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View Full Version : DM Help Tell me tales of your D&D campaigns with WEIRD player characters



OttoVonBigby
2020-06-14, 10:12 AM
One thing I've never done in ...dang, something like 20 years of DMing is run a campaign where the PCs are all quite weird; think monster classes, templates atop templates, or even (quelle horreur) deliberately suboptimal class choices. Bob is a tauric ogre; Carol is a chuul; Ted is a good-aligned lich awakened housecat; Alice is an Int-drained eladrin dungsweeper.

I want to know what such campaigns are like. Particularly if you played D&D 3rd edition, but not exclusively. Your tales can be from the DM's or player's perspective, but the reason I'm asking is that I want to be as prepared as one can possibly be (and I'm working on a new game world that I hope will better suit PCs like this).

Pex
2020-06-14, 12:20 PM
I played Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as a human fiend warlock. I was Lawful Good. The idea was his Patron was a devil seeking redemption. He had to prove himself to the Heavens. Being a devil he did it by the means he knows, making deals. However, instead of making deals to buy souls and he makes deals to save them and promote all that is Good in the world. He made a deal with my ancestor. He and his descendants would become a wealthy noble house in Waterdeep in exchange for protecting the city and its inhabitants and providing for the general welfare of the populace. Once in a generation someone would be tasked to take a more proactive role - the Warlock Pact.

That was totally my own idea. By coincidence the DM had the main villain be the Cassalanters who worship Asmodeous. We'd meet another noble family that were secretly devil worshippers. I joked it appeared that all the noble families of Waterdeep were devil worshippers, and I had to include my own. I didn't even know what Dragon Heist was about. My character was the perfect fit for it.

As a quirk I became fascinated by the stuffed beholder in the gnome's shop. I bought it as a decoration for Trollskull Manor since we decided to keep it and make it a business again. There was thought of making it a chandelier and have light come out of the eyes, but that wasn't feasible. It just became a decorative conversation piece. Thankfully the DM did not exploit my naive quirk to use the stuffed beholder as its true purpose as written in the module that would have screwed the party. I won't spoil it here what it really is, but for the purposes of our game it was only ever just a stuffed beholder.

The DM also made up NPC dragonborn card players. I happened to be proficient in card playing. I joined their game at first as a means to gather information as one does, but I took a liking to them and them to me so we became friends. More than good friends later as I indulged in their games of strip poker.

The keys to open the vault are random. In our game one of the keys was a beardless dwarf. A female dwarf would do. We had considered that but convinced ourselves it needed to be a male dwarf. As a funny revenge of sorts against the person who started us on this mad quest, we got Volo to shave his beard.

SirBellias
2020-06-14, 08:09 PM
Ooh, my time to shine.

College game, 2nd one in the same world. The first time around some mostly humanoid fellows messed up part of a ritual some elder god cultists were performing, causing a star-god to crystallize and fall onto the plane, breaking and causing the entire plane (which was flat) to start rotating. Solved the problem of the sun being in the middle of the sky at all hours, and the cultists weren't able to replace the sun with their god, so that's probably good.

The second game started the next semester (and many years after the aftermath of the first). Because I had a hatred for game balance and all things reasonable, we were doing gestalt level 10 with most homebrew allowed, including the Evolutionist (found here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?240717-The-better-man-There-is-no-such-thing-base-class)) and Mythos classes (found here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?517754-Mythos-Compendium-2-0)). The mythos class users couldn't gestalt, but for some reason I let the evolutionist gestalt and even double up. This was a mistake.

The Cast:

The Perfect Human: Evolutionist 10//Rogue 10. Had eight arms, was ridiculously fast, had too many crossbows, and a massive superiority complex. Horrendously deadly if given the chance for a sneak attack.

Shreİ (yes, really): Evolutionist 10//Evolutionist 10. Ended up as a huge rhino monstrosity that no one could stop from doing anything, but spent the first half of the game just being a minor nuisance and arguing about things. Would have been the most busted thing around, if it weren't for...

The Aspect of Fear: Epifovian 10. An eldritch monstrosity posing as a three eyed snake to enact its dark purpose across the world. Seemed pretty balanced at first, but then the player kept crunching numbers until it required a DC 60 will save for most of its abilities. No stats should be based on the number of tentacles you have.

The Fallen: Was Gramarist 10//Something silly 10, later Harrowed 10//Debaser 10. A Gramarist scientist who wandered too close to the stars above and then got repurposed into an angel of Lemaign, the god of Hope and Despair (I stole bastion's pantheon, so what?).

The Necromancer: Olethrofex 10. A mythic necromancer with a very self aggrandizing backstory trying to become the god of death in the new world. Didn't actually destroy the game, and spent most of the time waiting to be lead by the nose to a large amount of corpses. Didn't happen for some reason.

Verraign: The only character that continued from the first game, though not the only player. Also an angel of Lemaign, but by pedigree more than divine mandate. I don't remember his classes, but I think one of them was psionic.


A good mix, eh? This can't possibly go wrong.

The party met at cross purposes, with The (not yet) Fallen stealing an artifact or two from other in the party with the help of a variety of illusions and the party chasing him down. Eventually they decided to not work at cross purposes for some reason, and much of the first half of the game was lots of roleplaying where ShreC bullied anything smaller than him and the others went into their motivations and backstories. Balancing encounters was basically impossible, so I didn't bother trying and made them mostly peaceful or require creative thinking to get out of. Good stuff.

Then I made the mistake of giving them a major choice.

They came across a battlefield between the cultists from the first game trying to revive their dead god and a group of abjuration witches trying to achieve mastery over the plane by driving out the cultists and stealing their god's power for their dragon deity. The witches were portrayed as slightly less horribly evil, and the battle was at a stalemate because neither side could irreparably harm the other. Each asked the party to join them in driving off the others, and I expected the party to pick a side.

So, of course, half the party (the top half listed) went with the cultists and the bottom half went with the witches. And me, being me, tried to make it work. Each group had its own group chat, and I gave them magic items and a base relevant to their cause, and we were planning on doing a set of PvP missions where their goals weren't to explicitly murder the other party, and they'd come back through the same magics as both sides could muster. The players loved the idea, and it nearly worked.

See, one thing I didn't count on was that the half of the party that joined the cultists just horribly outclassed the half of the party that joined the witches. Like, they won on the second round of the first mission and there was literally nothing the witches' team could do to stop it. After that dismaying performance, the witch group said there wasn't really much of a reason to go up against that, and the other party was okay with just stomping everything for the win, so we all agreed to just end the game there with the cultists stomping their way to victory with the help of their added firepower. Everyone left on acceptable terms and played together for a while yet after in different games, and I learned a few important things about balancing and writing epilogues.

Moral of the story: Monstrous parties can work and be interesting, but it can go downhill if the character's are both not balanced and not somewhat agreeable.

I'm running an E6 gestalt game with some less abrasive players now with mythos classes banned (besides the Syntrofos), and it's been going much smoother. Some people are better than others in many ways, but the rest are unique enough that it checks out, and most of their goals at this point are going in the same direction, so I have high hopes so far!

thorr-kan
2020-06-15, 11:00 PM
I played Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as a human fiend warlock. I was Lawful Good.
Heh. Funny you should mention this.

A member of the Friday Night Gaming Group is DMing for the first time in the 20 years I've been part of the group. She's running Dragon Heist. We've got:
Tiefling Warlock (CG)
Tiefling Rogue (N?)
Tielfling Paladin (LG), ME!
Dragonborn Paladin (LG)
Gnome Paladin (LG)

We're all orphans, but I've been raised by a loving merchant family who owns an in. Ma & Pa are a half-orc bard and a half-elf rogue, respectively. Trollskull Manor was a natural for us. It's the first 5E most of us have played, we had no idea what was going on going in, and we're having a blast. Clueless, but a blast.

Wraith
2020-06-17, 03:48 AM
I'm currently gearing up to play in a friend's game using the Fading Suns setting. If you're unfamiliar, it's more or less D&D as in the Dune/Frank Herbert universe; very Spelljammer-esque, but with a greater emphasis on the decline of civilisation, almost but not quite in a post-apocalyptic sense. The PC's are shaping up to be something special.

One character is playing a Vorax - imagine a centaur but instead of part-human, part-horse, they're more like part-sentient-crocodile, part-another, bigger crocodile respectively. I *think* she's a member of the security team, but knowing the player she may well be the ship's cook or something.

The ship's mechanic is a sentient orangutan. I'm not sure if this is a reference to the Jokaero from the Warhammer 40,000 setting, as it's just as likely to be a call back to the early 90's children's cartoon, Bucky O'Hare.

One crew member is an ageless, sexless shape-shifter who has assured us that they are entirely trustworthy. Seems legit.

I'm playing as a Variant Human. By "variant" I mean, genetically modified to resemble a giant semi-cybernetic octopus, reliant on his pressurised servo-suit or else he'll suffocate outside of water. The weirdest part about me isn't that I'm the ship's doctor, but that I am genuinely not taking inspiration from Futurama's Dr. Zoidberg. :smalltongue:

mindstalk
2020-06-17, 07:52 PM
Well, after seeing those, I don't think my examples will be all that weird. But hey. The party felt weird. Last long game, Pathfinder 1e, Eberron:

* Shifter archaeologist bard. Probably not that weird. Was supposed to be a female Indiana Jones with extra politics.

* Half-orc bard, specializing in Intimidation, with Int/Wis as dump stats. Was supposed to be a rock star, even inventing rock music. Took a "pit dive" off a cliff into a river because it would be cool, nearly dying but for two divine healers on call. This may be more about weird players...

* My own PC, a kalashtar telepath, pretending to be a human "magical girl" to throw off Inspired assassins. Mechanically she wasn't weird, just a nicely optimized psion. What might be weird is that between high stats (25 point buy) and good synergies, she was very nearly a bard herself: +8 in almost all social and knowledge skills, at level 2. Personality wise she was a carefully crafted weird, meant to make sense internally and with the setting (given some charity), also standing out as the only effectively good character in a party of neutrals. Hey, I declared her first, not my fault everyone else went in a different direction...

* An oracle with healing and the Drunk curse. I think largely an excuse for the player to be in her friend's game without having to be too committed or attentive. I think the PC was officially Good but was too out of it to back up my PC.

* An elf druid raised by fey on a fey plane, sent to Eberron for obscure reasons. Was played as someone suspicious and clueless and trying (badly) to hide the fact that she was clueless about ordinary life. The player was genuinely clueless about rules and mechanics, but did fine anyway because, druid. If you play one badly it's still better than a fighter.

* A later PC, a fighter built by someone with un-updated AD&D experience and expectations; he hadn't wanted to "show up the casters" and specialized for an absurdly high AC. We were around level 8 by then, it was pretty hard for my psion to not show him up just by breathing. He was also into mercantile trading.

* Coming in with him, another oracle, also healing, and I forget what kind of curse. Also kind of clueless. Pacifist, because that totally makes sense when you're following a mercenary around. "He hits things, I heal them and yell at him." Would have worked better if she didn't heal enemies during combat.

Merellis
2020-06-17, 08:33 PM
I've been in a 4e campaign for the last number of years.

Started with a tiefling rogue, eventually moved on because I wasn't having too much fun with that. Made a elven avenger of a warrior god and had a blast teleporting enemies around and tanking the biggest baddie in the room. :D

Moved on from that one to fix up our lack of AOE damage by making a druid. Wanted to have some fun so I dove into the lore for the world my DM had made. Goliath's had lost their gods to the machinations of Orcus many years ago and now an entire southern part of a continent was literally crawling with undead, save for a mountain area where the goliath's and dragon-born had put themselves into.

Party was heading back there, and I needed to figure out why my character would be willing to leave the front lines. Went with swarm druid to make her a bit weirder, convinced my DM to allow me use crows as the swarm.

Built her, figured out her character and tics, then named her Corvid.

She looks like a standard goliath, but has crows crawling out of her skin occasionally, devours things with said crows then absorbs them back, and does some real creepy **** with her face. Made her have a weirdly monotone sort of speech pattern until undead are a part of the picture. Play up the death omens of nature, have her take luminescent swarm so that now the crows are spitting bugs at enemies.

Rituals that grant her other abilities, like better swimming and breathing, grant her crows new features like gills, webbed-feet, a third eye.

I have them all caw at once, turn to face things at once, and just creepily dissolve into crows to intimidate foes.

I've been having a blast. :smallbiggrin:

Man on Fire
2020-06-17, 09:21 PM
In my current party another pc died and player's new character was a druid tyat is actually sentient swarm of insects piloting old character's corpse.

martixy
2020-06-18, 09:56 AM
My campaign is on hiatus, but monster characters was the primary shtick.

My party consists of
A half silver/half gold true dragon sorcerer.
A pixie necromancer.
A nymph samurai.
A shadowy shadow-creature shadowcaster shaddar kai from the shadow plane. (🤚shadooooow✋) The smallest edgelord out of everybody.
A naga/lamia archer.

One of the players, at one point considered playing a Tsochar psion.

Although I do find it amusing how many people here bring up tieflings, half orcs or even humans as "weird".

FabulousFizban
2020-07-07, 01:38 AM
I played a human commoner in pathfinder once. He was an accountant who had a midlife crisis and decided to become an adventurer. He was feeble minded by a genie we found and subsequently was used as the party pack mule. When he did eventually recover his faculties, he decided adventuring wasn't for him and went back to accounting.

Tvtyrant
2020-07-07, 08:34 PM
Most of my players have weird characters.

Some that have come up:

1. Tabaxi Bard who was Antonio Banderas pretending to be Puss in Boots from Shrek.

2. 4E swarm druid that was a Pokemon master style character trying to collect 1 of each of the world's insects as part of his body.

3. Arachno fetish Drow that wanted to become a Drider for... Reasons.

4. Half dragon centaur dragonslayer trying to find and kill his Dad.

Civis Mundi
2020-07-07, 08:44 PM
[self-deleted]

D&D_Fan
2020-07-07, 08:45 PM
I am the weird player character.
It is 5e
I am playing a skeleton fighter named Boneular Jones.
He is 288 years old.
True Neutral
He uses the DMG NPC race.

He cannot speak.
He has a natural -4 to INT and CHA
He is vulnerable to bludgeoning.
He is immune to:

Poison, effect and damage
Exhaustion
Disease

He needs not sleep, eat, or drink.
He doesn't breath.

In the end you get a character that balances out since he is both very weak and powerful in different ways.

His backstory is unknown, since he has no way of telling the party.
That, and he lost most of his memories of his life over time.
It can be inferred that he was a soldier in a war a long time ago.
How was he was reanimated?
How did he get his mind back? (not much of it)
We may never know.

TeChameleon
2020-07-13, 07:22 PM
Eh. Honestly, the weird comes from players far more than any mechanical oddities characters may have, in my experience.

I've played a few oddball characters- 4e Goliath Paladin with... I think something like a 20ft+ reach courtesy of some odd feat stacking and reach weapons, which was sorta fun- playing a pure melee character at range was weird and amused me. Then there was my 4e grapple fighter... pixie. 6 inches tall and slamming enemies through walls. I played that as a flying Nac Mac Feegle, completely fight-happy and ludicrously strong. Again, it entertained me, but neither really made the campaign they were in that weird. Admittedly, Big Yan (for those who know the Discworld novels, yes, I was quite literally playing the pixie as a flying Nac Mac Feegle) was occasionally used as a grenade by the other characters, but...

On the other hand, I've played some characters that were... honestly pretty much bog-standard... that caused absolute bedlam, chaos, and general lunacy simply because of how I played them.

One was my Dragonborn assassin, Paik (no, not even he knows if it's pronounced 'Pike' or 'Pake' :smalltongue:) who during the brief period I was playing him, managed to make an enemy army self-destruct as a distraction- stealth in, assassinate the commanding officer... and then, when the DM expected me to stealth out again... disguise self as the commander with a magic item (don't remember what it was), hide the body, and stride out of the tent announcing that there were shifter assassins in the camp, passed the bluff check, then calmly left in the chaos, pausing only to give contradictory passphrases to the various officers he passed.

He was last seen plummeting off an airship with no parachute, and it was generally acknowledged by the rest of the party that he would turn up again at some point without comment, and that no, the rest of the party really didn't want to know what he'd been doing in the interim :smallamused:

And then there was my longest-played character, who was... a pyromaniacal human fire wizard. Shut up, it was only the second character I created :smallfrown:

Over the course of two campaigns, he has run away screaming from the notion of being crowned some kind of royalty (he's the younger son of a noble family), accidentally invented the chain restaurant, engineered major social change in the kingdom he was born in (granted, that was on purpose, but he really didn't expect it to work), turned most of the good-aligned kingdoms into a flying continent, gave Orcus PTSD, founded the what eventually became the world's premiere wizarding academy, inadvertently became a messianic archetype (which he hates, as he's not overly fond of people), ran away screaming from the notion of ascending to godhood, broken time and space, accidentally helped create the gods after an incident with said breaking of time and space, refitted an elemental airship for space travel...

In short, far, far more weirdness than even the oddest of my oddball characters.

Alcore
2020-07-14, 02:17 PM
The campaign might be quite normal... you say PC but unless you mean player then you only need to account for unusual appearance when in town and unusual abilities during encounters.


I once had a necromancer. A variant; the variant being the familiar replaced with an undead servant. Then we have Bob, the former axe vender. He was mechanically the same as any other skeleton but was an axe vender for so that his mindless corpse had a catchphrase; "GET YUR AXES AT BOB'S AXES!"

That was the last thing some creatures heard...

Otherwise it was kinda normal.

Magic Myrmidon
2020-07-14, 05:12 PM
One of my longest running campaigns had a

Werewolf transmuter wizard who used his knowledge to maintain his condition.
Vampire wereshark who eventually died and was made a vampire wereshark cyborg.
An elf who was slowly being transformed into the concept of fire itself.
A sock salesman who impersonated a world famous vampire hunter after he found the vampire dying in the woods
A skeleton with amnesia who eventually remembered that he was the personal adventurer of a long-dead empire's king.
Annnnnd a dragon.



My brother made a song to commemorate the campaign as a birthday present:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/184jGchvsfgSJHHFjMW1X141_FPMzNcz_/view?fbclid=IwAR1C8Hgi_ipVS9ynY738i8c_bhUqUM-wz9Ktl_e2z0MBMMT_EU0kBhUn36I

Phhase
2020-07-16, 10:50 PM
Whoof, let's see. Current campaign has:

A teifling storyteller (Dragon sorcerer/bard).
A dragonborn with some kind of OP homebrew abomination class that can transform into an adult red dragon.
A fairly "normal" Dwarf Barbarian.
Aaaand me, the Revanant Thri-kreen Mystic (Formerly Kraken Warlock). I'm literally Shedinja, an exoskeleton full of nothing but wind and sand (Or saltwater mist, back when I was a warlock. I was constantly dripping wet. This was very uncomfortable for a desert insect, undead or no.)