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Jay R
2017-04-06, 10:03 AM
Have you ever made a choice based purely on role-playing fluff that eventually turned out to have important and positive mechanical effect? Share the story!

I have a ranger who fights primarily with a guisarme. But I've known a few people who actually lived in the woods, and without exception, they were proud of the quality of their axe.

So I paid for a masterwork axe. This was a deliberate waste of money; I had no intention of using it except to chop wood, but it seemed right for the character.

Several levels and sessions later, we were defending a small village, and had to try to improvise weapons for the villagers. So I lent one of them my axe, and he wound up fighting with a masterwork weapon.

souridealist
2017-04-09, 10:17 PM
I love things like this!

It wasn't a mechanical effect, but one time I did have a character go out for drinks and gossip in an (occupied) town we were passing through, and she ended up confirming that the apparent BBEG had been mind-controlled. (We'd known it was a possibility, but it was nice to find out for sure.)

darkrose50
2017-04-11, 09:57 AM
I love things like this!

It wasn't a mechanical effect, but one time I did have a character go out for drinks and gossip in an (occupied) town we were passing through, and she ended up confirming that the apparent BBEG had been mind-controlled. (We'd known it was a possibility, but it was nice to find out for sure.)

I made a doctor for a D&D like science fiction spaceship game (Alternity, when it came out at GenCon). We rolled randomly for attributes. My character had a high INT, but she also had a high DEX. That combined with a series of good rolls turned her into the groups most effective combatant.

I made a Wizard in D&D. We were given an array of 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 08. I put the 16 into INT, the 18 in CON, and a +2 bonus into CON to make it a 20 CON. We rolled twice for each hit die, and selected one. This wizard had 7-8 hit points per level though level 9. It was fun.

For a LARP I made a character with some points in rogue and some points in earth sorcery. I concentrated my limited rogue skills that were granted by level with diminishing returns into skills that would earn gold. I concentrated my earth sorcery in combat, and some utility. Because I did not use my rogue skills on combat options this character was an economic beast. Eventually he was a something of a combat monster.

During one of the last games we played he sat in a ancient device that would randomly give and take something. He was made weak (lower STR), but was also given more health. In this system health was a number that was compared to damage. If the damage equaled or exceeded your health, then you were knocked out. If the damage was less than your health, then your heath would go down by one. A normal person had 3 health, and a sword did 3 damage. My rogue / earth sorcerer had 8 heath when the effective maximum was 6 heath. He also had a ring of strength that negated the weakness.

solidork
2017-04-12, 09:01 AM
Man, I feel like this has definitely happened to me before but I can't remember any examples from my own games. Does it count in the GM sees a role playing decision you've made and decides to deliberately include things that key off of that? If so, I've got at least one example from an actual play.

In a Werewolf: the Forsaken AP I read, one of the PCs was a singer/guitarist and one of the NPCs was a bassist.(they were at each other's throats for most of the chronicle, but in an alternate universe they would have been in a band together with a mutual friend who died before the game started) The story was an incredibly brutal struggle for survival, and both of them refused to abandon their instruments.
They placated a god with two sick solos and then a sicker duet.