Because the holidays mean D&D Weekends.
As you’ve probably guessed by my Tumblr icon, I play a lot of D&D. Back home, I DM for a small group of local nerds pretty frequently. Despite the fact there are only five of us, the players I have fairly effectively nail each and every typical gamer group stereotype: The Powergamer, The Psychopath, The Dead Man Walking, and The Guy who Actually Cares About the Plot. In case you aren’t an avid gamer, I’ll go ahead and explain these archetypes for you.
The Powergamer: In this case, this role is played by my best friend since childhood, Ben. This is the guy who literally spends his free time, his work time and the time he should be taking notes in class, coming up with the most ridiculous power builds I have ever seen. The man generates more cheese than the entire state of Wisconsin. I am under the impression at this point that he cannot play a single-class character. A normal gamer plays something like a Human Cleric. Maybe multiclass, maybe not. They choose feats out of the Player’s Handbook, and they play the game. Ben gives me things like this: “Feral Incarnate Construct Warforged 2 Totemist/6 Binder/9 Soul Eater/2 Warblade/3 Warshaper.” To clarify, that’s an exotic race, with an additional template, using five classes, each one of which is in an ENTIRELY SEPARATE BOOK. His goal is not to play Dungeons and Dragons. His goal is to feel as close to Godhood as possible while never, ever feeling even minorly threatened. In addition to his builds, however, Ben knows this game inside and out in the most meta way possible. He knows every exploit, loophole and irritatingly abuse-worthy line of vague text in every book ever written for the game, and he wields them like the Dark Side of the Force. To an average DM, this guy might as well be dressed in a dark robe, shooting lightning from his fingers and yelling “UNLIMITED POOOWWEEEERRRR!!!!” (Yes, that’s a link.) He also knows every creature out of every Monster Manual there is down to its last statistic. He’s like a human Pokedex for D&D monsters, and he’s also the reason I have to use home-brewed monsters and traps for every dungeon I create.
The Psychopath: Everybody knows this guy. This is the guy who can’t just be satisfied with killing dungeon enemies. This is the guy who played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the sole purpose of killing as many innocent civilians as possible and then teabagging their corpses like it’s Halo 3. In this case, this role is claimed by my younger brother, Alden. His affinity for murdering guards, townspeople and business owners who are too hard to steal things from is the reason I’m forced to give almost every one of my NPCs class levels, and it’s usually 20 levels in “Stop Breaking My City, You Asshat”. His goals in the game are to never pay a gold piece for anything (unless he can steal it back later from someone’s corpse) and to resolve every situation by murdering something until it stops being funny, and then do obscene things to its corpse. His attention span for the game directly correlates to how much killing things is occurring at any given moment. If Ben is the Emperor, Alden is Anakin Skywalker killing all the younglings. Fortunately, his irrepressible need to kill and maim the innocent hasn’t yet extended to fellow party members (probably because everyone knows Ben’s characters are basically unkillable anyway) but he does resolve most inter-party issues with “I punch [insert character here] in the face.” Case in point, this guy. (Also a link)
The Dead Man Walking: Every party has that one guy who hits on all the barmaids, triggers every trap, rolls more 1’s than a line of binary and almost always dies at least once. In our party, that man is Luke. A friend I’ve known since he was born, Luke joins our party as the living-challenged character who is destined to become a critical hit magnet. Luke has a long history of playing characters who almost inevitably wind up demonstrating bizarre homosexual tendencies, getting shot down by every female NPC he encounters, and being the first (and usually only) one to die. He’s the guy wearing the red shirt in every episode. When placing traps, ambushes and other pitfalls into my dungeons I can rest assured that Luke will trigger them. His characters almost always have backstory history or hang around closely with Alden’s characters which probably contributes to this, as palling around with murder incarnate isn’t exactly a healthy life choice, but it really just seems that the odds are always against him. For instance, take the final boss battle in my last campaign I ran with this group. I had been consistently rolling pathetically low numbers and had managed to hit nothing, and my players were tearing the boss apart. Alden’s frostraging barbarian was shredding him from one side and Ben was in full Palpatine mode, so they finally convinced Luke (who had been hanging around outside the boss’s reach the entire fight) to come in and throw down some damage. Luke was playing a shape-shifter who favored a Cryohydra shape, so he was entirely capable of doing so. Luke finally caves and meanders over to attack. The boss turns to attack the newest threat, and immediately rolls two critical hits in a row, dropping Luke to around 10 HP on the spot. He would have died if Alden’s character hadn’t finished the boss in the following round. Basically, I’m fairly sure the other players have begun to keep an extra “In case Luke dies again” fund in their inventories.
And finally, The Guy who Actually Cares About the Plot: With Ben mostly preoccupied with killing everything and babysitting the sociopath and the ICU-ward frequent flier, someone has to be left to actually care about the story I’ve worked so hard to construct. Fortunately for me we have just such a man, and his name is Matt. The newest addition to the group, (yes, we actually survived entire campaigns with just the earlier three) Matt brings a muchly-needed serious note to the group. That isn’t to say the others aren’t serious, of course. Ben is very serious about winning, Alden is very serious about committing genocide, and Luke is very serious about putting those extra ranks into Seduction. But Matt is more serious about actually caring about the storyline and the plot. (Even the parts that don’t involve fighting things.) He’s a more typical gamer that I can count on not to do the things the others do, which is highly necessary. He’s also turned out to be a pretty damned good DM himself which gives me the chance to go playerside again, which is something I really don’t get to do very often. Always a good thing.
It’s a fun group. I can’t wait to see how they do over the break when I introduce my horror survival adventure which takes away Ben’s supplement books and magic and Alden’s sneak attacks and murderable NPCs and forces them to actually avoid fighting in some cases and survive- something Luke already isn’t good at.
We’ll see how that goes.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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