Friend is starting a new game in 3.5. It’s pirate-themed, which, I’ve always, always wanted to do.
My character concept is a pirate swashbuckler who is, in reality, a mimic in human form. At some point in the distant past, she devoured an adventurer who was carrying an incredibly rare, legendary treasure. She now has that treasure sitting in her belly, forever, until some adventurer slays her and gets it out.
I imagine she dealt with one or two particularly difficult treasure hunters before deciding she was legitimately in great peril, and took human form to live a nomadic life on the sea, trying to avoid treasure-seekers the world over.
In gameplay terms, she’ll be a swashbucker class and a shifter race. Her “true form” is of course a treasure chest. I’m working with the DM to see if I can get some kind of attack where I assume the form of a chest, sit there, and when a greedy enemy opens me up to get the treasure, I get a chomp on em at advantage.
Still haven’t thought of a name or a quest for her beyond “don’t get killed and looted.”
I have no direct experience with this but Conjuration, Divination and Transmutation have the most fun-sounding abilities to me
Though my read on “fun” in D&D is apparently a lot different from other people’s, I like to design myself to be only half-useful and then have to struggle against my limitations /slash/ fail in interesting ways
This is actually fairly close to how I do. My wizard never actually went to wizard school, she was a librarian who came upon an old wizard’s spellbook (or possibly only part of it? I haven’t quite decided yet) and decided to try and learn about who he was and what he was working towards (and/or possibly on a quest to find the missing portion of the book, because it MUST BE WHOLE).
Mechanically, I deliberately didn’t take the Arcana skill, but took History and Investigation instead, and don’t plan on taking any caster feats. She’s just not a magical person, she’s just bright and has (half?) a spellbook. She can cast from it, but doesn’t have the kind of knowledge ABOUT magic you’d expect from a “True Wizard”. She has no clue who Tenser or Mordenkainen are/were, and can’t really recognize magical signs or effects any better than any other general-purpose scholar.
I really like that concept. I’m a sucker for a character concept that really engages the class mechanics, but by partially undermining them. My favorite pet class concept right now is a fighter/blade warlock that thinks he’s a paladin.
I’m trying to think which school fits “bookish scholarly nerd” best and I guess it’s divination? Scrying and finding out hidden information and whatnot.
Right, that’s what I was thinking, but then I realized that if she’s using someone else’s spellbook, the school wouldn’t really be up to her.
I ended up going for Transmutation, figured maybe the book’s original owner was trying to work out some mythical alchemical process or something. Also I suspect that our Cleric is not actually a cleric at all, and is actually a necromancer.
Changed the concept so that she’s an unusually old mimic, and it’s a widely-known pirate legend that the beating heart of a living treasure can grant any wish.
Having lived so long, she’s grown a baseball-sized red pearl where a human’s heart would normally be. Part of it sorta just sticks out from her chest. If it’s cracked or broken, she dissolves into red water, a la Evangelion.
I’m doing a similar thing in a spelljammer-esque game I’m running. The players are exploring a giant manta ray that flies around interstellar space acting like a ramscoop. Any rocks it happens to eat are digested and then extruded from its back, like spines. These spines are harvested by the settlers that live in a small town on its head. Over the millennia all the remaining tiny bits of not-quite-rock have accrued into an extremely valuable bezoar! And if the party looks close enough a strange alien artifact might have also found its way into the maw of this colossal beast
This thread is a great reminder of how varied experiences can be within the same basic game. Half of you guys seem to be creating new characters/starting new campaigns every other week. Meanwhile I’ve been playing the same character for over nine years now. After all this time he’s finally on the verge of making it to level 9! It could easily be two more years until he reaches level 10 and can finally cast 5th level spells(he’s a 1st edition Illusionist)!
Illusionists, by the way, are my favorite specialist wizard. Especially in their 1st edition incarnation. Their spells allow for both lots of creativity and occasional bouts of feeling totally useless if said creativity is lacking.
Do you take him from campaign to campaign and table to table, original 70’s dnd style, or is this one consistent 9-year game with the same people? Because if the latter, holy crap that’s amazing and also slightly scary for some reason
It is one campaign with mostly the same people(we’ve had a few changes over the years but 4 of us have been there from the beginning). I feel very fortunate to have found such a reliable DM.
What is almost scary is the fact that I knew none of these people beforehand. I responded to a meetup request for players for a 1st edition game. The likelihood of something like this working out this well has to be pretty low. Most of the other players do run in the same circles though. So I’m the only real ‘rando’ in the group.
Another kinda crazy thing is that I’m the youngest player in the group, and uh, I’m not young.
Well, if you’re playing OG, it’s not that weird. Nostalgia is real.
Anyway congratulations, we in the NoRA crew have been playing together for like 18 months and we are all constantly commenting about how amazing it is that we’re still playing regularly. I think for each of us it is our longest campaign ever, in real time
By most measures, any campaign that lasts more than a few months is a huge success. And a few months playing once a week is a pretty long campaign. My group only plays once a month, so there is that.
I do occasionally think about retiring my current character, but having invested nine years makes it hard to start from ground zero with a new one.
