How To Be: Cyclops (In 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
I’m always left wondering, month to month if I can come up with an interesting example for How To Be, where I wonder when I’m going to feel like I’m running out of options. For GDQ I was considering a list of ‘speedrunning iconic characters considered, then rejected the entire list because I realised that, once again, I could imagine a way to represent that character, a way to capture the essence. Plus, there’s always different veins of narrative, different types of stories to consider like this.
A long time ago, when I first started playing RPGs, a friend (hi BigAngry) said to me, the thing with RPGs is that once you play in them you’ll notice the way that literally every single piece of fan media presents you a list of toys, things you can always look at, then point to and say ‘I want that.’
And I thought about another friend who doesn’t care about RPGs, and I thought: Yeah. Let’s do Cyclops.
