Legends & Lore: Roleplaying

Though Dungeons & Dragons is the iconic role-playing game, there is not much in the game that really rewards or enforces a consistent personality, motivations, goals, etc.

I do not remember if XP penalties were really a thing in older editions, and 3rd Edition had a vague system of awarding 10-50 XP per character level depending on how well the Dungeon Master felt you did. Given how much XP you needed to level up it could be quite awhile before you saw any payoff, which basically amounted to “you might level up one session before the rest of the party”.

Other games provide ways to reward you for taking the time to develop your character, or just as part of creating your character: for example Dungeon World has bonds that you can cash in for XP throughout the
course of the campaign, FATE (which is basically free) has aspects that you can invoke for a reroll or flat bonus to a check (which cost points that you can regain when the Storyteller screws you over by invoking one of your aspects), and Exalted has its motivations and intimacies.

A common complaint I hear is that Dungeons & Dragons is not a “real” role-playing game, that basically all you do is kill things for XP and treasure. I disagree with this sentiment, but can see where they are coming from, and given the praise I often hear about bonds and aspects it is surprising that it took almost 40 years for Dungeons & Dragons to (probably) pick up on this trend.

The proposed system consists of bonds, flaws, and ideals:

• Bonds are your characters ties to the world. 
• Flaws are your weaknesses.
• Ideals are the things that keep you going when everything sucks.

This sounds…promising. It is not anything new or particularly awe-inspiring, but it is still good to see the game “officially” offer something more rewarding and interesting than XP for your time and efforts. Really the only thing that I dislike is that so much of it seems to springboard off of alignment. Given that alignment is supposed to be optional, I hope that this system will also be completely usable without having to reference alignment at all.

Flaws are a concern. I have never had a good experience with flaws: generally players would try to take flaws that would likely never come into play in order to scrape together enough points to buy an extra perk or what-have-you, or just ignore them entirely. I am hoping that they are more like the bad side of a well-developed aspect in FATE, something that you have to take (ideally derived from a bond or ideal) and the DM can potentially use against you, or at least as an adventure hook.

On the plus side there will apparently be several random tables for you to roll on and/or use as inspiration for writing your own stuff. Speaking of inspiration…

You can gain inspiration by doing things that reflects your personality, goals, or beliefs, and burn it to gain advantage on things linked to the action. It kind of makes me think of stunting from Exalted, and based on his description I like more because the bonus is normally small and immediate; you can only one one “inspiration” at a time, so it will be interesting to see if players will bank one as soon as possible and just save it for a key moment in the encounter. If the bonus is used up immediately, I think it will encourage more consistent attempts.

Of course this is just the basic mechanic for rewarding specific kinds of role-playing. According to Mearls there will be variations and more complex modules. It is encouraging nonetheless to see at least something built into the core of the game, and hopefully other modules will provide more gratifying mechanics. Really I would be fine with what would essentially amount to d20-fied aspects.

Playing Monstrous Characters

I don’t get to play D&D as much as I’d like to, so its a good thing that I enjoy running, but when I do sit on the other side of the screen I play a lot of monstrous races. While the other players are rolling humans, shifters, gnomes, and devas, I’m trying to find ways to shoehorn a minotaur or gnoll into the plot. I think its probably due to the fact that I’ve been gaming for a long time, about 15 or so years, and maybe I’ve gotten tired of playing humans and elves and the like. Heh, just kidding. I’ve never played and elf and hadn’t even seriously considered it until recently.

In your typical D&D setting most of these races are the bad guys. This usually means that if no one in the party is aware of each other when the adventure starts, you gotta do that cliche social role-play part where people distrust you, you talk back and forth for a bit, and then they grudgingly allow you to do your adventuring bit until you earn their trust. I hate that part because first of all, it is a cliche. Everyone knows its another player. All you’re doing is making everyone wait while you rummage through dialogue until someone says something halfway plausible to get the game moving (which would be the second thing I hate about it). Actually, makes me glad that monsters generally aren’t trained in a lot of skills…

Frankly, I prefer having that part inherent to the character background in addition to already knowing one or more of the party members for some extra insurance. Really that’s the best advice I can give for anyone playing a monstrous race: build up a background where the character has already dealt with the locals and gotten on their good side. It also can’t hurt to know someone influential in addition to one-or-more party members. While it might not matter in the next town over, at least at the start you can keep the ball rolling. Maybe your exploits and achievements will reach the other town before you do?

I’m not a bad player. If the DM explains that in his or her campaign setting that the monsters are Evil-aligned treasure-hoarding experience parsels that live in dungeons, I’ve got reserves. Tieflings do the trick just fine, and I’ve been known to play a human or two. However, this is one of the reasons I like Eberron so much. Its incredibly easy and consistent with the setting to roll up a monstrous character, because there’s an entire nation of monsters milling about Droaam. Well, two nations if you count all the goblinoids in Darguun, and that’s not counting all the orcs mucking around in the Shadow Marches. 

Its People!

Wyatt: “We’ll open with a simple question. In your campaign, is a goblin a person or a monster? What about other intelligent, upright-walking human-like things?”

The short answer is that, well…that depends.

The (very) long answer is as follows.

I think that the most important step is to determine the function of a monster (monster here being defined as anything that has a stat block). As I’ve said in the past, I only design what I need to. If I need a village, I create the barebones structure that will see realization during the course of play. Extraneous bits that will never see the light of day? Fuck it. I’m all for creating story and history, but I dont sweat the small stuff unless I am very sure that the players will interact with it in some way.

So if I need a monster to function as a combat challenge, then thats what it is: monster! It is there to kill the players because the story calls for it, and thats-fucking-that. I dont sit and wonder about the why’s or whatever for the same reason that I dont wonder if my wizard would actually have learned scorching burst back in the academy. I fucking want that spell, and so I have it.
Generally speaking these guys arent going to get a lot of screen time, so I dont flesh them out very much (if at all). I may be tempted to make a kind of personality structure that I can apply freely to, say, a gnoll on the off chance that the party might interact with it, but I’m not going to spend a lot of work on the stuff that the players are going to just kill and forget about later.

If I intend for it to be interacted with, then I prepare a name, basic personality and goals, and perhaps some sort of a vague history depending (again) on whats required. If I dont think its past will crop up, then I’m likely to just wing it. Overplanning can both end up being a considerable waste of time when spread over the course of a shit-ton of NPCs, and it can also lend a sort of rigidity to how you arbitrate player interactions (ie, get you married to a concept or course). Again, if I spend a lot of work on a NPC and the party just plows through it without so much as a glance, I can just lift the story from that monster and apply it to another one later: I’m a believer of recycling more than just statblocks.

So, I think that monsters can be treated like people. Its not an either/or scenario. I’m certainly not against elaborating on their culture and histories, if they are going to be key players. Eberron is kind of a broad example in that there are two nations of monsters (one is mostly goblins, though). It would be ignorant for players to assume that they are just monsters to be killed. Well…they can be, but they are also much more likely to be willing to talk (or be used as player characters).

On a somewhat related note, I think it is important for players to know that A) there are cases where they can talk their way out of a fight, and B) that it can actually be just as good for them to do so. See, here’s the thing. If I confront the players with a gang of goblin bandits that want to loot them, they probably arent going to stand for it. Now, the players could try and bribe them at the cost of some gear/money (resource lost), but they are likely going to prefer the direct approach of slaughtering them, keeping their shit, taking potential useful shit, and garnering some XP for their troubles (several resources gained).

Oh, and maybe even C) not everything in the Monster Manual exists to be implicitly fought.

Role-Playing and Social Skills

One of several criticisms that I’ve seen about Dungeons & Dragons is that the use of social skills removes role-playing from the game, which has always confused me because role-playing is more than just talking to NPCs or character-acting: at any point in time that you assume the role of someone or something else, you are role-playing. If I am running around killing harpies and undead legions in God of War II, I’m technically role-playing to some degree.

However I’ve come to terms that when most people mention role-playing, they are emphasizing character interaction over anything else, if they even consider the other elements to be role-playing at all. I think a more focused term for that is social role-playing, and while some think that using skills and dice to determine the outcome is bad, I think that it adds consistency and immersive play since the mechanics of a character are supposed to reflect what she is good and bad at.

My preferred method of utilizing social skills, such as Bluff and Diplomacy, is to have the player roll first and then interact based on the results of the roll. This is because I prefer the actions of the character to succeed or fail based on the merits of the character, but also because it makes things fair for all the players regardless of their personal talents and skills. If your character is stupid, don’t expect to do a lot of intelligent things. Conversely, just because you are socially inept does not mean that you cannot play a character with a high Charisma.

If I allow the player to come up with a really good plan, then it feels like I’m short-changing them when they roll and the plan fails. I used to give out bonuses in those situations, but I felt that it was a pretty one-sided benefit that could end up “breaking” character depending on the character, player, and suggestion. Also, it only favored mental and social skills, not physical ones like Acrobatics or Endurance.

I don’t think this method penalizes players who are really intelligent or silver-tongued, as if they want to play a character that is smart or great at talking, they are more than free to. Heck, D&D makes it pretty easy to break the mold with Multiclass and Skill Training feats: I played a barbarian that I wanted to be an excellent leader, so took Student of Battle and picked up Diplomacy. One feat and I got some great benefits out of it that reflected the character’s personality and experience.

Anyway, I’m not about to penalize a strong character that is being played by a physically weak player. I’m likewise not about to give a player a bonus to Athletics because they describe a really good way to lift something.