fergo
2023-03-10, 09:41 AM
I haven't posted here in years (and when I did, it had been even longer since I'd actually been a semi-regular contributor), but I recently re-read the comics from start to finish and that got me in the mood to check out these forums again, and thinking about my own experiences roleplaying, so I thought I'd share a story. This isn't a horror story, although it was a bit frustrating for me at the time as I was kind of thrown into the deep end, roleplaying wise--it was more of an interesting learning experience. It's not amazingly exciting, but I do think it's funny as an example of mismatched expectations, and how a character concept can be completely derailed in the very first seconds of a campaign.
This was my first ever time playing D&D, with a good friend DMing. I had some very limited experience playing RPGs (just one or two sessions), and I was looking forward to finally trying D&D and getting into a proper campaign with my friends, not least after following a D&D webcomic for over ten years at this point without knowing the first thing about actually playing the game :smallbiggrin:.
The only instruction we were given was that our character should be somebody who wouldn't be out of place in an army. After some thought, I came up with a character which I was excited to play: a dwarven paladin to Dumathoin, the dwarf god of the dead (thank you, D&D wikis!). My idea was that he was from a highly traditional, deep-down dwarf community in the mountains, somewhere which had almost no contact with dwarfs in the outside world let alone other races, but which was known for their devotion to Dumathoin in particular--old-fashioned even by the standards of dwarves, who in a lot of fantasy settings are traditional-minded stick-in-the-muds at the best of times.
After being ordained (if that's the right word, for a paladin?), my character was sent out into the world to minister to dwarven communities elsewhere: performing funeral rites, encouraging the "proper" worship of Dumathoin, helping dwarves venerate their ancestors, that kind of thing. His superiors would see these above-ground dwarves as, well, in need of guidance--slack in their worship and perhaps misguided, even to some extent corrupted, not in touch with their gods and with the traditional way of doing things. (A cleric would have fit the character concept much better, but after I came up with my backstory another player wanted to be a cleric, and I thought a paladin would work decently enough).
I thought that being an outsider to the world we were playing in would suit me as a newcomer to D&D, help explain the gaps in my own knowledge of the lore--and, as I wanted to ease myself into the roleplaying experience, take something of a backseat in the serious roleplaying side of things, interacting with important NPCs and driving the main plot along, as other more experienced characters would naturally take the lead.
My idea was to play my character as a complete fish out of water, well-meaning but extremely naïve. After growing up in a very isolated community where everyone shared the same perspectives and values, he would be surprised at the diverse and heterogeneous world he found himself in. His initial reaction would be to seek out the company of fellow dwarves but--I discussed with the DM--my thought was that he'd find them not nearly so receptive to the word of Dumathoin as he would expect. The dwarves living above ground in human lands would be a bit out out of touch with their roots and mostly be a bit puzzled by this old-fashioned youngster. They'd be happy to have him around to say the proper words and give grandpa a traditional send-off, and they would listen politely to his preaching, but they wouldn't really see its relevance for their day-to-day lives. The oldsters might nod approvingly and mumble about this being just what it was like back when they were a lad in the mountains, but for most of the dwarves he'd encounter, my PC would be an object of curiosity and maybe, for some of the younger, cooler dwarves, some mild mockery.
As for the army, well, I think I wrote some recent history of having been mugged or tricked out of his money, and deciding that signing up with an army would give him the opportunity to pursue his mission with dwarven soldiers, pioneers, armourers and blacksmiths, that kind of thing. The sort of worldly, experienced dwarves he'd be likely to encounter in a military setting, I figured, would be a particularly fun contrast to my character's straight-laced worldview.
My idea was that, as he encountered the world around him and came out of his shell a little bit, learning from his dealings with dwarves who weren't as traditionally-minded as those of his homeland and also my fellow PCs and the other NPCs we'd encounter, my character would learn to be more flexible with his beliefs and expectations, a lot more relaxed, and (I hope!) a bit more fun to be around. As I as a player learned more about D&D and the setting of the campaign and maybe got a bit more confident in contributing, my character would similarly learn more about the world around him and grow to accept it for what it is rather than try to understand it entirely through his preconceived worldviews. Maybe, after his adventuring was done, he would return to his homeland a wiser and more mellow dwarf, and perhaps even try and persuade some of his family and friends that no, those who live above ground didn't necessarily need some bossy busybody coming along and sticking their nose into their affairs and telling them how to live their lives.
Is that a bit long for a backstory? Perhaps not necessarily, but in hindsight it definitely relied too much on the DM shaping his campaign to fit my character. The core concept (traditional fish-out-of-water religious type) was simple enough, but for him to play out as I wanted the DM would have to be pretty regularly putting my PC in contact with very specific NPCs and in quite specific situations. To be fair, I did run every aspect by the DM and checked that it would suit the campaign he was planning, and confirmed that my backstory worked in the DM's setting: that there were less traditional dwarven communities in the lands the campaign would be set in, and that they might respond to my character's preaching in the ways I outlined above. I imagined his dealings with other dwarves mostly happening in our down-time and perhaps sparking a few side-quests, and not getting in the way of whatever the main plot was going to be. Nevertheless, I certainly went into the campaign too rigid in my expectations of who my character is, how he interacted with a world I knew nothing about, and how his personality would evolve without knowing the first thing about how things were going to play out. Ironically--or perhaps entirely predictably?--by creating a character who (initially, at least) would be inflexible and out of place, I'd created a character that in a more meta sense was both inflexible and out of place! It was a recipe, if not quite for disaster, then for frustration as my overly-specific expectations failed to match reality.
Okay, well, on to actual campaign--or even just the first five minutes of it, which was the root of our troubles. The thing was, our characters started off dead.
We crawled our way out of the ground, our bodies decayed, our clothes rotted away, our weapons and armour rusted. Around us, other bodies were doing the same. We seemed to be the only ones who were, well, us--the rest were mindless automatons who attacked any living creature they saw. They didn't attack us, though, because yes, we were definitely dead: decayed bodies animated by some nasty evil magic, even if we did seem to retain our own consciousness. The living people we encountered thought we were basic zombies, and we had a bit of a job trying to persuade them not to kill us on sight.
We didn't know how we got there. We remembered our characters' backstories, but we had no memory of recent events. Over time, we managed to piece things together and learned that we'd been part of an army who had fought a great battle here, over a century ago, and had died. We'd been resurrected when some generic bad guy started messing around with necromancy and, over the next couple of sessions, we helped defend the nearby city from his undead hordes before eventually being restored to proper life (to the best of my memory, this just kind of happened once the bad guy was defeated, without much explanation, and we were never told why we in particular weren't just mindless zombies like everyone else). And so the campaign started! We were alive, we were us, we all knew each other and were bonded by this rather unique shared experience--a great start to an adventure, right?
There was only one problem, as far as I was concerned: we had been, you know, dead, for quite some time.
Naturally, my character's first concern, as a paladin who had dedicated his life to the dwarven god of death, was what that had been like. Had he met Dumathoin? Had he spent his time quaffing ale in the halls of his ancestors? Had he fought in the dwarf version of Valhalla, or whatever it is that dwarves believe happen to them after they die?
No, I was told, he'd just been dead. It had been dark, and cold, and he'd came back as basically a zombie. Dumathoin had been nowhere to be found.
I saw this as a big deal for my character. How could he perform his rites, how could he preach to other dwarfs, how could he consecrate bodies and commit them to Dumathoin's afterlife, when he personally had learned that there was nothing on the other side? How could he carry out the mission he left his homeland for now? How could he return, with his family all a century older if they were still alive at all, having failed in his mission?
This could, of course, be an amazing opportunity for roleplaying! If I was an experienced player, I'm sure I would have jumped into the scenario feet-first, as an opportunity to work how my character would respond to such an earth-shattering experience which shook them to the very core of who they were as a person. The trouble was, this was my very first session! I did my best, but to be blunt, I just wasn't up for the challenge--my character ended up mostly sad and grumpy, and when I tried to set that aside and engage with the other players in the general fun, light-hearted level they were operating on, I felt like I wasn't really playing my character as, well, my character: he was just wise-cracking, jokesy, slightly silly PC #459, who just happened to be a dwarf paladin.
The campaign went on for some months after this and it was, on the whole, a lot of fun, and a good learning experience. My character, however, never actually met any other dwarves, so never had the opportunity to pursue his original mission even if he wanted to. He did eventually have a sort of religious experience where Dumathoin appeared before him and said something along the lines of, "You're doing okay, kid," but this was after months of real-life gaming and even longer in-world, and we'd travelled half way across the globe to a land that didn't have any dwarves at all, so as far as my original character concept went it was too little, too late.
We did eventually set off on a long journey to some dwarven colony where, I hoped, my character could get back to his roots and, depending on what he found there, I could either carry on playing him more as I originally intended or he could settle down and I could create a new character. Mid-way through this journey the campaign ended abruptly, as these things do, and I created a communist barbarian orc for our next campaign--another less-than-entirely-wise idea, but that's a whole other story and, to be fair, was a lot more fun.
As a player, I was frustrated that I never had the chance to settle in to playing my character as I intended before having this huge change thrust upon him. I do wish that when I suggested my character concept to the DM, he'd thought to himself, "Hm, that doesn't really work with my whole you-start-off-as-zombies idea", and suggested I think up something else. Or that we'd had a frank discussion after the first session about how my character could reconcile his experiences with his faith (the DM was a bit surprised that I asked what being dead had been like, and his decision that we hadn't been in any sort of afterlife seemed to be spur-of-the-moment, so maybe we could have retconned that so that my character had been in the afterlife after all). Or that he'd worked my backstory into the future campaign at all, instead of all the above-ground dwarves my character had set out to find totally around here somewhere, but never anywhere we actually were. Like many horror stories and other RPG hiccups, the obvious solution was "Just talk to the DM, you idiot!" :smallbiggrin:
At the same time, I certainly should have been more flexible. From what I know from OotS, people in D&D worlds usually know that gods and the afterlife exist as a fact, what with resurrections, speak-with-dead, plane-shifting, and whatnot, so maybe my character's personal experiences shouldn't have shaken his faith as much as it did. Or perhaps I should have just decided that my character saw his experiences as some sort of test from Dumathoin, and emerged from the experience all the more dedicated to his cause. Perhaps I was too ambitious as a newbie in trying to roleplay a reaction to this event, rather than just sticking with his character as I'd originally envisioned him. And, as I said way back at the top, I shouldn't have went into the campaign with a character who depended so much on the world around him being just so for me to play him as I intended.
I've had more RPG experience since then, mostly with the same DM, and have had an awful lot of fun--our latest campaign in particular has been great, with interesting and mostly straight-faced characters with detailed backstories and a setting and premise into which they fit perfectly. Needless to say, this was the product of detailed discussion between the DM and us as players so that we could make sure we were all on the same page before we got started. So I like to think that I've learned my lesson, somewhat :smallredface:.
Some day, though, I may try and resurrect this character--not literally, this time! :smalltongue:--and, with a few tweaks to make him more flexible, see if I can make him work.
This was my first ever time playing D&D, with a good friend DMing. I had some very limited experience playing RPGs (just one or two sessions), and I was looking forward to finally trying D&D and getting into a proper campaign with my friends, not least after following a D&D webcomic for over ten years at this point without knowing the first thing about actually playing the game :smallbiggrin:.
The only instruction we were given was that our character should be somebody who wouldn't be out of place in an army. After some thought, I came up with a character which I was excited to play: a dwarven paladin to Dumathoin, the dwarf god of the dead (thank you, D&D wikis!). My idea was that he was from a highly traditional, deep-down dwarf community in the mountains, somewhere which had almost no contact with dwarfs in the outside world let alone other races, but which was known for their devotion to Dumathoin in particular--old-fashioned even by the standards of dwarves, who in a lot of fantasy settings are traditional-minded stick-in-the-muds at the best of times.
After being ordained (if that's the right word, for a paladin?), my character was sent out into the world to minister to dwarven communities elsewhere: performing funeral rites, encouraging the "proper" worship of Dumathoin, helping dwarves venerate their ancestors, that kind of thing. His superiors would see these above-ground dwarves as, well, in need of guidance--slack in their worship and perhaps misguided, even to some extent corrupted, not in touch with their gods and with the traditional way of doing things. (A cleric would have fit the character concept much better, but after I came up with my backstory another player wanted to be a cleric, and I thought a paladin would work decently enough).
I thought that being an outsider to the world we were playing in would suit me as a newcomer to D&D, help explain the gaps in my own knowledge of the lore--and, as I wanted to ease myself into the roleplaying experience, take something of a backseat in the serious roleplaying side of things, interacting with important NPCs and driving the main plot along, as other more experienced characters would naturally take the lead.
My idea was to play my character as a complete fish out of water, well-meaning but extremely naïve. After growing up in a very isolated community where everyone shared the same perspectives and values, he would be surprised at the diverse and heterogeneous world he found himself in. His initial reaction would be to seek out the company of fellow dwarves but--I discussed with the DM--my thought was that he'd find them not nearly so receptive to the word of Dumathoin as he would expect. The dwarves living above ground in human lands would be a bit out out of touch with their roots and mostly be a bit puzzled by this old-fashioned youngster. They'd be happy to have him around to say the proper words and give grandpa a traditional send-off, and they would listen politely to his preaching, but they wouldn't really see its relevance for their day-to-day lives. The oldsters might nod approvingly and mumble about this being just what it was like back when they were a lad in the mountains, but for most of the dwarves he'd encounter, my PC would be an object of curiosity and maybe, for some of the younger, cooler dwarves, some mild mockery.
As for the army, well, I think I wrote some recent history of having been mugged or tricked out of his money, and deciding that signing up with an army would give him the opportunity to pursue his mission with dwarven soldiers, pioneers, armourers and blacksmiths, that kind of thing. The sort of worldly, experienced dwarves he'd be likely to encounter in a military setting, I figured, would be a particularly fun contrast to my character's straight-laced worldview.
My idea was that, as he encountered the world around him and came out of his shell a little bit, learning from his dealings with dwarves who weren't as traditionally-minded as those of his homeland and also my fellow PCs and the other NPCs we'd encounter, my character would learn to be more flexible with his beliefs and expectations, a lot more relaxed, and (I hope!) a bit more fun to be around. As I as a player learned more about D&D and the setting of the campaign and maybe got a bit more confident in contributing, my character would similarly learn more about the world around him and grow to accept it for what it is rather than try to understand it entirely through his preconceived worldviews. Maybe, after his adventuring was done, he would return to his homeland a wiser and more mellow dwarf, and perhaps even try and persuade some of his family and friends that no, those who live above ground didn't necessarily need some bossy busybody coming along and sticking their nose into their affairs and telling them how to live their lives.
Is that a bit long for a backstory? Perhaps not necessarily, but in hindsight it definitely relied too much on the DM shaping his campaign to fit my character. The core concept (traditional fish-out-of-water religious type) was simple enough, but for him to play out as I wanted the DM would have to be pretty regularly putting my PC in contact with very specific NPCs and in quite specific situations. To be fair, I did run every aspect by the DM and checked that it would suit the campaign he was planning, and confirmed that my backstory worked in the DM's setting: that there were less traditional dwarven communities in the lands the campaign would be set in, and that they might respond to my character's preaching in the ways I outlined above. I imagined his dealings with other dwarves mostly happening in our down-time and perhaps sparking a few side-quests, and not getting in the way of whatever the main plot was going to be. Nevertheless, I certainly went into the campaign too rigid in my expectations of who my character is, how he interacted with a world I knew nothing about, and how his personality would evolve without knowing the first thing about how things were going to play out. Ironically--or perhaps entirely predictably?--by creating a character who (initially, at least) would be inflexible and out of place, I'd created a character that in a more meta sense was both inflexible and out of place! It was a recipe, if not quite for disaster, then for frustration as my overly-specific expectations failed to match reality.
Okay, well, on to actual campaign--or even just the first five minutes of it, which was the root of our troubles. The thing was, our characters started off dead.
We crawled our way out of the ground, our bodies decayed, our clothes rotted away, our weapons and armour rusted. Around us, other bodies were doing the same. We seemed to be the only ones who were, well, us--the rest were mindless automatons who attacked any living creature they saw. They didn't attack us, though, because yes, we were definitely dead: decayed bodies animated by some nasty evil magic, even if we did seem to retain our own consciousness. The living people we encountered thought we were basic zombies, and we had a bit of a job trying to persuade them not to kill us on sight.
We didn't know how we got there. We remembered our characters' backstories, but we had no memory of recent events. Over time, we managed to piece things together and learned that we'd been part of an army who had fought a great battle here, over a century ago, and had died. We'd been resurrected when some generic bad guy started messing around with necromancy and, over the next couple of sessions, we helped defend the nearby city from his undead hordes before eventually being restored to proper life (to the best of my memory, this just kind of happened once the bad guy was defeated, without much explanation, and we were never told why we in particular weren't just mindless zombies like everyone else). And so the campaign started! We were alive, we were us, we all knew each other and were bonded by this rather unique shared experience--a great start to an adventure, right?
There was only one problem, as far as I was concerned: we had been, you know, dead, for quite some time.
Naturally, my character's first concern, as a paladin who had dedicated his life to the dwarven god of death, was what that had been like. Had he met Dumathoin? Had he spent his time quaffing ale in the halls of his ancestors? Had he fought in the dwarf version of Valhalla, or whatever it is that dwarves believe happen to them after they die?
No, I was told, he'd just been dead. It had been dark, and cold, and he'd came back as basically a zombie. Dumathoin had been nowhere to be found.
I saw this as a big deal for my character. How could he perform his rites, how could he preach to other dwarfs, how could he consecrate bodies and commit them to Dumathoin's afterlife, when he personally had learned that there was nothing on the other side? How could he carry out the mission he left his homeland for now? How could he return, with his family all a century older if they were still alive at all, having failed in his mission?
This could, of course, be an amazing opportunity for roleplaying! If I was an experienced player, I'm sure I would have jumped into the scenario feet-first, as an opportunity to work how my character would respond to such an earth-shattering experience which shook them to the very core of who they were as a person. The trouble was, this was my very first session! I did my best, but to be blunt, I just wasn't up for the challenge--my character ended up mostly sad and grumpy, and when I tried to set that aside and engage with the other players in the general fun, light-hearted level they were operating on, I felt like I wasn't really playing my character as, well, my character: he was just wise-cracking, jokesy, slightly silly PC #459, who just happened to be a dwarf paladin.
The campaign went on for some months after this and it was, on the whole, a lot of fun, and a good learning experience. My character, however, never actually met any other dwarves, so never had the opportunity to pursue his original mission even if he wanted to. He did eventually have a sort of religious experience where Dumathoin appeared before him and said something along the lines of, "You're doing okay, kid," but this was after months of real-life gaming and even longer in-world, and we'd travelled half way across the globe to a land that didn't have any dwarves at all, so as far as my original character concept went it was too little, too late.
We did eventually set off on a long journey to some dwarven colony where, I hoped, my character could get back to his roots and, depending on what he found there, I could either carry on playing him more as I originally intended or he could settle down and I could create a new character. Mid-way through this journey the campaign ended abruptly, as these things do, and I created a communist barbarian orc for our next campaign--another less-than-entirely-wise idea, but that's a whole other story and, to be fair, was a lot more fun.
As a player, I was frustrated that I never had the chance to settle in to playing my character as I intended before having this huge change thrust upon him. I do wish that when I suggested my character concept to the DM, he'd thought to himself, "Hm, that doesn't really work with my whole you-start-off-as-zombies idea", and suggested I think up something else. Or that we'd had a frank discussion after the first session about how my character could reconcile his experiences with his faith (the DM was a bit surprised that I asked what being dead had been like, and his decision that we hadn't been in any sort of afterlife seemed to be spur-of-the-moment, so maybe we could have retconned that so that my character had been in the afterlife after all). Or that he'd worked my backstory into the future campaign at all, instead of all the above-ground dwarves my character had set out to find totally around here somewhere, but never anywhere we actually were. Like many horror stories and other RPG hiccups, the obvious solution was "Just talk to the DM, you idiot!" :smallbiggrin:
At the same time, I certainly should have been more flexible. From what I know from OotS, people in D&D worlds usually know that gods and the afterlife exist as a fact, what with resurrections, speak-with-dead, plane-shifting, and whatnot, so maybe my character's personal experiences shouldn't have shaken his faith as much as it did. Or perhaps I should have just decided that my character saw his experiences as some sort of test from Dumathoin, and emerged from the experience all the more dedicated to his cause. Perhaps I was too ambitious as a newbie in trying to roleplay a reaction to this event, rather than just sticking with his character as I'd originally envisioned him. And, as I said way back at the top, I shouldn't have went into the campaign with a character who depended so much on the world around him being just so for me to play him as I intended.
I've had more RPG experience since then, mostly with the same DM, and have had an awful lot of fun--our latest campaign in particular has been great, with interesting and mostly straight-faced characters with detailed backstories and a setting and premise into which they fit perfectly. Needless to say, this was the product of detailed discussion between the DM and us as players so that we could make sure we were all on the same page before we got started. So I like to think that I've learned my lesson, somewhat :smallredface:.
Some day, though, I may try and resurrect this character--not literally, this time! :smalltongue:--and, with a few tweaks to make him more flexible, see if I can make him work.