The bard is a hick who wears overalls, is named Beauregard (“Beau” to his friends), and charms the underpants off of various people and creatures of all kinds with his unassuming and innocent, natural “aw shucks” charm.
Secretly, he’s a perv from a big city putting on an act.
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.
The peasant farmer always gets underestimated but kicks ass.
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.
The drow one is just straight up PTSD from being a Drow, that’s a solid character basis.
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 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
There’s a longer and better version of this that has a fanart of it
I would like to see that.
Edit: Found it!
We’re not twitter, link to sources
https://dat-soldier.tumblr.com/post/186717742297/terrible-character-ideas
I had a guy play a combo of the sentient hat and farmer. A lich screwed up, was left as just a head, and his phylactery was the farmer. As the farmer got stronger the lich got weaker but more connected to the farmer, until the lich was very nearly fully in control of the farmer (fighter/rogue by that point) before the party found a way to remove the lich.
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.
A druid who got involved because they’re the party’s weed dealer.
Isn’t that the plot of Dazed and Confused?
A werewolf who doesn’t believe in the moon.
This would play out as an unintentional (or intentional) allegory for addiction, and the denial that masks it. The party would very likely form an intervention of some sort. I mean, they’d have to. After the third werewolf attack or so, it starts to become a real problem.
“If the moon is real how come I always black out when it is allegedly supposed to appear?”
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.
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!”
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.
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.
One time in a group I wanted out of because of a problem player, he tried to steal a critical piece of gear from my character while I was sleeping. Before I could say anything he started with a “What, it’s what my character would do!” I told him “Well MY character would kill anyone caught stealing from him with his very large axe, so good luck!” Weirdly he didn’t think that was as funny.
The “that’s what my character would do” thing really sucks. If the other players don’t think it’s funny, and the DM doesn’t think it’s funny and often not even the player themselves think it’s funny (or replace funny with any other measure of worthwhileness), then why are they doing it? It’s not like the character is a living being that demands accuracy.
I don’t get it. Obviously hobgoblins don’t think hobgoblins are ugly.
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.
Ya it can be a fun concept for like a one-shot but after that, the joke gets stale.
i had a rogue that i claimed to have forgotten the name to each session. in reality, i was playing them under a false identity and hiding from the thieves guild, that was just me dropping bread crumbs. that was fun.
magic user pretending to be a different kind of magic user can work if you establish some code words with your referee
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
There’s also Brother Cadfael: a crime-solving sleuth from the 12th century. A high Wisdom stat is exactly what the Cleric class needs, so it would work out pretty well.
Heard one on the weekend - a party of warlocks who are all each other’s patrons through the power of friendship.
Ok, this gives me a great idea - a warlock whose patron is his own mlm scheme, he has to sell his shitty “get magic quick” scheme to lots of people to power up. “Just dedicate and focus your energies to the collective and you too can gain godlike powers, share it with your friends and loved ones. Join now and you’ll be empowered in no time. Empower 4 others and you’ll get candle lighting privileges! Reach archeon tier like me and you’ll be throwing fireballs, just 7 short tiers to work through, what better use for your time?”
