@stupidranger @dalcher Hi [= @geeksgreamgirl says you can help hack’n'slash PCs into a bit more of a story driven RP game. Suggestions?

Dante will be sharing ideas to help DMs encourage more roleplaying from their players.  Me, I’m taking a look from the player perspective.  If you’re a player who is mostly hack-n-slash and you want to develop your roleplaying, here’s are a couple of suggestions to get you started.

Develop Your Quirky Side

A great way to ease into roleplaying is to develop a character quirk that you can exercise periodically.  Think of something a little off-the-wall for your character.  Maybe you’ve developed an intense fear of spiders.  If you’re an archer, maybe you like to check the fletching on your arrows before you turn in for the night.  If you’re a sword-swinger, maybe you check the edge of your blade.

A small quirk can give you something small to interject into your game that a) doesn’t take a lot of effort to roleplay and b) doesn’t take a lot of in-game time.

Develop an In-Character Connection

You can roleplay with other characters, familiars or NPCs in-game with a little creativity.  This can be something you work into your backstory: you and the other fighter went through militia training together before moving on to something bigger, giving you something to chat about around the campfire.  If you have a familiar or animal companion, you can spend some in-game time chatting with it.

It’s a little easier to work your way into roleplaying conversations if you have a reason to have a conversation!

Take Your Opportunities When They Arise

When you find a chance to roleplay, take the opportunity.  Sitting around the campfire is a great time because you’re already out of the combat mode.  Or wandering around a new town, as you meet new people or interact with shopkeepers.  I know it’s a little intimidating to start speaking in-character, but remember, this is supposed to be fun.  Take small steps and easy opportunities to flex your roleplaying, and enjoy yourself!

For the DMs out there, stay tuned for Dante’s DM-focused advice on how to help your players roleplay more.

Learning by Doing

For those of you that don’t know, I am a somewhat experienced martial artist (as is Vanir). I have been training in Shotokan Karate for the last 18 years or so, and as a result I have had an opportunity to train with some very interesting people. After relocating to my current job, I was told of a sensei in our area that is one of the greats, so I sought him out to train with him.

Now, that in itself correlates heavily with most roleplaying games: the student seeks out a very skilled teacher to train him further in his chosen craft, but over the weekend I got the opportunity to participate in a few classes for their club’s annual “spirit training”. This involved an early morning training session with his entire school (around 30-40 people showed up) packed all in a tight little room to train intensely from the hours of 6 am to 7 am all week long. (I only participated in two days due to schedule conflicts.)

Stupid Ranger and I settled around 40 minutes away (during rush hour), so that meant I got the distinct pleasure of rising around 5 am to get ready and make the trip to the training session.

OK, that’s great, but how does it affect being a Dungeon Master?

It’s actually quite simple: if I was a player character and my DM simply just hand-waved my morning training rituals, the character development just wouldn’t have been the same. The whole experience of training in that way, with that group of people vastly improved my outlook for those days. I was tired and sore, but upbeat and mentally energized at the same time. This would’ve looked somewhat odd from a player’s perspective to just jump into that state with nothing more than a comment like: “Ok, ok, you get up and do your training in the morning, let’s get back to the plot” from the DM.

Putting yourself in the shoes of your character in a real way by acting out their training regiment from time to time, or asking the DM if there are any heightened opportunities for class training with others or a seasoned instructor nearby can provide an opportunity for roleplay and fun. Dungeon Masters should be open to this type of interaction and seek it out, it makes a big difference in the quality of your character development.

Proper Villainy, pt. 1 — Evil 101

As recently discussed on dungeonmastering.com, villains add a great element to a campaign: an opposing force that the players can invest themselves in fighting against.

But what makes a really good villain? Let’s start with some basic concepts:

• What The Hell is “Evil”, Anyway?

  I’ve never been real crazy about declaring alignment for characters. If you have a Lawful Good character and he’s homeless and penniless and he steals some bread to survive, does that make him not Lawful Good anymore? What about a man who kills someone in a jealous rage but is otherwise good? Is he now “evil” or is he still a good guy who made a horrible mistake?

  People are more complicated than that. “Evil” people are still people — it’s just that the way they view the world is a bit more twisted than most everybody else.




• Nobody Is Born Evil

  Bad guys act the way they do because they’re EVIL, right? Well, sometimes. In a cartoon or a crappy movie, yeah. The bad guys are just bad and that’s the way it is. But a good villain probably didn’t start that way. Very few individuals would kill an entire litter of puppies and then go, “Man, that was great — I sure do love being evil!”. They had to start somewhere. And there’s a lot of ways to get evil, including:
  

  
  
  • Temptation

    It’s said that every man has his price. Somebody found this character’s price. They might have been offered money, or power, or anything — but whatever it was, the character wants it enough that he’ll do morally questionable things to get it.
    

  
  

  • Fear and Anger

    You get enough fear and anger together, and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing anymore. And in your head, committing horrible acts upon whatever you’re afraid of/angry with seems perfectly justified!

  
  

  • Sense of Duty

    This one may contain elements of the previous two. A character works for someone who asks him to do something reprehensible. He knows damn good and well it’s not right. So he’s “just following orders”. Not to say that a mistake flips the switch and makes a character evil all of a sudden, but if this character continues to do this sort of thing and starts thinking of this as “normal” behavior…. who’s to say?

  
  

  
  Note that in all three cases, the common theme of a desire and the willingness to do whatever is necessary to get it exists. It’s in the continued willingness to do evil that lies the heart of a true villain.

Next time, I’ll show you why it’s easier than you might think for a villain to do bad things. Until next time……

Also appearing in the Proper Villainy series:

1. A Little Self-Analysis – Review the information related to your class and race. Preview your career options. If you really were your character, you would know who you are and who you want to be. It’s merely a matter of knowing yourself.

2. A Little Geography – Take a look at your campaign setting. I’m not recommending that you memorize the capitals or the location of every river in the continent. But, depending on your character, you would probably have a general idea of your surroundings. The broad strokes of the setting can help make it a little more real, and if your world is more real, your character will feel more real.

3. A Little Creative Writing – I love writing backstories for my characters. The creative process involved helps me connect on a very deep level with the character I’ve developed. A stray memory from childhood, a rite of passage, any little thing that helps make your character unique will help you connect to your character. On of my favorite techniques is to tell the story of how my character came into her profession; not only do you create an insight into how you came to be who you are (Level 1), you have a great reason to keep doing what you’re doing (see #1).

Three little step to help me stay connected to my character, but each leaves a lot of room for personalization and adaptation to any character.

***** POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!!! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE DARK KNIGHT, DON’T READ ANY FURTHER!!! *****

Chaotic Evil With A Side Order Of Insanity

If ever you were wondering what the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil is, the Joker’s your poster boy for Chaotic Evil. Whatever he does, it’s to suit whatever plans he has. Granted, not all Chaotic Evil people have desires as sick and twisted as our purple-suited antagonist, but it does show that Chaotic Evil-aligned people don’t so much care about how they accomplish their goals or who has to die.

Just being Chaotic Evil isn’t what makes the Joker so frightening. Think about it for a second. Just because you’re evil doesn’t necessarily make you motivated. I’m sure most of us have known people over the years who really wanted to do some bad things to get their way, but they were too scared to. The Joker’s got that motivation somehow. The scary part is what he’s motivated to do. And most don’t find out what that is until it’s way too late.

Why So Serious?

Though the Joker has been portrayed in a variety of ways over the years, the main thing that separated him from most of the other Bat-villains (especially after the 80′s, when they really started to turn up the homicidal cuckoo) is that he’s not really after anything aside from chaos and mayhem. Yeah, he might rob a bank, but you can bet he’s going to use all of that loot to fund some sort of scheme that will sow the seeds of terror in the streets of Gotham somehow. As Alfred says during the movie, “Some men just want to see the world burn.”

That’s scary stuff. That means that you can’t reason with a person like this. You can’t make them go away by giving them what they want. If you give them what they want, horrible things happen to you and your loved ones and their loved ones and your dog and their dogs and probably their dogs’ friends and everyone’s neighbors. People like this love to see others suffer, and probably the single scariest thing about TDK’s Joker is that he lives to see people corrupted and to make themselves and their loved ones suffer. It’s like he can make a Diplomacy check gone horribly, horribly wrong, and if he succeeds then you’ve crossed the line where you’re not sure if you’re a good person anymore.

This maniac was born to tear places and people down, and he’s frighteningly good at it. Somehow he’s charismatic (or frightening enough) enough to have a bunch of minions following him. He makes unbelievably effective plans to accomplish his insane goals, probably due in part to the fact that he doesn’t need to have an exit strategy most of the time. Nobody’s quite sure if he even cares if he lives or dies so long as the chaos continues to spread. As he put it himself in TDK, “It’s like I’m a dog chasing cars. I don’t even know what I’d do if I caught one.”

Bringing Mr. J to Your Campaign

I’ve just detailed a lot of things that make the Joker a frightening and unique villain. You can use a lot of the things he does in TDK and weave them into your adventures in D&D.

Suppose you have a mad wizard laying waste everywhere he goes. Nobody knows why he’s doing this. Guess what happens if the PC’s try to talk him out of it! (Hint: it ends in “ireball”.) Or worse, their conversation points out to the arcane psycho another abomination that needs to be…. corrected. At the root. In the PC’s hometown.

Or, how about a fallen villain from earlier in your campaign who wants nothing more than to see the heroic party shamed before all who hold them up as a shining example to their people? This villain could set up a trap with a seeming no-win situation in which the PC’s would have to look bad one way or the other. Or he could just plain try to tempt or goad them into doing something morally questionable and let the stone continue to roll down the hill of evil.

I could go on quite a bit more, but you get the idea. The Joker is, in my mind, the epitome of a Proper Villain. Use characters like him as a resource, and your own characters will get a lot more colorful and believable. And if any of your PC’s hunt you down because your villain was just too damn evil to stop, then I apologize in advance for giving you just a little push in the right (wrong?) direction.

I encourage you to check out these articles if you are new to the game, or share them with someone who is.

D&D for Beginnings – Roleplaying 101

D&D for Beginners – Understanding Dice Notation

D&D for Beginners – Player vs. Character Knowledge

Beginner’s Guide to Creating a D&D Character

Enjoy!

Seinfeld was never my favorite show in the universe, but I did watch it now and then and it did get me thinking a little this morning — rarely a character shows up on that show that isn’t put under a microscope and all their weird little idiosyncrasies examined in detail (and usually poked with a cattle prod, causing hilarity to ensue). I like it when D&D characters enjoy that same kind of character development. I frequently like it much more than I do the main plot of the story, which I’m sure is the source of at least six or seven aneurysms in Dante and the other DMs I’ve played with.

To wit: my favorite sessions are usually the first two or three, when the crap hasn’t hit the fan yet and we’re getting to know everyone, followed closely by the “break” sessions in the story where we usually follow one character’s personal story (which may or may not be woven into the main story). But barring those weird times when we’re all arguing about which direction to go because we can’t figure out the clues laid before us, those sessions where we’re not doing anything particularly “useful” per se are what I really look forward to, especially with a new character to play.

Making a character that has some strange personal idiosyncrasies, in addition to making everyday roleplay with your character more interesting, may have an impact on everyone’s lives (good or bad!) in much the same way that the folks on Seinfeld frequently have misadventures because they’re really freaking neurotic. I mean, they devoted half an episode to Kramer trying to defend himself from deadly birthday wishes. And I was enraptured.

I’m a believer in that the small stuff can be every bit as interesting as the epic. Characters should be more than a bunch of combat stat blocks! The difficulty, of course, is that as you get higher in level, the monsters you fight are optimized to be a challenge to people who are prepared to fight them. On several occasions (but especially with Bat Loaf), I’ve picked spells and items that weren’t particularly combat-friendly and it cost me. It’s just a fact of life that the vast, vast majority of D&D campaigns revolve around stuff killing other stuff and you need to keep that in mind before you go too overboard. If you don’t, you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated week after week.

But don’t abandon the fact that you have a character to play. DM’s — let them! And try not to dogpile in the end battle on the guy that picked Percussion to give a little atmosphere to his nightly trysts with the barmaids. Dante.

Prepare for the Unknown

For trivia or for spells, there’s usually two schools of thought that prevail. One, specialize. Two, jack of all trades. Specializing, you take as many spells of the same type; if you’re a cleric, you might take several offensive spells, or you might take several healing/restoration spells. Option two, play the jack of all trades: take a little bit of every kind of spell and hope that the ones you pick are ones that will be useful.

The Power of a Team

When you have multiple trivia players, or multiple spell casters, you may have better opportunities to cover the requirements. Pretty obvious, huh? The more people you have, the more chances that someone will know that obscure bit of knowledge or the spell that will make the difference in that battle.

Harness the Team Mentality

If you’re trying to conquer the trivia challenge or the Undead Lord, it helps to be coordinated with your other spell casters. Try to all follow the same preparation method; there is usually greater success if you are all specialists or all jacks of all trade. Try to coordinate your spells so they span the greatest range of possibilities. If you plan it right (and the other teams are not as smart as you), you might win that trophy!

Here’s What I Like About It

Two-weapon fighting doesn’t happen by accident. If you’ve taken the effort to develop your fighter into a two-weapon fighter, you have put some thought into what weapons you wield. These weapons are your signature, they’re part of your character.

The Tempest prestige class doesn’t require a specific combination of weapons; you can use whatever two weapons you want. So this prestige class works as well for my elven thinblade/short sword combination as it would for an axe/dagger combination or a double-weapon. I like that I don’t have to fit a stereotype to follow this prestige class; it’s adaptable to my character.

Here’s What I Love About It

The Tempest prestige class finally recognizes that your fighter is intelligent. The class features credit your character with the ability to become a more efficient fighter as you grow into proficiency with your two weapons. You gain AC bonuses, you reduce your two-weapon fighting penalties. And, my personal favorite, you gain the effects of certain feats for your secondary weapons; for example, if you have Weapon Focus for one of your weapons, you gain its abilities for your other weapon.

These class features (there are more, so read up if you’re interested) demonstrate that your character is growing as a fighter throughout this process. I love that it’s a natural progression of skills we might expect a two-weapon fighter to develop.

The Moral of Today’s Story

Whether or not you ever take this prestige class, there is something important I want you to take from this discussion. Your prestige class should be a natural complement to your character, and any sacrifices (pre-req’s) should be easily outweighed by the class benefits. Do your research and enjoy!