Visiting the Archives: Roleplaying Pitfalls pt. 2: Hogging The Spotlight

Today we bring you the second installment of Vanir's Roleplaying Pitfalls opus, where he details spotlight hogging and how to manage that urge!

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Originally posted on 10/10/2007 by Vanir

I'm SO guilty of this one: you have concocted a brilliant idea that puts your character in the spotlight and provides hours of roleplaying opportunities - for you.

Enjoy your time in the spotlight, but don't hog it every week. If your group spends more time on hastily-constructed side quests that you caused (or worse, watching you complete them alone) than they do on the actual plot, you might want to back off a little bit.

If You Must Hog The Spotlight

Make sure it's worth it! In our group, we usually set aside some time every campaign for some PC-specific stuff, which is a lot of fun. So when it's not my character's turn and I decide to do something completely off the map, I usually try to do something to further the story in my own way.

A good example of this is the time I thought everybody in our party had been captured aside from Bat Loaf and I decided to convince a bunch of low level wizardry students to help me rescue my comrades by showing them how to score with the ladies. Off the tracks: you bet. Hogging the spotlight: check. Well-received by the party: well, nobody threw anything at me (even the Stupid Ranger!) and it was entertaining enough that everybody seemed to be having a good time!

An even better solution would be, if possible, to convince your compatriots to join you on your crazy mission. Your GM's head might explode, but at least you've involved everyone AND you still get to do what you wanted.

Metagame (Slightly)

There's a certain point where you just need to shut up and go with the party. Yeah, I know it's not what your character wants to do and he totally would just leave them and do his own thing in this case. Usually, a D&D campaign is based around the fact that the party has a common goal and is willing to work together to reach it. There's some leeway there, but by and large that's how this game works. As I frequently say on this blog, there are other people at the table, and they probably want to play too. Would you rather play D&D with your friends or continue to play in your sandbox by yourself?

Like so many other things, being in the spotlight is best when done in moderation. A little can be entertaining, too much isn't fun for anyone. Keep the lines of communication open with your group, and you'll find the right balance. Until next time!

Never Underestimate The Power of Ernie Keebler

When we play D&D, I really love it when I get a chance to step outside the box. I love it more when I can do it in character. And I really love it when I can do it without derailing the plot that our intrepid DMs have set before us.

(Not that it usually stops me.)

Class Is Now In Session

In our group's current campaign, we now possess, through a series of strange events, a magical item that allows us to control the legendary Tarrasque. We weren't exactly sure what we were supposed to do with it, just that we needed it to combat the forces of a dark goddess who was angry at us. So we were riding it back home so it could eat a couple armies.

As it happened, I had been hitting the E.L. Fudge cookies pretty hard before we started playing Saturday night and I was very thoroughly sugared up. I had reached a state of being Dante refers to as "Professor Vanir", in which insanity starts to pour out of my mouth but I speak with confidence about it as if I was a college professor teaching a class. (I am told he imagines a graham cracker mortarboard on my head when I am like this, but that sounds like the ravings of a madman to me.)

The Inevitable Conclusion of Rock

In the throes of my delicious chocolaty berserkergang on Saturday night, I was possessed by the urge to roleplay. And by "roleplay", I mean "let Bat Loaf's freak flag fly". For those who don't know, Bat Loaf is my rock-and-roll bard. He has settled down (after a fashion), and gotten himself married. He and his wife are both epic-level rock bards, totally metal and totally in love. We had a legendary monster at our disposal with only moderate risk of being torn apart and eaten. We had been afforded the opportunity to do things you never get to do in the span of a normal character's lifetime.

Thusly, the only logical conclusion for me to arrive at was to do the single most metal thing that has ever been done: conceive their first child on top of the Tarrasque.

You Want To Do What?

When I announced my intentions to the group, Dante got that glassy-eyed stare that he gets when he simultaneously thinks something is intensely funny and still wants to kill me. Several players (and my wife) simply put their head in their hands and sighed. But we were escorting the Tarrasque for hundreds of miles at a movement rate of 30 and it was literally swallowing every random encounter we had whole, so it's not like we had much better to do.

Initially, I did not know how I was going to get Bat's wife to our location, and I suggested to Dante that he and his wife had a thing that's called "radar love". I also submitted to him the fact that they had both "a wave in the air" and "a line in the sky", and thusly she would know he needed him and would travel to him as quickly as possible. Incredibly, these arguments fell on deaf ears, and I was forced to come up with a more realistic alternative. (Like magic!)

Eventually, I asked the wizard of the party to use Limited Wish to teleport Bat Loaf's wife to our location, and so they took care of the very serious matter at hand for the next 48 hours as we moved. The rest of the party assumed positions and cast the appropriate spells such that they would not be exposed to any adverse sights, sounds, or fluids, and thusly attempted to pretend all of this never happened. Many steps were taken to assure that the union would bear metal fruit, not the least of which was the use of the spines on the tarrasque's back as a Liberator sex wedge to elevate his wife's pelvis. Our paladin also cast Divine Favor to increase our chances of success and realized he should devote part of his life's work to encouraging people to have babies. At the time of this writing, we do not yet know if the Bardic Torpedoes successfully entered the appropriate exhaust port or whether they just impacted on the surface. However, the attempt was pretty goddamned metal, and thusly worth it regardless of the results.

Our paladin, however, was moved to perform rituals of atonement because of the "wicked thoughts" he was having about how one might mate a human and a Tarrasque -- and consequently that got us all thinking about one might harvest a Tarrasque's genetic material. That conversation will haunt all of our dreams forevermore.

Making The Most of a Unique Situation

Having a psychic link to the Tarrasque making him your ally (sort of) affords you some interesting opportunities you might not normally have. One is to cast Haste on the Tarrasque. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One was to make him eat our enemies faster. The other far more important reason was so that I could imagine the Benny Hill theme song playing as he did so. There was some debate as to whether the Tarrasque was intelligent enough to understand that we were allies and thusly could drop his spell resistance, but in the end I have to think that Dante let it happen because it was just too funny not to.

Somehow, the baddies managed to make the Tarrasque fall over and roll on its back. Which was good for us, since we weren't underneath it like about 500 of the bad guys were. Seeing this inspired me to use the psychic link via Bat Loaf remembering the last time he had the bedspins from too much ale, causing our gigantic monstrous legendary indentured servant to lose his balance and do a barrel roll on command. Gotta be careful with that one.

Just Smile and Nod

You may be wondering if there is a point to all of this. Not really! I just wanted to share some of the delightful retardation we had last weekend. D&D is what you make it . Even if you never get anything done, as long as everybody has fun you did it right. I'm pretty sure everybody had fun (after the initial shock), and somehow we actually DID stay on track for what Dante had in mind to happen during the adventure despite the box lying broken and burned by the side of the road, never to be stepped inside ever again.

And if Bat's wife is pregnant, they're naming it "Tarrasque Loaf". Here's hoping!

The Power of Zero

There came a certain point in my gaming life over the last couple of years where doing big giant things got boring. That is, I'd been in a couple of campaigns where the characters got to epic levels and were throwing down ridiculous amounts of damage. It becomes an arms race, and the monsters and you progressively get tougher and more able to kill each other. It's fun sometimes, but it lost its luster after awhile. So I decided to step away from the large and look at the small.

Paradise By The Continual Light

In the last campaign I played in (and that Dante and Kanati are continuing), I played a kickass bardic rock star named Bat Loaf. His stats, skills, and spells were not really set up for combat. He was a lover, not a fighter. I mean that in a very literal sense. In every town, he was hooking up with every hot barmaid he could find. I would add that we never got too far into roleplaying the details of these encounters -- because, well, EWW. Suffice it to say that the process was abstracted into a series of Perform checks. Heh heh.

My bard's love life is a tale for another time. What I will talk about, however, is how you can produce some very powerful results out of seemingly nothing if you just use your imagination. Being the lecherous dog that he is, Bat Loaf had a veritable arsenal of spells designed to aid him in his chosen lifestyle, including:

• Feather Fall - Let's suppose that Bat's current bedmate sleeps on the second floor, and her husband walks in. There will be no hastily-constructed bedsheet rope and probable falling damage for this bard! He will float gently to the ground and hope he remembered all his clothes.


• Percussion - Used during concerts.... and for mood music after the concert!


• Easy Math - Used to quickly count the proceeds from his concerts, because he was always running away from someone due to his after-concert escapades.


• Ventriloquism, Minor Image, and Ghost Sound - great for stage effects - and for convincing distractions when he needed to flee a lover's room in a hurry.


• Contraception - Surprisingly, the only spell I chose from the Book of Erotic Fantasy for Bat Loaf. He was, if nothing else, very practical in these matters. I'd have taken Remove Disease too, but it was not available to bards -- so he found himself at the temple a couple times begging for forgiveness and relief from burning sensations.

By now you may be wondering what all this has to do with getting "powerful results". Watch and learn.

Lost Boys and Gladiatorial Girls

One night, our party came to a village and Bat immediately set about his usual business of getting loaded on ale and taking the hottest woman he could find to take to his room in the local inn. The paladin of the party always spent the night in a local temple, cleaning everything to atone for his sins. It was at this time that our illustrious GMs decided to have the party captured and taken off to fight in some secret gladiatorial games run by an organized crime syndicate. Problem was, they just got everybody in the tavern at the inn - not Bat or the paladin. So, one GM went upstairs with the captured players, and it was up to Bat and the paladin to launch a rescue mission!

Once we found the place (it was secret, after all), we started talking to the people there. We weren't getting a whole lot of answers because most were just there to bet on the games, but one guy told us the city guard shows up and runs everybody off sometimes. The place was heavily guarded and had wards against spells, so here I am thinking this is the clue to freeing my comrades -- I have to make the bad guys think the city guard is coming so they all run away!

I don't exactly remember what Plan A was for accomplishing this. I do remember it resulted in a big mess where I was confused about where the guards (who helped enforce the no-spellcasting rules) were relative to Bat and it ended up with him getting killed with a battleaxe after he cast a spell. Fifteen minutes of argument later, the GMs and I had successfully made our Craft(Compromise) check and they used their godlike powers to reset time to right before Bat cast his spell. In this new and improved timeline, I metagamed slightly and knew the guards would totally kill Bat with a battleaxe if he cast a spell inside the arena. (It's just common sense, after all.)

Thusly, Plan B was born!

Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through

Bat went outside the arena, rolled around in the dirt a little bit and messed up his hair and clothes, and pretended to collapse at the feet of one of the guards outside the arena gates. But not before wheezing "the city guards.... they're coming... RUN!!.....". The guard didn't so much believe him, which I found a little strange, but I went with it anyway. Not to be stopped, he crawled off and hid behind a nearby tree. Then he cast Ghost Sound. At Bat's level, he could create as much noise at twenty normal human could with the spell, which was perfect for a believable city guard facsimile. Definitely enough to convince a gate guard that the sounds of angry soldiers coming over the ridge were very much the real deal - especially with Bat now screaming and running toward him yelling "I TOLD YOU!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!"

Everybody at the arena had a protocol for when the city guard showed up - they dropped everything and ran like hell. And so it was a fairly simple matter to free our friends, because they were still locked up in the fighters' quarters near the ring and there was nobody guarding them anymore. A few monster encounters later and a ton of looting and we were on our way. We figured out the puzzle and won the day! Right?

Well, as it turns out, Dante and Kanati had an entirely different night planned for us. The captured PCs would get to fight and show off their skills in the ring, and exciting monster battles, lots of cool stuff. And it also so happened that they had a very special encounter planned in case of emergency to give the PCs a way to get free -- the owners of the arena, knowing that the standard protocol when the city guard showed up was to drop everything and run like hell, would hire some mercenaries to pose as the city guard, not even telling their employees the truth. And then they'd pocket all the money people had placed as bets. All this was to have been revealed to us at the end if we'd talked to the right NPCs. But instead, my 0 level spell brought everything crashing to the ground, and we ended three hours earlier than we usually do.

This story has been clinically proven to stop "power gamers" dead in their tracks, and I have learned no fewer than three new four-letter words since it happened. This, my friends, is the power of roleplaying!

Use it wisely.