I'm almost afraid to ask...

[Pauper]

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]

--
Pauper

 

[delericho]

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]

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.

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.

--
Pauper

 

[TwinPeaksGuy]

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]

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]

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]

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)
--
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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[TwinPeaksGuy]

I was afraid that would be the response.

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

The problem is not with 5th edition rules, it's that AL is organized play and has rules of its own. The ability to house rule anything, whether or not it makes sense, is limited in exchange for being able to drift from one FLGS or convention to another.

Find a home game and house rule things to your heart's content.

 

[kalani]

Yeah, this is the Adventurers League forum. As such, these rules only apply in respect to Adventurers League (the 5E Organized Play program). In a non-AL game, house-rules are only as limited as the DM allows. I don't see many DMs having an issue with you creating a hybrid weapon/implement in their games. Heck, I personally don't see it as game-breaking even in AL. It still isn't allowed in AL however, for the reasons described above (no matter how innocuous)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Dudes, this shouldn't even be a house rule issue. Attaching bells to a mace is something a kid could do. Native American war clubs and tomahawks were frequently decorated with beads, feathers, medicine pouches, etc. You can find Asian & African blades & polearms with metal rings that jingle in museums. For that matter, warriors worldwide and all through history up to the modern riot-gear equipped policeman have used their weapons & shield as improvised drums to intimidate their foes.*

The difference between an escrima fighting stick and a similarly sized rhythm stick? Ridges. That won't change the force of a blow struck with one.

Sure, it lets you have something that is 2 things at once, but so do wizards & monks with their walking sticks/quarter staves/wizard staffs. The difference is everyone EXPECTS those to be dangerous in a FRPG. Besides, it does so realistically, and usually at the cost of not being easily able to move silently. And making music with something most people wouldn't it is the very kind of thing I'd expect a Bard to be able to do.**

To be clear, there are things I like about 5th, but this kind of thing bugs the bejesus out of me. Besides, I have 70+ other systems I can play with, so, while I feel bad about abandoning the game that got me into the hobby in '77, that feeling will pass.

Paraphrasing Rival Sons' "Good Luck": well, its gonna hurt right now but later it won't even cross my mind.

Sorry to derail.






* by this point, I'm pretty sure that there is no rule for an improvised instrument.

** anyone ever make a comb harmonica? Familiar with the origins of the glass armonica? Seen the guy who makes flutes out of carrots? Or see Frank Zappa play the bicycle on the Steve Allen show?

 

[devlin1]

 

[delericho]

I was afraid that would be the response.

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

That does seem an awfully small thing to be a deal-breaker. Especially since it applies only to the organised Adventurer's League games. But then, once you've got a few doxen games available (and other editions of D&D as well), I guess you don't need much - they really have to persuade you to play their game.

 

[Steve_MND]

I was afraid that would be the response. That's definitely a last straw for me: I'm not buying into 5th.

Note that that's not 5E, that's AL, which is by itself an almost embarrassing collection of wibbly-wobbly elements on the one hand that are almost guaranteed to vary from table to table, coupled with a handful of other elements on the other hand that are so written in stone, they're practically cuneiform. It's definitely an awkward collection of disparate elements rules-wise, so the best advice I've been able to give is go by the rules as best you can, and go by what you can find in your area and the people running it so you can have fun with everyone, but do not expect anything will be the same at a different table or a different locations.

Not that AL can't be fun -- it still can be -- but you just have to keep in mind the occasioanlly-schizophrenic personality of the campaign. But if worrying about potential stuff like that isn't your bag (and it isn't for a lot of people), then they might be better suited to a home campaign under 5E. But if it's a local home campaign, your DM may well allow it. Don't sink 5E totally down just because of a single type of campaign.

 

[Eltab]

Oddly enough, I had a 3e Bard whose entertainment shtick was a puppet show. (with Mage Hand, I can do like Pinocchio "I got no strings")
I never thought to bring the puppets out during a fight, so the discussion embodied in this thread never came up.

 

[TwinPeaksGuy]

https://i.chzbgr.com/full/5302643456/h76EAD099/

 

[Pauper]

I was afraid that would be the response.

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

I wouldn't give up on the whole system over one AL ruling -- just start your own home game and you can have whatever jingling clubs or lute-axes you want.

Though maybe I'm misunderstanding the reason for your disappointment.

--
Pauper

 

[Jabborwacky]

To be honest, the whole creepy puppeteer idea feels more survivable than a lot of other character concepts in Ravenloft simply due to the xenophobia one has to expect when jumping into the Ravenloft setting. Your only real worry would be locals mistaking you for a true vistani, which will be quickly proven wrong by how differently you act. 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.