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?

 

[Thunder Brother]

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

In hindsight, as the DM, I think I would have asked the player out of game what they're hoping for with this character concept. "How do you want the reveal to happen, and is there anything I can do to help make it happen" or something like that. Because I wonder if they just didn't notice that the hooks I was dangling for them were, well, for them. I'm still a fairly inexperienced DM and integrating a character's backstory into the adventure in a satisfactory way, especially for a short official module, is a skill that I'm still developing.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

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.

On the flip side, one thing to remember is that not all DMs have perfect hearing or sensory processing, and that paying attention to multiple conversations in multiple directions might well be beyond them. Tricky voice stuff and multiple conversations can cause significant problems for the DM (and other players) and might result in your character getting passed over because the DM missed that you said something.

If your character always speaks in a hoarse whisper and you as a player do the same when he talks, I as a DM with hearing loss in a gaming store with loud background noise won't hear any dialogue you come up with for NPCs. Either you're going to have to speak in a voice I can make out (which I will clearly tell you, this isn't a trap), or I'm just going to assume your character says nothing important because I can't really do anything else about it.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

In hindsight, as the DM, I think I would have asked the player out of game what they're hoping for with this character concept. "How do you want the reveal to happen, and is there anything I can do to help make it happen" or something like that. Because I wonder if they just didn't notice that the hooks I was dangling for them were, well, for them. I'm still a fairly inexperienced DM and integrating a character's backstory into the adventure in a satisfactory way, especially for a short official module, is a skill that I'm still developing.

Hey, that's the best thing to take away - what would you do differently. Life is learning, and kudos to you for devoting yourself to developing your skills.