Tournament Arc, Part 7/8
Not so long ago we were wondering why Lumberjack Explosion still hangs out with Fighter. Now we know. Theirs is a relationship based in good brosmanship. I guess it’s only fair.
But you know why I like about Fighter in today’s comic? He’s managed to stay true to his character (a self-absorbed jerk) while still being a good gamer (helping a partymate with a personal quest). Chances are I’m giving Fighter too much credit here. He is famously self-absorbed after all. For the rest of us though, I think that the distinction between in-character and out-of-character dickishness is key when you’re playing an unpleasant character.
The phrase “it’s what my character would do” is so maligned because it’s used to justify all manner of bad out-of-character behavior. Just think of the thief that steals from the party; the lawful stupid paladin that ruins every plan; the suddenly-traitorous wizard deserting the group for power. While it’s possible to justify these behaviors in terms of the game world (I steal from everyone! I’m obligated to turn you in to the constabulary! What self-respecting arcanist wouldn’t jump at the chance to become a lich?), they’re obnoxious because of their real-world effects. The cooperative game becomes antagonistic. Arguments springs up between players instead of characters. In a novel, these might be fully-realized three-dimensional characters with interesting flaws. On the tabletop however, there’s a subtle difference. These hypothetical players are prioritizing their personal narrative goals over everyone else’s.
Think about that for a second. Stealing from the party sets you up as the sole hero of the story (everyone else is just a dumb mark). Turning your buddies over to the cops means that your version of right and wrong is the only one worth considering (play my way or go to jail). Embracing lichdom means that your quest for arcane power is more important than the party (those fools were just pawns in your master plan). Sure it’s a valid thing for a character to do in those situations. But as a good gamer, it’s your job to look beyond your own character. You’ve got to remember the other players at the table, and that you’re all IRL people trying to tell an ensemble story together.
If your character is actually a jerk, you can make that plain without foiling the storytelling ambitions of your buddies back in the real world. Try stealing from NPCs rather than the huge guy with the battleaxe that’s supposed to be your flanking partner. Look the other way when your morally-gray partymates are plotting to rob the almost-definitely-a-succubus-in-disguise Grand Duchess. Try lich-lite alternatives that don’t require you to betray the party. In every case, it’s possibly to justify antisocial behavior in terms of character. But at the end of the day, it’s you the player that’s deciding to act that way. It’s in your power to act differently.
Question of the day then! And what do you say we frame this one in positive terms? When have you gone out of your way to help another player complete their quest? I’m sure your PC had their own personal goals competing for attention, so how did you find a way to justify it in-character? Let’s hear your tales of selflessness and good intraparty brosmanship down in the comments!
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Welp, so much for that date between LE and Snowflake
Yup. I know you guys were clamoring for it, but there’s definitely no way there’s a love triangle here. >_>
Poor Snowflake. She tasted fame, and now it’s time for her to go into the backlog of side characters that are lucky to show up once in three months. And L.E. is saved from drowning in Gunslinger’s misery.
Overall, a perfect ending to the tournament arc! …Wait, what do you mean there’s one more tournament comic?
I didn’t want a love triangle, I was rooting for the sapient equines to get together and have Elf princess be stuck on the sideline (since it’s probably still illegal).
Fun fact: Horsepower is LG. Lumberjack Explosion is CG.
Makes you think how ‘thorough’ the persona switch is on any given Vigilante. Is the mask the true self (as with Batman)? Are they so distinct in personality that they could be different people entirely, Jekkyl and Hyde style? Do the personalities conflict with themselves or are merged in perfect unity?
The different alignments thing is such a trip. In this case, I like that it’s so open to interpretation, because different PCs can do ANY of the above and make it work.
Back to my old well of CASE stories, the riot control robot who was also the nicest person ever. While we were travelling through the abandoned city CASE used to guard, we discovered that CASE used to have a partner; a significantly more advanced robot named WAY. We discovered this when she jumped off a building and started spraying us with railgun fire.
However, despite her murderous tendencies, CASE still had some pretty strong feelings for WAY, so the party dropped basically everything we were doing to go subdue WAY and perform robot brain surgery on her. Despite the tech being used in her construction being about five hundred years ahead of anything we’d ever seen, we had actually accidentally managed to assemble… Well, not the perfect team, but as good a team as we could get for the job on a backwater moon currently in the state of transitioning from Apocalypse to Post-Apocalypse. We had a robotics prodigy, a cyborg, and a surgeon (me) all work together to get WAY’s head back in order. And despite the insane odds against us, it totally worked!
Good times were had all around, WAY became an ally and was very happy to see CASE again, and only half the party got captured, which we managed to fix with help from WAY.
That is an awesome love story. I can just picture everything going slow-mo and pink and soft around the edges for CASE as WAY leaps down to ambush the party, bullets and glass flying everywhere.
It was made even better by the fact that one of the pieces of random loot we had found was a wedding ring, and it was the entire reason we all decided that we needed to get CASE and his girlfriend back together, even though he would have been fine if the party had just avoided her patrol area entirely.
In one campaign I played a lawful good cleric of Moradin in a party where several people were much less lawful, and much less good. One of the big challenges was also one of the things that really developed my character’s personality and character throughout the game: working with the party while still being a lawful good cleric.
In character, the biggest way I tried to work with it is having the tenets of religion requiring the self to endure trials and tribulations, and set an example to others. Don’t take the easy way out. Turning the party over to the constabulary would be easy. Working with them to minimize the chaos while also trying to guide them to a more good understanding is harder but better.
There still have been a couple of instances that have really, really strained being lawful good and a good player. One notable one was when a character obsessed with revenger against her vampire brother decided to become a vampire for the power, and part of that ritual required slaughtering a familh of innocent halflings. Fortunately a lucky roll of Divine Intervention brought the family back to life, and my character interpreted the event as a personal failure for not seeing the signs of edgy-bloodhunter’s sooner, and decided that the Divine Intervention was Moradin giving a chance to redeem himself and take down the greater evil. So the party immediately set out to take down the character’s brother, then trying to cure the PC’s vampirism. Unfortunately that was way above the party’s paygrade and it was almost a tpk. Fortunately vampire character got bored with their character, so the party ended up killing the character without too many hard feelings after she tried to abandon the party. Still, staying true to lawful good and working with a character that just slaughtered an innocent family to become a vampire…not easy, but it was a moment that really helped shape my own character.
Bravo, dude. That is a seriously tall order, and finding a way to make it work is a sign of real creativity.
Still, I find myself wondering if you should be asked to make that leap. Did you feel like it was fair for you to expected to stretch your character that far without PVP?
In that case, a few things that helped with the stretch was 1) lucky divine intervention brought the victims back to life, so there was a “second chance,” 2) the other PC was the one who told my character that she did it, and basically acknowledged she was becoming a monster and asked my character to kill her after her brother was defeated, 3) loyalty is a huge tenet of Moradin, so loyalty to party is literally party of my religion, 4) “work with the lesser evil to bring down the greater evil,” 5) pragmatically speaking, this character was now a vampire which are notoriously difficult to pin down. Even worse, she had armor of radiant resistance to travel in sunlight. PVP would probably mean the other person fleeing and becoming a recurring thorn for us.
In this case I think I was able to justify it without breaking alignment or character. Still, there is the broader point of the fairness of asking players to stretch their characters. I usually advocate for “find a way to make your character motivations work with the party,” but an event where another PC’s actions are so antithetical to yours that it’s irreconcilable…that’s tough. At a certain point I think it is unfair for other players (especially with PCs leaning to the lower end of alignment) to demand you go along with actions antithetical to your own. I just try to make a good faith effort to work with the other players and their characters, help them with their goals, and generally be a good sport. I think I work hard enough at it that other players don’t see me as trying to force my own character or narrative goals on them when my character does insist on some degree of LG. Plus, one of the benefits of being a bro that helps the rest of the party out, including crafting gear and rezzing people, is if there is PVP most of the party would likely side with the helpful, loveable party cleric. Bro code goes both ways, after all.
I think you might just win this thread, Bill. Well said all the way down.
So my current character, a vivisectionist alchemist that I geared for being the party’s primary front line combatant, has tried to help everyone with their personal story quests. She’s a knight, and while her code is a little non-standard, the fact is it is very important to her. She’s had some bad luck, though.
She agreed to help the shattered Assassin’s guild that was part of our Rogue’s backstory. The rogue in question got splattered when he stepped out of position while in stealth and was revealed by friendly fireball. The six ogres in range beat him to death. But an oath is an oath, and his personal story arc will be finished without him.
Another player wanted their character to become a vampire, but ‘use the darkness for good.’ My character encouraged them, and is on great terms with the NPC’s from their story arc. …better in fact than the character themselves, whom upon becoming a vampire got all that goes with it and has had an intense case of buyer’s remorse.
As for my character, well… let’s just say events have taken a toll on the optimistic, somewhat mad scientist alchemical knight.
Cheers for the good brosmanship!
Have you approached any of your partymates out-of-game to discuss your personal quest (read: your looming case of pessimism)? In my experience, those arcs are best when you talk about them and plan them out a little bit with an accomplice.
WELL, there’s COMPLICATIONS with that. Sorry about the length. >.< TL;DR: I’ve made characters intentionally to come out like this, but this character was supposed to be happy and not fall into these things. Consider this a case study in the importance of being good friends with your fellow adventurers.
So this is that Rise of the Runelords game again. My character had been investigating all the cultists of Lamashtu that were popping up all the time. My character has sworn an oath to protect the party from anything, so she tries to solve situations diplomatically by making new friends-it results in 100% less getting stabbed. She also has a little different PoV on the morally challenged creatures of Golarion, which is to say she mostly considers ‘evil’ to be different political affiliations we don’t agree with or predatory hunger. She does believe in an absolute morality of good and evil, but very few creatures they’ve met qualify for that distinction.
Anyways. So I’m doing my thing, basically trying to prevent a fight with a couple of big demons by imitating a cultist of Lamashtu. My character has studied the cultists the whole game, was wearing a breastplate with her unholy symbol on it for a long time, and when she was finally able to get her own custom heavy armor (+feat), she decided to incorporate the symbol into her new armor. Continue to deceive her targets, claim power over the enemy-all that kind of thing.
WELL… the demons respond well to her! She knows what to say and how to say it…but they DON’T respond well to the rest of the party. Negotiations break down and the demons think she’s on their side, so they attack everyone BUT HER. After a couple rounds of combat seeing that things have really spiraled out of control, she jumps in to help her friends with the fighting instead of Aid Another type things.
After the fight, the party threatens to kill her if she shows any signs of falling, and she is -devastated.- She’d been worried for a long time she might have to fight the Monk (oath concerning if they turned into an evil murdery vampire that my knight take them down), but faced with the prospect of fighting the whole party (Unchained Monk, Earth/Fire Kineticist, Summoner, Cleric/Sacred Sentinel) she basically freaks out. As a knight, she recognizes that it would be bad tactically, and as person she feels like she can’t even trust the adventurers she’s put her life on the line for.
Just to see what would happen, feeling like she had nothing to lose, she does an experiment in the shrine of Lamashtu and manages to produce a monstrous humanoid out of a raccoon with her Vivisectionist class features instead of a normal humanoid. What happens next.. is we gained a level, and I got a feat, but didn’t know what to do with it. So I sez to tha GM, ‘ey GM! I’ve done a ton of RP stuff this whole campaign… how about a custom feat to reflect all that?
So we go looking through all the character’s accomplishments… and realize that she’s realistically attracted Lamashtu’s attention. She is now a CE Half Fiend champion of Lamashtu… in some ways wondering how the heck that happened, and in other ways happy that someone seems to appreciate her talents and skills.
The OOC angle on this is that the GM feels she’d try to corrupt any of the heroes she could, and my alchemist was in a really vulnerable place after her best friends threatened to ice her. I couldn’t disagree.
What is the definition of “falling” for an alchemist. I mean, it sounds like you already have if you’ve signed up to be Lamashtu’s champion. Are you hiding that info from the other players at this point, or is there some dramatic irony business going on?
More importantly, where do you see the character going, and are any of the other players in a position to help you get there?
Short form answers!
1) I was GOING to, until our Cleric went axe crazy on a wizard who SURRENDERED to us for being the agent of a demon lord. I don’t want to have to kill him.
2) Most of the party is likely going to return to their home lands and retire. Cerise though… the GM and I were talking… probably goes on to create new monstrous races ‘blessed’ by Lamashtu, knock over a few towns, maybe even Magnamar, and then into the Abyss to try to take Haagenti’s “Demon Lord of Alchemy” title.
My original sideplot, incidentally… was an expedition to a nearby underwater ruin to discover secrets of ancient Thassalon. No one has been interested in it, and I feel that plan is effectively dead. The GM rebuilt the Mega Dungeon we were in so all of our character arc villains were there, and we dealt with them… so when we hit the module next, it’s the final part to go kick in the BBEG’s door.
It’s really one of the best character arcs I’ve seen happen in a campaign, though. It didn’t go to plan, but I would say it’s ending in a legendary, world building sort of way.
I think it says a lot that you’re asking about the definition of ‘falling’ as an Alchemist. A writer wouldn’t ask that if it weren’t an interesting question.
Could we have some snippets from Fighter’s Tabeltop RPG version of the bro code?
“When a bro hears the DM make a mistake that helps another bro out, a bro keeps his mouth shut and smiling.”
And into the notes it goes.
Fingers crossed for Lumberjack Explosion turning into a prince from that kiss!
And not accidentally turning Elf Princess into a frog, mare, or other non-biped.
And also into the notes it goes.
It’s extra-in-character for Battlemaster Fighter to pick loot over action:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/always-choose-gold
Usually I play a Good character who would go out of their way to help people because it makes sense for their character. My less morally-upstanding characters tend to be backups that never see the light of day because DMs are averse to lethality/I avoid dying, or are played in one-shots.
My wizard in CoS tries to help the other characters cope as much as possible. She started adventuring for rather down to earth reasons (debts to pay), and hadn’t necessarily planned to stick with that group for long, or even to keep adventuring for long, but now that they’ve found themselves in Barovia, they’ve all got bigger things on their plate and since she has a good head on her shoulder, she found herself helping being the one that keeps the group together (through cheering up the understandably depressed party members, trying to figure out ways to keep safe, etc).
She might even keep up adventuring once (if) they get out of Barovia, instead of pawning off her magic gear, paying her debts and going back to her regular life, like she had planned at first. We’ll see.
CoS is a strange one for strong personal motivations. Plucked from your regular life, you find yourself in a strange land with some rather pressing problems. Banding together to overcome this is the natural response. In this way, it’s less about individual quests than THE QUEST to defeat Strahd.
In my own CoS game, my noblewoman’s family was her main priority. “Blood matters more than anything” was her shtick. That’s tough to pull off when you’re whisked away to an alternate dimension. Happily, my DM found a way to introduce one of my long-lost-cousins as a former opponent (now servant) of the BBEG.
In that sense, I guess the classic maneuver is to fold personal quests and motivations into the main storyline so that they don’t wind up competing with one another.
Yup, CoS is a bit constraining for that stuff. Too bad, because it’s my first long campaign, where there’s some time to explore that kind of character development. On the other hand, it’s a good way to develop character that initially had selfish reasons to adventure.
Fun thing though : remember how I said my character had debts? Well, since I’m also the note taker in the group (as a player, not a character), she has sort of become the treasurer of the group. And since they haven’t inquired IC about my motivations, the other PCs don’t know… But the players do. Because I told them, after we got our hand on some good loot :p
So now I get to watch them squirm a bit, and try to work out IC reasons to ask about my background. (It’s all in good fun though, don’t worry). I honestly don’t know myself if I’ll pull a fast one on them after getting out. Probably not, but it’s fun to keep them guessing.
Stealing from the party coffers? Egad! Such duplicity in the fair realm of Ravenloft!
I think this is where a player-character separation moment can help everyone’s roleplay. Say you are playing the stick-in-the-mud paladin who is utterly Lawful Stupid and won’t tolerate any shenanigans from the party.
Other party members talking about plans to steal something doesn’t have to be met in-character: instead of distrupting their plans or hauling them off the the guard, why not say “wow, it’s a good thing Sir Smitesalot can’t quite hear you right now, because he would not approve of this!” Thus rather than going straight to game-ruining PVP, you instead warn that you won’t have your character act out of character and allow them, but also let them know you’re not going to straight-up spoil their fun either.
If everyone is willing to be adult about the game, this can lead to more fun for everyone. Perhaps Sir Smitesalot dilligently stands watch over the inn while the others sneak off to steal from the Duke. Maybe they bluff their way past the good knight, while heading off for a good night. Then the next day there’s a massive uproar, and Smitesalot can insist that they offer their servicers as investigators. Do the others try to cover their tracks, or implicate a rival? Maybe they keep returning, or Smitesalot ends up standing watch with the Palace Guard…
The point being that taking a moment to be human to your friends not only reduces the chances of everyone getting upset, it allows you to play an ignorant and uncompromising character without being one yourself. And it opens the possibility for way more fun and adventure than you may have had otherwise.
It’s a bummer for Sir Smitesalot to have to hang back at the inn while the other characters go and do the adventure. At that point, RPing that you’ve been duped into complicity with the shenanigans might be more fun.
Also, obligatory Gamers 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90wFS7cDQCg&feature=youtu.be&t=250
These hypothetical players are prioritizing their personal narrative goals over everyone else’s.
Someone else got the sudden need to play Graceful Wicked Masques? 😀
As for helping other player reach their goal… Well, TTRPG is a communal effort, but isn’t charity. Screw the others, earn our happy ending and their too. Maybe we like PVP too much but we think games are more fun with a little more conflict. We can face to be at each other throat and try to rip out everyone else faces. But consider that even then we can be helping the other players. Think of this, if in the table there can be only one winner doesn’t mean that the fun goes for only one person, you can say that the hypothetical players are prioritizing their personal narrative goals over everyone else’s, but it could also be that they are adding to the other players fun and narrative goals. By fighting and trying to wrestle the game to their side they are making the other players wanting to do the same until one wins and takes the victory. He wins but isn’t the only one who got fun. Think of many free-for-all games, you may win or lose but you will get fun. The same can be in a communal game. In a typical D&D game there is the adventurers team and the BBEG team, the two fight but only one wins. In a PVP each player is its own team but all of them are contributing to the fight and the narrative of how they struggle to achieve victory. The same role the BBEG has in a normal game, opposing and make the adventurers efforts more epic can be filled by the other players 😀
Many times we have done more PVP games, in our next campaign, when the quarantine is over, it will be 80 days and counting during weekend, we have already planned a nice game that depending on how we develop can have lots of PVP and some nice info on the setting and its past. I am looking forward for it to finally be able to tell them so many things 🙂
This isn’t a referendum on PVP. Backstabbing and self-serving is fun when that’s what you’ve signed up for.
I’m talking about those games where PVP isn’t discussed in Session Zero: “I mean… I guess I figured it was something that could happen, but I didn’t think Bob would actually kill my character in his sleep!” When you try to insert PVP randomly into play, you can create interesting conflict. Unfortunately, you can also create resentment.
Well if the people playing the game isn’t mature enough to… oh, right, now i got your point 😛
As the question for sacrificing the spotlight for someone else, yeah, i have done that in almost every opportunity. I don’t like the spotlight, the spotlight is bad 🙁
Wizard stands aghast.
For 0,5 microseconds until he realizes that mean more spotlight for him 😛
Remember i am the one in charge of the overall plot and the setting in my group. Mine is the power to make and unmake, to canon and un-canon, is my authority the retcon and retgonne. With this power at my command i can’t be in the spotlight. Also i would use all my other powers for evil but not these ones 🙁
Reminds me of the time we played D&D 3.5 with the Swashbuckler flaw system. Taking a flaw in Swashbuckler is a personality trait that becomes activated when another player triggers your flaw in a scene. I played a ninja who had come back from a mission to find her entire clan killed by a mysterious enemy, and so my flaw was paranoid. After a few sessions in a martial arts tournament where numerous unusual occurrences already had my character on edge about the other lady in the group, someone pulled the final straw. During the tournament, I had ended up facing off with an obviously superior fighter who, due to a lucky crit, was soundly winning. I noticed the other lady walk over and talk to someone, then the warrior I’m fighting forfeits and walks off the arena. My hackles are already up. At the awards ceremony, I’m given a chance to look at the scroll that houses the location of one of the fabled Nine Swords, and I take every dirty ninja precaution in the world to read it in such a fashion that only I know the location. Next night, the other lady approaches me about an expedition to the very location I saw the sword was at. Hackles raised further. Thinking “Friends close, enemies closer” I agree. So we’re traveling and during the conversation, one of the players triggers my paranoid flaw. So I’m watching for any sign of betrayal, generally low key panicking, we get attacked by some monsters, and the party takes a pretty big wopping. Most everyone but me is hurt hard (I had been using invisibility to make myself not a target through most of the fight) and it was a low magic game, so direct spellcasters were forbidden. So everyone beds down for a night’s rest. I assure everyone that I will take first watch. Then I passed the Gm an index card after tossing a die. The Gm stares at it aghast, looks at me, looks back at the card, then says Everyone make a perception with the -10 for being asleep. No one makes the DC. Everyone make a fortitude save. I throw my sneak attack dice plus a d4. Everyone looks at me funny. The GM says “You guys triggered paranoid. This is your fault. you are all murdered in your sleep by the paranoid ninja.”
“This is your fault. you are all murdered in your sleep by the paranoid ninja.”
Nice,i like that type of DMing. That phrase reminds me of something, but i can’t remember what. Surely a thing i made a Tuesday 😛
Why does the optimization-heavy Cleric keep the self-absorbed Fighter around, anyway? If Fighter is so power-focused, why is he a Human Fighter?
Sometimes you can make room for the problem character, if the players are all on the same page. In a Dark Sun campaign, we had a traitor in the party – one of the PCs secretly working for the local Sorcerer-King – and obviously that’s a problem for a heroic party that’s trying to overthrow the Sorcerer-Kings.
But it worked for us, because the players all knew about it from the start, and the player of that character knew that sooner or later, the game would be up and whatever the outcome, he’d need a new character. And the rest of us were happy to go along with it, because it was actually a lot of fun playing our characters trying to figure things out without metagaming… and waiting for the “sudden but inevitable betrayal”.
It’s all about that metagame pvp:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/intra-party-romance
I think the thing a lot of people forget when it comes to the “it’s what my character would do” excuse is that the other party members are also your character’s friends and trusted allies, or at least useful companions for the more evil types. Most of the time you shouldn’t really need any better motivation to help them with a personal goal other than the fact that they’re a friend and you want to see them succeed. Obviously, this excludes parties that don’t start off knowing each other, but your characters should at least have some in-fiction rapport by the end of your first story arc. I’m always a bit taken aback by players that retire a PC because they don’t have a reason to travel with the party anymore. Does just having your friends’ backs not motivate the PC enough to stick around?
I think the characters not knowing each other is the reason (or at least one reason) my first and only D&D one shot failed so badly. The GM wanted to avoid the “you meet in a tavern” trope for the three of us, and so had us wandering around a small town during a festival and running into each other one on one. My character was a kindhearted bard that, until recently, was in a band that was frequently hired by the rich, and so we all stole things while the patrons trusted us; the rest of the band was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and the jailers found stolen goods on them, but my character always abstained from alcohol and was able to run away to the small town. My character was playing the flute around town, and an incredibly drunk sorcerer noticed and came up to me to offer me a beer. When I turned it down, he left after casting ‘message’ to call me boring. I realized that was the GM attempting to make us meet up, and we failed, and so when I ran into the monk blowing magical bubbles in fun shapes for some kids, I first tried to help him amuse the kids. I talked to the monk and tried to use my meta-knowledge that he introduced himself as a shipwrecked pirate before the session to try and create a common bond. Obviously, he became suspicious of my character being so blatant, and so he gave me a fake name and walked away.
Because our characters weren’t friends at all, when the main plot of a mayor kidnapping was pushed on us we didn’t work well together. Even though it was technically PVP, I still think tackling the sorcerer to stop him from using magic missile again on the mayor was needed, even though he later said either the mayor organized the murder of his guards and the kidnapping or the lizardmen would have to stop if their captive died. The monk was now even more suspicious of us since he was disguised and running alongside the kidnappers to find out their lair and saw the magic missiles hit the mayor, and so, when we later found the tied up mayor being tortured and the sorcerer decided that killing the mayor would calm down the mastermind kidnapper, the monk ran away and left us to be attacked by the decidedly not calmed down mastermind and company. The sorcerer and I won by the skin of our teeth, but when I told him I was going to bring him to jail for killing the mayor (I wanted bounty money), he stabbed himself in the neck, causing me to cry.
Anyways, I learned that everyone in a party needs to have some reason to trust each other and work together or else what you’ve been hoping to play for years will be horrible.
I’m sorry, I just wanted to complain.
i think random not working, it keep taking me to
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/entrepreneurial
It’s working for me.
What browser and OS are you using?
That’s a totally randomly selected comic, we swear!
Jokes aside, it looks like the random is cached – if you keep reloading, it shows the same comic; if you wait a bit or switch to a different browser, then it gets “stuck” on a different comic. (Started on firefox it kept leading to the Shopping Expedition; I opened it in Chrome, that always loads the Unworthy Quest; trying again in Firefox after a couple of minutes it’s now stuck on The High Ground.)
“it’s what my character would do”
Is it really? Stealing from the party gives them free pass on lynching you when they find out. Give your party to the cops and guess who they named as a mastermind of all those crimes. As for becoming a lich, first check your character. How all are they? Did they try all pleasures of life before becoming an undead? Is there anything preventing them from becoming a lich on the dawn of their life, surrounded by family and wealth?