The devotee of the goddess of all magic January 11, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Player Characters.trackback
(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.
D&D assumes that all characters are combat-capable and is built around the assumption. Breaking it is a bad idea.
When my players do something that looks stupid, I ask for their intent: What are they trying to accomplish? If it looks totally impossible, I explain that to the player. If they want to make it, I make it a difficult roll of the dice; success means that it worked, regardless of how hard it might have been. Failure and it doesn’t.
This is definitely something that I need to work on. I tend to react one of two ways — either allow the action or tell the player that’s not a good idea. I like the idea of encouraging the player to think a second time about what he’s doing, and then counsel based one what he is trying to do.
You’re definitely right about the characters must be combat-capable. Not necessarily combat-excellent, but capable. Sparrow, for example, has a high armor class but cannot deal out damage, because most of his feats, skills, and equipment were geared towards leadership and diplomacy, but he is capable of surviving combat and providing support. Steplan failed to accomplish “capable.”