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autumnalwalker · 6 months

Text

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

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igorlevchenko-blog · 1 month

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Icewind dale2: gnome paladin/illusionist multiclass.

I imagine he's also party's surgeon, using illusion spells for anesthesia and paladin's healing spells to facilitate recovery.

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theworldbrewery · 29 days

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Funmaxing: How to Create a Character You'll Like Playing

Part Two: Choosing Your Features

'part one: choosing a role that fits' can be found here.

Okay, so you've decided on the roles that sound fun to you and that suit your character. Now for the fun part: actually doing character creation.

Every part of character creation is made up of two basic elements: flavor and mechanics. Each of these affects the other; when people talk about the 'fantasy' of a given class, they're referring to the experience created by the synthesis of the flavor and mechanics. For instance, the 'fantasy' of the Ancestral Guardian barbarian is a character that goes into a mystical warrior state to deliver no-holds-barred beatdowns, powered by the support of their long-dead ancestors. In order for that fantasy to work, you need both the flavor of the 'mystical warrior state' and the 'support of long-dead ancestors,' and the mechanics that let this idea work out in practice -- a character needs to be able to deal sizable damage in one-on-one combat, with meaningful support mechanics from their ancestor spirits.

The trick of choosing character options that work for you is twofold: you must determine which mechanics let you engage in the roles you have selected in part one, while also checking the flavor for compatibility with your character's roleplay concept.

First, let's talk mechanics.

Understanding how to choose mechanics that you will personally enjoy is surprisingly difficult; I think it's because the flavor is doing so much heavy lifting that it's hard to see the game expectations underlying each concept, and because it takes experience to recognize how different mechanics interact. To help provide examples, I'll be using a friend's character from my prior campaign to demonstrate.

Alice is a half-orc with the guild artisan background and the wild magic sorcerer class.

How does D&D expect Alice to behave? What does she do?

As a half-orc, Alice will have a bonus to her Strength and Constitution scores, proficiency in Intimidation, an extra damage die on a melee-weapon critical hit, and an ability that lets her drop to 1 hit point instead of 0 once per day.

On its own, this doesn't tell us much. These abilities could enhance Alice's efficacy as a Tank and a Powerhouse...or they could be used to help compensate in some areas where she is weaker, like keeping a fragile Glass Cannon standing and giving her a bonus to melee attacks if she's low on spell slots.

As a guild artisan, Alice is proficient in Insight and Persuasion plus a set of artisan's tools. According to her backstory, Alice is a stonemason, so she's taking that proficiency in mason's tools. She also gains a feature that connects her to the rest of the guild, who will help her meet patrons and allies and grant her lodging when needed, as long as the guild has a presence in the local community.

Now here's a better look at the picture! Alice has skills and features that help her in social situations, mostly with personal charm and insight, so she might be good at the Cold Reader and Friendly roles. She's also connected to the guild, which could set her up for a role as an Information Broker. Her skill with mason's tools could help her detect traps or other dangers, or give her an edge on finding secret areas in a building -- so Trap-Wise and Mapper are good prospects for her role in Exploration.

As a sorcerer, Alice has access to spellcasting features, including sorcerer cantrips and first-level spells. Looking ahead, she'll gain access to sorcery points, which let her cast more spells, and at third level she'll gain Metamagic options, which let her change elements of the spells she casts. She has proficiency in some simple weapons, but no armor, and her hit die is a d6. Her spellcasting ability will be Charisma.

So here we can see Alice is going to be a spellcaster first and foremost--at least, that's the assumption the class mechanics have created, because everything about this class revolves around spellcasting. If Alice's player wants to play a weapon-based character, this is likely not the class for them. We can also see that with no armor and the smallest hit die available, the game expects that Alice will be avoiding melee combat at all costs. Instead, the class is designed to fire spells at longer distances and deal large amounts of damage, so the sorcerer class is built for a more Glass Cannon-like role.

If we take a closer look at the sorcerer spells, it doesn't seem to have many summoning-type spells, and zero spells capable of healing or ending harmful effects. Instead, the sorcerer's spells largely deal targeted or Area of Effect damage, affect the environment and enemies, and defend the sorcerer and their allies from attacks. Alice is therefore well-suited to a Glass Cannon or Battlefield Manipulation role in combat -- and since she doesn't have many abilities beyond spellcasting, she should prioritize spells that let her act effectively in battle. The metamagic options reinforce this: they let Alice deal extra damage, fire a spell across a greater range, cast an extra spell as a bonus action, and extend the duration of a spell, all of which are assets to a character in long-range combat affecting the battlefield and dealing high amounts of damage.

But what about outside of combat? Some spell options for the sorcerer are more useful outside of the battlefield, and it's wise for Alice's player to choose some of these as well. Spells like Comprehend Languages and Knock can help Alice read unfamiliar writing, eavesdrop on an enemy, and magically unlock manacles, doors, and treasure chests. Depending on if the player prefers a Trap-Wise, Looter, or Puzzle-Solver role, the player can choose spells that fit those preferences. As a sorcerer, Alice is likely to have a high Charisma score, which means she would make a great Friend or Influencer in social encounters.

At first level, Alice also gets to choose her subclass. As a wild magic sorcerer, Alice's first subclass ability is Tides of Chaos, which lets her grant herself advantage on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw.

Because Alice can use Tides of Chaos, it makes sense for her to take on roles in the game that let her make use of her skills and saving throws, but it also would help if she took combat spells that use attack rolls instead of making the enemy make a saving throw. Why? Because her Tides of Chaos lets her give herself advantage on spell attacks. Spells like Chromatic Orb and Witch Bolt can then be more likely to hit their target. Later on, she'll gain abilities that let her affect other creatures' saving throws, so she might choose more save-based effects then.

As you can see, even though the race, background, and class/subclass features are guiding the player toward certain roles, these roles are by no means a hard and fast rule. And with each layer of customization, you can specialize your character into the roles you most enjoy. If you like the idea of playing a spellcaster, but the Glass Cannon doesn't appeal to you, you might instead choose to play a bard or a warlock, which have higher hit dice and can let you branch out into melee fighting, or choose the Clockwork Soul sorcerer subclass to access more defensive and healing-oriented spells.

The trick is to put all this into practice in reverse: if you know which roles you'd like to play, your task is to look at the classes, subclasses, and other character options that most interest you and evaluate whether or not they will help you fulfill those roles. Not everything must be of use to your favorite roles to play, and you aren't obligated to stick closely within the confines of one role in each pillar of play, either. But in general, you'll enjoy playing your character much more if you know you like using their abilities!

Lastly, you'll need to reconcile the flavor of your chosen character options with anything you already know about your character concept. Some mechanics are simple to re-flavor, like changing the source of magical abilities or changing a damage type. Others, like reflavoring spellcasting as weapon attacks, are extremely difficult verging on the impossible. If you find yourself trying to completely overhaul the flavor of a class or background, you might want to look in a different area for the mechanical features you enjoy.

If you're looking for more specific advice, feel free to send in an ask. Happy character creation!

#d&d #rpgs #ttrpgs #dungeons and dragons #character creation

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literalcatpod · 2 months

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This Month on the Literal Cat Podcast:

Okay, let me just start by saying that even though it's April 1st, this is the real schedule for the month! No tricks here, just the next two episodes!

Let me ALSO say that our next seasonal theme has been decided! Wild West Winter wins! So we know Deadlands, but we need at least 5 more!

But anyway, onto the episodes!

April 3, we have a guest from the Paranoia: Fight Together or Die a Clone podcast on to help us make a character in Paranoia! (listening to this episode might possibly be treasonous, we're not sure)

And April 17, we look at Magonomia: The Game of Renaissance Wizardry from Shewstone Publishing!

Also don't forget, we're running playtests on a new one-shot TTRPG! follow this link and/or Ask us for more details!

#cats #podcast #ttrpg #podcasting #literalcatpod #character creation #how to make a literal cat in your favorite rpg #literal cats #ttrpg character #ttrpg podcast #ttrpg stuff #ttrpgs #ttrpg community #indie ttrpg #paranoia rpg #magonomia #mongoose publishing #shewstone publishing

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ladydenkiart · 1 month

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OC Al Paterson dit Black Hat

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another-rpg-sideblog · 11 months

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More Crews: Relic Hunters & How to Build Your Own by Scrivenmyth on reddit

#rpg #dungeons and dragons #dnd #character creation #party backgrounds

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mamaangiwine · 7 months

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Being a story teller is hard, cuz how do you explain to people that you're not just somewhere else when you space out- but someone else?

#not magic #writing #dnd #rpg #world building #character creation

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fantasyfictionfables · 2 months

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BG3 Tav Backstory Bash

This is a challenge to help people flesh out their Tav’s backstory by exploring their past. It is organized into four sections with seven prompts. You can treat this as a monthly challenge or a general project. You can write headcanons, fics, or share art based on the prompts! You can interpret the prompts however you want. If you want to share use the tag #bg3backstorybash

Thank you @elspethdekarios for tagging me!

I´ve seen most of my choices have already been tagged, so I´ll tag the remaining ones that come to mind.

@galesdevoteewife @necromosss @theletteraesc @gufu-vire

I have not worked through all of the prompts, so do not forget to take a look at @kelandrin's original post where all prompts can be found.

Athena Dekarios née Asteriadis

High Half-Elf • Paladin-Cleric• Acolyte of Lathander • Neutral Good

Parents

Father: Amicus Asteriadis

Human artist and craftsman who was unpredictable in his violent tendencies and preference for sticking to himself. He moved to Baldur´s Gate as a young man once he found out his love - Athena´s mother - was planning on running away to the city.

Mother: Keylana Alastrarra

High-born Elf from the noble house of Alastrarra in Cormanthyr. She fell in love with Amicus, while he was performing in the city. Her parents disapproved, so she ran away to Baldur´s Gate in the hopes of a future with him. She became a merchant, but quickly let herself become corrupted. Knowing no responsibility, erratic behavior grew and she ended up taking lovers. Having grown up with money - which she no longer had - she was in the habit of spending too much; leading to terrible conflicts with her husband. (Who was a mere craftsman and very thrifty.)

Birth

Athena was the firstborn and came 8 years before her brother. Her birth was easy, unlike the pregnancy which had been heavy with nausea. She knew her mother had sung to her as a baby and toddler, even having gone so far as to invent her own lullaby for her, but later on their bond became severed and Athena was incapable of forming a bond with her mother. Her father was the one always there for her, despite his violent behavior and emotional abuse towards her. The abuse she had to suffer built the foundation for her strong personality later on, making it difficult for her to trust others.

First word

Plain old "Dada" followed by "bread".

When they first walked

Once Athena started walking at the age of 11 months, nothing was safe. She was particularly interested in books - but not necessarily in looking at them, but rather to use them as countertop for her baking experiments. She was scolded more than once for playing with flour on a green covered book, which she later found out was a book about plants and their different uses.

Tantrum

Athena would never forget that one tantrum she threw as a toddler, where she was on a flea market and saw a mountain lion plush toy. She wanted it so badly that she cried bitter tears, begged and threw herself to the ground. It was the same day she had been too trusting when faced with a big dog, who nearly bit her hand off. To her astonishment, she got the Mountain Lion plush toy. (And still feels bad for having acted out as a toddler.)

First sickness

Measles

Friends

Never really had friends, due to her mistrustful nature and difficulty in forming bonds. She was the awkward know-it-all who did her own thing. Later on Jaheira becomes her best friend.

Siblings

Has a younger brother - Evan - which she basically raised due to neglectful parents. They both know they are there for each other when necessary, but barely maintain contact. He owns a tavern in Waterdeep.

Getting into trouble

Despite her parents´ boasting about her to outsiders, she remains the black sheep of the family due to her reluctance in complying with her father´s demands and open hostility towards her mother´s behavior. She ran away often as a teen, once her parents had separated shortly after her brother´s birth.

Birthday Eleasis 13th

Learning something new

As a Priestess of Lathander she is on a constant journey of self-improvement, which includes learning. May it be combat, medicine or a new spell - she is always gaining new knowledge.

Trauma

One of her mother´s lovers sexually harassed her,

and a boy from the neighborhood tried to assault her. (It didn´t end well for him, but it made her even more cautious.)

First love

She fell in love with Jidam - a classmate who had longer brown hair and striking blue eyes - when she was thirteen years old. He mistreated her and made her the laughingstock of their year, but her devotion never faltered. A girl she thought her friend ended up getting involved with him.

Rebellion

Moved out as a teen and sought refuge in Lathander´s Temple in Waterdeep where she became an Acolyte.

Reckless behavior

Athena never was one for recklessness. Her difficult childhood and devotion to Lathander gifted her with wisdom beyond her years.

Peer pressure

Athena was known for her defiance of the masses and did not cave to peer pressure. The only time she fell for peer pressure she ended up stealing something from a big shop around the corner. Feeling bad afterwards, she donated everything stolen; keeping only four books which made her difficult younger years bearable.

Growing pains

Growing pains plagued her during her teens - usually at night. She could feel it in her bones but never complained.

Taking responsibility

All the responsibility seemed to be on her shoulders from an early age on. First the mediator between parents, then the bodyguard of her mother when lovers turned too unpleasant, afterwards a mother to her brother.

Serious relationships

She only had one partner before Gale and was engaged to him.

Stephanus was a very analytical and stoic man, who had difficulties showing affection, lusted after other women and was an egoistical lover. He was averse to building a family, and Lathander was not pleased to see his Chosen in a union with such a man, leading to a conversation between the god and Athena. She eventually broke up.

Work

She used to serve Lathander in the Spires of the Morning. Later on she became a Paladin of Lathander, serving as a member of the Order of Aster.

Once she returns to Waterdeep with Gale, she becomes a Priestess of Lathander - she also teaches and practices midwifery in that function.

Aging

Due to her nature as a half-elf and being blessed by Lathander, as well as married to the Chosen of Mystra, who could prolong life, she could technically live forever.

Starting a family

Athena and Gale end up being the parents of three children - two boys and a girl.

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legionofmyth · 2 days

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Alien RPG: A Hard Life Amongst the Stars - Spaceships

🚀 Dive into the thrilling world of Alien RPG by Free League Publishing! Discover the secrets of starship design and essential spaceship components to elevate your game. 🌌 Don't miss out on this comprehensive guide that will take your tabletop RPG experience to the next level! Watch now and embark on your interstellar adventure! #AlienRPG #TabletopGaming #Spaceships #SciFi #RPG

ALIEN RPG Core Rulebook ALIEN RPG Starter Set Dive into the dark and thrilling world of Alien RPG by Free League Publishing as we explore the intricate details of spaceships and their components. Uncover the secrets of starship design and learn how to enhance your gameplay with these essential elements. Don’t miss out on this deep dive that will elevate your Alien RPG experience to new heights.…

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prokopetz · 10 months

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Inadvisable tabletop RPG character creation schema #137: Each player receives the same extremely complicated pre-filled character sheet describing an ancient legendary hero, and is obliged to black out a certain percentage of it with a marker, playing whatever remains as their character. Blacking out individual letters to form new words – and thus new attributes – is explicitly permitted.

#concepts #gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #character creation

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yesiplaygamez · 1 year

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In game hair

Mod hair

#video game meme #video game mods #mods #video game shitpost #playstation #xbox #switch #dragon age #mass effect #video games #playstation games #pc games #rpg #character creation

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redeyeflyguy · 10 months

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Wonderful Things That May or May Not Be Wonderful!!! Humanity is watched over by a race of invisible angels known as the Celestrians. They protect and help the populous for the purpose of collecting their gratitude in the form of crystals. This is all so one day they will all ascend back to the realm of the almighty. And when that fated day comes, tragedy strikes breaking the ritual and casting one rookie Celestrian down to the planet below. One who must stop a long dormant darkness and help prove that humanity, despite its many faults, is still worthy of grace. As one review from my youth stated "Too much free time? Tired of having a life? Play Dragon Quest IX!" For a JRPG, It's got all the turn based combat, conversation text, and overworld questing you could possibly want and more. So many side quests, so many unlockable classes, so much to do and explore that its crazy it fits all on one DS cartridge. On top of that, this is the only RPG I've played where you to create your own party of ragtag adventurers instead of having a pre-set group of defined characters. Your own Akira Toriyama styled posse of party members with the roles and backstories you prescribe to them. Yes please! Plus, once you complete the main story, there is a massive post-game with randomly generated super dungeons to conquer, treasure maps to decipher, and ultra hard quests to discover and on top of that, you can wirelessly team up with other players locally or over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (if it still existed RIP) so you don't have to go in alone. DQ9 is a time sink if there ever was one and if you have said time and a DS, it is a sink worth filling. Definitely worthy of wonderful-ness.

#wonderful #dragon quest ix #sentinels of the starry sky #square enix #jrpg #nintendo ds #video games #role playing games #character creation #fantasy #online play #turn based rpg #akira toriyama #post game #side quests #classes #fun

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theworldbrewery · 29 days

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Funmaxing: How to Create a Character You'll Like Playing

Part One: Choosing a Role that Fits

I'm about to be a player in a full campaign for the first time in 5 years (I was lucky enough to play in a few oneshots and an 8-session mini-campaign during that time), and for the first time in a long time, I get to really think about being on the player's side of the table!

If you, like me, are about to embark on the journey of creating a D&D character, this one's for you.

If you've played D&D before, you've probably had the problem where you came up with an awesome character concept and started playing, only to realize you picked features that your character wouldn't use, or that didn't work with the way you like to play.

Some DMs may let you change it at some point, but the majority of the time, the only solution to being dissatisfied with the mechanical choices you made is to...retire the character. Make a new one. When you really enjoy roleplaying the character, it can feel like you're between a rock and a hard place: say goodbye to a character you love, or muddle through with mechanics you hate.

(this can happen the other way around as well! I'll be writing about that later)

So how do you get in front of this problem? How do you choose mechanics you actually like that also make sense for your character concept?

The advice below assumes that you have come up with a character that is willing and able to go adventuring.

The first step in designing a character's mechanics is to ask yourself:

What roles do you like playing in D&D, both in and out of combat?

There are many different roles in D&D. Some are pretty well-known: you have the tank, the DPS, the glass cannon, the healer. But you also have the support caster, battlefield manipulation, and more. At the same time, not all of D&D takes place in combat. Depending on the game, there are different ratios of combat:exploration:social interaction. If one of those 'pillars' of play doesn't interest you, that's okay, but there will likely be some elements of all three in every game, and it's helpful to have a character that is capable of interacting with all these pillars.

The lists below are not exhaustive. It's also typical to enjoy more than one role, and to take on more than one role at a time. As you review the lists, think about which roles you would most enjoy playing.

Combat Roles

Tank: soaks up attacks. If you like taking huge amounts of damage or making enemies waste attacks on you that never hit, this is a good role for you.

DPS: for the uninitiated, this stands for 'damage per second'. If you like doling out huge amounts of damage each round, this role is a good fit.

Glass Cannon: like DPS, this role deals out high damage but frequently has limited resources, like spells, and has a low defensive capability. If you like to feel powerful 'at a cost', this is a good role for you.

Healer: this role keeps allies standing and protected against danger with wards and restorative abilities. If you like to feel like a rescuer and pull your party out of bad situations with a clutch move, you may enjoy being a healer.

Support: this role focuses on making your allies stronger and your enemies weaker. If you like setting up your fellow players for extreme power without wanting it for yourself, or get satisfaction out of watching your enemies crumble, this is a good fit.

Battlefield manipulation: this role controls different elements of the encounter by moving allies and enemies around, taking control over enemies, and creating effects that change the physical landscape. If you like thinking tactically about placement on the board, affecting who can go where/do what, and turning enemies to your side, this is a good role for you.

Summoner: this role uses other creatures to fight on your behalf, not just summoned ones. If you like having animal companions, constructs, or summoned creatures take on the fights for or alongside you, you may like the summoner role.

Exploration Roles

The Trap-Wise: this role is on the lookout for unexpected dangers, like ambushes, pitfalls, and cursed treasures. If you like to stay on your toes, monitor what others are doing, and be a front-liner of exploration, this role is a good one for you.

The Looter: this role is looking for Stuff. You might be checking bodies, foraging for the party's dinner, or combing through bookcases for interesting tomes; if that sounds like your kind of fun, you might enjoy the Looter role.

The Puzzle-Solver: this role wants to gather and resolve information about the scenario, whether that's literally solving a puzzle or figuring out the BBEG's secret plans before she can put them into action. If you like thinking about how the scenario works and gathering intel, you might like being a Puzzle-Solver.

The Poker: this role sees something interesting and decides they're going to poke it. If you want to throw caution to the wind and just trigger the pressure plates already, this role could be a good fit.

The Mapper: this role is for figuring out where you are, where you're going, and how you're going to get there. You might be checking for secret rooms and hidden doors, or scouting ahead either on your own or with a familiar or divination ability. If you're always thinking about the next step forward, you could have fun as a Mapper.

The Prepper: this role is getting ready for the next threat. If you want to set up defenses for your camp, heal or empower your allies before you face danger, or divine the future, you might like the Prepper role.

Social Roles

The Friend: this role tries to get on others' good sides. You may deescalate a tense situation, convince an untrusting NPC to let down their guard, or earn the favor of a powerful creature. If you really did come here to make friends, this might be a good role for you.

The Powerhouse: this role uses skills, physical strength, or magical power as leverage. You might magically or physically force a confession, show off your competency to get an adventuring contract, and back up your allies' words with an intimidating presence. If you want to say more by saying less, you might like playing a Powerhouse.

The 'I Know a Guy' Guy: this role relies on interpersonal connections, linking the party to NPCs for resources, information, and new quests. If you like networking and building connections, you might enjoy playing this role.

The Information Broker: this role collects and exchanges information, from gossip to news to clues. If you like plying others for intelligence, you might have fun as an Information Broker.

The Trader: this role speaks the language of barter and coin, assessing others for their material worth and goals. If you like transactional roleplay encounters from haggling to bribery, the Trader could be a good fit.

The Influencer: this role distracts crowds, plants the seeds of gossip or discontent, and directs the favor and ire of the public. If you want to be at the heart of the crowd, you could enjoy the Influencer role.

The Cold Reader: this role assesses others for their motives, intentions, and feelings to gain a social advantage. If you like to understand what's happening at the heart of an NPC, you might like playing a Cold Reader.

Once you've identified the roles you enjoy, think about the group as a whole: will anyone else want these roles? It can be extremely frustrating to choose a glass cannon role, only to discover everyone else is playing glass cannons, too. Party composition doesn't need to matter to play a good game, but when you have the same role as another player, it can be easy to feel like you aren't adding anything new or interesting to the encounters.

Next, think about the game you're about to play: will these roles be useful in this game specifically? Some DMs might leave out the elements necessary for a given role to work, or the specific game you're playing won't give you many opportunities to use a certain role. You can always let the DM know what you want to see, so they can give you situations that play to your interests, but it's also fine to acknowledge that not every role will fit in every game.

Finally, consider your character concept: which roles fit with the character I've come up with? If you know things about your character's personality and background, you can compare them to the roles you're interested in and see where there are points of alignment. You don't need alignment between the combat, exploration, and social role, but some roles fit better together than others, like a DPS combat role being Trap-Wise in exploration and an 'I Know a Guy' Guy in social encounters -- that describes a very typical rogue archetype, and rogue abilities often serve these roles well.

Once you've assessed the roles you like in combat, exploration, and social encounters, you're ready to build your character's mechanics!

A short example: In the upcoming campaign I'm playing in, my character concept is a drow woman from a minor noble family who was disowned for improper behavior. She was previously trained in martial fighting, but has since become a pit fighter to help make ends meet. This character is going to be mostly battlefield manipulation with some tanking, because I love to play with combat tactics and soak up damage. In exploration, I'm not yet sure; I think she'd be a good Poker, but another player really gravitates toward that role, so my backup choice is the Looter. For social encounters, she'll be mostly Influencer, but since she'll be tactical in combat I think she'd also be a Cold Reader when it comes to assessing potential threats and their capabilities.

'part two: choosing your features' can be found here.

#d&d #rpgs #ttrpgs #dungeons and dragons #character creation

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