When Fantasy Meets Reality

What happens when the awesome role-playing idea you created for your character doesn't work in your game?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"What do you think, sword?"​

One of my players in my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign envisioned having whispered asides to his weapon, raising the question if the weapon was sentient or if his character was delusional. It was a fun idea...

But it doesn't work in an online game. Between Zoom and Roll20, initiative is carefully managed so that each person gets to speak in turn. Background noises make it difficult to hear, so random asides from other players don't work as well.

We settled instead for having more of the dialogue happen in the fiction summaries we create afterward. I sympathize; this happened to my character too.

"Take your hands off your mouth, I can't hear you"​

When one of my characters died from a plague in a 3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons Living Greyhawk game, I decided to play him as a reanimated necromancer in 4th Edition convention games. My corpse-character wore a mask to (poorly) disguise his condition and would roll a six-sided smiley-face die to show what mask he was wearing that day. It was meant to be funny and creepy. But he had to talk sometimes, so I would cover my mouth when I spoke for effect.

At one crowded convention hall at Gen Con, the Dungeon Master wasn't having it. He told me point blank to stop role-playing like that, because he couldn't hear anything I had to say. I realized that while the concept was fun for me, it wasn't fun for everybody else, so I dropped it. I still rolled the die to determine his mask in social encounters though.

That character ended up becoming Mr. Mask in my fantasy trilogy (he's introduced in Slightly Furmiliar and is the main character in Unfurmiliar), so his ridiculous backstory lived on.

"This isn't working..."​

I'm always willing to experiment with role-play, but I try to be cognizant when something is annoying or not working. Conversely my players often "feel out" their characters in Session Zero and lower levels of D&D, changing elements as they progress: backstories may be tweaked, accents may come and go, masks may be dropped, and we may not talk as much to our weapons as we used to. But it's important to to be flexible enough to allow space for both players and game masters to experiment. And if it doesn't work out, it's okay to drop it.

Your Turn: What role-playing quirks sounded good in theory but didn't work out in practice?

 

[OptionalRule]

This 100%. Role-play is collaborative and could be brilliant with a certain group and terrible with another, or work fine for a certain campaign and not at all with another.

It occurs to me that this might be something GMs struggle with who haven't been players for some time. I was primarily DM most times, so in some respects I think I treated my PCs as NPCs. And discovered that what made them fun and memorable as NPCs wore thin when I had to play them week after week.

Right. It's a push-me-pull-you scenario. I don't think people are realizing it but they're basically imposing a playstyle on the group in a small way. That's great if it works with the flow of the group but can be rough if it's orthogonal or in an opposite direction.

 

[Shiroiken]

Something to consider with these types of characters is making sure the party is willing to adventure with you. While most groups just accept any PC, there really needs to be some logic to it (unless in a forced situation).

One player in a game I was in tried to talk the DM into letting him play a druid that worshiped an ear of corn. Since he'd been a druid for a while, it would be completely rotten, but he'd carry it around and venerate it. The theory was that in the Forgotten Realms sometimes unknown powers can grant spells to worshipers of false gods, taking their place. This would allow the DM to make up a good story about who his "god" really was. The DM was very hesitant, but I pointed out to the player that his character was obviously insane, so we'd have nothing to do with him, even killing him if he kept following us. The player dropped the idea.

 

[Lanefan]

I think it's worth separating the idea from how you're expressing it in game. If you want to wear a mask and describe that, I don't think people would have a problem with it, it's the hand over the mouth bit that didn't work. Likewise with whispering to the weapon, the whisper is the problem, not the concept. It's perfectly fine to interject at full volume, "I turn to my weapon and whisper...". Roleplaying doesn't have to include pantomime, just as it doesn't have to include accents, speaking in first person, or a number of other things.

It doesn't have to, but it's light-years more effective and entertaining when it does.

One of the great failings with online play (and online voice communication in general) is that the voice systems can't handle more than one person talking simultaneously and-or clearly be heard; unlike like play around a table where side conversations can be done in real time and - for those who can do it - one can pay attention to more than one conversation at a time.

 

[Lanefan]

I built a warforged druid with the concept that all his class features, including spellcasting and wildshape, were functions of his warforged construction - his root-like endoskeleton was a living plant, and thus he'd spontaneously grow and lash out a vine to cast grasping vine, or sprout pheremone-laden blossoms to cast charm person.

I am Groot.

I really wanted to get in those descriptions, and even just not tell other players what class he was. But ultimately, those flavourful descriptions hog spotlight,

Which isn't really an issue as long as people are entertained by what you're doing/saying.

and the other players need to have a general idea of what your character can do.

If you mean the other players need such an idea ahead of time, I disagree. Ideally, with a character like this your capabilities (and weaknesses) would emerge during the run of play, rather than in advance.

 

[Krachek]

you got a deeper explanation as I want to take notes?

I played a bard-cleric once. It was with rolled stat, and it was the perfect case of skill monkey. Having decent skill in everything but I miss a clear personality, and it takes several sessions before I found a clear path, a kind of anarchist and terrorist. But the skill monkey concept that is pretty technical fall short very fast.

on the other hand I play a cleric, I was having a clear idea of a former military priest that was suffering from post trauma syndrome. Even with 8 in charisma, int and dex, he was more active and interesting than the Bard-cleric that have solution for everything.

 

[jasper]

Kenku as written are problem. Mimic voices they heard. Players start speaking normally like Joey off the block.

 

[MarkB]

Kenku as written are problem. Mimic voices they heard. Players start speaking normally like Joey off the block.

Yeah, but the other version I've seen takes it too far the other way. They play it like their Kenku has never heard conversation before the start of the adventure, and will only mimic dialogue the player has actually heard in-game.

 

[jasper]

The same happens to me also. I did not mind killing Wet Chicken.

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

Nothing like thinking you rolled up Snakeeyes

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Less of a roleplaying quirk, more of a character concept.

I was the DM for a short campaign of Lost Mine of Phandelver last year with some friends of mine. One player was really excited about the idea of playing an Eberron-style changeling. I had some reservations, but this was going to be a "hair down, everything goes" kind of campaign, and the idea of changeling bard sounded really cool overall.

Anyway, throughout the entire run of the campaign, about 10 sessions or so, they never revealed the fact they were a changeling. Even the other players never found out, let alone their characters. The player simply never brought it up. There were opportunities, mind you. I tried my best as a fairly new DM to give everyone a moment to shine in roleplay. But yeah, never came up, and I still wonder what their plan was (I never got the chance to really ask, because the switch to online made communication difficult).

If you were to do this all over again, would you do anything different?