The devotee of the goddess of all magic January 11, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Player Characters.2 comments
(Spoilers)
(Note: My descriptions here will be about both the character and player, because you cannot separate the two. Thus, some of what I write may seem harsh or critical.)
The first character I want to discuss is Brother Steplan Krag, a magic-item creator and devotee of the goddess Mystra, played by Bret. It is important to note that the final version of the character was not what Bret wanted to play; he had wanted to play a wizard with magic-item creation skills, and not a cleric.
Brother Steplan was born in Irilyth, in Valuria. He lost both parents during the War of the Pass (Harold’s invasion of Valuria) and was raised by his maternal grandfather, Augustus Malix, a professor of fey languages in the Surculus of Ianus, the famed arcane academy in Irilyth. He fell into a friendship with one of the school’s blacksmiths, Tidus Cromwell, and became interested in crafting. Enduring his grandfather’s wrath (because he was choosing such a menial vocation), he combined his love of crafting and magic, becoming a talented item creator.
When he graduated, he immediately was offered a position crafting weapons for the King’s Armory in Tarnas (Valuria’s capital). Knowing that these weapons may be used against his own people and that his parents died at the hands of the king’s army, he refused, attracting the attention of the Obsidian Guard, who began to attempt to intimidate him into accepting. When his grandfather was accosted by “brigands” outside his own home, Steplan realized that his decision was endangering those around him, and decided to move on for his grandfather’s sake.
In play, Steplan was an enthusiastic supporter of Mystra, always proselytizing and handing out informational pamphlets. He was also mostly concerned with applying his trade and creating magic items. However, this began to cause some serious problems in the campaign.
First, Steplan’s first impulse when meeting someone new was to say, “Do you know about Mystra?” and attempt to stuff a pamphlet into that person’s hands. It started, of course, when meeting the other player characters, but continued with every NPC they met. It was funny at first, but became annoying quickly. At one point, the party was attempting to establish diplomatic relations with a slightly hostile half-orc (half-Tarn, actually – the Tarn are the orcs of Chorenn) tribe, and when Sparrow stepped up to greet the already-suspicious leader, Steplan jumped forward, interrupted Sparrow’s greeting, and started waving pamphlets in the leader’s face. And this is all coming from a lawful good character.
Second, whenever the party had some downtime in a city, Steplan would rent a workshop for a little while and create magical items for the party, usually giving them to the other characters for free. This caused two problems. Steplan became dirt-poor, since he was buying the materials but not charging for them. The other party members began demanding that he charge them, and even then, he still gave them discounts. Then, he also began lagging, level-wise, behind the party, because the item creation rules in D&D mandate that the creator lose experience points when creating these items. (The general consensus is that this rule is stupid — you lose experience for doing something new?) At the time that Bret left the game, Steplan was lagging nearly 1.5 levels behind the party.
The bottom line, though, was a personality conflict between Bret and the direction and feel of the campaign. Bret is an enthusiastic player, but he has a tendency to obsess about one or two things, especially those that get him laughs or gratitude. A major example of this is the fact that while he spent much of his time poring over the rules for magic item creation, his character, who was wearing a breastplate, had an armor class of 16 — worse than the armorless wizard. He had simply not bothered to consider the combat equipment of his character because he was so busy coming up with ideas for proselytizing and items to make.
Part of the problem also stemmed from my inability to deal with the situation. When he thrusted the pamphlets at the Tarn leader, I suggested that he reconsider his actions, in light of the fact that his character has a wisdom of 20 and should know that this would not be acceptable. Instead, I should have had the Tarn leader disdainfully grab the pamphlets, eat them, and then make the subsequent negotiations harder for the party. I know now that, instead of telling the player what he’s doing wrong, I should have punished him in-game, to both let him know subtly what’s wrong and also reinforce the point that it’s the character, not the idiosyncrasies, that are important.
One other mistake I made was to attempt to help him increase the effectiveness of the character by making suggestions of things he could change retroactively (mostly, it was suggesting that he pretend he had never bought his +2 crossbow [which he never wielded even once] and add some magic to his breastplate). This, I think, had the effect of insulting him, implying that he couldn’t build an effective character. I also believe that he honestly had no interest in combat effectiveness, considering that his character did what he wanted it to do — create magic items.
Bret left the game after about eight months, saying that he no longer had time for multiple games because he was studying for his Microsoft certifications. I am quite sure that he really left because the game wasn’t what he wanted, and his character wasn’t what I wanted.
Everyone else… January 10, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Game Mastering, Player Characters.Tags: characters
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After the creation of Sparrow came the gathering of the rest of the players. Robert, my husband, would be one of the other players, but none of the other spaces were filled. One of the problems was that many of the members of Robert’s and Nathan’s campaigns were not good roleplayers — to them, a character was a set of numbers written on a piece of paper, and “parley” meant to say, “My character says, ‘I guess that’s ok,’” in as dead a voice as possible. So they were out (almost).
I began considering all of our friends and who might fit into this campaign. Of the previous group, the only one I chose was Kyle. While he wasn’t an outstanding roleplayer, he still understood the concept of character and played the personalities he chose well. However, the last two players, to round out a group of five, were difficult.
The next person I chose was Bret. I knew him from an old D&D group, in which he played a bard under 3.0 rules. He still managed to make that character effective (and it became even better under 3.5 rules!), and his ebullient roleplaying of that character was memorable. He is also an enthusiastic GM, weaving wonderful worlds and stories. I was very happy when he accepted.
The last choice was Mel (short for Melissa). Mel had not played any 3rd edition D&D. She had played 2nd edition many moons ago, and her only recent exposure to gaming was World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy Online. However, she was eager to get back into table-top gaming, and other evidence suggested that while she might have a bit of a problem learning the rules, she should be a good roleplayer.
Once the choices were made, I let the players decide for themselves what types of characters they wanted to make. This resulted in no cleric: Kyle – scout; Robert – fighter; Nathan – fighter; Bret – wizard; Mel – something archer-like. After a bit of soul-searching, they decided they needed a cleric, so Bret moved from wizard to cleric, and Mel became the wizard.
I want to note here that this presaged future problems. First, wizard is a very difficult class to play, and I should not have given the rookie player the wizard. Second, Bret wanted to make a magic-item creation wizard, and when he switched to cleric, worked very hard to make that cleric a magic-item creator, to the detriment of his fighting and combat-casting ability. It resulted in his being unsatisfied with the character, and I believe it was one of the reasons he chose to leave the campaign.
However, the party was set, and the players made their characters. At this point, I worked with them all to make their characters unique. Here are the things I did.
1. I forced them to create a solid, cohesive character background, including naming locations where they lived and people that they knew. They all did work hard on this, which is good.
2. I added to their backgrounds. I decided that there needed to be two things each character really needed. First, they needed friends and family, and enemies, so that they weren’t just isolated adventurers who no one cared about, and who cared about no one. Some of them listed some contacts; I gave them more. I gave them named people and described their relationship with that person. Second, I gave them goals. Some were as concrete as “you want revenge on person X for event Y” and some were as nebulous as “you’re angry about this, and you want to do something about it, though what, you haven’t figure out yet.” This gave them direction and an initial momentum.
3. I added to the characters. One of the limitations of the D&D character generation system is that there is little difference between one character and another, and if a character is different, he’s usually also less powerful. For example, if you create a base fighter and get the fighter feats and buy the fighter skills, there are tons of other fighters out there just like you. If you decide that your fighter was the son of a blacksmith and therefore spend skill points in Profession: Blacksmith, those are points that make you less powerful than the fighter who spent the points in Climb (or, more importantly, Spot).
So, I gave the characters a little more than usual, without penalizing them by requiring they give up something else. For Sparrow, he got a number of points of Knowledge:Nobility, since he should know that stuff. Since magic is supposed to a common (but not studied) thing in Chorenn, a couple of the characters received small magical powers.
Stay tuned for the rundown of the characters.
I am the Kingmaker January 10, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Game Mastering, Player Characters.Tags: characters, Sparrow
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(This article contains spoilers.)
Two of the major motivations for this campaign were 1) wanting to model the story on the plot of the book The Silver Sun, by Nancy Springer, which revolved around the journey of a young prince to becoming king, and 2) wanting to give one of my players a chance to bring the party together around him and forge his own destiny. Thus, the first thing I needed to do, after creating the world, was to start working with the player to create the young prince.
The player in question is named Nathan. By the beginning of the campaign, I had been gaming with Nathan for nearly four years. Robert (my husband) and I were invited to join a gaming group consisting of co-workers at my new job. Nathan was one of the players, playing an Arcane Archer named Delnor, and the campaign, set in the Iron Kingdoms campaign setting, was run by Mac. When that campaign ended, I took the job of GM and moved the characters to the Forgotten Realms. After that, the group evolved — players came and went, and Nathan and Robert each started their own campaigns, with different characters — but through it all, Nathan, Robert, and I remained.
Personality-wise, Nathan tends towards the stereotype of British nobility: Tall, quiet, proper, with strong convictions, and a tad supercilious. His interests lie in that romantic direction: He studies fencing and swordplay, as well as history and his own geneaology. And physically he fits that model as well; picture a young Prince Charles, though much better-looking.
Both Nathan and Robert are strong roleplayers with very different styles: Robert tends to be the talker and the take-charge guy, while Nathan prefers to take the role of either the intellectual or moral backbone of the group. Also, while he is good at assuming the personalities of his characters (even those very different from his own), Nathan tends to get tongue-tied when improvising. These things together usually resulted in Nathan living in Robert’s shadow to some extent.
Thus, when I came up with the idea to create this campaign, Nathan was an ideal choice for The Silver Sun’s Prince Hal. Nathan’s personality fit the character so closely that when I mentioned the concept to my friend Bob (who is my advisor and co-plotter on this campaign), his first response was, “Oh, that’s cool! And you know who’d be perfect for this character? Nathan!” This would also give Nathan the chance to be the center and focus of the group, since eventually, if his character so chose, he would be leading them towards seizing the Chorennii monarchy.
The next step, then, was to ask Nathan. This needed to be done carefully, because if Nathan refused the role, then he needed to have as little information as possible about it so that he could not spot the rebel prince among his party members. Thus, I gave him a very short synopsis of the character — a prince, the son of a cruel and evil monarch, hated by his own father, runs away and is trying to make his own life in the world. Whether or not he decides to claim the throne is up to the player. Luckily, Nathan jumped on it immediately.
One of the main things that I learned in this campaign is that if you give your characters the ability to control their own destiny, they will work hard to do so. In previous campaigns, I had always either followed the module I was using, or simply given the players a quest to follow, and they dutifully searched the walls, stabbed the monsters, and scoured the dungeons clean. It’s fun, but it’s limited. In this campaign, I’ve given the players a world and their characters real lives, and they’ve lived their lives.
In this particular case, Nathan came back within a day with piles of character background. He already had names for his family, and had invented an older brother, who was cruel like his father but had been killed in an accident, leaving his younger brother as an unwilling and untrained Crown Prince. (This was an improvement over Hal’s situation as an only child in The Silver Sun — it had never sat right with me that King Iscovar had deliberately alienated the heir he so desperately needed to control.) Some of his background had to be modified, since I hadn’t yet defined the world for him, but the enthusiasm was refreshing.
Thus, Prince Johnathan, alias Sparrow, was born. King Harold, the monarch of Chorenn, finally achieved what his forebearers could not and subjugated the monarchy of Valuria. In return for not leveling the country, he demanded the hand of Valuria’s Princess Cynria, knowing that her issue would then both inherit the monarchies of Chorenn and Valuria, uniting the two once and for all. Her first son, Thomas, was groomed by Harold as the heir, and became as cruel and greedy as his sire. Harold, and thus Thomas, ignored Cynria and her second son, Johnathan, who she called her “little sparrow,” leaving her to raise him to love peace, beauty, and music. Sadly, she died when Johnathan was sixteen. When Thomas was killed in a freak accident during military training and Harold went into a rage, Johnathan fled the castle before the king turned his attention on him.
The young prince fell in with a group of outlaws in the Ravenheart Woods, though he soon learned that these were decent folk who were simply making their way in the world. He learned much about the outside world from them, then left to find his own fortune, wondering if he should be returning to the castle for his birthright, rather than fleeing from it. One day, in Silverleaf, on his way to Fin Quil, he met with a cleric of Mystra going his way, and they chose to travel together…
