What do you do with unplayable characters living rent-free in your head?

[Particle_Man]

I have the concept: a half-dragon, quarter-ogre, quarter-human. I have a three generational backstory leading up to him being forced to serve his evil green dragon mother, to become at her command a green star adept precisely to limit his magical power and to become a living treasure for her, finally joining a paladin of the same order as his long dead human grandmother, as well as a mind bender to defeat the dragon (the mind bender perished in the battle), going to his human grandmother’s city, becoming a citizen there (granted legally because his grandmother was a paladin there), joining the local arcane guild as a sorcerer, become the official roof inspector and tourist attraction, track down distance relations through his human grandmother, and the story keeps going.

But the character is ECL 20. And suboptimal besides. I will never play this character. I know this.

But I can’t get him out of my head! Should I write a bad short story about him? Make him a powerful NPC when next I run a campaign? Seek therapy?

LN Half-Ogre with Half-Dragon template, paragon half-dragon 3/sorcerer 2/green star adept 10/Mindbender 1 (with 1 la buy off). Feats would include: improved flight, combat casting, combat casting, brutal throw, versatile spellcaster and lifesense.

It is just so vivid!

[Troacctid]

"This character I'm planning is unplayable because it has +5 LA" should point towards making the character into an NPC adversary. Find a reason to put your half-dragon at odds with the PCs, give 'em a good "Stand down now or die" moment, and then, since PCs have never ever stood down in the history of D&D, pow! They fight.

[Beni-Kujaku]

And the NPC's killed‚ and then they learn about his backstory‚ and it's sad for 30 seconds‚ then they go on to kick mama dragon's butt.

[Particle_Man]

Hmmmm. Maybe I can go the friendly npc quest giver route instead. It would be a change of pace from the bearded old man in the tavern.

[Maat Mons]

If you decide to make him into an NPC, I can't find anything in Races of Destiny saying what the CR of a Half-Ogre is.



I wouldn't bother with the Half-Dragon Paragon levels. The Dragon Breath feat (Races of the Dragon, p98) gives you unlimited uses of your breath weapon each day, which blows the 3/day from Half-Dragon Paragon out of the water. Though, to be honest, 6d8 damage every 1d4 rounds isn't impressive at 20th level, even with no daily usage limit.

It would be much more practical to refluff Dragonborn of Bahamut (Races of the Dragon, p5) as being a "half-dragon." Choosing the Heart aspect gives you a breath weapon with no daily limit starting at 1st level, and you can take the Dragon Wings and Improved Dragon Wings (Races of the Dragon, p100) feats to get innate flight.

If you want Large size, you can keep Half-Ogre as your base. But being larger than Medium can be a hindrance in many circumstances. So I regard the fact that the feats give you wings without requiring you to be Large as a strength of this approach.



There's no reason the bearded old man in a tavern can't be a robo-dragon-ogre-man.

[King of Nowhere]

You can talk with your dm into letting you play it with some handwaving for LA. I mean, a suboptimal build and free LA should just cancel each other.
Or find some other sort of compromise to play him.
I'd be VERY amenable to making concessions to a player coming up with a detailed story and so much passion

[Beni-Kujaku]

You can talk with your dm into letting you play it with some handwaving for LA. I mean, a suboptimal build and free LA should just cancel each other.
Or find some other sort of compromise to play him.
I'd be VERY amenable to making concessions to a player coming up with a detailed story and so much passion

As always for this sort of thing, the LA assignment thread can be of much help. A half-dragon half-ogre is very much not balanced at +0 LA, but reducing the LA from +5 to +3 (assuming Half-Ogre is worth LA+1, which isn't too much of a stretch, especially with AotGS) should make for a fun but not overwhelming character.

[Malphegor]

I stuff mine into ‘the ranch’ which is a notes file on my phone where characters lurk until I find a use for them. Sometimes they get deleted if I see a better way to build em but there they can retire in peace mostly until adventure finds them

[Draconi Redfir]

idk if it helps super well with characters, but any time i find ideas or thoughts raging around my head that i can't get rid of, i pull up a voice recorder (or probably text document in this case) and just tell it everything i have about the thought. my feelings my opinions, in this case what the character is, his backstory, his starts, weapons, everything. anything you have to say about the character, say it, save it, and lock it away for later.

with any luck, the character will now exist in the file you just made and not in your head. Just don't delete the file, that just shoves the thought back into your head.

[Asmotherion]

Make them the BBEG of your next campaign, write his backstory and goals, and make it the centerpiece of the campaign.

At least that's what I did with my Demilitch.

[Feldar]

Make them the BBEG of your next campaign, write his backstory and goals, and make it the centerpiece of the campaign.

This!

First, you get to make your sub-optimal character.

Second, good guys make the absolute best opponents for the party.

Third, sub-optimal is really just code for "not good in every situation". In some situations, he'll be awesome, and you should set him up in those situations as the "bad guy".

Finally, you get to tell his story.

[unseenmage]

I put them all on a Spelljammer that is then stranded in whatever world I'm running at the time.

They usually tend to noble piracy as a means to gather rather funds and resources to return home.

This means that at any given time there is a roving band of misfit DMPCs gallavanting about the gameworld that the PCs usually never encounter.

[Venger]

Why don't you use this character for one of the forum's contests (iron chef, villainous competition, junkyard wars, zinc saucier, etc) either as the build showcase should something appropriate come up or as a supporting cameo character? That's what I usually do with characters like this.

[Murg]

But I can’t get him out of my head! Should I write a bad short story about him? Make him a powerful NPC when next I run a campaign? Seek therapy?
It is just so vivid!

Write a story about it. Or create one!

Many years ago I played through the D&D gold box games. Although your adventuring party is never given a backstory, with my overactive imagination I ended up creating backstories for my characters, and like you I couldn't get it out of my head because it was just so vivid! I ended up writing a fan fiction story about it and posting it online, which took a lot of time but was ultimately a satisfying experience.

[AnonJr]

My brother-in-law would often make them valuable NPCs in the campaign since for the longest time he would DM more than play.

Sometimes they would be our guide from A to B, or an "overseer" assigned by the quest giver who would periodically check in with us (hear: prod us to the next plot point if we were drifting). Some have been handy counter-balances for when he misjudged the CR of an encounter - they'd swoop in to join us, since they were looking for us to give us the next plot point.

[Milodiah]

One time in 3.5 I found myself "against" a particularly murderous DM. It wasn't so absurd that it made you wanna stop playing, but it was definitely the kind of table where you learned not to form attachments to characters or start planning ahead beyond the next couple of sessions.

My "solution": a list of twenty backup characters, each one slightly stupider than the last. Less optimal, or more annoying, or more funny and amusing rather than utilitarian or compelling. Stuff like druids who wild-shaped into bizarre and obscure animals, or wizards who considered it a cheap cop-out to use any spell other than one of the Polymorph varieties to solve a problem. And that's the top half. #20 was literally just a True Mind Switched psion who inhabited a globster, which is a real-world phenomenon of unidentifiable organic matter that just wash up on beaches every now and then. Sooner or later the GM would realize that there were consequences for his murders, consequences involving him ripping his hair out at how ridiculously dumb my characters were getting, and each escalation was entirely his fault.

But #10 is my favorite, because he is an example of the way I minmax characters. Unless I'm specifically asked to, I never minmax characters to just "be the best", or even "be incredibly good at specific useful things". No, I minmax for stupid things.

Like Pokey-Man.

Pokey-Man was a half-ogre bard, whose one and only purpose in life was to achive the maximum possible reach with a longspear. He had his Large size, a magic spear, various combat feats, spells, magic gloves, creepy aberration and mutant feats, anything I could find that would boost his reach. I think 45 feet was the maximum I achieved.

I never had to play him, because we actually managed to communicate with the GM that we weren't enjoying the frequent deaths. But I always dreamed of getting to break out this freak, and roleplay him pulling this ridiculous over-long spear out of his sleeve like a magician, extending his freaky tentacle arms out like Stretch Armstrong, popping his shoulders out of socket so his arms pushed even further out, saying the magic words to make the spear even longer, hitting the magic button that makes the spear even longer, standing on his very tippy-toes with the Lunge feat, activating his magic gloves to push the spear five feet further away from him, and finally, finally, stabbing the enemy archer standing on top of a cliff 45 feet away.

And only doing like, 2d6+3 damage or something.

I said I optimized reach, not that I made him actually dangerous when he hit someone.

[Seward]

Sometimes I assemble a party through them and run them in playtest mode through old scenarios. I used to playtest Living Greyhawk adventures for conventions, and still have a lot of those old outlines and drafts, and can pretty much level a party from 1 to 16 if I'm in the mood. It's like revisiting an old favorite CRPG, basically.

Sometimes they turn up in a different game system, edition, or a computer game (MMORPG or CRPG) with a lot of the fluff but the crunch changed to fit the system. The best example of that process is a character originally written for an Eberron game that never happened, that played out his Prehistory from level 1-15 in Pathfinder Society, while simultaneously playing his "actual" self in a Jade Regent game that never got past level 3.

While also turning up as a Criamon Ars Magica character in a convention run, in some early playtest-type fooling around with 4th edition D&D before we settled on a circus troupe adventuring group that made it to about level 5, and as several CRPG protagonists. Oh yeah, and a Dresden Files adventure, I almost forgot about that one. He became kind of my "eternal champion" because his backstory was so detailed, he could be played as a teenager, a mature adult in two modes (plan A and plan B in preventing the world from ending in fire) and as somebody who prevented the world from ending in fire but had screwed over so many divine forces he was on the run..and just wanted to reunite with his estranged family. Also level 1, after making epic level enemies because he derived all of his prior power from the very divine forces he'd screwed over to break prophecy. His wife vanished long ago with her unborn kids after reading his library of prophecy that concerned them, and why he married her. She burned down the library and worked VERY hard to not be found, knowing how scary he was with his astrological divination. (his wife was played by my actual wife in all versions. Her unborn kids were always played by people who didn't know me, as young adults whose birth-father wandered into their lives as a middle aged, down on his luck adventurer veteran with stories well beyond his level)

A lot of it was an exploration of two traits in Eberron - blood of a forgotten god and something else that I think indicated prophecy. I've always liked characters like Dream Girl in the Legion of Superheroes who try to do something with their visions of the future, not just be a useless gibbering mess when they get prophetic powers (which can range from being good at dodging blows to saving the universe, depending on scope and scale and leverage). One logical consequence was playing his eventual cohort from level 1-12 in Pathfinder Society. "Ok, I'm now known as a Venture Captain in the Pathfinder Society, one who can send out expeditions and with real temporal and political and magical power - I just need the right cohort to enact my master plans and save the world." After spending a week of divinations, he learned the person he needed was right there, in the headquarters, a librarian. Unfortunately he was only level 1. So a very surprised librarian suddenly found himself assigned to all kinds of dangerous adventures to level him up......

Usually if the thing in my head is just a mechanical concept, working it out is enough (like for a Iron Chef challenge, even if unsubmitted). It is when the backstory grows and comes to life that it wants to get played. I'm pretty sure a couple of my recent submissions and ideas might turn up in a CRPG or future game unrelated to D&D someday. But they mostly live as backburner ideas waiting for the right moment to emerge.




Like Pokey-Man.


I have a weakness for this too. Before life intervened and I had to quit playing Pathfinder Society, I played a lumberjack character. He took stuff that would only help him cut down more trees (he had favored enemy plants, growth domain to become giant sized briefly, had an oversized eventually adamantine dwarf waraxe with -2 to hit for size but did a lot of damage to things that didn't move, and was working on the whole power-attack, cleave, cleaving finish, great cleave, great cleaving finish, lunge tree so he could chop as many trees down in a single round as he could reach and sunder with a single blow....trees that would get larger and larger as he leveled. I had eventual plans to push him in specific druid archetype to the point where he could wildshape all day as a giant (in 3.5 it would have been a master of many forms build). Naturally he had maxed profession lumberjack ranks and was going to have an ox-animal companion because, Paul Bunyan.....

Some of those cleave feats in Pathfinder had weird synergies, where you could keep attacking a harder target with bonus attacks caused by one-shotting weaker enemies. Unlikely in play vs enemies but pity the tree with some saplings nearby.....

Which is another one I keep trying to re-create in various systems. Successfully once in a Fate game as a culture hero in a frontier campaign, basically a fey-type who left the old-country to re-invent himself with new legends. Ever since I saw Paul the Samurai fight a Paul Bunyan superhero I've liked that sort of thing "My Katana was forged blah blah blah". Paul "Yeah, well, my axe is Sears Craftsman with a lifetime Guarantee" (in the 1980s, both were legendary artifacts....). That Paul could also see a country mile, a detail I appreciated.

It does turn out that a really good lumberjack isn't a terrible adventurer. A lot of enemies hold still long enough to get chopped down like trees, and armor that is immune to rusting out in the elements is also handy against rust monsters (he had enchanted obsidian armor...)...or anything else that might try to hurt you. "That door is just lumber. I'll have it gone in a second"

GM "Are you using a special lumberjack power?"

Me "Power attack and a 2d8 axe?"

GM "Oh yeah. Never mind"

Sometimes you can get the GM into the head of your mentality.