D&D and Me: Part 5 (Multiple Personalities)

[This is the fifth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about some of my earliest D&D characters and why I enjoyed playing them, including the very first time I played a woman.]


I’m not sure I fully understood it at the time I wrote the last installment, but, having had some time to reflect, I think that I probably have my good friend Tim to thank for having the courage to play a female character.  It’s one of the many things I have Tim to thank for: he also taught me more about how to be a good game master than anyone else.  Tim was never bothered by playing a woman, which he did fairly often.  I recall the exquisitely icy Toxana, a drow whose class I can’t recall, but who wielded a powerful +3 sword as well as a broom of flying.  And then there was the lithe and elegant Raeze Terpsichorean, who approached battle like a dance and just flowed from enemy to enemy, slicing as she went.  The thing Tim did that was so great was to play the women exactly as he did the men: there was never any juvenilia, never any “hey, look! I’m a chick!” ... it was just that, sometimes, he was a she.  No big deal.  Looking back on it now, I doubt I would have been comfortable enough to play a woman without Tim’s example.  But, after I took the plunge the first time, I was never hesitant about doing so again.

In the midst of all these nature-based characters, I was convinced, a handful of times, to play a fighter, one of the 4 core classes that I was trying to avoid because I naturally gravitated to the paths less traveled.  Both times I decided that, if my class had to be that vanilla, I would let my freak flag fly using my choice of race.  Once, for a morally questionable mission,¹ I played a half-ogre named Trask.  I desperately tried to embrace the “just turn off your brain and deal buckets of damage” philosophy, but I hated it so much that by the time he lost his lovely plate mail to the rust monsters outside the dragon’s lair, I didn’t really care any more.  I charged screaming at the dragon and was fried to a crisp.  I vaguely remember just shrugging and starting to plan out my next character.

There was also a short stint that we referred to affectionately as “the freak campaign,” where everyone (except our resident min-max-er, who of course played a human, because: no penalties) played a totally non-standard race.  Tim was an aarakocra (bird-person) named B’Gawk, my friend Marcus played a wemic (like a centaur, but with a lion instead of a horse), our other friend Carl played a bramble (tiny faerie creature covered with thorns), and I chose the alaghi, sort of a yeti-like creature.  His name was Gron, and he couldn’t really speak the common tongue, but he was perfectly happy to work for raw meat, and he was fiercely loyal to his comrades.  (In retrospect, I still should have been a barbarian.)  But, overall, I failed to make playing a plain fighter interesting enough to hold my attention.²

Anyway, after my happy, bright, nature-y phase, I went through a dark brooding phase.  Because: Batman.  I mean, seriously ... who doesn’t love Batman?  Even I liked Batman as a kid, and I pretty much hated all the popular superheroes.  But Batman got a pass, because being all wrapped in shadows like that while punching bad guys in the face is just plain bad-ass.³  And, honestly, starting with Batman can quickly lead you to the real dark and mysterious heroes like Phantom Stranger and Ghost Rider and Moon Knight and Swamp Thing and Ragman and Cloak & Dagger ... if you have a love of horror and a love of comics, there are plenty of characters waiting in that juncture to scratch your itch.  And why not carry some of that over to your love of fantasy?

For one of our “evil campaigns,” I played a sneering, ultraintelligent psionicist named Ravell, a salt-and-pepper bearded, one-eyed gray elf, who carried, among other things, a cloak of absorption and a carpet of flying, and who had inherited Toxana’s magic longword.  For another evil campaign, I was Galbraith, a wannabe necromancer who was an expert in anatomy and necrology, worshipped Mictlantecuhtli (the Aztec god of death), had the flaw of “insane babbling,” and was too low level to animate anything really useful, so my GM (the ever-excellent Tim again, as it happened) let him wander around with a small flock of undead chickens.  Then one day I was reading over someone’s shoulder while they played Arena and saw that one of the class choices was something called “nightblade”: apparently a cross between magic-user and thief.  I was very intrigued, but that kind of thing wasn’t really doable in D&D at the time:⁴ thus far in my gaming career, we’ve only gotten as far as 2nd edition.

Then along came something called the Player’s Option series and of course we bought them all.  The first book in the series, Skills & Powers, contained a character point system, including a way to trade in some of your standard class abilities for other things.  Strictly speaking, you weren’t supposed to be able to buy the abilities of another class, but we never paid any attention to restrictions like that.  My first attempt at the “nightblade” concept was a thief who gave up some of the less useful “thief skills” in exchange for a few choice wizard schools (probably just necromancy and illusion).  Thus was born Shan Blackmoon, probably the closest I ever came to an actual Batman rip-off.  He dressed all in black, could cast some spells—but only at night!—and could use his short sword just as well in total darkness as in full daylight (thank you, blind fighting proficiency!).  Worst of all, a previous injury (I think it was something like someone had tried to slit his throat once but he miraculously survived) left him with a rough voice and a hesitancy to show his lower face and neck ... so he talked exaclty like Batman, and he had the partially exposed face thing, just in reverse.  Still, I really dug that guy, even if I couldn’t really make the mechanics work the way I wanted.

Attempt two was to do it the other way around: start with magic-user, give up a bunch of schools of magic (even the flashier ones like evocation—I wasn’t in this for the fireballs), and grab a bunch of thief skills.  This required taking a hell of a lot more flaws, so I decided this woman (my second female character, I believe) had been fathered by a demon or somesuch, so she had blue skin, red eyes, and a forked tongue.  I can’t remember if she had a tail or not, but probably.  Of course, I was essentially creating a homebrewed tiefling:⁵ tieflings probably existed by that point, but they were only in Planescape, and I don’t think we had bought that setting.  Certainly I didn’t find out what a tiefling was until a bit later, at which point I went, “oh, yeah ... wish I’d had that when I was designing her ...”  I can’t actually remember her name, except that I’m pretty sure it started with a “V” ... Valandria, maybe? Valestria?  Something like that.  Valandria-or-whatever-her-name-actually-was lived in Ravenloft, where she’d been raised by Vistani, and was used to hiding her demonic features, but, despite her appearance, she was actually quite gentle, and worked hard to overcome her cursed ancestry and the prejudicial expectations of strangers.

Of course, with today’s rules (5th edition), Shan would probably just be an arcane trickster (at worst a rogue assassin with a few sorcerer levels), and my Ravenloft waif would just be a classic tiefling warlock (or tiefling sorcerer—Strix from Dice, Camera, Action is a useful role model).  In fact, I recently(ish) did a sort-of-almost-recreation of / homage to my demon-girl for a one-shot run by my eldest: Sabina Zinkara was a tiefling rogue/warlock (inquisitive/Raven Queen patron) who fancied herself a bit of a detective.  But, back in those days, gluing together classes via Skills & Powers was the best we could manage.

Of course, in retrospect the Player’s Option series is sometimes referred to as “2.5e,” as it indicated an ackowledgement that the old edition wasn’t flexible enough and had too many restrictions.  Little did we know that a new edition was in the works, and a mere 5 years later, we had 3rd edition, with proper multiclassing, many fewer arbitrary limitations on race and class combinations, much more sane psionics rules, and a more consistent ruleset all around.  We were very excited for the new edition and my friend and ofttimes GM Tim—by that point the only other remaining member of the gaming group I’d originally joined—agreed to DM us through our first 3e campaign.  I was over my dark broody phase, and I wasn’t ready to go back to playing nature-bound characters,⁶ but I was still interested in going against the standard tropes.  I had bucked trends with druids and bards, by playing a psionicist instead of a wizard, and by trying to forge new classes out of combinations of two standard offerings.  What was left?  Well, I’d never played a monk ...



Next time: exploring 3e and the monk class, and even more things to thank Tim for.

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1 I’m pretty sure this was our trek to Dragon Mountain.
2 At least in 2e.  Fighters got cooler in later editions.
3 It also didn’t hurt that, via the pages of The Brave and the Bold, Batman introduced me to a lot of obscure superheroes, which is what I was really into.  See also part 1.
4 I mean, not really.  You could be a “magic-user/thief” if you were willing to be an elf—or could talk your DM into ignoring the race restrictions—but it didn’t really work that well, plus you were always at least 1 level behind everyone else.  Multiclassing in 2e sucked.  See also my History of Multiclassing series.
5 Although, honestly, I was probably more inspired by Nightcrawler, who was always my favorite X-Man.  I know Wolverine usually gets all the fanboy love, but I just always dug Nightcrawler.
6 Not then anyway.  I did so not long afteward though, with a class I built out of a heavily customized version of the NPC “expert” class, which I dubbed “naturalist.”