Unfortunate Developments
It’s been a while since we last saw Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits. Ever since she and Demon Queen had their tussle, swapped bodies, and summarily freaked out about it, Handbook-World has gone on unaware of the change. Judging by the expression of Woolantula the Servile, that state of affairs might not last much longer. We’re coming up on Devil’s Night after all. The walls between worlds grow thin once more, and the one year anniversary of this story arc draws nigh!
While we wait for plots to develop, let’s talk about the unfortunate fate of our favorite catgirl. When she first took up her rapier, learned to cast spellstrike, and embarked on the adventuring life, Magus couldn’t have known that she would one day occupy a throne of darkness. How she reacts to this unforeseen eventuality is very much down to personal preference though.
For some players, a strong vision of character is an essential part of the experience. You guys remember that time our illustrious illustrator found her beloved fashionista elf reincarnated as a dwarf? It was very much a BAD TIME for her. She tends to build characters with a strong visual design in mind. Messing with that vision messes with her essential enjoyment of the game.
I’ve heard my share of tales from other players though. Race-swapped, sex-changed, turned into a vampire, battling against a reversed alignment… All of these can and do happen over the course of a campaign. And if you’re the kind of player that loves a rod of wonder, wild magic sorcerers, or crit fumble deck, encountering the random and the unforeseen is the essential enjoyment of the game.
I contend that we’re all operating on that continuum. On one end of the the line is “my vision of the character.” On the other is “what happens to them.” Go too far in one direction and you wind up with the “Deck of Too Many Things.” In your quest for the new and the unexpected you’ve accidentally annihilated the status quo. The game is an unrecognizable morass of disconnected components. Better start over. Go too far in the other direction, however, and you become a hypocritical Wizard. Bad stuff can’t possibly happen to you! Your character is your precious baby, and risking their safety is unacceptable. Congratulations, your game has become a joyless exercise in risk-free power fantasy. Better start over. As you can see, there’s a reason that GM screens and the phrase “I’ll roll in the open” both exist.
So for today’s discussion, I propose we give this continuum some serious thought. Do you prefer a GM that gently nudges you back to the status quo, or would your rather bow to the power of random chance? Is there some “essential quality” about your character that you will not change? How high do you turn the randomness nobs on your own game? And have you ever requested help from the GM to nudge a storyline one way or the other? Tell us all about your own bizarre fates, unexpected character developments, and eventual returns to normal down in the comments!
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I’m someone who very much wants to keep their characters looking the same as intended and I don’t like it much when that gets messed with. I’ve spent a good amount of time slowly collecting possible art to use as character art (because I have absolutely no artistic talent of my own in that sense). So I like to be able to point to the art and say “that” and once I’ve chosen it I don’t enjoy saying “used to be that” or such.
As a GM I also treat my players the same way. It’s just as easy and probably more rewarding to mess with a character’s situation in life or their internal lives without messing with the player’s vision for who the character is.
Though I’ve certainly played with people who don’t feel the same, of course.
I tend to like “injury randomness.” That is to say, characters in my games frequently suffer permanent deleterious effects – a lost arm, a madness forcing them to pursue their goals to the exclusion of all else, a pair of broken legs – and they might even suffer more major transformations due to wild magic – the loss of a true name, being drained of some magical power – but I’m not going to change essential elements like alignment, race or class unless they seek that out. It’s just more interesting to see how they react to the smaller changes than to impose big ones.
As my go-to games to run are Warhammer and Ravenloft, I make sure my players can accept that sometime the Mutations or Dark Powers are gonna get you, and generally my players are good with it. Only situation I had where I know I caused a player a sad was in the final session of a Warhammer campaign. The party Dwarf melee-brute went toe-to-toe with a Lord of Change (greater daemon of the most mutation-happy chaos god for the uninitiated) and came away with a mutation. It was mostly concealable, but part of the (2nd ed) rules is it changes your base class to Mutant, so although its just an admin-issue, his character was technically no longer a Dwarf, and I know that hit him hard (and this is a player who once had a Earth Genasi warrior have a complete body-swap with an elf rogue and laugh it off).
As for myself, I once had a character accidentally take a Potion of Gender Changing, and I was pretty annoyed… until I realised my characters (very edgy, sorry I was young) backstory involved him being on the run for a crime he didn’t commit, and well, he wouldn’t have to worry about wearing a disguise any more! Towards the end of the campaign the party were gifted a bunch of wishes, and the DM said he wouldn’t monkey with the wish if I wished to change him back, which was pretty good of him.
So while status guo has it’s use and place, I am more in favour of “actions have consequences”, It’s partly why I like warhammer rpgs, their critical damage tables and if you court the forces of chaos you must accept the risk of spawnhood.
Of course it’s just a game and we are supposed to have fun with it, warhammer comes with Fate points just so you can dodge the worst effects. And sometimes the dice just fails you. Or you are playing Paranoia and you are just waiting who is going to make you scratch another clone off… don’t blame me you ticked the box where you admit being mutants.
“As you can see, there’s a reason that GM screens and the phrase “I’ll roll in the open” both exist.”
Yes, it’s so my notes can be protected from prying eyes and I have handy rules at hand and the open rolling is because the Dice Fall Where They May.
And as a Player I’m very “will of the dice”.
My very first D&D character, Jareth Clanovo started as an Elfven “troubleshooter” (think Elf Royal Family Hitman) and eventually became an Undead “abomination” King struggling to save his family/race from extinction.
My current incarnation of that name, Jareth Mooncalled, Elven sage/agent/hobo went on to become a Cultist to YOG-SOTHOTH (The Gate and The Key) and a property owner. Though he’s still not an ‘evil’ cultist despite being excommunicated by the “good” gods (can’t blame them, ‘worship’ the outer powers, get excommunicated, it’s pretty standard – even though Jareth doesn’t //worship// YOG, letting even the smallest most infinitesimal part of it into reality, e.g. his mind, is grounds for excommunication).
How dare you? When I quest for the new and unexpected, I annihilate the status quo on purpose, thank you very much!
…unless the GM stops me, I guess.
Anyways, I haven’t developed a lot of skill at expressing my character’s…character at the table, so I don’t know how to respond to this episode’s discussion question. I guess I could draw on my play-by-post experience, where I definitely indulge in rolling with whatever crazy changes come about thanks to the GM’s plans, other players’ actions, and my own mistakes.
Like that one sci-fi game where I ate a weird pill and destroyed the whole base. Probably shoulda listened when the GM asked if I really wanted to do that…
On second thought, I did listen. What I should have done was ignore the voice in my head that wanted to know why the GM was warning me.
Ah, the ol’ ship of theseus situation. I do feel that if the only thing that can alter the status quo for a character is death (and not undead, dead dead) than that can create a certain sense of apathy. I’ve never really had anything interesting happen to any of my characters (besides a gender bender of my first) so I find the possibility of consequences very tantalizing (I always perk up when I see an Injury table or such in a book). This is probably why alot of people are drawn to Call of Cthulhu games, to see what kinda mess their characters will end up ad.
LARPing in college, I began a character as a reaction against the three dead sword-jockey characters that preceded him. Larry the Bartender wore no armor, was not proficient with any weapon, and was basically a RP character with a stack of Craftsman skills. The effete social butterfly (against all odds) became a popular and long-lived PC. Jump-cut to some years later, just a few months before I (newly married) moved out of state and (sadly) left LARPing in the rear view mirror.
As Larry joined a group of intrepid heroes to literally harrow Hell itself to rescue the soul of a wrongfully-condemned friend, someone came up to shake my hand and wish me well as I accompanied the expedition. First, I had to sheath the weapon in my left hand, then I shifted the weapon in my right to my left and sheathed that, then I took the third weapon (a back-up for a friend) and stuck that through an equipment loop in my satchel of grenades and spell packets. My friend, chuckling, gave me a pat on the shoulder, only to be met with the solid “clank” of the breastplate I’d been persuaded to don beneath my liege’s tabard.
We looked at each other for a moment. “You are not the hobbit that you were,” he said.
Realizing that my character had now well and truly jumped the shark and had nowhere else to grow, I said “Aye.”
My characters exist to suffer or triumph for the sake of my amusement. If the situation they are in isn’t just frustrating to me, why wouldn’t I be fine with continuing with the situation and seeing where it goes?
One of my characters got a major change she didn’t want and a major change she did want back to back.
So we were playing through Descent into Avernus. The penultimate dungeon before the plot device is called “The Bleeding Citadel” which is basically comprised of a giant scab and was really gross. The map was actually sort of the D&D equivalent pf those sidescrolling sections of Link’s Awakening. Every time we had to climb on one of said super-gross walls I was making little retching noises.
At one point we poof’d a Demon while it was directly above my character. In Avernus getting exposed to Demon Ichor can mutate your body. Nat 1 on the dex save to get out of the way of the ichor falling on me. My mouth was open for that because of the nat 1. (No mechanical downside, but eugch.) All right my Con save is pretty good, I can take it. Nat 1. My character’s fingers were suddenly mutated into demonic claws. She was completely freaking out aboot everything; she was covered in a number of horrible substances and now had horrible claw-hands: She was having a bad day. We got that fixed through a **Greater Restoration** thankfully.
Later upon going through a vision-quest to grab a holy sword, the party reasoned that my character was the only one who was both Good and martial (I was LG Commander Warlord, the Thief Rogue was CG, the Dreams Druid was LN, and the Kensei Monk was TN) enough to do so. Upon grabbing the sword she got a celestial transformation: Her Charisma became 20, she took on her “Ideal appearance”, she got fancy celestial eyes with truesight, and she got angel wings with a fly speed. After all the jokes aboot her “Extra charisma” (Actually just the ideal appearance) from myself and the party she was pretty okay with that transformation. Upon realizing that the sword wouldn’t zap non-good people who held it like we thought we decided to “Puff puff pass” the transformation. However it turns out that doing so would also change the alignment to LG as our TN Lizardfolk (Roleplaying the stereotypical lizardfolk amorality) Kensei learned. Our CN klepto Thief rogue declined the transformation, possibly for aesthetic reasons, and possibly because the player didn’t want her character to not be a klepto.
I personally enjoy it when the status quo changes. Character growth is my favorite part of playing D&D by far; if my character is just gaining levels and doing nothing with them, then that kinda sucks. But if they’re learning from the experience then I’m much more interested in the game. Scars, missing limbs, (light) trauma, and the in-character joy of discovering that Flight is actually a really fun spell to play with during downtime are all simply reflections of that character growth.
One of my favorite unintentional examples of this was in a sci-fi game I was in. Basically, the plot revolved finding 9 macguffins, each one so powerfully attuned to one of the nine alignments that whomever held one was slowly turned to that alignment. I was the one designated to carry these, since I had a high Will save and a good perception to spot if I was being affected. Thus, for most of the campaign we were collecting the macguffins without any major alignment changes.
One of the macguffins was protected by a vampiric cult, which kept getting in our way to try and sell us on vampirism as if it was some form of MLM scheme (which is basically is, if you think about it). We turned them down at every opportunity, and even ended up staying a while in the dungeon after getting the Macguffin until the vampires went away so we didn’t have to deal with them again on the way out. The combination of that longer time holding the Macguffin and a terrible save roll ended up changing me to Lawful Evil by the time I got back to our ship. I ended up talking with the GM about what that means for my character, to make sure it didn’t make me an enemy of the party or anything like that. Apparently, I just viewed things in a more selfish / less moral light, since I was already lawful.
And since my character wanted to become stronger, that meant I had no reason not to go back and accept the vampire’s MLM scheme. After all, that gets me more power immediately even if it does have downsides later! The GM was really surprised by this; he had introduced the vampires as future antagonists, with the assumption that the mostly-lawful-good party would never undergo such a blatantly evil ritual. It was really fun playing an evil vampire version of my character for the rest of that campaign; through evil my character finally found the self-confidence she was looking for, which hilariously resulted in her overcompensating and becoming *too* confident, which then resulted in her untimely demise in the final dungeon due to her own hubris. I couldn’t have asked for a better character arc, in retrospect.
I’m not the biggest fan of permanently altering PCs, at least not without some prior consultation/consent. The biggest example from my own games is when a PC lost his body in a lawsuit in Hell Court (long story) and so the party got their wizard scholar friends to move his soul into his suit of armor. Given that he already had a robot arm (which the PC took with him when he gave his body over to the plaintiff and integrated into his armor body), it wasn’t that big of a deal for the character, who looked at becoming an immortal robot as a chance to fight even more demons.
I do have a future campaign planned where this might be an issue, though. A substantial part of it is based on the AP book “Curse of the Lady’s Light” (SO SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THAT I GUESS), and that includes the infamous Clone spell trap, where a PC can get killed but wake up in the clone body of the ancient wizard who built the dungeon. It’s a really cool concept (especially since the book repeatedly gives advice about how dungeon denizens react to seeing a PC that looks like their former boss), but I am concerned that it is a) rather agency-stealing and b) dependent on a PC failing two not-that-difficult saving throws (a PC with no ability bonus passes if they roll an 11 or a 14, depending on class) and if they pass a single one, nothing cool happens and the players never know what might have happened. My current solution is to make the DCs much higher, but the effect does not kill the PC. Instead, it renders their original body inert but alive while sticking them in the clone. After a session or two stuck in the clone, the party finds a gem that functions like a Magic Jar spell and allows the PC to switch between the bodies… or switch around with other PCs. Then the party can choose who goes in the clone as they use it throughout the dungeon and no doubt engage in all sorts of ridiculous body-swapping schemes. (Later parts of my dungeon even have a ghost who might steal whichever body the PCs aren’t using at that time.)
Does that sound better than “you failed this save, so you are now a female human wizard unless you kill yourself and use Reincarnate”? (I guess the original isn’t THAT different from “you died normally and then used Reincarnate”, but it FEELS more like an attack on the player’s agency, doesn’t it?)
All I’ll say is, my first ever 2e Pathfinder character (converted from 1e), took the reincarnation into a dwarf better than the aforementioned elf fashioning.
Wymond Dwerryhouse was a simple man, second son of a River Kingdoms farmer turned paladin of Erastil with a loyal angelic pig by his side, but a deadly encounter with Klarkosh, the Clockwork Mage, deep in the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, left him dead. The party rushed back to the surface after finishing Klarkosh off, and he got reincarnated ASAP. Ultimately all it did was make him shorter and turn his mustache into a full beard. He was already a sweet and hardworking country boy with a West Country British accent, so not very much changed. What would have REALLY been funny is him getting reincarnated as an elf or a shoony! 😛
My thoughts on transforming characters permanently are similar to my thoughts on permadeath: It should be an opt-in thing on the part of the player. People who are comfortable with just taking whatever consequences the game hands out can get permanently reworked as much as the GM wants, while people who don’t like the idea should have a way to fix it.
Now, for my characters, it depends on the context, but generally I’m more okay with it if I can still do the same kind of things with them. If my elf wizard gets turned into an orc, they may have trouble coping with it, but I can probably adapt. If that wizard goes blind and can no longer read their spellbook, that’s a problem. If they get their alignment permanently changed (outside of natural character development), then they’re not just not my character any more.
On a related note, I’ve come to realise I don’t like forced alignment changes because they’re hard to handle properly. If the neutral good fighter picks up a Helm of Opposite Alignment and becomes neutral evil, do you trust the player to play their character as evil without much incentive to do so, or do you turn them into an NPC and force the player to get a new character? I can’t find any guidelines on this, even though it comes up a number of times in various systems and editions, and that’s a big problem.
I habitually lean towards having a vision of my character that I don’t want threatened. It’s a problem. I try to be less bullheaded about it than I was in years past.
Our partys druid in a game I played ended the game as a one eyed (Took an ogres chain to the face), one armed (Had a rough encounter with a wolf), one legged (A lizardfolk chopped it off, while he was distracted), heavily scared (Life happens, ya know?) wrinkly looking elf (He drank a potion that would have aged anyother species to dust). And he was one of the most memorable characters I have ever played with.
So I think random stuff can do a lot for a character, and it is part of why I play the game. To experience the story that emerges from dealing with that randomness.
That said, I have also been on the annoying side of this. I once played a changeling whose quest was to become a real elf (She was adopted and raised by elves). So she kept being a changeling a secret. She died in one of the first encounters after joining with the party (Because the DM didn´t understand the grabbing and CR rules). The only resurrection option the DM decided to give to the party was reincarnation (The party checked with pretty much every temple in town, including the clerics, but apparently the only person in this giant overly magic city who was able to raise people from the dead was an archdruid who just happened to pass by), which lead to her being resurrected as a half-elf. Which pretty much deleted her entire motivation, as it was close enough to being an elf that she felt a kinship. It was… a somewhat tiring experience.
Tbf to my DM, he did allow me to roll twice. Through the other result was a goblin, which was just an utter no-go for the character. It very much felt like he just wanted to shut down the character concept.
In general I try to stay away from things that changes a character concept. That is changing their personality, alignment or species (Without consent). I will sometimes introduce such elements, but they will often be temporary. It does also depend on the player in question. There are some that I would never do something like that to, and others where I know I can go “Your character now sincerely believes that the moon is their giant cheese god” and that they will run with it.
> “Your character now sincerely believes that the moon is their giant cheese god”
The little ratfolk entrepreneur Churrik just had a religious epiphany. (And his fervent belief in the giant lunar cheese god won’t stop him from trying to corner the moon-cheese market!)
Listen, believing in the Moon Cheese God is a rat race. If Churrik can out-compete the other believers, then it is because Churrik deserves to corner the moon-cheese market.
After all, cheese is made to be eaten. And by eating the moon cheese you are eating your god, which is basically a holy sacrament. Might as well earn some coin on the side for it. Spaceships for transport aren´t free, after all.
I feel like when the status quo is shaken up thoroughly enough, the game might devolve into an attempt to recover that status quo.
Take for example, a permanent curse affecting a PC. There’s two outcomes here: The PC learns to live with it, or the PC seeks to remove the curse. The severity of the curse and how much it affects RP/combat mechanics, as well as if the curse affects the rest of the party indirectly (e.g. by making combat more inconvenient or just being super annoying) also determines if the whole party will shift gears from whatever plot the DM had in mind to a quest to seek a cure for the curse.
I can’t tell if the fact that the throne room and its coating of webbing hasn’t changed in a year is a sign of due diligence on the side of Woolantula, keeping it in ‘pristine condition’, or a state of not cleaning up the place for literally ever.
Oh! This one I can actually comment on!
So as a DM I try to stick with dice as they lie, but will on occasion use a different or d6 to adjust the outcome. Why would I do this? My group and I have come with a couple of rules regarding crits: the first is max damage plus roll to make it feel more like a critical. The other is an impairment system: “Oh, you got a crit and managed to cut open their right arm? Congrats, he can barely hold his sword and he’s bleeding out. Not to mention he has disadvantage since he’s using his off hand.”
I bring that up because we all agreed that whatever the party can do, the NPCs can do. So we have a couple of characters with pretty nasty scars that mess with their ideas. Not to mention we have had a couple of people die and used a cheaper resurrection spell and they’ve all come back as different species. And don’t get me started on our expanded wild mage surge table.
In short, it’s whatever people think is fun for them. I know some min-maxers will rage and I won’t use them in a game. Then again, some people love the random thrill of the game, where a single dice roll can make your character godly an abomination.
Then again, I play a human wild magic sorcerer with quills for hair and was gender flipped and age regressed. So I may be a bit biased…
So, yeah.
So the crits are sort of like ad hoc adjustments? Meaning that, if you don’t like the outcome, you change it but still keep an element of randomness by rolling an extra d6?
I may need an example, because I’m having trouble picturing the way this works in practice.