A journey through a land of fantasy…

(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.)

Now we come to the most difficult of the characters to discuss:  my husband’s.  Not because I don’t want to be critical of him — we’ve been married 11 years so I’ve had plenty of practice — but because his is by far the most complicated and ambitious.  The story of Robert’s character’s creation may also be instructive, since we had to compromise to come up with something that would work for both of us.

You might remember that I stipulated that all the player characters had to be human.  Zoriya ended up as a half-elf (which is what Mel wanted) mostly because of what happened with Robert.  After he received the world and campaign description (which included that it would be a heavy roleplay game), he came up with the following idea (heavily paraphrased from his original text).

Vryn Smithson is a half-doppelganger (real name is Xephnon), a member of a group of doppelgangers from Faerun whose spelljammer malfunctioned and crash-landed on an island beyond the shores of Chorenn.  Seeking to make their way in this strange new world, they sent some scouts out to learn of the ways of the human, but after one disastrous incident, they realized they needed a breed of doppelgangers that would not be revealed by such simple spells as dispel magic.  They bred a small number of half-doppelgangers, who hold on to the form they choose in areas of no magic, but do not have any telepathic abilities.

The original Vryn was an inhabitant of a small fishing village in Japrilis.  One day, when he went out to fish, Xephnon captured him, learned of his life and attitudes, and then killed him, taking on his persona.  He then declared to his “family” that he felt the call of a wandering life and left the village to travel to distant parts of Chorenn.

The doppelgangers intend to slowly invade the human world, taking over the populace and seizing their lands.  They eventually plan to usurp the throne from the (in their eyes) weak and pitiful human king and rule the land secretly.

I think you can probably see the problem here.  I’m going through all this trouble of creating a campaign in which Nathan’s character is going to take the throne, and Robert’s character is going to murder him and take his place the moment Nathan utters a word of it!

Thus, a number of days of discussion (verging on argument) passed.  While I felt that it was an interesting character, I also felt that it was intended to destroy the world that I had spent so much time creating.   On the other hand, I didn’t want to disappoint Robert by nixing the character he wanted to play. 

That’s one of the problems with playing with your spouse, by the way: There’s more than just the game at stake.  It’s not like the game is going to destroy your marriage, but there are other feelings at work.  Luckily, neither Robert nor I take things that happen in the game personally (though I do want to make him happy in the game, too). 

After much wrangling, we came to a compromise that made us both happy.  The doppelgangers find Chorenn to be boring and backwards (especially compared to Faerun!) and want to fix their crashed spelljammer and get the hell out.  To do this, they need to amass magical items to drain their power into the spelljammer’s engine, then start it using psionic power.  However, the doppelgangers are unable to provide the flavor of psionic power that it needs, and must organize at least two hundred humans to provide it (even humans without obvious psionic power have a bit of psionic energy that the doppelgangers can harness).  Vryn and his half-breed brethren are seeded in the human world and are attempting to solve the problem.

With this, we were able to satisfy Robert’s craving to play a shapeshifter and yet avoid the destruction of my campaign.  While Vryn is wholly dedicated to his task and will not balk at committing evil deeds to accomplish it, he will look for and take alternate routes, since causing chaos and possibly attracting attention to himself will only hinder him.

Vryn is definitely single-minded in his pursuits (his specific task is to gather magical items and feed as much information about Chorennii religion back to the doppelgangers as possible), and that has opened him up to character development: Will he learn to work with the humans with which he travels?  Perhaps he might find other goals that he finds more worthy.  You’ll learn about this when we get to appropriate points in the actual campaign history.

The character was built with 2 effective character levels from his doppelganger heritage; Robert and I both agree it should have been 4, but that would be too hard to reverse-engineer now.  I believe (without actually checking my notes right now) that his original character had levels in ranger (with favored enemy human), fighter, and the prestige class War Shaper.  My husband is quite the powergamer, so Vryn has become a very powerful front-line fighter, but this turned out to be good, since the only other melee character in the group, Sparrow, is heavily built towards defense and diplomacy.  On the other hand, it means that Vryn is extremely difficult to kill (*wink*).

Vryn has made the character interaction and storyline of the campaign much more interesting, and while I had envisioned a group of human adventurers, I am glad that I allowed the character.  Robert, of course, has much to do with it, since he plays the character as not quite so nice as everyone else, adding much-needed tension to the group.  In retrospect, I should not have allowed Zoriya to be half-elven, because it added nothing to her background or roleplay; the character and her history would have been the same if her mother had been human.  I think if I were ever to write a novel of this campaign (I’ve considered it, though I am not a skilled prose author), Zoriya will be human.

(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 magic-user of the party was Zoriya, played by Mel.  I use the past tense because Mel is no longer playing and Zoriya has been replaced.  Mel did play for about 1.5 years before she decided to quit due to other obligations.

Mel was newly introduced to D&D 3.5 rules.  She had played tabletop RPGs many years ago, probably during AD&D, but her only recent exposure to a similar genre was her experience in Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft.  Thus, there was not only the difficulty of encouraging the player to develop a vibrant, three-dimensional character, but also that of teaching the player the rules.

Unfortunately, the experiment did not work well, and you’ll see why later in this entry.

Zoriya was half-elven in a world where elves were unknown.  The elves tend not to mix with humans at all, and haven’t for over a millenia, and thus they are considered creatures of legend.  Zoriya thus had to conceal her race by wearing hoods and head scarves.  As a child, she loved her parents very much and was devastated when they were killed during King Harold’s invasion of Valuria.

She always had studied magic, but threw herself into her craft after her parents’ death.  A second blow came when her cousin, a full human teen girl who had been studying in Nemeril, committed suicide after telling Zoriya that she had been raped by Prince Johnathan.  (I added this part to her background.)  Zoriya then left her homeland, travelling to find meaning as well as to exact revenge from the royal family that brought so much sorrow to hers.

Her story is a little trite — the angsty wizard driven to revenge by terrible circumstances — but it should have been interesting to play, especially considering the eventual conflict with Sparrow (and probably Falco).  However, this never blossomed.  A lot is to be blamed on Mel’s handling of the character, but you must also consider that I did a poor job of helping her along.

There were a number of problems, any one of which probably wouldn’t have affected anything much but together were devastating.  The first problem was that I assumed that, given a list of rules pointed out specifically, they would be read and understood.  For example, when we began character creation, I sat with Mel for two hours and went through all the rules on how to create a wizard.  At the end, I pointed out that there were things we didn’t cover, but this is what we haven’t done and she should read them and decide if she wants to use them.  The next day, she assured me that she had read them, and yet later, I found that she used none of them.  One of them was the rules on magic specialization — Zoriya wasn’t specialized until I gave her a quest to get specialized.

The second problem stems from the first.  If a player isn’t actually familiar with the rules (or maybe she just wasn’t thinking about them, only reading), she cannot apply them to her benefit.  This happened daily, with her inability to choose appropriate spells to use, and her forgetting from week to week what actions she can take in a round.  There were also instances in which she failed to use her character’s abilities correctly.  For example, once, when she was alone, a monster (large, “covered in scales and with horns and spikes bristling on its back”) stepped through a portal and landed in front of her.  Instead of using a Knowledge (Arcane) check to attempt to identify the monster (it was a demon or devil of some type) as something about 3 CR levels above her with immunity to lightning, she simply stepped back and threw a lightning bolt at it.

The third major problem was that Mel never actually was Zoriya.  To her, the game was throwing fireballs and cracking out-of-character jokes.  She never visualized what Zoriya was seeing, or felt what Zoriya was feeling.   She took no initiative (when I told what she had to do to get her character specialized and said that she’d have to ask the party to make some time for her to do it, she dragged her feet for nearly six months, and made two levels within that time), even when it was her character’s main goal (when I gave her the opportunity to assassinate Prince Johnathan, she discussed the strategy with the party for two sessions, then, when she finally got there, she did nothing, barely even speaking throughout the entire session.)

Here’s an actual exchange during a session. 

Mel: “Oh yes, the prince wronged my… who was that, my niece?” 
Me: “Your cousin.” 
Her: “Oh, and what did he do to her?” 
Me:  “He raped her.” 
Her:  “Oh yes, that’s right.  Wait, she died from the rape?” 
Me:  “No, she committed suicide.” 

While I don’t expect people to remember every detail of their character’s background, I do expect them to remember the single driving force of their life.

As we played, it became clear to me what the problem was:  Mel was expecting D&D to be like WoW.  In an online RPG, your character has a very clear role in the group, and very few options, with the rules being taken care of by the software.  Character interaction is rarely an issue, unless you’re part of an exclusively role-play group.  Scenes are displayed to you, rather than requiring your imagination to paint them.  Motivation comes in the form of wanting to gain experience to make level, or finding the items you want, or going with your friends to hunt or raid.

D&D, or at least my campaign, has very little of any of this.  The actual point of my campaign was to have the players live the life of their characters, through their eyes, and not as simply as statistics on a sheet of paper.  And the more you live your character’s life, the more options there are.  You don’t just need to choose which of your ten pre-loaded skills to use, you now must make the decision about whether or not to use it (“maybe we shouldn’t be killing this monster…”).

D&D turned out to be much more complex than Mel expected.  In retrospect, she should never have been allowed to be the wizard, which is arguably the most complicated base class to play (of the ones in the Player’s Handbook); Robert (my husband, whose character I haven’t yet discussed here) should have been the wizard and Mel should have taken the straight fighter.  Combining the three problems — ignorance of the rules, inability to apply the rules and her abilities, and lack of immersion — made the experience very frustrating for everyone at times.  When Mel’s personal life became busy, she found it was an excellent excuse to bow out of the game due to time constraints.  While I do think I could have done more to help here, there is a limit to how much I’m willing to hold the hand of a player over the lifespan of a campaign that is now into its third year.  I think it ended about as well as could be expected.

(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 next character to discuss is Falco Bors, played by Kyle.  The reason for this is that the other two characters, played by Robert and Mel, are rather complex and will take some time.  Falco is a lot easier to define.

Kyle assumed the mantle of rogue for the group, but didn’t want to play a classic rogue.  He instead created a scout/ranger with a tragic past.  Falco is a native of Lasquibur, the region which is perpetually in territorial and racial struggles with its neighbor, Chondheim.  Falco grew up in a peaceful fishing village, but it was invaded and razed by Chondian forces, and he barely got away with his life.  His anger over the event prompted him to join the Lasquiban military, where he specialized in scouting and reconnaissance.  However, he soon tired of bloodshed, and when he got the opportunity, he left the military and his home region, seeking peace.

I pegged him as the unknown wild card in the group and added a bit more to his background.  While he was in the military, his abilities were noted by those he didn’t know were watching him, and at some point, he was offered a position in the Obsidian Guard, the king’s secret service.  I thus had to create how exactly the OG worked, so that Kyle could adjust his character accordingly.

The Obsidian Guard (or kingsmen) live incognito among the citizens of the realm, watching for any possible treasonous activity.  They are unmerciful and ruthless, and those who speak against the king may suddenly disappear, never to be heard from again.  The kingsmen have a more open presence in Nemeril, where the officers of the corp run it day-to-day, but in the rest of the kingdom, no one knows if the person sitting next to him is a kingsman.

In order to make this plausible, I gave the OG a secret language, like a thieves’ cant, in which words and gestures made during normal conversation convey other messages.  Kyle was required to take the language normally (one of his starting languages).  Thus, one OG can identify other OGs by observing someone talking and seeing if their language makes OG-sense.  News and information is passed by word of mouth, which is often very slow — a piece of information, even when the OG is trying to spread it, may take weeks or months to travel to the next town, depending on the travels of the kingsmen.

The kingsmen are divided into two “ranks.”  One is the “observer” rank. These kingsmen live their lives and if they see a problem, report it in rather than do anything about it.  Thus, they are not required to have combat or stealth capability, and they are more successful at maintaining their cover.  The other is the “operative” rank, those that actively do missions, kidnap, arrest, or execute people, etc.  They are less concerned with maintaining cover, since their work is much more open.  Falco is actually a member of the second group, though he infiltrates like the first.

Falco does get paid for his work periodically (I’m not sure I’ve paid him recently; I better check).  He, however, has only met OG that either trained him in Lasquibur or he has established contact with on his journey.  He has never been to Nemeril and has never met the established Guard there.

Kyle accepted this bit of subterfuge very readily.  He decided that Falco joined them for idealistic reasons, believing that they actually are bent on doing good for the realm and the king, rather than being secret police.  In the course of the game, Falco has been discovering that all is not as it seems, and is wondering if anything in the world is good.  As yet, the party has not discovered his secret agent status, though, unbeknownst to Kyle, two of the party suspects him.

(As a note, this wasn’t the direction I was hoping Falco would take.  I wanted Kyle to use his connections in the OG to eventually start funnelling information to the party, but as it is, Kyle is straddling the fence, trying to live up to his obligations on both sides.  It is starting to crumble, but not completely yet.)

(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.