My friend played Farmer Bob at a larp. His village had a legend that the chosen one would come from the village to defeat the great evil. When things got bad enough they picked him because he was the only one who was literate at the time, so they figured that was heroic enough.
@its_kim_love @Stamets Shades of discworld logic, right there.
You have no idea. It’s hard to explain, but Bob was a riot.
Anyone who’s had a player who’s “an [X] trying to convince the party they’re a [Y]” is probably having PTSD flashbacks now.
It sounds funny to read about but in my experience players who commit to constantly gaslighting fictional characters are not team players and always willing to spoil the fun of others.
In my party was a hobgoblin convinced he was the most beautiful being on the earth. And he tried convincing everyone to think the same. Was very funny
That sounds very cute! I’m thinking of the players who seem to need secret knowledge over the other players.
I was in a game with a secret were-rat who was constantly passing notes to the gm and then you’d wake up missing items or finding NPCs you liked dead and the player would angrily deny having anything to do with it. We all saw you pass a note.
A friend of mine once intentionally derailed a pug game by playing a priest of torm who was convinced that torm was black, to piss off the gm and the paladin of torm who were super racist. We probably shouldve just left the game, but we were asshole teens.
Had a game where the DM and his bestie homebrewed Roy Mustang. The PC was insufferable and overpowered by level 3… shooting fireballs that consumed the entire room in a single attack.
The party, and the group, broke up because they were mad the rest of us didn’t want to live in their power fantasy world
Hear me out: I played with an orc fighter who was convinced he was a mage, and tried to convince the rest of the party of the same thing. He carried a cast iron pan as his weapon, and his spells were “pan toss” and “pan smack”. There were a lot of laughs when NPC’s would be like “you’re clearly a fighter, you’re wearing plate armor” and he’d say it was his spell casting focus.
I would love to see the werewolf play the pompous know-it-all: “Um, actually the idea that the moon causes the change is a superstition. It’s a body cycle that often coincidentally matches up with the full moon. People just remember the times during the full moon because of confirmation bias.”
Meanwhile the moon disappears behind clouds and they briefly turn human, “COMPLETE COINCIDENCE!”
“If the moon is real how come I always black out when it is allegedly supposed to appear?”
(the moon is up at any hour of the day, it only rises at dusk and sets at dawn when it is full)
I’ve done the peasant farmer, who left his farm and took off to be a cleric. He never had the knack for farming like his brother, and when a passing cleric told him about the wonders of his deity, old Jeb was enthralled. The cleric was nice enough to even sell Jeb, promised to be the genuine article, his very own holy symbol for all Jeb’s coins and a pair of chickens. His brother said he was a gullible fool, but Jeb was sure he had seen his true path. Gave up the farm and hit the road looking for enlightenment. It was actually a fun character, too bad the campaign slowly died off because people couldn’t make it to the sessions.
Most of these are just gimmick characters that will have one fun interaction with the group and then become useless. They can be used for one-shots, but not full campaigns.
Like the dragonborn one, after the initial interaction where they explain the skin condition. Most players will just go “okay” and move on.
Except for the sentient hat one. That has a mystery attached and you can keep changing the mannequin throughout. Maybe it also works on a mop or barrel.
It really depends if the players are in it for the gaming or for the roleplay. Several of these are solid roleplay opportunities for people really into that aspect, and they would probably have a lot of fun.
Some of course are just silly thought experiments.
The druid is just a how the team met story.
The drow one is just straight up PTSD from being a Drow, that’s a solid character basis.
The mannequin one can be used to re-spec. Need a tank? Big, heavy and slow puppet. Something dexterious? Ten arms with ten fingers each.
Or with a buoy body it gets a swim speed.
As a DM. I’d totally let a player pick a new body each day or something. Like up to Dex mod per long rest you can take 10 minutes to swap bodies or something. And you get stat modifiers based on which body you have.
Break the game? Maybe. Fun? Definitely in the right hands
You could reward the player by allowing them to find new bodies with different abilities. Later in the game, they could come across a gnomish flying contraption that would grant them a flying speed.
And you know at some point, they could be fighting a stone golem, and the character could deliver the “killing blow” with, “I slam my hat onto the golem and attempt to gain control.”
Mechanically it could work similar to a Warforged character.
Semi-related: I created a gnome subclass in this vein, gnome in a mech. Could be inspiration for anyone wanting to flesh out the mechanics of this.
My sister has, no joke, played as a sentient fucking sandwich.
As long as your not a part of it I don’t see an issue with your sister’s fucking Sandwich.
Hey, step sandwich
I would totally buy drugs from a druid named Violetbriar or Shroombeard…
Fuck, now I gotta roll new characters…
I basically did the farmer once. My character was a winemaker with barely any skills that would be useful on an adventure. When his sister’s fiance and that fiance’s cousin - both wizards - got invited to visit some rich uncle at the other end of the realm, he took the chance to see a bit more of the world. By the time they arrived, the uncle had been killed by demons and my character basically got stuck at “I want to go home” and “Can we just let the inquisition handle this?”
Edit: to be fair, this wasn’t D&D but The Dark Eye, so a lot more social and knowledge based skills that can make a non-fighting character useful.
I played a Protector Aasimar Barbarian named Krill who was a fairly average scholar who had decided studying wasn’t for him. He heard somebody talking about “Power Word Krill,” and decided that he wanted to learn how to do it. He would basically go along with the party on everything (sometimes a little too quickly, he was hard to kill and often forgot others were squishier), but was absolutely obsessed with finding Power Word Krill.
He was asked multiple times if he was instead looking for “Power Word Kill,” but he really wanted to summon a lot of small crustaceans on demand. Or maybe it would just summon a big one, he didn’t know and was fine with either situation.
You’d love Ring of the Grammarian
There’s a longer and better version of this that has a fanart of it
So I don’t know DND rules, nor the strengths of the classes.
But you could follow several European Monk blueprints:
- definitely a beer brewer
- Hildegard von Bingen Route: be a herbal healer and a bard
- Mendelssohn Route: have a knack for breeding peas, combine it with the fairytale of the giant beanstalk and you could have a handy getaway or bridging monk
I got a DM to let me play a 3.5e ninja but lie to the party and tell them I was a bard.
Depending on peasants’ lifespans in this world, the peasant with the midlife crisis could be just out of their teens
Nah. More like early thirties. Average life expectancy in the dark ages was 30 or something, but that’s just because most people died very young, mostly as babies. If you managed to grow up at all, you could reach your 50s or 60s.
@Manjushri @AllNewTypeFace If you got past age 5, your life expectancy soared.
Unless you’re in the middle of a major plague or have a ridiculous amount of war, peasants in a medieval-style world who survive young childhood should generally get to an age of about 60. Though getting old with medieval-level medicine while working a physically demanding job probably sucks hard.
In Pathfinder, as a Tanuki you can take a feat called Teakettle Form that allows you to change into a inanimate object (like a hat) and if you’re a witch you can have your familiar take a humanoid form.
