::A Geek in Korea::

Thanks to the help from the last character related post I had inspiration to come up with a nice backstory for my character. It turns out I had all the different themes I wanted to build into my character, and just didn’t know how to organize them well enough to make a backstory.

The first thing I did was roll his stats, which was a bit of a mistake. Taking a purely “power gaming” approach to something is probably not the best way to play the game. Of course I want my guy to kick some ass, but without a compelling reason to play him, what is that worth? I decided to check out some of the other areas of the world of Forgotten Realms, our game setting, to see if any of the various locals inspired anything I could work into my character.

As I mentioned before, I wanted the character to be working under the idea that positive change is always possible. I decided I’d write koans to describe his motivations. Since he is literally made of the elements in human form, this is what I came up with:

Right now, he manifests the Watersoul traits. This I picked for strategic and power gaming purposes, but instead of trying to maximize everything, I picked a second trait, Earthsoul, even though I can’t take full advantage of it at low levels. This change let me pick a region from Forgotten Realms more easily and thematically.

My character will now be from Calimshan, which is a desert ravaged into factions. One supports an efreet, while the other backs a djinn. They had warred with each other, and the Genasi, the race of Elemental beings on both sides, had taken human slaves and continued their bitter war long after those powerful creatures had disappeared.

I can be a resistance fighter, trying to free the human slaves from my very own people. Perfect! Now I have a motivation. The problem was that my party was meeting for the first time thousands of miles away from where I would have been otherwise. What would explain my character’s presence in this first meeting?

This was actually pretty easy. Since there are gladiatorial games where humans are forced to fight for their lives for the amusement of the Genasi, I decided to say I had sabotaged a menagerie that was collecting exotic beasts for the arenas. The boat I had been on mysteriously sank not far from the port the other people in my crew happened to be meeting at for the first time.

I think I actually made a compelling, cool character. I get some gruff for my name being “Brash”, but I lived up to my name when I pressed the party to continue on for a fight instead of resting up between every single encounter. It’s a shame that daily powers are one use wonders in an adventuring day. People in my party freak out every time they go into battle without one. Perhaps that over-confidence was misleading, since we didn’t get down to business nearly as much as I would have liked.

The first time back to playing a game of D&D for experience points and for a campaign our party got it’s ass KICKED on nearly every encounter. The DM decided he wasn’t running a character in absentia, so we were a man down from our normally short four man party. The problem is that most encounters are build for five characters. He had scaled the encounter to be for four players, representing “hard mode”. We normally welcome the challenge, but there were special problems with this.

While my character is a stand alone leader that has some amazing powers in later levels, without a fighter or defender to soak up damage and redirect some fire from time to time, I’m not tough enough to stand up and fight for the entire party. While the wizard was dropping foes, and the striker was picking people off, my character isn’t designed to go toe to toe with everything we encounter. My character is supposed to augment everyone else. Make the knife hot, you can cut through butter more easily. When I need to be the one fighting everyone I’m just not tough enough to get it done. We were running three characters, but really without someone to hit people I can back up, it was like we were only two and a half characters. I need a fighter out in front to turn the tide of battle if were going to be fighting shorthanded.

When we played simulated games, we had assumed I’d have help holding up the front while the other characters played their roles. This time, the gaps in our party were apparent in the second encounter onwards. We got caught in a pit trap. All of us landed with a thud and lost 80% of our health right away. Next, we get ambushed by goblins with superior positioning. EVERY battle we ended up blinded and couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn. We had no choice but to run. We ran from three straight encounters. Some heroes we turned out to be.

Anyway, there was a clear need to roll up a new character we’d need to fill some slots in our lineup at the moment. Since the roll of my character is to make other characters kick more ass, I’m the one lined up to make this new stand-in character. If we had a fifth player, it wouldn’t fall to me, but now it seems like I’ve got to go through the character process again and make a new character for the party once again. The last one took me the better part of a MONTH to figure out, and I’ve got till Saturday this time around.

The DM had brought back figures, and dungeon tiles. We could actually visualize the battles very easily and it was a lot of fun to see the lay of the land in a clear way. This was pretty cumbersome to play at our normal place due to space issues, so there is a chance we’ll be finding some other venue next time. There was even talk of going to a love motel and getting a cheap room that didn’t have a bed to use the floor as our warspace. Four dudes hanging out at a love motel playing with little figurines. Nothing strange about that.

All this work coming up with characters. This is starting to feel like homework.