I'm almost afraid to ask...

Pauper · Mar 25, 2016

TwinPeaksGuy said:
I've narrowed on the back story: The marionette is a depiction of Baba Yaga, who imprisoned this bard's wife some time ago. Her abusive dialog is the Bard's way of expressing his rage and frustration, as he's otherwise a fairly nice person, if unfortunately driven to seek power and revenge to eventually rescue his wife.

[sblock]Interestingly, there is a Baba Yaga analogue in the Curse of Strahd hard-cover adventure.[/sblock]

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Pauper

delericho · Mar 25, 2016

Iolo Morganwg said:
Regarding CoS tone, I get that it's gothic horror, but even the authors have have injected silly humor here and there, especially the WFRP 1E-esque names in the Ravenloft crypt.

Sir Klutz Tripalotsky

Elsa Fallona von Twitterburg: "She had many followers."

Artista DeSlop - Court Ceiling Painter

Good stuff...

We have very different definitions of "good stuff".

Pauper · Mar 25, 2016

Good points, especially with respect to tone; Gothic horror does require a specific tone, and 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein' ain't really it. Of course, if you want to run Curse of Strahd as a slapstick comedy, go ahead and give it a shot, but be sure everyone's on the same page before you begin.

delericho said:
Partly because the Gur have a key role to play in the storyline, and a Gur PC may very well be problematic in light of that.

There's actually a lot of problematic stuff for those who know Ravenloft lore beyond what is presented in 5E material. For instance, if the Gur and Vistani are really the same ethnicity, then a male Gur wizard with the Divination school should be shunned by every Vistani in the adventure. Such a character is known to the Vistani as a "Dukkar", a male Vistani with the Sight, prophesied to be the destroyer of the Vistani.

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Pauper

TwinPeaksGuy · Mar 25, 2016

delericho said:
We have very different definitions of "good stuff".

There is such a thing as room for comic relief, or other brief flashes of light to provide contrast to the darkness. Keeping an uninterrupted gloom and doom atmosphere makes for a really stale experience.

I'd be very open to an agreement with the DM that if my character got too "laughing gas" he was also painting a target on himself. The fool in a horror movie does exist as a trope, but he's usually one of the earliest to die.

Having put a little flesh on the character, the humor used always needs to keep focus that it's a way to vent a lot of rage and sadness the character has no other outlet for. The only reason he has to laugh is that if he didn't, he'd cry himself to death. His wife is kidnapped and possibly dead, his clan has cast him out, he barely ekes out a living doing puppet shows, and his mortal enemy has him hopelessly outclassed. The only reason he isn't dead is BY wanted him to suffer more.

Ainulindalion · Mar 25, 2016

delericho said:
And partly because I was in a Ravenloft game that was killed in a single word, by a player who chose to call her character 'Jigglypuff'.

We have a character this season called "Sir Kem Shizem." Everyone but his player refers to him as 'Sir Kay' or simply 'Sir' for that very reason.

(But, again, the structure of AL imposes some different constraints than would simply apply at my table. So that concept may very well be simply a no-no there. Though if you also use the Spell Component Pouch I don't see any space for there to be an issue.)

Could the puppet root around in the component pouch for the right component? That might be fun. Maybe it wears the pouch instead of the PC.

delericho · Mar 25, 2016

TwinPeaksGuy said:
There is such a thing as room for comic relief, or other brief flashes of light to provide contrast to the darkness.

Sure, humour has its place. I'm just not sure those names count as humour.

Dannyalcatraz · Mar 25, 2016

Pauper said:
If you want a club/mace that looks like a harlequin cane, go for it. You just can't also use it as a spellcasting focus, because there is no existing item that does that**, and creating one would be creating an item that's better than every other item of its type in the game. Why would anyone take a club or mace when they could take that thing instead?

(Edit)
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Pauper

**Edit: the closest thing to an exception to this is an item that isn't called out in rules, but is generally allowed by DMs (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) -- characters with a staff spellcasting focus should use those foci as improvised weapons in melee combat, but some DMs don't bother with that, mainly because wizards tend not to be optimized for melee combat anyway, so it's not seen as game-breaking to allow them to add their proficiency bonus and do a tiny bit of extra damage when they do decide to swing the staff for damage. Strictly speaking, though, a staff purchased as an arcane focus is "a specially constructed staff", not a quarterstaff.

Despite AL's insistence that DMs cannot make 'house rules', no prohibition on the house rule that allows wizards to use their staff foci as quarterstaves has been issued.

Mmmm...perhaps I was being unclear.

In the case of the bauble-mace with bells (or some such) attached, the musical instrument isn't the mace itself, but the bells attached to it. Music isn't fundamentally about pitch, it is about tempo, rhythm.

The chiming of the bells or rattles as the bauble is shaken would be the bard's instrument; the weapon would be the bauble itself.

kalani · Mar 25, 2016

As we said before - you cannot have a single item that counts as both a weapon AND a musical instrument in AL as no such item exists in a player resource at this time. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The closest you can come to is treating your musical instrument as an improvised melee weapon (d4, no proficiency bonus).

Granville · Mar 25, 2016

I really like the idea you have going for your character and I think it fits the themes of CoS quite well.

If you attach your doll to a musical instrument I think you're pretty much good to go, just pay attention to the V,S,M requirements of spells. As another poster put you could simply have the spell component bag attached as well, then have your dummy pull the components out.

As for humor: CoS says the adventure runs better with a little bit trickled in, and I believe that. The original adventure had plenty of it
and was not a 100% grimdark adventure.

As for the new edition of Ravenloft, CoS, "Blinksy" was a cool addition that created some of that humor.

Elsa Von Twitterburg was a really poorly misplaced joke.

Dannyalcatraz · Mar 25, 2016

kalani said:
As we said before - you cannot have a single item that counts as both a weapon AND a musical instrument in AL as no such item exists in a player resource at this time. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The closest you can come to is treating your musical instrument as an improvised melee weapon (d4, no proficiency bonus).

I was afraid that would be the response.

That's definitely a last straw for me: I'm not buying into 5th.

I'm almost afraid to ask...

Pauper

That guy, who does that thing.

delericho

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