World builders are especially frustrating when they mess with the player characters for verisimilitude. Like: "Faires can't really be barbarians, so I am giving you a penalty to a class feat to make it more realistic; there might be more in the future. Your backstory does not say your fighter is rich, so it wouldn't make sense if he had starting equipment; you might get a club 4 or 5 combats in. The gods take their laws very seriously and you did nothing when the rogue stabbed somebody you did not know for sure was evil, you lose your channel divinity and all your spells; but you can make a new character, I am not forcing you to play a bad fighter."
Someone who was once a friend ran a fantastic cold open once. In the pre-Baldur's Gate III days, they had us start on a Mindflayer spaceship, facing mindflayers. My lawful evil paladin, Manon Ravenscorn, got in a solid hit with her long sword. In the moment I imagined her slashing a mindflayer's chest and glaring at him with a glint of defiance in her gold eyes. This is honestly one of my top moments so far as a PC.
Thanks for acknowledging the 'implications' of forcing someone to meet expectations specifically of 'horny bard'. Honestly I'd even consider it a type of sexual harassment - 'don't play a Bard if you don't want people to assume you're going to be an obnoxious flirt' reeks of 'well don't dress like that if you don't want attention'. I play a bard who considers her practice to be borderline spiritual, connecting to the world and magic through music, sort of like a form of music therapy. As someone on the ace spectrum I'd be beyond pissed off if she was railroaded into slutsville. If you're a horny bard, I'm happy for you - don't flirt with people around your table if it makes them uncomfortable. If you have a bard at your table, don't assume they're That Bard unless they say they are. Simple.
7:00 agreed, I never understood the hate for doing this. I've mentioned it on this channel before but I've had DMs full on lift a movie, game, or something else and insert it into our game with the names unchanged. But the difference was our characters were there and they were obviously 10x more capable than the regular humans that had been the former protagonists. It makes the whole thing pan out differently and the DM had a clear idea of how to RP the characters. Win win for everybody. Off the top of my head, I've played through The Mummy (1999), Castlevania (the OG game with some animated series mixed in), and Sonic Mania (though the main cast didn't appear in that one). Everybody had a blast.
Honestly even outside of D&D there shouldn't be hate for taking ideas and making new things Unlock your deliberately claiming to be doing an adaptation but that's a completely different kind of worms But if you're creating your own original story and borrowing plots from other stories and having characters that are based off different ones the fact is all the idea of mushed together are going to make them different from any of the individual piece if they were dragged from, and that's just how stories work or art or any other type of idea
Imagine in a situation where everybody at the table is playing a fantasy race like tiefling, orc, drow or dragonborn and your GM complains about a girl playing a guy breaks his immersion? Last time i checked there are not a lot dragonborn or tiefling roaming arround in RL
I usually have the opposite problem with DMs introducing my character... and by that I mean they tell me nothing about what's going on but also somehow expect me to know how to jump into the party's current situation with 0 set-up. Some examples: My character is found tied up in a barrel at the entrance of a dungeon the PCs are investigating to stop some great disaster. At the time, I had no clue who tied me up, why, any knowledge about the dungeon, or anything about the PCs. So it's just like "I guess I'll follow you because... because." It was decided my character was sent by their organization to hunt down the same monster the party was. Cool! Except I didn't know anything about the either one! So the party bombarded me with questions about both, but of course I couldn't answer and the DM hadn't told me because they somehow didn't think it would come up... The party had just wrapped up a major battle and was going to start an expedition but I was given no information as to where or why so again my character just had to be like "don't forget to bring me, a total stranger, along!" 😅
I have this kind of thing happen to me probably with the best D&D group I ever played with though But I know a bit of the world building beforehand even if I didn't know quite how it was being introduced and I was given two options for how I wanted to be introduced and but all they were were just locations without any of the plot then I filled the rest in through the DM's narration and through my understanding of the world before that and it was pretty cool but even if I hadn't figured that out though and my character didn't figure it out immediately but he was a cleric and an Uber intense one who was being sacrificed or being like in the lineup to be human sacrifice later when the party found him so when they rescued him he joined them out of gratitude and offered to help them solve the issue and I figured out the world building around that and added that to his motivation for staying around it worked out pretty well But if I'd been playing a different character or hadn't paid as much attention I probably wouldn't have gone as well as it did I got lucky
I greatly appreciate these videos that just give such good advice. As a new DM who's been planning to run a campaign, this is such good information to have.
I've always had a very hard time letting myself include things I enjoy in games, both as a player and DM. Because of a fear of being cringy or such. But the times when I stop forcing myself into variety just cause and lean into what I enjoy, I end up surrounded by people who like the same things and it's so much more fun! Despite this, accepting freedom in my writing is still a slow process, and that's okay.
I think the only time I remember disagreeing with anything on this channel was on that very 'taking control' issue. So it's pretty cool to see that kind of self-reflection. One of the old episodes had a story about a player who refused to use a magic hammer for his barbarian (or maybe fighter) because he just really, really wanted a sword. It ground the game to a halt, to a point where another player just offered to make it LOOK like a sword, as if this was WoW or FF14 with their transmog/glams. And I always felt like the sword player was in the right. Clearly, the player had a very firm fantasy in mind, maybe not for their backstory but for the way they wanted that barbarian to fight: your classic Conan, or your Warcraft-style blademaster, or some other idea where being a SWORDSMAN, with that mix of power, skill, and speed is just really central, instead of accidental. That mattered to them more than the fantasy of finding interesting new weapons in treasure hoards, or just being really, really strong. That's who they sat down to play: a master swordsman. That's important. Maybe it doesn't quite fit how the game is 'meant to' be played, but if you're pulling people into this game with promises of high fantasy adventures instead of 'so, you kill cool monsters and get all sorts of cool gear!' some of those classic DnD elements don't really fit. Mary and Pippin find some random loot in a tomb, yeah. But, y'know, if someone had sets out to play Aragorn or Legolas (complete with the same backstory and aesthetic), they'd be just a little frustrated if, on their visit to Moria, they came across a special set of double scimitars (which, come on, don't be stubborn, are a type of sword and just way better for a melee ranger than a longsword!), or an incredible Orc-made crossbow.
I mean you can play the character you want to play without throwing a giant hissy fit and ruining the game for everyone Like okay you didn't get a sword the first loop drop cool take the magic hammer sell it at the next door and buy a sword Their problem solved you get to play the character you wanted to play and don't have to be a child about it
I'm not the best at voice acting yet My last character I played with mail, I made things harder for myself by or maybe easier for myself by playing a goblin though so the fact that my voice with feminine could just be attributed to five and then I tried to deliberately make it even higher pitched which was funny when I remembered to do it but also resulted in a lot of the MPV not realizing he was a guy I think possibly because my DM would forget, it's kind of surprising how absolutely little a character's gender actually comes up
I used to force myself to play an equal number of male and female characters, but I eventually realized that I was kinda just forcing myself to do that so that people wouldn't question my female characters.
Every time I see crispy talk about problem dms my mind flashbacks to that one time a guy that dm'd made us sit as he narrated A CUTSCENE THAT LASTED 2 WHOLE SESSIONS AND HALF By the way, the cutscene was irrelevant to the plot, he then got mad at us for not being engaged enough.(he kept repeating us how we were unable to speak or move during the whole thing due to some divine magic, the fuck were we supposed to do?)
"Can my character think?" "...yes?" "Okay, then my character thinks: 'This is really boring, if I was theoretically controlled by someone in another universe as a made-up character, that someone would be in their rights to leave the table and go get snacks or something."
Here's my view on DMPCs: don't use them. If you want to include NPCs that accompany the party, they should have few combat skills and shouldn't be built using the rules for player characters. A good example of an NPC is a scout that leads the party to the dungeon, a hireling who holds a torch or carries some of the party's gear, or an awakened animal that has no real combat value but does have opinions on things. The scout could be taciturn and only speaking when spoken to, the torchbearer could be a young woman who doesn't have the skills to be an adventurer, but wants to explore the world, and the awakened animal could be a grumpy tortoise who criticizes the party for their sartorial choices. All of these NPCs add flavor to the campaign and allow social interaction when the DM wants, but none of them hog the limelight. Like Crispy, I seem to be playing more PCs who are of opposite gender recently. My main character is a female half-elf warlock with the Courtier background from Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. She grew up a servant in Baldur's Gate, learning ettiquette to be a courtier, before making a pact with a Celestial and running away. She desires political power and the finer things in life, such as fine clothing. She keeps a wardrobe in her portable hole with some fancy dresses. She is the level headed member of the party, dealing wiht a a greedy cleric, a horndog monk/fighter, a wizard made obsessed with Order by attuning to a fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts, and a puzzled Aarocokra. In another campaign, my PC, a male Harengon Bard was killed. He was a bit of a joke character, basically I was playing Bugs Bunny before he got unceremoniously killed. My replacing is a female Fire Genasi Bard is a cool, collected bounty hunter, who takes risks that she hopes will pay off. So far she is fun to play, but is mostly known as a non-joke character in the campaign. I have faced pushback in the past from some people for playing opposite gender characters, though never from a DM. The only time I strayed in cringy territory doing so, was a female Zeltron Noble I played in a Star Wars Saga Edition campaign. I designed my Noble to essentially be a rock star, but the DM didn't include that backstory much. Those who remember Zeltrons from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe know that they were extremely horny aliens. If we had done a Session Zero, I probably would have toned things down, but that was back in 2011, before Session Zero became as well known as it is now. I think that having a Session Zero can solve many problems involving opposite gender PCs, but it also requires an open mind. The DM needs to lay down the tone of the campaign, but that won't help if the DM or other players are not accepting.
People complaining about players playing a gender they are not should stick with their guns and play a human plebian with stats accurate to their current state. Don't play something you're not, right?
Firstly unless you know either of them personally that you have no way of knowing whether or not they know each other personally, just because it's unlikely doesn't mean it's true and therefore you are also making an assumption about people. Secondly this comment was not a declaration just a question about a potential thought process asked out of curiosity, so it's not even that much of an assumption. I don't think it's that weird either, especially if we don't know the tone and it could easily be curiosity or a joke and doesn't have anything negative on it.
World builders are especially frustrating when they mess with the player characters for verisimilitude.
Like: "Faires can't really be barbarians, so I am giving you a penalty to a class feat to make it more realistic; there might be more in the future. Your backstory does not say your fighter is rich, so it wouldn't make sense if he had starting equipment; you might get a club 4 or 5 combats in. The gods take their laws very seriously and you did nothing when the rogue stabbed somebody you did not know for sure was evil, you lose your channel divinity and all your spells; but you can make a new character, I am not forcing you to play a bad fighter."
Someone who was once a friend ran a fantastic cold open once. In the pre-Baldur's Gate III days, they had us start on a Mindflayer spaceship, facing mindflayers. My lawful evil paladin, Manon Ravenscorn, got in a solid hit with her long sword. In the moment I imagined her slashing a mindflayer's chest and glaring at him with a glint of defiance in her gold eyes. This is honestly one of my top moments so far as a PC.
I am always happy when I find resources to improve my DMing. Thank you for this Video, Crispy.
Thanks for acknowledging the 'implications' of forcing someone to meet expectations specifically of 'horny bard'. Honestly I'd even consider it a type of sexual harassment - 'don't play a Bard if you don't want people to assume you're going to be an obnoxious flirt' reeks of 'well don't dress like that if you don't want attention'. I play a bard who considers her practice to be borderline spiritual, connecting to the world and magic through music, sort of like a form of music therapy. As someone on the ace spectrum I'd be beyond pissed off if she was railroaded into slutsville. If you're a horny bard, I'm happy for you - don't flirt with people around your table if it makes them uncomfortable. If you have a bard at your table, don't assume they're That Bard unless they say they are. Simple.
7:00 agreed, I never understood the hate for doing this. I've mentioned it on this channel before but I've had DMs full on lift a movie, game, or something else and insert it into our game with the names unchanged. But the difference was our characters were there and they were obviously 10x more capable than the regular humans that had been the former protagonists. It makes the whole thing pan out differently and the DM had a clear idea of how to RP the characters. Win win for everybody.
Off the top of my head, I've played through The Mummy (1999), Castlevania (the OG game with some animated series mixed in), and Sonic Mania (though the main cast didn't appear in that one). Everybody had a blast.
How do you play through Sonic Mania??
Honestly even outside of D&D there shouldn't be hate for taking ideas and making new things
Unlock your deliberately claiming to be doing an adaptation but that's a completely different kind of worms
But if you're creating your own original story and borrowing plots from other stories and having characters that are based off different ones the fact is all the idea of mushed together are going to make them different from any of the individual piece if they were dragged from, and that's just how stories work or art or any other type of idea
The new DMG is really good. Very well organized and easy to read. I gained some new insights.
That's great to hear! I'm generally a 5e fan, but was sadly a bit let down by the 2014 DMG.
Imagine in a situation where everybody at the table is playing a fantasy race like tiefling, orc, drow or dragonborn and your GM complains about a girl playing a guy breaks his immersion? Last time i checked there are not a lot dragonborn or tiefling roaming arround in RL
4:49 Poor lil guy
How dare this be hidden from me for 23 minutes :( Yippee for constructive criticism!
I usually have the opposite problem with DMs introducing my character... and by that I mean they tell me nothing about what's going on but also somehow expect me to know how to jump into the party's current situation with 0 set-up.
Some examples:
My character is found tied up in a barrel at the entrance of a dungeon the PCs are investigating to stop some great disaster. At the time, I had no clue who tied me up, why, any knowledge about the dungeon, or anything about the PCs. So it's just like "I guess I'll follow you because... because."
It was decided my character was sent by their organization to hunt down the same monster the party was. Cool! Except I didn't know anything about the either one! So the party bombarded me with questions about both, but of course I couldn't answer and the DM hadn't told me because they somehow didn't think it would come up...
The party had just wrapped up a major battle and was going to start an expedition but I was given no information as to where or why so again my character just had to be like "don't forget to bring me, a total stranger, along!" 😅
I have this kind of thing happen to me probably with the best D&D group I ever played with though
But I know a bit of the world building beforehand even if I didn't know quite how it was being introduced and I was given two options for how I wanted to be introduced and but all they were were just locations without any of the plot then I filled the rest in through the DM's narration and through my understanding of the world before that and it was pretty cool but even if I hadn't figured that out though and my character didn't figure it out immediately but he was a cleric and an Uber intense one who was being sacrificed or being like in the lineup to be human sacrifice later when the party found him so when they rescued him he joined them out of gratitude and offered to help them solve the issue and I figured out the world building around that and added that to his motivation for staying around it worked out pretty well
But if I'd been playing a different character or hadn't paid as much attention I probably wouldn't have gone as well as it did I got lucky
I greatly appreciate these videos that just give such good advice. As a new DM who's been planning to run a campaign, this is such good information to have.
I've always had a very hard time letting myself include things I enjoy in games, both as a player and DM. Because of a fear of being cringy or such. But the times when I stop forcing myself into variety just cause and lean into what I enjoy, I end up surrounded by people who like the same things and it's so much more fun!
Despite this, accepting freedom in my writing is still a slow process, and that's okay.
5:09 Didn't expect to see this clip from Arcane, but dang it it fits!
I think the only time I remember disagreeing with anything on this channel was on that very 'taking control' issue. So it's pretty cool to see that kind of self-reflection.
One of the old episodes had a story about a player who refused to use a magic hammer for his barbarian (or maybe fighter) because he just really, really wanted a sword. It ground the game to a halt, to a point where another player just offered to make it LOOK like a sword, as if this was WoW or FF14 with their transmog/glams. And I always felt like the sword player was in the right.
Clearly, the player had a very firm fantasy in mind, maybe not for their backstory but for the way they wanted that barbarian to fight: your classic Conan, or your Warcraft-style blademaster, or some other idea where being a SWORDSMAN, with that mix of power, skill, and speed is just really central, instead of accidental. That mattered to them more than the fantasy of finding interesting new weapons in treasure hoards, or just being really, really strong. That's who they sat down to play: a master swordsman.
That's important. Maybe it doesn't quite fit how the game is 'meant to' be played, but if you're pulling people into this game with promises of high fantasy adventures instead of 'so, you kill cool monsters and get all sorts of cool gear!' some of those classic DnD elements don't really fit. Mary and Pippin find some random loot in a tomb, yeah. But, y'know, if someone had sets out to play Aragorn or Legolas (complete with the same backstory and aesthetic), they'd be just a little frustrated if, on their visit to Moria, they came across a special set of double scimitars (which, come on, don't be stubborn, are a type of sword and just way better for a melee ranger than a longsword!), or an incredible Orc-made crossbow.
I mean you can play the character you want to play without throwing a giant hissy fit and ruining the game for everyone
Like okay you didn't get a sword the first loop drop cool take the magic hammer sell it at the next door and buy a sword
Their problem solved you get to play the character you wanted to play and don't have to be a child about it
In my game, we have two girls playing male characters. It was pretty fun, but we would sometimes forget that the characters being played are male.
I'm not the best at voice acting yet
My last character I played with mail, I made things harder for myself by or maybe easier for myself by playing a goblin though so the fact that my voice with feminine could just be attributed to five and then I tried to deliberately make it even higher pitched which was funny when I remembered to do it but also resulted in a lot of the MPV not realizing he was a guy I think possibly because my DM would forget, it's kind of surprising how absolutely little a character's gender actually comes up
I have noticed that I tend to make more female characters than male. Must be that Woke Mind Virus™️ that Elon keeps rambling about. 😂
Oh Elon. The "man of science". 🤣
Loving the lip shade! I wish I could wear colours on my lips but I have a curly stache and lick my lips too often 😅
I used to force myself to play an equal number of male and female characters, but I eventually realized that I was kinda just forcing myself to do that so that people wouldn't question my female characters.
Improvement! 🎉
Improvement!
Every time I see crispy talk about problem dms my mind flashbacks to that one time a guy that dm'd made us sit as he narrated A CUTSCENE THAT LASTED 2 WHOLE SESSIONS AND HALF
By the way, the cutscene was irrelevant to the plot, he then got mad at us for not being engaged enough.(he kept repeating us how we were unable to speak or move during the whole thing due to some divine magic, the fuck were we supposed to do?)
storiesforcrispy@gmail.com
Feel free to rant :)
"Can my character think?"
"...yes?"
"Okay, then my character thinks: 'This is really boring, if I was theoretically controlled by someone in another universe as a made-up character, that someone would be in their rights to leave the table and go get snacks or something."
Here's my view on DMPCs: don't use them. If you want to include NPCs that accompany the party, they should have few combat skills and shouldn't be built using the rules for player characters. A good example of an NPC is a scout that leads the party to the dungeon, a hireling who holds a torch or carries some of the party's gear, or an awakened animal that has no real combat value but does have opinions on things. The scout could be taciturn and only speaking when spoken to, the torchbearer could be a young woman who doesn't have the skills to be an adventurer, but wants to explore the world, and the awakened animal could be a grumpy tortoise who criticizes the party for their sartorial choices. All of these NPCs add flavor to the campaign and allow social interaction when the DM wants, but none of them hog the limelight.
Like Crispy, I seem to be playing more PCs who are of opposite gender recently. My main character is a female half-elf warlock with the Courtier background from Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. She grew up a servant in Baldur's Gate, learning ettiquette to be a courtier, before making a pact with a Celestial and running away. She desires political power and the finer things in life, such as fine clothing. She keeps a wardrobe in her portable hole with some fancy dresses. She is the level headed member of the party, dealing wiht a a greedy cleric, a horndog monk/fighter, a wizard made obsessed with Order by attuning to a fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts, and a puzzled Aarocokra.
In another campaign, my PC, a male Harengon Bard was killed. He was a bit of a joke character, basically I was playing Bugs Bunny before he got unceremoniously killed. My replacing is a female Fire Genasi Bard is a cool, collected bounty hunter, who takes risks that she hopes will pay off. So far she is fun to play, but is mostly known as a non-joke character in the campaign.
I have faced pushback in the past from some people for playing opposite gender characters, though never from a DM. The only time I strayed in cringy territory doing so, was a female Zeltron Noble I played in a Star Wars Saga Edition campaign. I designed my Noble to essentially be a rock star, but the DM didn't include that backstory much. Those who remember Zeltrons from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe know that they were extremely horny aliens. If we had done a Session Zero, I probably would have toned things down, but that was back in 2011, before Session Zero became as well known as it is now.
I think that having a Session Zero can solve many problems involving opposite gender PCs, but it also requires an open mind. The DM needs to lay down the tone of the campaign, but that won't help if the DM or other players are not accepting.
Keep hoping to see my story cause I emailed one ^_^
People complaining about players playing a gender they are not should stick with their guns and play a human plebian with stats accurate to their current state.
Don't play something you're not, right?
Super detailed map and ripped from hunter x hunter? The map in that series is just ours with continents flipped upside down and shuffled
L
Crispy... have you potentially considered you're trans? like, my egg detector is going crazy
it's more they are just fem and don't really care about presenting as such because that's just their style. crispy cosplayed shadowheart so....
That's a weird thing to say to someone. You don't know anything about him in real life.
Femboys are a thing, you know.
*glances at my very heavily male leaning population of OCs* oh gosh
Firstly unless you know either of them personally that you have no way of knowing whether or not they know each other personally, just because it's unlikely doesn't mean it's true and therefore you are also making an assumption about people.
Secondly this comment was not a declaration just a question about a potential thought process asked out of curiosity, so it's not even that much of an assumption.
I don't think it's that weird either, especially if we don't know the tone and it could easily be curiosity or a joke and doesn't have anything negative on it.
I have never been this early! 🤍🖤💜