A few months ago, I prepared a demo D&D game for PM, his friend Vince, and Franky’s brother Mike, all newbies to RPGs or D&D 3.5 in general. Franky had joined to even out the group and act as the expert on the players side.
Our game session, based on Paizo’s excellent Pathfinder #1 adventure, was marked by atrocious dice rolls by the players and is chronicled here.
After having read Graham’s account of his new Pathfinder campaign, I got the urge to re-visit that game and maybe get another session going in the upcoming weeks.
I polled the players and 3 of them agreed. I suggested that they could, if the chose to, create new characters. We would still pick up the adventure where we left off (after the goblin raid) but we’d RetCon it so that the new character would be the heroes.
Vince, while he seemed to have enjoyed his one foray in the world of RPGs, was not available, so I asked Yan to stand in.
Of course, 24 hours later, Yan had a character fleshed out for 20 levels.
He made himself a Warblade (from the Book of Nine Swords) loosely (read totally) based on Kurosawa’s Kuwabatake Sanjuro, a samurai character from a movie we saw over at PM’s a few weeks ago.
While I have yet to see the novel Yan will write on his new character, one cool flavour he borrows from Japanese legend will be that Jubei (his character) will always fight with a Bokken (A wooden Katana).
I have to hand it to him, Yan loves character creation and really pours himself into his characters.
Franky and Mike haven’t yet chimed in on thier choice to keep the old characters or make new ones.
Getting a character for PM was a bit more complicated. PM is definitively a casual player, he doesn’t want to tackle actually learning the game’s character creation process and I respect that.
He’s also showing clear signs of being a story telling/method Acting type of player. So we agreed that while I would shop for a character class, he would think about some fluff and we would tack the later on the former.
While looking for a really simple class to play, and knowing that the Fighter role was already ‘taken’ by Yan, I looked into alternatives that were easy to play from a crunch perspective.
Based on seeing him play World of Walking (he he), I surmised that PM does not dislike playing support characters. I therefore started looking into cleric alternatives in my numerous sourcebooks. Yan did too on his side.
That’s when I found the Favoured Soul. It’s basically a Divine spell-slinging sorcerer. There are no spells to prepare, a limited selection of spells and no undead turning complications. It might not be the most powerful character but it’s certainly one with little resource and rules management.
Yan came out with the Scout, a fast moving rogue that does bonus damage when he moves instead of when he flanks.
I proposed both concepts to PM through Gtalk and he agreed to mull it over.
Five minutes later he reverted with something like:
“Hmmm, it would probably to complex to pull off crunch-wise, but could I be a really powerful cleric/favoured soul that is losing his powers…”
Never being one to shy away from a challenge, I pondered this for a few minutes and proposed the following:
-Why not go the fluff way instead?
-Let’s make your character an Ex-Archbishop of a very large and powerful church. Somewhere in the character’s quest for power, he lost touch with his divine faith and became a bureaucrat.
-To teach him a lesson, an agent of your god cursed you to start aging backwards, losing the memories of prior days as you progress.
-Seeing what was happening to you, you started a journal of the memories you had on each day as you slowly regressed for many years, loosing your position in the church and slowly reverting to a lowly cleric.
-Many many years later, you finally lost your 1st level of cleric, becoming a commoner.
-That’s where you found a new, purer, stronger faith and the curse was broken.
-You became a Favoured Soul, the only memories of your past life is the journal you keep.
He loved it, especially the story potential of the journal! Old enemies, keys to enigmas, mystic secrets, it’s all there!
(For those who haven’t read it, I stole the idea from Dan Simmon’s Hyperion book, the Memento movie and the classic Second Chance trope).
Having done something similar before, I must say that I really love helping forge a background, personality or cool gimmick to make the character more interesting for the player.
What about the tricks you use to help your player build more satisfying characters?
I like the character concept, excellent hook potential, and a lot of fun for a divinely favored class.
This will probably look a bit long in comment form, so I’ll try to be as succinct as possible:
The most recent change we had in my campaign was an alignment shift. One of the players is a young monk, lawful neutral. He comes from a peasant family in the north, where the commoners value hard work and a life of dedication to improving your body, mind, and soul. Before he was twenty he left home, bored with the life of a farmer.
I have the Oriental Adventures book (gorgeous, gorgeous book! I’ll still probably use it even in 4E, somehow …), and he was getting bored of both his character, and the monk class around level 7 (there’s not a lot of class features beyond that). We found the Shintao Monk in OA, it’s a kind of paladin flavored monk prestige class.
The hitch, however, is a requirement of lawful good. I thought about it for a while, thinking of a way to offer an alignment change. During his absence, the small province he was from suffered from religious troubles (the traditional worship of Pelor suppressed by the larger established church). His village was burnt in the troubles.
Later, after more time had passed while the players were in Faerie, ghosts of commoners began to appear in the destroyed villages. The player went back and met with his parents (in a very touching scene). They charged him with using his strength to prevent death and spread mercy in the world.
So, he accepted the responsibilities layed on him by his parents’ ghosts (which will help explain the Commune with Spirit ability of the Prc).
Telling this story it reminds me an awful lot of Luke in the beginning of A New Hope now, so I must have tapped a trope (or a cliche). Key differences are he actually met with his dead relatives (who are at peace). He does not seek revenge, but only to prevent widespread pain in the future.
We’ll see if he’s more interested in a wandering protector than a bored thug.
Holy wall of text! I apparently need to get my own blog instead of filling the comments section of others.
One thing you’ll never hear from me is that you left too long a comment… although I will also encourage you to blog if you want to tackle it!
Great story you got there!
And thanks for the feedback!
So what are your thoughts on the pathfinder adventures? I heard some really good things from someone (he didn’t give me a complete description, but said they were interesting) and I was tempted to pick up a few copies. I’m not sure if I would run them in DND, or port them elsewhere. If they’re written by the teams behind dragon and dungeon, then I know they’ll be quality. What are your thoughts on them phil?
They’re quite good, John. I’m running them right now, and Chatty has been singing their praises for a while. Incredibly well-written, great fluff and world in addition to good encounter design and a very engaging story.
Also, nice usage of the key there. You’re a coder by day, I assume?
I’ll make suggestions that will be easy to engage with in actual play. Someone on the brink of change is always a good idea, as is someone with a clear opposing force.
Especially the more casual or silent players should have characters who are deeply engaged in the situation. The experience, dedicated and loud players can have characters with less immediate trouble, the player will come up with something to do anyway.
What about the tricks I use to help my player build more satisfying characters?
Well, first a note on fluff: I don’t like to read long background stories. The argument being that neither I nor my players are published authors so if I want to read a good story, I’d better pick up a book. We’re just not that good. As far as I’m concerned, actualy play is far more important. That’s why I tell my players to write a sentence or two about their background, and run with it. What they do from level 1 to level 8 is going to turn into the background of their future character!
As for crunch, I’ve limited the races to the ones from the PHB and the classes to PHB + DMG. So there’s not a lot of crunch to pick from.
As the story progresses, I will allow characters to expand on their background if they need somehting. All I request is that it doesn’t contradict our past games and that it fits into the rough world sketches I’ve prepared. I’ll help fitting the character into the setting.
This rarely comes up in play, however. I guess because most of my players imagine themselves to be loners. And without a network of imaginary friends, it just seems pointless.
Graham|ve4grm: Not quite a coder, I’m kind of jack of all trades techie for my day job. I’ve been prone to a lot of typos lately because my right thumb got broken a few months back. It got broken doing Belegarth, the full contact foam sword fighting without the larp. It is mostly healed now, but sometimes causes me issues because of the way I hold it.
Thanks for the comments on the pathfinder adventures. I am really tempted to pick them up. I was sad when they said they weren’t publishing dungeon anymore. I understand the benefit of the online aspects with the New DND insider, but I don’t agree with it.
I love the backstory! Nice work.
I’m re-reading Pathdfinder right now; I’m coming close to talking my group into playing D&D again, and I’ve high hopes that running Pathfinder will get them back into the game. Here’s hoping, eh? 🙂
Good morning all! (or afternoon/evening for my Euro/Asian buddies… globalization indeed)
Wow, I’m impressed at the responses!
John: While I only read the 1st Pathfinder in detail, they all have excellent production values and are customizable to fit a large range of play style.
They definitively replaced Dunegon for me as I swipe encounters, loot and ideas from them even if I don,t get to play them.
Check my Pathfinder category to see my previews of the first 3 (I still haven’t received my #4)
Tommi: That’s a great suggestion, thanks!. Yan will create his own mischief but I’ll focus on PM and Mike for some ‘pre-loaded’ in game issues 🙂
Alex: My group (myself included) has grown tired of vanilla D&D’s crunch (and I feel that we getting tired of the fantasy genre, but that’s another post) so that’s why almost all characters are non-core anymore.
Greywulf: Thanks man!
Be warned one and all that Pathfinder #2’s very creepy horror themes and ‘iffy’ haunted house mechanics have turned off quite a few people. Hacking might be necessary.
“Also, nice usage of the key there. You’re a coder by day, I assume?”
The “”s come because when he hit “Submit comment”, he did not answer the anti-spam word. Because the content of form fields is lost on hitting the “Back” button, the script handily gives you a cut-and-paste box of your comment to take with you.
However, the code taking comments parses out special characters and escapes them with “”s. It does this BEFORE checking to see if you answered the anti-spam word, and therefore when it displays the text of your comment to be re-entered, it displays the raw string to be stored in the database (including the inserted escaped characters, the “”s).
That makes a lot more sense. I didn’t think I was typing THAT bad. I know I’m bad with typos, but that seemed a little too consistent.
I’ll throw my kudos in to the Pathfinders- above all else, I really enjoy the way they’re organized. The first one had some typos that caused some problems, and I didn’t like having to flip to the back of the book for new monster stats, but everything else is laid out to run smoothly.
As far as character background, I just had a similar experience to you. A player’s character was killed (thanks to a non-healing cleric) but he wasn’t all that upset… he felt he wanted to play something else other than a rampaging barbarian. He wanted to still be a fighting character, but with some more interesting options. After looking through some books, he liked the idea of the Dragon Shaman. After talking back and forth, I suggested to him playing a Hobgoblin that his own character had killed before, brought back to life by a dragon and “shown the light.” He loved the concept, and he ran with it, writing up an interesting story for him. This, in turn, gave me a bunch of new background fodder to play with. Win win for everyone.
You might want to look into hacking the shammy a bit (Fighter progression and maybe Heavy armour)…
It’s a class on the weak side and Stef was disappointed with it.
And maybe create big tokens for him to plop on the table for all to see to remind them of all the cool auras the Shammy shares.
You guys are going all out today 😉
For the sake of completeness Phil; the Japanese legend that inspired the bokken fighting is Miyamoto Musashi. While the name of the character is a shameless rip from Jubei Kibegami main character of the Ninja Scroll anime.
So ka! And when can I expect the backstory 🙂
Or will you go with throwing sticks in the air at crossroads and decide then?
🙂
And for the sake of complete completeness, Chatty’s error was the result of having the same actor portray Tsubaki Sanjûrô and Miyamoto Musashi… (Kuwabatake is another name for the same character, he just obviously uses fake names.)
I could go pedantic here, and point out that I made no ‘errors’ but I won’t… 😛
Suffice it to say that there are enough Japanese tropes in that character that all my Gmail Google adds are now in Japeneese because of your comments!
🙂
I like the thought and effort that went into crafting the cool backstory– particularly explaining his beginning again with a more personal faith. It’s a great idea, well implemented.
Oh yeah the throwing stick for the direction part.. I had forgot about it. Nice scene and it shows perfectly the fact that he is a Ronin.
As for the backstory, I’ll come up with something don’t worry… 😉
But my writing currently as backlog of a few items mostly lillie’s log.
Weeeee! Lillie’s journal is coming back!
We want Lillie’s journal!
Woot!
Remember that you can take the key of Attention by publishing that journal in one of Ptolus’ Newsletter…