D&D 5E (2014) Blind People Get Dogs or Sticks: What Do You Give A Mute Spellcaster?

[mrpopstar]

[MENTION=6701422]Plaguescarred[/MENTION]

 

[aco175]

Maybe the character is not actually mute, but for some reason cannot speak without the aid of a puppet. It would be basically a prop, but makes the mage use both hands to cast. Another option is that he has a wind-up skull/orb that speaks command words.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

For example, he could swing his staff menacingly to intimidate.

He could, but if he can't tell the person what he wants then the intimidation attempt isn't going to be successful.

He could hold up a bag of coin and a drawing of a person being looked for, to make a negotiation.

True, some interactions would work using writing, but they would be slow and subject to misinterpretation. "OK, one bag of gold, and I will get this picture framed for you."

For every person who is happy to negotiate with someone writing everything down, there will be many people who don't have the patience to waste time.

In game terms, that means many interaction scenes where this player doesn't get to do anything apart from, "My character stands menacingly."

I'm saying this from experience. I played in a V&V game where one of the characters had the disadvantage of muteness. It lasted about four or five sessions, then the player begged the GM to change their character because of how boring it was to play.

 

[Blue]

Being mute is a heavy penalty by default. Either you want to play a mute character and have a heavy penalty or you're not taking the implications of being mute very seriously. If you want to be a mute character, but just on situations that doesn't penalize you too much, I think the experience of playing a mute character is not what you're looking at. As I said, in such a situation, using muteness as a "character skin" would be much better, and also free [MENTION=6872920]LF219[/MENTION] to focus attention somewhere else.

Sorry, but you're not responding to what was brought up. What was brought up was ascribing to the original poster that he wanted to play a heavy penalty when he specifically called out that he wanted to have a penalty, but not an overwhelming one where he can't cast (except spells without V).

Trying to argue that his intention was that he wanted penalty that didn't allow him to cast is absolutely refuted by his own words.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

Trying to argue that his intention was that he wanted penalty that didn't allow him to cast is absolutely refuted by his own words.

I never argued that way, I simply said that I can see no way in which muteness can be treated as a small penalty, because I believe that it's not. Since this is a message board, and we're all allowed to share our own opinions, not only to solve the OP problem, but also to present things from a different point of view, I shared my view on the subject: either treat the penalty in a serious way or just ignore it and let the player cast whatever he wants. Obviously, you can disagree, but these are my thoughts on the matter, and my experience here tells me that it's perfectly fine to share them, even if they're not solving the OP's issue.