our table top imagination time.
If I have a player that REALLY wants to do something, but the rules just flatly don’t support it, I turn to reflavoring. An ability or a power is, at it’s most basic level, a range you can do the thing at and a save or damage or a general boost. So far as I’m concerned, if the table agrees that X thing as presented in the rules is perfectly fine, then X thing reflavored to Y thing is fine so long as function is identical.
But here’s where I split off. I make custom feats for my players-I sort’ve have a side bar of bonus upgrades they get in addition to normal player progression that’s not NEARLY as crazy as Mythic rules. For your ‘this gets samey’ bit, custom feats that take advantage of the reflavoring is where you can really bring the design and concept to a life of its own instead of it just being Thing X with Thing Y’s skin.
I had an Ettin refluffed into a “Rock Troll”. My ranger rolled an Ettin follower, but ettins are Evil, and I wanted only good followers. So the DM let me reflavor it into a Shannara-style Rock Troll. Still had all the same stats and abilities as an Ettin, just looked different and wasn’t evil.
It really depends. For some things, like a barbarian rage, I think reflavouring can make a lot of sense. It is already badly labled as rage when all the existing fluff clearly indicates that it is based on the berserker battle-madness of Celtic myth… 😉
Your monk’s “Ki?” it’s clearly big M “Magic” so why couldn’t it be the same as a sorceror’s Sorcery Points, just focussed differently? And why not use the Triton race to reflect your half-merfolk character?
But one must be careful. The first guideline I use is “Is there already somethhing in the core rules that allows for what you want to do?” If someone were to suggest using a bow for a stone throwing device (as you list in your comments), I would have to say no, but let’s consider buildimg a piece of apparel that autocasts magic stone, if that’s what you want. Or use a sling. Street Samurai’s scorching ray arm would be fine… as an enchanted item (a wand).
Basically, if you’re going to invoke flavour to justify using a particular mechanic, make sure that the fluff actually fits, amd doesn’t better fit another option.
Puuuh, finished the archive binge. This is a fantastic series, sir!
Curiosly my very first “Reflavoring” also involved a macuahuitl: my tabaxi barbarian/fighter swung a reflavored greatsword in Storm King’s Thunder. Tabaxi seem to have an Aztec theme going what with their names being literal translations of Aztec gods (Skirt-of-Snakes, Smoking Mirror), so I chose this badass “obsidian saw-club”-skin over some lame claymore. Unfortunately I had to bin it as soon as I was gifted the Giant Slayer T_T.
Personally I love reflavoring weapons and armor for my PCs, but I feel that it’s done more out of necessity. 5e has had the same 37 Weapons, the same 12 armors and one shield since I started DMing and playing in 2014 until now.
I still remember seeing the weapon shop in Neverwinter Nights for the first time. All those double-headed axes, kamas, heavy flails, throwing stars. I remember how much fun I had building a character around the insane x4 crit modifier of the scythe or the terror that a fighter/monk with kamas would unleash upon the battlefield.
Much later I started playing D&D at the table in 5e, instead of my computer in 3.5e and noticed that the gear pool is quite slim. Every rogue has to swing a rapier now, it’s the only logical choice. To stand out you absolutely have to reflavor it a bit.
“My character is wandering masseur from this settings not!Japan, he´s swinging a tantō”
Mechanically everyone has the exact same shield.
“Not me, my character is from not!Rome, he`s rocking a scutum”
While I love reflavoring, I feel that (in 5e at least) it`s the symptom of being starved for meaningful, mechanically different character options for too long. Glacial release pace and all that.
Welcome to the comic! I hope you enjoyed your binge. New comics are Mon and Fri. 🙂
I feel for WotC on this one. They bottled lightning with 5e, making an accessible game perfect for introducing a wide audience to the hobby. But the longer the edition lasts, the harder it is to keep long-time players interested in the same few build choices.
By the same token, deviating from the elegant design risks alienating new players who might see complexity rather than “exciting new options.”
Unfortunately, in the same way that long-time fans get grumpy about film series “dumbing down” material to make it accessible to a broader audience, 5e has to make the same calculus. There are simply more new fans, and appealing to the broader demo is more profitable than appealing to the existing fan base. When that starts to shift I predict we will see a flood of new 5e material followed by 6e.
Definitely enjoyed it and will continue to. Also felt called out a few times.
As a DM I only managed to finish 2 campaigns up to now, so several tropes felt really fresh and unused to me (The Anti-Party, casting Awaken on everything like Belle from Beauty&Beast suddenly went Druid, the cleric demanding payment for his services etc.).
Honestly, a lot of those tropes come from that strange fantasy land known as The Internet. Of the three you’ve mentioned, I’ve only used the antiparty in one of my games.
Grats on actually finishing campaigns though. There’s many a DM who can’t say as much.
I’ve expressed this before back on the kitsune’s regional feat options, but flavor is flavor. We don’t need a katana to be added to the game, we already have scimitar/longsword.
One of the things that really bug me is when people want to homebrew a class to represent an IP that they like, when reflavoring an existing subclass (sometimes multiclassing with something else) gives them literally every aspect of the character they are trying to make.
one character I ported form an mmorpg, so to account for the “battle sprite” mechanic we reflavored the eldritch cannon feature of artillerists to be a construct familiar. Best part is, the abilities lines up nicely with what a Drakon battle sprite does
Well played. What was the MMO?
Honestly? I never really liked reflavoring in general. It just… clashes with how my mind works. If it’s different, it should be different. If it ends up the same… well, then it ends up the same. For things like weapons, I can understand it. What I never understood was people doing it to races… which is a thing I see all the damn time! Yes, I want to play a wolfman or a fox person, and the system doesn’t always have those. That doesn’t mean I want to just take “Elf” or “Halfling” and call them “Wolfman” and “Foxfolk”!