I'm almost afraid to ask...

Jabborwacky said:

Hard mode would be playing an entire party of tieflings. Now if that doesn't cause some angry mobs, I don't know what will.

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I feel like hard mode would be playing a party of half-orcs; until the domain of Saarkaath was introduced in an online netbook, there were no orcs or half-orcs native to Ravenloft, and even that domain is an Island of Terror, likely visited by few. The peasantry of Barovia has probably seen (or think they've seen) the occasional tiefling, but they've never seen a half-orc that wasn't an outlander.

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Pauper

To circle back to the original topic, I've been giving a little more thought to this character build. I've chosen the Entertainer background, so the background feature is Popular Demand. I know it's not going to fly at a DDAL table, but for my own amusement I wrote up a variant background feature for the puppeteer bard:

Unpopular. You must roll a Charisma check with disadvantage to find a place to perform. You receive free lodging and food of a poor or modest standard as long as you perform each night. When strangers recognize you in a town where you have performed, they typically take a disliking to you. Puppet shows are annoying.

Pauper said:

...there were no orcs or half-orcs native to Ravenloft...

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According to 3e Ravenloft, if you wanted to play a mechanical half-orc, your character looked like it had been cursed in the womb - and you got a healthy penalty to all your "I fit into a crowd" rolls.

Eltab said:

According to 3e Ravenloft, if you wanted to play a mechanical half-orc, your character looked like it had been cursed in the womb - and you got a healthy penalty to all your "I fit into a crowd" rolls.

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Calibans (the race that replaces half-orcs in the Ravenloft campaign setting) are mechanically similar to half-orcs, but have a very different origin and function in that setting. The very high 'outcast rating' is one expression of that difference.

Half-orc adventurers in settings like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms might be viewed with suspicion, but were generally grudgingly accepted. Caliban adventurers in Ravenloft, on the other hand, had an extremely difficult time interacting with any level of civilization, given their Charisma penalty coupled with the high outcast rating, which imposed a penalty on non-Intimidate-based Charisma rolls. A party of outlander half-orcs would not have nearly so much difficulty, but would still have more difficulty than a party of humans, elves, and halflings.

The distinction between calibans and half-orcs is probably moot for Adventurers League, though. If you're knowledgeable about the Ravenloft setting and have a supportive and knowledgeable DM, you might be able to customize the Far Traveler background from the SCAG to represent a character from some domain other than Barovia, and you might even be able to re-flavor the half-orc as a Ravenloft caliban in that game, but I wouldn't expect such a character to be very portable to other AL tables where the DM might not have the same experience with the 3.0/3.5-era (or earlier) campaign setting.

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Pauper

That would be perfectly fine were it not for the fact that the admins have stated there are zero Ravenloft-Native PCs in AL. All PC characters are foreigners taken by the mists from Toril. If your DM is willing to let you say you are a native of Ravenloft however, the AL-police won't be knocking on your door to enforce that your character is a Faerun-native.

With that being said however, don't expect other DMs to acknowledge this detail - and that the player should assume that other tables will treat them as an outsider to Ravenloft. This is especially true since being a native of Ravenloft would logically grant non-specific mechanical advantages that non-natives would lack, and reflavoring cannot result in mechanical changes.

As such, a reflavored half-orc (Caliban), cannot gain any advantages that a regular half-orc would lack, including a greater awareness of the setting. If you said your character had amnesia or some such, so that they lacked any roleplaying advantage, I personally wouldn't have an issue at my table (but I would stress to the player that they should expect table variation).

Posting this here rather than starting a new thread because it relates to the puppeteer character:

I see in the PHB the following land vehicles are listed: Carriage(100gp) and Wagon(35gp). Are either of them conceivably usable as a horse drawn caravan that sleeps one or two and holds 3-4 chests worth of adventuring and camping gear? Are these ragtops like the classic US Conestoga design, or hard tops like the Romani Vardo? not really getting a clear picture of what these vehicles are and whether my puppeteer would want one.

Draft Horses can carry 540lbs without becoming encumbered. A wagon weighs 400lbs, and as such a horse-drawn wagon could only include another 140lbs of gear (including weight of the driver). It would require at least 2 horses to properly pull a wagon (as they have a combined encumbrance of 1,080lbs).

A single horse could pull more than 540lbs, up to a maximum of 2,700lbs - but doing so would reduce their speed to 5 feet (as a creature can push/drag/pull 5x their maximum encumbrance at a speed of 5 feet). If you are fine traveling at a slow speed, a single horse is fine. Otherwise you will need at least 2 - 3 horses to pull a fully laden wagon (which I estimate could hold a half-ton of gear ~1000lbs), depending on the weight of the driver.

Vistani use vardo, which are IMHO little more than a covered wagon. I would say that for pricing and weight - they would be similar to a carriage, and would probably require 2 draft horses to pull as well. They don't technically exist for purchase for players, but you could always reflavor a carriage as a vardo (it would still be mechanically a carriage however).

Perfect! Thanks for such a quick answer! Having two horses just makes a lot of sense. When I saw "carriage" I thought along the lines of "old west stagecoach" but this is a close enough approximation for my purposes, and just adds a nicely flavorful option.

Im so glad that most of my gamers are so new they dont have much of an idea of Ravenloft so I dont get the 'BUT why cant I be native'? pleadings. A few of my gamers do know about Ravenloft that very little.

Note that, unless you are using the variant rules for encumbrance in the PH, there is really no penalty for being an encumbered pack animal - there is simply the animal's carrying capacity, which for dragging (which is what a pack animal would be doing with a wagon) is 30 times the animal's Strength score, doubled if the pack animal is Large-sized.

Even then, the animal is not prevented from dragging the wagon, but its speed drops to 5 feet. (Basic Rules, p.60, "Lifting and Carrying")

Edit: (removed as inaccurate).

Edit to the edit: There is a maximum weight that can be dragged: 30x the creature's Strength score in pounds, doubled for each size category above Medium (and halved for Tiny creatures). Unless you are using the variant encumbrance rule, the only penalty for dragging great weight is that, if you drag more than 15x your Strength score in pounds (modified for size), you are reduced to a speed of 5 feet.

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Pauper