This article made me laugh. It portrays an intrepid young woman who looks upon LARPing with a fair bit of amusement, referencing a few different movies and documentaries that show what it looks like and sounds like on the surface. She is a fan of science fiction and fantasy, perhaps even games like Dungeons and Dragons, but thinks the LARPing thing might be over the top.
She’s invited to play an NPC at one point, and details her original task, and how she began hamming it up, to which the other participants begin giving her openings to join in. She realizes she likes this play-acting, and even takes inspiration from her character’s original task. She has a built-in way of roleplaying her character, a widow who asked heroes (other play-actors) to help save or avenge her husband, was refused, and took up the banner herself after being slapped into sobriety by a sympathetic but gruff cook who was tired of the woman’s laments.
I played D&D for about a year, when my entire household was into it. I fondly remember my first character. But it was my third that had so much potential, that I regret that I chose to create a new character instead, rather than continuing with the one I had. We were just beginning a new campaign with all new characters, and after playing a ranger and a rogue previously, I decided that this time, I would play a sorceress, a magic-slinging lady. I made sure all her stats were compatible with a magical character, that her spellbook was full of spells that might benefit the party offensively. And we set off into the forest.
Where my character was immediately eaten by a tree.
These were very strange woods, indeed.
The Dungeon Mistress (or DM) rolled her dice, gave me a look, and began to laugh. Everyone began asking, “What happened? What did you roll?” She had rolled a “1″, the lowest number on any dice regardless of how many sides it has. If you roll a 1, it generally means that whatever you were striving for, be it a movement, an attack, or a simple stroll through the woods, is going to end up badly.
“Well,” the DM laughed again, looking at me squarely, “one of the ancient trees bends down, and swallows your character whole.” The table erupted into laughter, me included. The character was less than three hours old in real-time, I didn’t have an emotional attachment to her, though I did feel miffed that after all that work, I would have to sit down and create yet another character.
My husband, who was playing a druid, held up his hand. “Let’s do something.” I cannot remember the specifics, but between the cleric, the druid, some spells with very positive success rolls of dice, and me bellowing defeatedly to just let me stay dead, they got me extracted from the tree, put me in stasis, and transferred my soul from my lifeless body to that of (and this was a random roll) a black bear that was wandering nearby. As thanks, I asked for and got permission to allow the other adventurers to pick my former character’s body for trinkets and goodies to take with them.
I asked the DM for specifics about what my bear could remember, and do. She consulted the book. “Well, you now have a strength of 24,” (bears had an insanely positive bonus for strength, which sorcerers do NOT have), “and since you don’t have thumbs but retain the ability to speak, you’ll be able to cast any spell with a speech or item component,” (spells use either a spoken word, a hand gesture, or an item to be cast, and sometimes a combination of the three). We all giggled over my character’s plight. The DM apologized very profusely. I kept waving her off, “No, no, it happens, I think it’s funny, I’m really okay.”
The DM finished the session with the others, and sat with me to figure out what would happen now. I could continue to play the bear sorcerer, or I could roll up a new character. My love of rolling new characters won out, sadly, and she asked me to write out my old character’s stats, spell list, items she was carrying that had not been looted, and anything else I wanted to share. I first set out with the task of creating my fourth character, who would join up with the party in progress later. And then I sat down to write up my sorceress’ character sheet.
My husband and I spent the entire week giggling about the way I could roleplay my character. Even with her severely limited spell list of two spells, if she were played long enough and leveled enough, she could gain the speech-only spell that would allow her to reform her hand to allow for thumbs, thereby removing all limits to her spellcasting. In the meantime, she would be a magical talking bear who was really, really edgy and grumpy when around trees. (The DM previously had said that this “new” character would have only a vague memory of what had occurred.) I decided the bear would be especially grousy around people. She would growl, “Oh, you and your opposable THUMBS,” for instance.
I did create a new character, but I always did regret letting this one get shelved–what a perfect and ready-made way to roleplay an unusual character. I still think about her and giggle.
The article linked at the top of this entry made me think about finding inspiration from one’s surroundings and running with it, incorporating it into one’s budding character. I do wish I had. :)
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