DMing with Charisma

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Going over all of my campaigns to pull out characters was a neat historical exercise, and figuring out which ones were interesting enough to warrant five hundred words got me thinking about how my gaming style and the styles of my players have evolved. I may go back and do some retrospectives for other characters, too. About fifty characters didn’t make the cut, and several of them really deserved an article but didn’t get one because their letter was taken by someone else. If nothing else, writing about them will give me something to link to whenever I say things like “half-ton ladies’ man” or “kobold werepanther ranger/sorcerer raised by goliaths”.

I will admit to failing one portion of the challenge, though I also admit no wrongdoing in that failure. See, one of the points of the challenge is to visit other blogs. The managing blog put it pretty well on day G:

One of the best things about the Challenge is meeting new people and finding cool blogs that are super-interesting. However, the only way people will know you’ve visited is if you leave comments on their blogs. That not only says that we’ve dropped in, but that we were engaged enough to introduce ourselves.

I tried to do this, I promise, but every time I tried to leave a comment something technical got in the way. One blog banned all comments from anybody who wasn’t signed into a Google account. Another pretended to let me comment, but when I tried to submit my comment it took me to a separate login page and erased what I had written. I’m not sure a technology designed to foster communication is doing its job if it limits that communication only to a subset of the audience. I ended up following a few blogs for the entire challenge, but I specifically want to give a shoutout to Fuzzy’s Dicecapades; it has a lot of interesting things to say that merit discussion, but its commenting system means I am in no danger of saying so on each post.

I also didn’t want to get into the habit of commenting along the lines of “yep, this post sure was a post”. I feel like if I’m not contributing to the discussion I don’t need to assert my presence in it. It’s why this blog doesn’t have many posts about updates on my campaigns or their settings unless they pertain to some greater conversation about gaming (or I just want to show off my swank Zelda maps), and why every post in April had to involve something about how the character made me an angrier a better DM. If there’s no advice in my comments I’m doing a pretty poor job of representing an advice blog, and if there’s no actual commentary then what’s the point?

Accordingly, if you made a comment here this month (or ever, really) just to say “my keyboard works, here is a link to my blog” and you’re wondering why it didn’t get approved, there you go.

I’m already trying to figure out whether I’m going to do this next year and, if so, what I’ll talk about. I thought about covering the most fun NPCs and villains I’ve run, but that feels like a month of patting myself on the back for being amazing. Another option is to spend each day telling a story about some monster in my campaigns. I know I have stories about a xorn, a zombie, a qlippoth, an umber hulk, and a jyoti, so that’s half the battle right there. Apparently the other half will be wrestling my auto-spellcheck into submission.

What I definitely won’t do is another month of characters in my campaigns. Even though I enjoyed it, I only had one options for F, H, N, O, Q, U, X, Y, and I’m not planning on asking my players to run characters only in the disused section of the alphabet. Since my next two campaigns are going to use mostly characters from earlier campaigns, I just won’t be able to get the volume I need.

Name: Zee
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

We started the month with a character who started off looking one-note but became awesome accidentally through play. Let’s bookend it by talking about a character who started off one-note and intentionally stayed exactly that boring.

Zee was a cleric from the Plane of Law. Readers well-versed in D&D cosmology may have read that and said “oh, you mean Mechanus.” No, I mean a plane named “Plane of Law”, created solely for this character. This was the home of the zenythri, who lived in their capital of Zenythriopolis. It was here that Zee, a zenythri, joined the Church of the Lawful Pantheon and dedicated herself to law, religion, and good, in that order.

To this day I don’t know how much of the above paragraph is a exact and valid example of zenythri culture, how much is a joke at my expense, and how much is it is just incredibly lazy character design. See, zenythri only exist in The Book of Bad Ideas the D&D 3.0E Monster Manual II, where the full description of their race, philosophy, history, culture, and racial powers fits on half a page. This gave us a lot of freedom to design them, and Zee’s player decided they were direct in naming and pretty much everything else (almost—I think she decided her racial language was Bureaucracy, which is the least direct thing possible but did come up during play several times).

Her key personality trait was that she had purple skin. If you do not consider this a personality trait, you’re right. Zee had little to no character, again intentionally. She took a heavily bureaucratic race, applied a low Charisma modifier to it, and played it to the hilt. She didn’t try to understand the other members of the party because she knew they were wrong, and she only stuck with them because they were her best way to find the demon lord she’d been sent to kill. To that end she treated them as minions, mostly snarking at them whenever they erred and reprimanding them for not following the byzantine tenets of law only she knew by heart (take a drink).

The player, however, did not, and that’s the point. She was an irritating, stoic curmudgeon, but her player applied it in a way that was fun for everybody at the table. Zee didn’t refuse to participate in plots that didn’t further her personal objectives, she didn’t force other characters to pledge their allegiance to her, and most of her ire was reserved for the campaign’s half-dragon orc barbarian because that’s what was funniest. She was the blue oni to his red oni, and their sniping always had a comedic edge to it. Still, she went along with whatever harebrained schemes the party had, and if you’ve listed to the podcasts I linked during Thrae and Valitude you’ve heard most of them. She was the most likable unlikeable character I could ask for.

She did manage to kill the demon lord she was after, then got killed by that demon lord’s father, then killed him back. A few sessions after that the campaign ended, with Zee successful but still not entirely clear how to get home to a plane nobody else had ever heard of.

Name: Xavier Beauchene a.k.a. the Voice
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera

Full disclosure: I started putting together the list of characters for these posts months ago to make sure it was actually possible. It turned out I had never run a campaign with a character whose name began with an X or a Y (though I did run for a character named the Roman numeral IX, which is so close). Around that time I was starting the vigilante campaign, so I asked the players if they could kindly help me out. Conveniently these letters are right next to each other, which lets me do a bit of comparison. You may even want to skip this post and come back tomorrow so you can read them back-to-back.

Xavier was, obviously, a vigilante. He didn’t start the campaign with a code name but was soon forced to adopt “The Voice” given his predilection for very high Stealth checks during conversations with characters who had very low Perception. A member of the town guard by day, he worked the beat so he could explore the city as research for his nighttime activities. As a build he was focused on the sap, which let him apprehend criminals without killing them, and mobility, using a vigilante trick that let him get a sneak attack during the movement he made to get into position for further sneak attacks.

If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Xavier it would be Superman, not because he was a top-tier powerhouse but because he wanted to do what was right both in and out of costume. Xavier is his identity and the Voice is his mask; he joined the guard to fight for justice, and when the legal system proved too corrupt to mete it out he starting doing it himself. Despite using stealth he still took his fight to his enemies up front, and he did no permanent harm when he could help it. Most of the time he approached the other party members to talk rather than the other way around, and he was probably more into the idea of a superhero team-up than any other character (which I appreciate, since that’s what the campaign was about and I made sure everybody knew that). He is most definitely the hero.

I’ll admit I was frustrated when I saw how easy it was for Xavier to knock out an opponent in a single turn, approaching an enemy and making two sneak attacks with bonus damage before the enemy even knew he was there. But that only really happened with low-level mooks, which is the exact point of low-level mooks. The more I saw Xavier work the more I liked him, and he could be the unofficial leader of the unofficial vigilante team if they ever got around to considering such things (this does make the fourth time this player has been the party leader, so I’m starting to think he has a type). I think it’ll be really interesting to see how he works when he’s not in a town where he’s working in the guard and how the character changes as he works with people who have his back.

The good guys won, so Xavier is still alive and active. One of the explicit points of this campaign was to build the characters as antagonists for a future campaign, where the two groups the players have in this setting face off against each other (take a drink). I’m looking forward to that.

Name: Valitude
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

You know, I almost made it through a whole month without admitting I had a campaign name “Unnamed Monster Campaign”. I didn’t realize they were all at the back of the list.

Valitude was the monster campaign’s third arcane spellcaster, after the first died to a frost worm’s death throes and the second died to an incredibly overpowered arrow demon. He was a nerra, a race of mirror-people from the 3.25E Fiend Folio. He was in many ways a mirror of his player: laid-back, didn’t have a lot of relevant knowledge but didn’t need fancy thinking to do his job, reflective spell resistance, and so on. He didn’t guide the plot or even follow it as much as hitch a ride with it whenever it was going someplace.

Please understand that it’s a little hard for me to effectively describe Valitude without also discussing his player or degenerating into a fit of enraged spittle, both things I’ve tried hard not to do this month. I have never had a character or player so emotionally distant from the storyline, the other players, or the table mood, and I’ve run for characters named Fat Albert, Gloves Badidea, and “Richard, son of Ganon.”

Weirdly, Valitude is a contributor to, if not responsible for, one of that most important realizations I’ve had around my gaming style: the DM is a player too; as with any player, if he or she isn’t having fun there’s something wrong. Running for Valitude wasn’t fun. He liked save-or-die spells, which broke encounter balance and session timing. He responded the same way to everything, which broke emotional pacing. He had a racial ability, his reflective spell resistance, that hurt the cleric’s healing and buffing powers and thus broke one of her key roles. Once his player even played a full session without a character sheet, making up his numbers as he went. I don’t think I can properly describe the breadth of ways in which that stuck with me as a DM and as a player.

Rather than describe him in detail, I recommend you check out the beginning of the episode of I Podcast Magic Missile where we talk about him some years after the fact. It’s better for my blood pressure. Valitude’s ignominious death is also discussed there. Suffice it to say that while there are several characters where I’ve had to talk to their players and make significant changes, Valitude is the only character I’ve ever had to put down.

Name: Thrae Ssissth Vorel
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

If you’re tired of reading this month and you’d rather hear this entry in audio format with three times as much snark, you can listen to us discuss this character at I Podcast Magic Missile. The section on Thrae begins at 18:40 and I suggest skipping to it if you don’t want spoilers for Tuesday.

The epithets I’ve been using in the post names are ones I’ve made up for this month, except Egan and this one. “Pretentious Ruler of the Skies” was Thrae’s in-campaign epithet. It was the initial high concept and the character grew from there. According to D&D rulebooks, even his name is Draconic for “pretty air thief”. If you want to stop reading now because you fully understand this character and his player, I understand.

At the point at which Thrae joined the campaign the party needed three things: arcane blasting power, levity, and transportation. His character design steps were something like “come up with an idea that fits all three, then make it hilarious, then make it make sense.” He was a drunk cat-person airship pirate sorcerer. If you want to stop reading now, I also understand.

I remember him most for his equipment: an airship, which was eventually destroyed when a castle flew into it and no I didn’t get that mixed up; a belt of inebriation, a custom magic item that was largely a Batman utility belt filled with forty different kinds of liquor; and boots of perching, another item that gave him a bonus to Charisma checks whenever he stood in a Captain Morgan pose (“Do you believe me?” [lifts leg] “How about now?”). His race came up not at all, and his class only mattered in combat and when it was funny. His favorite strategy was to quietly cast fly on himself, shout “Ahh! Abandon ship!”, leap off the side of the boat, fly under it and back up the other side while the rest of the party panicked, and calmly land and continue steering like nothing had happened.

Thrae could have been incredibly disruptive if run by a player who wanted to hog the spotlight or troll the rest of the table, but he wasn’t. Instead he provided an off-the-wall comedy that accentuated the more down-to-earth comedy of our pathologically-lying murder golem and our half-naked dragon orc (“down-to-earth” here is, of course, relative). He was only in the group for the last sixth of the campaign and he knew it, so he never expected to get a significant growth arc. He was a great casual character, demonstrating that not everybody needs a dark backstory and personal demons to overcome.

I think after participating in the final battle and saving the world but condemning the party to infamy, Thrae went off in search of a new airship. He was nothing if not consistent.