DMing with Charisma

Name: Icranouf Loroden
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao

Once of the reasons I have Sessions Zero for all my campaigns is to make sure the players are all on the same page regarding character design. The party deserves to know if they’re all planning on playing rogues and adjust accordingly so they don’t bungle into a campaign missing roles they all expected somebody else to fill. This does, however, require that one or more players are willing to change their character concept. Sometimes nobody is.

Icranouf Loroden was intended to be the party diplomat. He was a bard in a party with a rogue, a summoner, and a barbarian, so the party already had various flavors of diplomacy down pat. But Icranouf’s player really, really wanted to play J. Johan Jameson as a bard, so he stuck with it. He also wanted to be an archer, so there’s where his feats went. But we immediately realized he was the only person able to heal in battle, so we tried to convince him to put his spells toward that. It didn’t quite work.

Remember Egan, and how I said he didn’t deserve the death he got? Draw conclusions accordingly.

It didn’t help that the character didn’t quite work with the campaign. Icranouf was supposed to be nigh-obsessed with finding new and creative ways to do things, whether that was an interesting resolution to an armed conflict or an unknown method of raising the dead. He rarely considered whether his methods were successful, only that they were new, which may be part of the reason the campaign ended with the party goading an army of giants into squashing the armies of the countries they were hired to help. He was also supposed to be a wanderer in a campaign where the players were all local members of the same guild, and a proponent of peace who hired an assassin to kill a party member, captured the assassin, and tortured him to death.

After Icranouf I’ve tried very hard to make sure my characters meet their concept. If they don’t, I have to revise one or the other. D&D is one of those systems that really shouldn’t have much segregation between story and gameplay; the person you say you’re playing should be the person you’re playing. If you want to play a muderhobo, fine, but don’t pretend it’s part of your paladin quest.

Technically, Icranouf survived his quest and returned home victorious. I haven’t decided if he’s still part of the adventuring guild or if he’s split off to find his fortune elsewhere. I might even bring him back as an NPC if I thought anybody would recognize him.

Name: Gloves Shieldbearer
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

Often the simplest character ideas are the most interesting. Not everybody needs to break the mold with a celestial necromancer, or a cleric librarian with delusions of adequacy, or a cat person air pirate sorcerer (more on him later, though). Some characters just take the simplest idea possible and run with it. Some characters wear gloves, carry a shield, and are named “Gloves Shieldbearer”.

This can go too far, like the pyromancer Medium Rary. We’re not talking about that.

Gloves was a former slave who carried a giant’s shield and used it as his primary means of attack, defense, negotiation, and, presumably, locomotion. He was a good reference point in a campaign with a half-ton healer, a swarm of rats, and a turtle with apocalyptic ambitions. As part of a group specifically tasked with finding and stopping giant monsters he could work his way through most situations with skill and aplomb. When things were good he was even-headed and happy to think things through before acting. When things got rough he could intimidate with the best of them. And when things got really, really bad, his shield was also a chainsaw.

The biggest issue I had with Gloves was not unlike the biggest problem I had with Egan, which shows how amazing I am at learning nothing. The world of the Eight Arms has racially-aligned countries; there’s a human country, a dwarven country, and elven country, and so on, where people are free to move about them but each government and culture is based around a single race. As part of this I wanted to have countries for the elemental races as well because I liked what they added to the setting and it gave plenty of chances for me to have “monsters” live and act like “civilized races”. Gloves threw a spanner into that particular work by hailing from one of the countries I had created, and also declaring that humans were the dominant race there and the elementals were very, very secondary.

I was upset. I’m still upset; letting things go is not my strong suit. But honestly, this makes more sense than what I had. There’s no country of just ifrits or oreads, that would be silly. Logically, these countries would be dominated by a more common race, and the elemental race would color it. I keep having to remind myself that this is better than what I was planning and adjust the setting accordingly. And it wouldn’t have happened without Gloves. (Though I also want to throw an assist to a certain video game character with Greek-styled armor and a chainsaw shield, who may have served as some inspiration perhaps.)

Of course, this campaign had players, and players hate going by the DM’s plans, especially when they explicitly agree to said plans. The monster-hunting party quickly became the monster-friending party and Gloves got a lot more chances to work his verbal skills than his spinning shield. But in the final session he did help murder a bard in his sleep and fight a scary bird, and in the end that’s really what matters.

Name: Felicia Elkin
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin

It’s hard to join a campaign already in progress. There’s a whole bunch of backstory, team mechanics, inside jokes, and tradition a new player doesn’t know, and they run the risk of feeling like an outsider at the table and in the story. I’ve had plenty of characters join in the middle of a campaign; many worked, some didn’t. But so far I’ve only had one situation where character joined a party between campaigns, and that worked much better.

Felicia joined the Eight Arms Ostensible Crafting Team for their second campaign, several months after the first campaign had finished. She joined with another character who is not on this month’s list. Both characters shored up roles the party lacked. The other character fulfilled their need for a tracker and wilderness expert. Felicia fulfilled their need for a beauty-obsessed front-line tank with heavily reskinned weapons and an unerring moral compass as it related to matters of fashion and decorating.

I realize this is a very specific need.

Felicia played more than a little like Rarity from My Little Pony: obsessed with looking good and making other things look good, against grime on principle and nature by association, but willing and able to focus and fight when things get hairy. She had a large array of abilities her player kept forgetting about (lay on hands, spells, auras, whatever she traded smite evil for), which made her really interesting and capable in a pinch. The only enemies that really gave her pause were, naturally, campaign bosses and, ironically, a crystal dragon powered by condensed pride.

I did talk about this blog post with Felicia’s player, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I’m going to talk about Felicia.
Player: Is she the best character you’ve ever run whose name begins with F?
Me: She’s the only one whose name begins with F. So I have to think of what I learned from running her in a campaign.
Player: You could say you learned you could make an acceptable piece of portrait art with Photoshop.
Me: I’m not saying that.

The most interesting long-term thing I learned from Felicia was how well a paladin can work when her player isn’t a jerk. Paladins have a reputation as unlikeable because unlikeable people play them, acting as a high-and-mighty “my character wouldn’t abide this sort of levity” yoke. But Felicia functioned in a party that leaned very chaotic and a little evil because she didn’t refuse to allow other characters to play and because the other players didn’t refuse to allow her to be herself. It was Law 0 and Law 4 at their finest, and she’s a good example of somebody who can have an opinion without being militant about it.

Also, I learned it’s really easy to assign the seven deadly sins to a party when one of the characters has a peacock motif.

Name: Egan Mospru
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao

I’ve done a lot of talking about characters I liked. Let’s mix things up a little.

Egan was definitely the best character in his campaign. His competition was a barbarian who thought he was the living embodiment of the will of the god of mindless destruction; a summoner who though he was Russian despite having exactly none of the traits or culture relevant to the setting’s version of Russia; the summoner’s half-demon, half-alien, half-insect flavorless tangle of stats designed for maximum damage; and J. Jonah Jameson if he was an archer and also a bard. Egan, a fairly straightforward gnome, would have been an ordinary character in an ordinary campaign, but in this one he was a delight.

The big issue I had with Egan was his background. The campaign setting was still in flux, and I didn’t want to come down too hard on player backstory because I wanted to fill things out a bit. But Egan’s backstory was that he was one of the last survivors of a gnomish kingdom underneath the city where the first Eight Arms campaign had taken place, a kingdom that had recently lost a land cave land war with drow. It was challenging to reconcile with the facts that gnomes already had a country, the players had already explored under the city, and nobody aboveground had ever heard of either kingdom.

This is where the really interesting stuff happened, in that Egan’s player and I talked things over and determined that this was the backstory Egan’s father had told him. That didn’t meant it was true. With that we opened up a wide array of potential stories, as we could explore what actually was where, who told what about what events, and how much was lost to time or deliberately covered up. It’s one of the few times I had to give a hard “no” to a character backstory, but it worked better when we gave it a “yes, but” instead. The “yes, but” basically invalidated it on the same level as a “no”, but whatever.

Unfortunately we never got to explore that, at least not with Egan himself. Near the end of the campaign he died, one of the few characters deaths about which I feel bad. We did manage to bring him back as a vampire, which normally is really neat. Since we were in an east-Asian pastiche, he became a hopping vampire. And hopping vampires have half the speed of their base creature. Egan became a rogue who could only move at ten feet per round via pogo stick. He didn’t deserve that.