How do you deal with your P's evolution during a campaign ?
For players : >Do traumatic experience mark them, are they influenced by what happens to them and how ? Does it show in the way you play them ? Have your characters ever change alignment ? (if you use alignment systems, and in that case, ew)
For GMs : >Do you encourage your players to make their characters evolve with what they live, adapt to what they experience ? Do you favorise players that actually put effort in the evolution of their characters ? Do you include stat or rule changes for it ?
Alignments are shit but character development is always great. More systems should encourage it mechanically.
It's hard to get players to do it, though, and like i said, there are usually not that many mechanics that will reflect character development. Alignment is dumb, and switching alignment isn't even a good indication that anything happened to the character, but is usually rather that the player wanting to play a different type of game. Any kind of skill progression should be handled by the system, but changes in personality aren't things you can enforce or track, since it really depends on the players.
Mason Harris
Actually I don't know, someone I know sent it to me and I didn't ask for source then.
Next time, use the little triangle to do an image search to find source. I can't believe there are people on Veeky Forums who don't know how to do this.
Mason Myers
What a classic blunder!
Andrew Murphy
Well it's kind of unfair, I think you can reflect the evolution of your character in the way you use your XP in some cases.
Weak, timid girl who first encounters big fucking monster and almost dies might become more fierce and decide to fight back, so she'll put points in melee or something.
It can be a good way to show how a character is changing over time, if you're not opti-maxing.
Austin Wright
That's true. But not a lot of games allow this kind of mechanical character re-work.
Juan Scott
I play a lot of White Wolf based stuff and I like the way you can make your character grow the way you want, add Advantages and Disvantages to reflect what he becomes : add a phobia if he was traumatised by something, add Good Time Management if he spent months studying the unknown to effectively fight it etc...
Nolan James
Multiclassing. Or taking your first level in a class. Depends on context.
Ethan Hernandez
In time, you feel more in touch with your companions than with your family. You disassociate yourself from other humans, even fellow countrymen, in favour of your brother in arms. The morality of the group becomes your morality, and any slight, even if well-deserved, committed against the party becomes and slight against you.
It is a natural tribal instinct.
Blake Smith
That is if you're running a game where the party has to work together.
I personally have a fondness for the kind of games where all players have interests that do not match the other's, not always in a way that leads to them fighting but in a way that opposes their views and actions.
You need to have good players who can dissociate from their characters to maintain peace between the humans but you get the idea.
Justin Thompson
>Next time, use the little triangle to do an image search to find source. I can't believe there are people on Veeky Forums who don't know how to do this. This, for Pete's sake.
Noah Anderson
>classes
Dismiss yourself
Connor Murphy
>not a lot of games allow this kind of mechanical character re-work. Open your eyes.
Liam Lee
How would you stat an Axolot race?
Mason Jackson
B-b-b-b-b-but muh mechanics! If we don't use these we might as well all do otherkin freeform RP on some shitty forum somewhere! MUH MECHANIIIIIIIICS!!!!!!
Lincoln Taylor
I've only had one or two characters live long enough to effectively change at all and the only real difference is that they stopped volunteering to test traps.
Sebastian Jackson
I try to let traumatic experiences cause natural evolution of characters, yeah. Some of mine have slowly descended into paranoid madness, while others have become dour fatalists. It just depends, but it does depend.
Kayden Smith
Slowly accumulate derangements until you're a dysfunctional mess with 2 Humanity points and a host of enemies baying for your blood?
Levi Hall
Axolotl must have the best base Regen of all classes
Gavin Green
Not everyone began their time here on /a/, the most tsundere board.
Cooper Russell
>>Do traumatic experience mark them, are they influenced by what happens to them and how ? Does it show in the way you play them ? Have your characters ever change alignment ? (if you use alignment systems, and in that case, ew)
I got hit by a helm of reverse alignment at one point. That was kinda brutal. Different character though, years back.
More currently; I have a tribal nomad champion who's now... golly. PTSD, a serious aversion to castles (claustrophobia plus traumatic memories) and a even more serious one to dungeons (which she's wound up in pretty much every time she's visited a castle, in one form or another).
She went from having gotten over never having had a blood-mother and not really thinking about it to hating that bitch who abandoned her and was still alive, to making up and desperately trying to make up for lost time apart, adoring and devoted and desperately trying make her mother proud. (Momma is just kind of blindly delighted to finally see her daughter again.)
Grandmother has shifted from a terrifying, myth-shrouded legendary badass to spiteful, ultra-hardass, bitchy rival to... steely detente of mutual respect. Beating the shit out of each other does that.
Overall the violent, loud-mouthed steppe barbarian is getting uncomfortably civilized and familiar with the settled folk she initially (and still) looks down on, though she's a bit quieter about it now and more open to the idea that not all of them (nor all the things do) are completely worthless and without merit, courage, or bravery.
It's been a lot of fun. Change is pretty awesome. She might even level towards a swordsage equivalent, rather than just her rip-and-tear warrior path I had prepped for her.
Oh, and she wound up with an inadvertent waifu who's pretty cute too.
Andrew Garcia
>Not playing WoD like it's Cthulhu
Carson Stewart
I often like to make my characters evolve in a kind of realistic way, at least to the best I can, but what really annoys me are characters that just don't seem to react to things.
>Just created character that has no history of hunting monsters or even facing an enemy outside of his brother (with a wooden sword) >First scenario fights orcs and free violated women >Is exactly the same afterwards and did not react in any particular way to a thing he litteraly juste saw and faced for the first time
Jacob Adams
Does your GM support you in these changes ? Like, does he make NPCs treat her differently now that she behaves somehow in a less dickish way than before ? Cause I had once a GM who would make kind of all his NPCs judge PCs by what their classes and race were. Regardless of behaviour.
Bentley Turner
A bit. Mostly the same, but he does react to how much of a cunt a player is, so there's that.
Blake Harris
>make funny comedian character >something shitty happens to him or has to face responsability for the first time >try to make him more serious to show how he growed >rest of the table confused because I'm not a bufoon anymore
Grayson Turner
Then your group is stupid.
Sebastian Roberts
Word.
Seriously though, character development is my fetish.
Owen Rodriguez
>character development is my fetish >super discreet magical realm
aww yeah
William Diaz
My other one is watching the party work together to overcome obstacles
Especially ones that would be insurmountable to any of the players alone .
I know I'm filthy degenerate, there's no saving me.
Luis White
I hope you're not also one of those actually good and engaging roleplay between characters that don't affect player's relationship loving madman.
Eli Fisher
Especially when it leads to snappy dialogue or later plot relevance.
Jack Flores
Surely this thread deserves more posts and less fetish discussion in spoilers.
Surely.
Brandon Torres
But does it ? Surely OP knows Veeky Forums is full of autists who thrive on character and roleplay as much as, if not more so than, stat building. So this thread is kind of irrelevant, since everyone seem to agree.
Luke Harris
>Next time, use the little triangle to do an image search to find source. I can't believe there are people on Veeky Forums who don't know how to do this.
For centuries I had no fucking idea that's what that little triangle did.
This whole time I've just been right-clicking and manually searching through google images via google chrome.
Hunter Brooks
PC's are fucking insane. What they call routine combat is a traumatizing experience for anyone else.
They experience mind-effecting spells and slaughter poisonous and diseased monsters all the goddamn time. Things are only traumatic if the player arbitrarily decides something is traumatic.
Michael Phillips
>PC's are fucking insane. What they call routine combat is a traumatizing experience for anyone else. That doesn't strike me as particularly extreme. They ENDURE these things, it doesn't mean that they're immune to them.
Mason Rodriguez
My current character just got blindsided by some development. >Playing a "I want to see all cities destroyed and have nature reclaim the land" type Druid >Real misanthrope, especially he's been without human interaction for so long >Working with the party mostly as a means to an end to gather resources >Party encounters an acting troupe >Everyone tries their hand acting with them for fun >My character gets pushed into it >Roll really high, the troupe ends up loving my performance >First time in years my character's gotten positive attention from other humans, he sort of likes it >Decide to hang around with them while they're in town and keep acting >DM gives me circumstance bonuses the more I rehearse >Druid's heart begins to grow three sizes that day
I have no idea where this character is going now, but I like it. Probably for the best considering how stereotypically he started
Jose Jackson
URBAN D R U I D
Juan Peterson
If you don't play class-and-level-based system and/or have all advances decided before the game for day build then it happens naturally as player buys skills and advantages.
Josiah Reed
Omelletes and eggs user
Thomas Wright
I love this
Hunter Long
>>Do you encourage your players to make their characters evolve with what they live, adapt to what they experience? Yes? Who doesn't? >Do you favorise players that actually put effort in the evolution of their characters? Not ruleswise. If your character changes over time I may give their character arc more focus. >Do you include stat or rule changes for it ? If a player came to me wanting some rule changes for their character based on their experience I would certainly consider it, but they wouldn't get it for free. Maybe a special feat that they could pick up when they level up, maybe they can get some sort of power that has an equal penalty to it.