@LitheOhm Objectively I agree as well, but he's not going to. He's spent nine years making friends and all he wants out of us is to find out if he can make something more out of his existing character.
@BESW seems it's already a veritable mutt. By mutt I don't mean undesirable, but very much diversified
plus, the web of houserules - they've got a better shot to navigate than we
I was in a PbP that wasn't so strict
I dunno. Guess after RPing in no-dice crap groups with people who want to win all the time at everything forever, I sort of got attacked to my int 7 fighters and other such character flaws
I understand from an optimization standpoint, that's stupid. Guess I don't see it that way, at least an 8 con caster is human (in the mortal sense of the word). They can be recycled into NPCs for use against/with other parties.
I'm barely on rpg.SE, just wanted to pop in and check if a question I want to ask is a good one for the site. Just taking a moment to put my thoughts together =)
So anyway, the basic question is about how to play a certain character. The campaign started at level 15, and I had an idea to play a (Lawful) Evil Cleric with a ring that could hide his alignment (I don't recall what that ring was; I had asked the DM and he essentially said that yes, it could be "always on"), and a high Bluff. The idea was that this character would try and gain an upper hand over the party members while always appearing to be on their side.
General consensus afterwards was that I didn't do very well with that character, so I was just wondering if anyone had ideas on how to play something similar?
@Izkata I think that's a better question for chat than for a post, honestly. Alignment-based questions can get out of hand, and there are a lot of variables relating to your specific campaign that would have to be clarified.
IIRC, out of character, knowing the full consequences of everything I did, it just didn't seem like the actions of an "evil" character - a neutral prankster at best
(Apparently I tend naturally towards "good" alignment, so I had difficulty with this anyway)
Well, I think there's a question in there about how to run a character with secret goals that the other characters don't know about but which the players do.
@Izkata I'm really not sure. I'd say go for if you clearly phrase the question so that the evil part is just an example.
If I may offer my own advice on the actual 'being evil' part, though: You need the GM and the whole party to buy into it before you start the game, and you need to work with the GM on developing a goal you're working toward.
Just being evil means you're inclined toward being selfish and not caring about the consequences to others so long as you get what you want. That basically leads to petty acts of crime and meanspiritedness. If you have a goal, perhaps a master you secretly serve, then the GM can help you orchestrate truly diabolical outcomes for the party.
In my own campaigns, I've banned evil PCs with very very few exceptions, and those rarely worked out well.
It just never ended well, even when the whole party had the best of intentions, but I'm sure it can be done. Just... not with the groups I've run.
Mmk, I'll start putting the question together now. This'll be the title, and I'll just use my alignment one as an example: "Tips on playing a character whose goals run contrary to his outward actions (to the other PCs)"
I look forward to it. Please don't accept any answer quickly; it has the potential to be a really good resource post, and people stop answering once an answer has been accepted.
Ohh, y'know what, it may not have been a ring. I was a cleric, perhaps I was just casting Undetectable Alignment on myself every day; it does last 24 hours (DnD 3.5e)
I had a player once who convinced me to let him run a LE vampire with a curse that forced him to be a paladin until he'd atoned for all the evil he'd ever done.
It was a good gimmick, but unfortunately it fell prey to an intractability where two players each insisted their character could only respond to a situation in one particular way, no chance for alternate responses, and so both PCs had to be forcibly retired from the party.
@Izkata That's really a GM call. I personally think that if subversive action is the best way to undermine an illegitimate authority, a paladin should be subversive.
I assume killing prisoners is generally an "evil act" that Paladins would not allow, so I could possibly include as another example, a Paladin doing something the party wouldn't agree with but wouldn't go against, without them knowing it was the Paladin
@BESW sure, me too. They just become the standard when they're less rare. I was considering running a game where people picked a class and stuck with it, I've never had a rogue even make it to tenth without multiclassing. "Different" is the new norm
@LitheOhm Well, when prestige classes give everything you want from a base class and bonus goodies, it's hard to see why you would want to stick with the base.
@BESW yeah. Even my first character ever was in one
something about it leaves much to be desired. I was taught by a powergamer, and started my gaming career by powergaming. A lot of my friends didn't, they had to learn it later. I guess it boils down to the 'grass is greener' or some whatnot
@BESW at times it seems to devalue the story aspect. Case in point - my power gamer friend designed a prestige class. Very good one, I threw in my two cents. Problem is, it's completely dry. No flavor text at all. After that, I came to the realization that for him the story aspect of the game isn't really all that fun. I was both glad to learn something about my friend and saddened that our goals in RPGs had come to such a contrast.
Not one that couldn't be reconciled, it was just that odd student-walks-away-from-the-teacher moment.
I was actually once invited to join a group that had spent more than eight years kicking in doors and building CharOp. They wanted to try role-playing, and I had a reputation for encouraging it in the people around me.
@LitheOhm For me, I figured out really quickly that the GM can kill anyone instantly. The Doomlock Aerial Boulder Squad is always on standby, waiting for the signal.
So 'winning' at the expense of the PCs is cheap and pointless.
In my groups, the GM's goal is to put the PCs in situations that let them tell good stories.
Part of a good story is the bit where the hero is defeated, hope seems lost, all is despair. Otherwise his triumph is hollow because he never lost.
So as a GM I need to challenge my players, put them in desperate situations --but never actually lead them to utter and permanent failure. Unless that's the kind of game it is!
If we play MLWM, we're in a different genre and I'll help them tell a darker, more desperate story where there's gong to be catharsis... but victory is in doubt.
My players never run away or avoid conflict. Ever. I throw them ridiculous encounters, they will stay and fight. If I tell them, "You know you're not gonna make it, just run," they stay and fight and blame me, the GM, for the casualties. They complain my encounter was too hard etc. When I tell th...
one PC I had went "on strike." Nothing wrong except the fact that she (first-second level ranger in the Sunless Citadel) wanted a ring of feather fall, and wouldn't play unless she got it.
The minions are monstrous things who cower and obey his whim because they have no hope of ever being treated better, but secretly develop personal relationships with NPCs until they have enough sense of humanity to defy the Master.
same campaign, the wizard would rest after every encounter. I'm not joking. And would never use any scrolls, ever. I stopped giving them out because they weren't using their consumables
Tom Baker played the Fourth Doctor. He was the actor who played the Doctor for the longest period of time, and to this day for people who knew Classic Who before New Who, he's who you think of when you think of the Doctor.
He got a little caught up with himself, and was hard to work with. Rumor has it that eventually he told someone higher up in the BBC that if certain of his demands weren't met, he'd leave and then Doctor Who would fail.
So they used some old footage from an unreleased episode and had him get stuck in a time loop for the whole story.
He's apparently mellowed a bit lately, and provided some narration for releases of partially-recovered stories and the like, but he refused to watch New Who for several years.
@LitheOhm He had a point; his face was the Doctor's face for seven years, and during that time it had become a national icon. Prior to that the show was better known for the Daleks than for its main character.
But the reason the show has endured is that it's perfectly suited to adapt and change. The Doctor can change actors. The show can be philosophical (second doctor), horrific (seventh doctor), adventurous (third doctor).
It can have a budget where one of the most iconic villains of all time are armed with plungers and egg whisks, or it can have one of the biggest budgets in all of BBC.
In the last story of the Second Doctor, the advanced Time Lord technology interface is a magnetic board with some funny-shaped magnets they move around on it.
And the Doctor and his companions regularly hide (successfully!) behind hanging sheets of bubble wrap.
No, I don't think they actually filmed them ahead of time. Just had points in the script at least once a season where any character could be written out in a hurry if needed.
But there was Lyta, Laurel, and Dr. Kyle (all 3 from the pilot movie) and Sinclair from the series (which I always thought was intentional).. Am I forgetting someone?
One died mysteriously in an airlock, and I know the actress for Na'Toth did choose to leave, the character being re-cast before being gotten rid of
@BESW Given Sinclair's roles in War Without End and minor appearances between Season 1 and then, I had thought that was part of the script for his character
@Izkata The most recent answer to your question raises a good point; if you're only interested in the situation where the rest of the players know what's going on, you might want to make it more explicit in your question. Otherwise you'll get more "Don't be a #!*&" answers than perhaps you're looking for.
Wheaton's Law is pleasantly popular, if rarely by name, here.
You know, I always wanted to run a game where every PC was a secretly a doppelganger that thought the rest of the party was a regular group of adventurers.
which I find is one of the major reasons why trainwrecks like this occur.
It's critical to use the right tool for the job. And shoehorning intrigue into D&D inevitably ends up with one player rolling bluff against another player to see if she lives or dies.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton Very true, a lot of D&D-playing groups don't really consider that it's not a one-size-fits-all-genres system.
I'm reminded of the White Wolf player who joined my D&D group. I had to explicitly explain that D&D doesn't support the same playstyle as Vampire and Mage.
A quick Google later... Arrampicarsi sugli specchi (climbing on mirrors) Trying to make up imaginative explanations for something unknown or impossible
I think the English equivalent is "clutching at straws."
Some people will call them metaphors or euphemisms, and sometimes an idiom is also one of those. But we're talking about idioms.
There's a surprisingly good episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about an alien race that speaks in idioms, so the universal translator can translate the words but not the meaning intended by them.
But the whole episode the crew keeps calling them metaphors.
I've just started playing D&D 4e using the starter kit. Our group has gotten to the point where we level up for the first time, and I'm confused about how to alter the numbers on my character sheet.
Consider first how the sheet should look before I level up — say I start with 18 wisdom. My m...
If your attack has the weapon keyword and you're using a weapon you're proficient with, you get to add that weapon's proficiency bonus to the attack roll.
@detly It's a brand-new set of decoding skills that the PHB spends 5 pages detailing.
So no shame in being confused. It's also... still sometimes confusing after 5 pages of explication, when a developer decides to be cute about the power he's designing.
So, for context, my character is a human cleric (storm kind). A specific example of a power I'm confused about is Storm Hammer, where the card literally says "ATTACK:___ (Wisdom) vs. Fortitude"
Storm Hammer / Cleric Attack 1 You call out the litanies of the cleansing storm as rage overcomes you. Divine winds swirl around you, and with each strike, thunder and lightning explode from your weapon. At-Will - Divine, Lightning, Thunder, Weapon Standard Action / Melee weapon Target: One creature Attack: Wisdom vs. Fortitude Hit: 1[W] + Wisdom modifier lightning and thunder damage. Level 21: 2[W] + Wisdom modifier lightning and thunder damage. Special: When charging, you can use this power in place of a melee basic attack.
All weapons have a proficiency bonus. I'm not sure what the mace's is; probably +2.
If you're using a weapon you're proficient with (your class has a list of weapons you know how to use), and attacking with a power that has the weapon keyword, you get to add that proficiency bonus to the attack roll.
Yes..... and they generally assume you already know that nearly any time they say "Wisdom," they mean "Wisdom modifier."
If they mean the whole Wisdom stat, they'll say "Wisdom score."
THEN you get to bust out your 18.
(This will hardly ever happen.)
You're very right in our comments, by the way: you also add your 1/2 level bonus to defenses. This lets attacks and defenses scale up next to each other, getting increasingly ridiculous together.
Okay. Chat is a bit annoying on my phone, so I'm going to go and re-read a few things, but my last question is – I'll be back at the game shop tomorrow, would you recommend the player and DM handbooks?
Visual for an upcoming D&D session:A cypress swamp that boils and foams, strange-shaped bubbles floating off the scummy surface and into the black sky. On the shadowy horizon loom great angular silhouettes like twisted monoliths miles high, if monoliths squirmed when you weren't looking right at them.
Visual for my next D&D session: a big vaulty room with a white dracolich in it, who just jumped away from the cleric's ring of blades. No way for him to escape without bashing magic reinforced walls (on a sieged castle). Hmmmmm
I preferred coldballs, myself. Deals the least amount of damage to objects, the better to loot the room afterward. But against a white dragon, I can see where sonic would be less likely to get resisted.
Sonic is generally the least common energy to be resisted.
I've just started playing D&D 4e using the starter kit. Our group has gotten to the point where we level up for the first time, and I'm confused about how to alter the numbers on my character sheet.
Consider first how the sheet should look before I level up — say I start with 18 wisdom. My m...
