How To Be: Samus Aran (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.
Really gotta specify that ‘in 4e D&D’ on this one.
When we talk about How To Be, the point has always been to take characters that are interesting in some particular way then see how we can carry that vibe into the creative space of 4th Edition D&D. What we’ve seen, when we try and make things like a real-world-alike gangster or a robot dinosaur, is that there are some concepts that seem very easy to translate into the play space that really aren’t. Zelgadis is a D&D character and he was very challenging to translate to the game just because he’d already been filtered through another set of different game rules. Minfilia showed us that when a character leaves large parts of their method and ideology as blank slates, there’s a challenge creating something in the space that fulfills that character.
Extremely defined and extremely vague characters, in both directions, are hard.
Anyway, let’s look at Samus Aran.
Shirt 23.04 — Can’t Lose
I need very little encouragement to make some things. Over on my Patreon (where you can sign up for as little as a buck to give my brain good chemicals), I suggested this shirt design as a potential one for this month. One person went ‘I like it,’ and so I went and did it.
I was aiming at evoking a university sports team logo (which I looked at a lot of) and the DOOM logo from 1993 (which I also looked at a lot of, but for different reasons). This design involved learning a lot of things about how to make 3d-looking shaped text, which is how I got this eventual ‘curving’ effect — it involves the Lens Distortion tool in GIMP.
The popped text above and below the logo was made first in a vector program and then also made 3d in GIMP, too. Honestly, looking at this piece I’m pretty proud of how many pieces of this involved developing or refining a new skill to do something, or built on a skill I’ve gotten so used to I didn’t even conspicuously think of it.
I kinda want to get a hoodie or coffee mug with this on it for my dad but I think he, a preacher, might balk at the actual pentagram.
Anyway, you can get this design in black star or white star versions.
Horny vs Spite
When explaining creativity to newcomers, I express the idea that everyone who makes something makes it out of one of two possible motivating factors, when viewed broadly enough. The line is:
Everyone who ever made anything made it out of one of two possible motivators; horny, or spite.
This maxim serves to get the conversation started. You either wanted the thing to exist that didn’t exist yet, or they were mad at the thing for not existing the way they wanted it to. These two driving could also be seen both in terms of just ‘wants’ – but I think that when you simplify it that far, you leave the listener without a valuable handle, a way to grapple with the idea.
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.03 — Planetary
This month, for phd reasons, game development took a backseat. But don’t worry, I still have something I dedicated time to looking at, even if I didn’t get to get it to a playtesting table (and I may yet get it to the table in the next few weeks, thanks to uni work).
But most of all, I think this game presents a very exciting looking form factor:
Yeah, right? Like get a load of that. It’s a bunch of planets, made out of cards. Each turn, players are going to be laying cards that expand on the identities of these planets, and each time they do that, the cards change how players may value those planets. You may occupy a place that’s rich in gold and eggs, haha, but now you see, I have discovered this region of the planet that reveals it smells like dinosaur farts. Do you want to populate the planet that smells like dinosaur farts? I didn’t think so, farty.
Continue Reading →4e: Dangling Claws
The weapon system in 4e D&D is full of specific keyworded mechanical distinctions for each grouping of weapons in a way that’s designed to add depth to the play experience of any given type of weapon. While in earlier systems, axes and swords and staffs all could be reduced to a mathematical formula representing their damage output over time and therefore, inevitably, the greatsword won, 4e weapons have two different ways they can feel different. The first is just how the weapons work, period, where anyone who picks up a weapon of that type will notice this effect or feats that reference weapons by their category to indicate that the training for that particular weapon enables a different way for that weapon to work. In the first group you have weapon effects like Brutal or Heavy Thrown, and in the second, things like Hammer Rhythm or Axe Expertise. The result is that the weapon system is genuinely interesting to engage with and even though there is a clear hierarchy, the boundaries between the tiers of that hierarchy are not so steep, not so absolute.
There is nonetheless, an area where the weapon system does stagger, though, and that’s natural weapons. The base game features almost nothing with a natural weapon, and the one option you have for it in the starter set is the Gnoll, with a heavily errata’d mess of a feat to get your claws dirty. What’s more, the feat is a bit wonky and weird because, first, you’re spending a whole feat to get the weapon, but you’re also getting a weapon that is only about as good as a short-sword and it interferes with abilities that require you to not be wielding a weapon in your off-hand.
I think that’s dumb; I can treat my fist like a weapon at will, but the game doesn’t then say that I must always have a weapon in my off-hand even when that hand is empty. This indicates to me a simple hole in the way 4e handles natural weapons, and how it makes them available.
So I fixed them.
Continue Reading →Shirt 23.03 – Sandy Hook Monday
When you engage in a work of satirical criticism, you need to approach it with a clarity of purpose that indicates to your audience the moral framework with which you do it, so that at no point it can be construed as uncritical support for the thing you are satirising, even moreso when contending with media designed to be consumed extremely quickly and uncritically. This is on my mind as I put a lot of work into how to draw a stupid cartoon of Alex Jones as a Garfield character, who absolutely sucks.
I made this design to be a sticker. Alex Jones makes a bunch of stuff in the form of stickers, things you can place around the world to direct attention towards his shitty advertising stream. Alex Jones, let me be clear, is an abusive cult leader who is trying to exploit en masse a community that he also never wants to interact with. Right now, he’s clocking on with a tediousness that speaks of the ‘hilarious’ office garfield strips about hating mondays, and that was the genesis of this design. He sucks, and he’s banal, and the things about him that suck are also pathetic.
This design didn’t feature the background at first. The ‘Hate mon days’ logo used to be ‘HATE ‘MON DAYS,’ as in ‘hate them on days.’ There didn’t used to be as many stackies of paper, nor the big Sandy Hook bill. But I had to add to it to try and make sure it didn’t just look like I was at best neutral about how much this guy sucks.
I’m proud of it, I think it looks unmistakably like Alex Jones if you’re familiar with him, and if you want, you can have it as a sticker, a pin, a shirt, a hat, a coffee mug, or even a magnet!
A Game I Don’t Know How To Make
I was asked over on my patreon to consider how to make a game like:
A game that can, at least *sort of*, help people who may not be incredibly familiar with each other grow to know each other/grow closer.
Now, this is the kind of open prompt that can invite an answer that I think may feel a bit nice and homey but also, feels a bit of a bullshit dodge from me, the person providing the answer. Because, just as every game is educational, every game gives you an opportunity to understand someone, every game gives you a chance to grow to know someone else and get closer to them. And that’s true, but it’s meaninglessly true, it’s trivially true. If you asked that question, if you asked for that kind of game, then chances are telling you ‘the answer was inside you all along’ feels like I’m just avoiding the responsibility my implied expertise offers.
Plus, this person gives me money.
Which makes me feel decidedly assholey about bouncing on my responsibilities here.
With that in mind, I dedicated time to work out an answer to this kind of game idea, and I got an answer but it’s an answer my current skillset doesn’t really address. I think, knowing what I do about what webpages can do, that this is probably a game that a very skilled person could make run out of, like, a webpage, but I do not know how to approach it.
Let’s just talk about the game as a design and my mentality behind it.
Continue Reading →CoX: Riprap
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
“Ey! Ey you! What’s your matter, eh!?”
They say that Sharkhead kids bite first. It’s a rough town with rougher industries, overseen by outsiders from St Martial and Grandville. Fact is, Sharkhead’s people have to grow up quick and grow up mean, scavengers and scroungers, trying to find some way to wind up in one of the least bad lives.
Fallon’s day job was to shift crates. And the most common thing they shifted was coral from many mining operations around Sharkhead. Do it long enough, inhale enough, and you’d wind up…
Changing.
When Fallon found they could shapeshift into a coral-armoured coralax, they did what anyone else in the Etoile would do with deniability: Go smashing their enemies, while keeping it hidden.
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.02 – Bakarina
Okay, okay, I need to do another one of these posts, the ones where I talk about the monthly prototype for February, that was Smooch Month, okay, that means it’s a standard template at this point, complaining about how hard it is to make smoochy games. Oh wait, what do you mean this time I got inspired and had a cool idea and wanted to build on that? Well, snap, what did I make?
Inspired by My Next Life As A Villainess, All Roads Lead To Doom, I devised something that was really nagging at me as a problem. See, smoochy games don’t feel to me like they benefit from being competitive (mostly). I was stuck on the question of, hey, how do I make a romantic narrative game that focuses on a relationship and choices that lead to that, that doesn’t pit players at odds with one another? How then, do I make a cooperative game about smooching?
I did it!
Continue Reading →Shirt 23.02 – Steddie Things Shirt
First up, the design! On a shirt!
Second, the design on its own so you can look at it!
This design is something of a proof of concept. At first, the idea was that this was an idea I could port to a lot of different sets, where an identifying Ship Term (in this case ‘Steddie’, but I also considered Soriku) is surrounded by a love heart of phrases that are meant to relate to experiencing these characters in their lore space. And this is a design type I want to make more of (now I have this first one done), but at the moment, this design took a long enough time to make that my ambition to make a bunch of these ran into a wall.
The thing that may surprise you is how hard this list of text to add to this turned out to make. To make this kind of word clouding work well, I need a big variety of textwith different weights, and I had to construct this cloud myself. That meant that I also had to make the title in the middle the way I chose to. If I needed 300+ words with different appearances and weight, I was able to get to a whopping fifty.
I like this design! I like how much better I can make the next one, too.
If you want this design, it comes in three flavours, the mixed colour version, the pure red version, and a pure white version.
CoX: Astray
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
Bryce Oxton was a biology nerd in the Kings Row Community College’s Access Program for supertech lab qualifications. After school, he volunteered his time at the Praetorian shelters as a social worker, using his niche expertise to help design containment and care for super science Powers Division problems. That’s why he was there in the lab that wasn’t his, dealing with the accident that wasn’t his fault. That’s how he wound up the host of the corrosive, toxic, aggressive STRAY symbiote.
He didn’t choose to be a tentacle catboy – tentacle catboy power was thrust upon him.
And, he has found, tentacle catboy powers bring tentacle catboy responsibilities.
Continue Reading →The Mind And The Heart (but the card games)
If you don’t already know what it is, The Mind is a 2018 card game with a mechanical system so seemingly simple as to seem nonexistent. There’s a deck of cards that just show a bunch of numbers. You shuffle up the cards, deal some of them out, and then, without communicating, each player lays out the cards they have, into a stack, in order. And you may think ‘that sounds easy’ but it’s fiendishly engaging because you’re all playing into the same stack and the only information people are getting from one another is the timing of the playing of the cards. There’s more to it than that, but the core of the game is just that: playing cards from your hand based on your ability to determine that you think it’s the lowest available card, with only intuitive communication and timing to assist you.
I find this system really interesting because it really does put paid to how simple a game system can be when there’s machinery holding onto the memory and the game state – the cards communicate for the players, they remember for the players and the game personalises itself really quickly. If I can play The Mind with my mum and sister that’s a different game with different invisible communication and timing than the game to the one I play with my niblings. It creates the phenomenon of people feeling psychic and feeling clever that they managed something, but also not at all feeling hard done by when they fail because the game is so hard when viewed outside of those moments of intuition.
Hearts, if you’re not familiar with it, is a trick-taking game, a few hundred years old, but differing from most of the well-known examples of the genre because it’s a trick evasion game. In Hearts, you do the standard trick taking game things, where you need to play out cards into a trick to folllow suit, but if you wind up winning a trick where hearts are the suit, you eat a penalty. This means strategically the best way to play the game is to try and avoid ever winning any tricks, because the penalties from the hearts overwhelm any points you could be getting by any other means.
And the two games just coincidentally are named while I think about simple card games about romance.
Rewriting In Your Voice
Writing is a challenge. It takes a blank page and then it involves scrawling onto it whatever words you want to put there. It’s been addressed in a lot of different ways. One of my favourite ways to describe it is that the act of writing is a violent one; where violence is the curtailing of options through force, a writer takes a blank page of infinite possibility and reduces it down to just one. Another way to see writing described is as a form of agony; one merely stares at a blank page until your forehead starts bleeding, the line goes. I don’t think these descriptions are necessarily trying to describe a particular kind of pain, but it’s a sentiment that I think is easy to reflect. Fanfiction tumblr, I’ve seen in particular, is filled with people who wish to murmur of the dreadful agonies that come from a want to write and a lack of ability, time, focus, concentration or will to do so.
Continue Reading →Game Concept — Boyfriend Material
I default to tabletop games when I make games. It’s the skillset I have and it doesn’t involve, typically, reaching into a new skill space to try and develop something. But it’s not the only system I’ve ever used, and there is a design that I’ve had kicking around in my head for an idea of a few different visual novels, or maybe even RPGmaker style games. One of them that I think has a perfect name to go with its concept is Boyfriend Material.
January’s Game Project: Adventure Town!
Adventure Town is a roll-and-write game about running a town that adventurers pass through, a type of thing that I seem to find really fascinating.
Gunna level with you: I had a lot of writing to do this month. I work on it a little bit at a time, trying to find time to make pushes to finish it, especially since it seems to me to be a really easy project to just get finished, but tell you what: I haven’t had the time in January. This is life, and part of my life in January was a combination of helping someone move, a convention, and a lot of writing for the most important project of my life.
Adventure Town suffered. But it didn’t get nothing done. Particularly, what got done was a very important thing, in my mind: I stopped trying to make perfect mechanics, and managed to instead, get some good mechanics down.
Continue Reading →Shirt 23.01 – I’m Fine, And You?
First up, the design on a shirt.
Second, the design in a png so you can read it.
And third, the raw text of the shirt so you can read it even more clearly:
The text ‘I’m fine, and you’ interrupting a litany of text in the background struck through that reads:
In late November 2022, a misprinted label on a pair of bootlegged boots introduced the world to the name and credits for GONCHAROV, a ‘greatest Mafia movie ever made’ which then caught on for what was roughly one long weekend of Tumblr engaging in an extensive game of ‘yes and’ that involved improvising screencaps, scene summaries, movie posters, and a truly impressive amount of sapphic fanfiction that was derided then by non-tumblr users as ‘just tumblr’ even as the joke spread all the way to Martin Scorsese, its supposed director himself.
If you’d like this design you can check it out in black or white text!
CoX: Swivel
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
In all technicality, the man known once as Vice Swithin doesn’t exist. He never attended public school, never was recruited into the military at a young age, and was never court-martialed. Officially, he didn’t spend over a year in prison being constantly the subject of assault attempts due to his lean frame and youthful looks, being constantly upgraded in security due to his self-defense capability leading to injured inmates.
Such high-risk prisons were certainly not combed for inmates experiencing minimal deviance from a genetic mean to find strong candidates capable of surviving a protracted full-body implant and neuroconnective surgery. Medical records don’t exist for a process that wired him from heart to head, that upped his reaction time, accelerated his thought process and kept the young man wired on a personal basis alongside the firewalls and flamewars of wireless internet.
One life, redacted.
Continue Reading →Speed and Haste and Waste
No transcript here, I’m afraid, this entirely came off the top of my head and had only one retake when the dog barked. Oh and right at the end when I stumbled on ‘idyll.’
How To Represent Speed?
When working with videogames, there’s a a lot of different ways to represent speed, and a lot of the challenges they present start out as technical. Infamously on the PC, getting fast scrolling on a room to create the impression of single large spaces the player could move through was a big technical hurdle; outrun used a camera trick and moving single silhouettes, and the VR push of a few years ago (is it reasonable to suggest that VR is now over?) featured a whole host of ways to grapple with the question of duping a human brain that’s very very good at recognising when it’s standing still and convincing it that it’s not.
But that’s videogames, an entire form of games that I don’t really make. I could try, that may be interesting, but anyway for now.
How do we get to represent speed in tabletop game places, with human interlocutors? Have some ideas! Go go go!
Continue Reading →Speed of Thought
There is a fundamental unfairness to the speed with which I create words and the speed with which you, probably consume them.
MTG: December 2022’s Custom Cards
Hey, it’s a new year, but there’s still some business from last year to tidy up. No-Effort November yielded a bunch of cards with no themes, obtained by grabbing everything out of my year’s total collected work that I cut from other lists or other ideas. Simply put, you got a grab bag of ‘huh, why not?’ designs.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Prototype 22.12 — The Wrapup
Well, time to take a loss.
Continue Reading →Decemberween 2022: NixiiiE
It’s another Nixie Posting!
Nixie is of course an influence on my work, partly because she’s my adorable disrepectful internet family, but also because this year has featured some super dope Nixie Content.
I’m not linking to twitter, because
uh
Twitter, right now.
But that’s okay because what Nixie has done this year that excites me the most is seizing the pedagogic means of production. What she’s been doing has included amongst other things, learning languages and that includes things like moving, something which sucks at the best of times.
But twice this year, Nixie has come to me to ask my help making a game. And then when I told her methods and tools I’d use, she did that thing that I always love to see: She went ‘okay, I got it,’ then she went and made the game to her specifications.
These games were then cool enough that she showed them to her teachers and those teachers went and told the class about them.
Twice this year, I’ve watched live-streamed performances of Nixie at choir. One of them was because she wanted me to save a video for her, and one of them was because, well… it was her recital. It was a choir performance she did, and she invited me to come watch, so I woke up and sat back and changed my day’s plans to make sure I was there to talk to her about it.
Is it weird to say I was proud of her? I know I clapped at my computer. That seems weird. Oh well.
Now of course, you already knew I think Nixie is great and adorable and sweet and definitely cool. And I’m really laying it on thick here just so I can bully her with reminding her of how wonderful she is. But the point is the longer this article is, the more of it she’ll have to read as she gets more and more annoyed at me.
See, she’s also a good writer, but without the threads to link to, I’m not about to be able to prove it. So that’s why this year, around when Twitter Looked Volatile, I made a cheeky little move to contact her and ask her to give some input to an article I was writing about one of her favourite movies, Air America.
And then, to my amazement, she and I made one of the same jokes in our writing, without any input from one another, and it’s an obscure bloody joke.
T-Shirt: Inspiring Threat
Hey, you know those ‘live laugh love’ and ‘in this house we do hugs’ kind of inspirational posts? Those things have this weird threatening energy to them. I’m often struck by how the aesthetic of them deforms the message, where how they become unsettling just by the way they are composed and all it takes is the right mix of unimpressively hacky fonts to take a message with some meaning and make it demand scrutiny.
Anyway, a long time ago I heard at a draft table, you can’t make it go faster but you can make it go slower, you know, as a way to scold players who were trying to rush other players making decisions. Somewhat recently, I rewrote it, a permutation of it:
I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot in the context of, uh… well
You look at twitter over there?
It’s a phrase I like the more I turn it over, because it’s both an impetus to be kind (think about the ways your impetus to act may cause harm) and also direction to recognise that some things are damaged beyond salvaging (and maybe you should be spending your energy tearing down bad things).
Anyway, uhhh, you can probably get masks, shirts, and stickers before Christmas, if that’s a thing you want?
MTG: November 2022’s Custom Cards
Ah, No-Effort November is over. But the cards of the month were made the month earlier, which is why despite it being No Effort November, there was, in fact, effort for these cards! How dreadful! But the theme of the month – I’m sure you’ve already worked it out, right?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Prototype 22.12 — The 2022 Prototypeapalooza
Just wait someone’s going to tell me ‘palooza’ is racist or something.
This year each month I dedicated some time – varying in scope and effort – to prototyping a new game. Of these games, two of them got to what I consider ‘made prototype’ stage, where I have a physical game that I can hold in my hand and share with people for proper playtesting. And that’s cool!
But I decided what I wanted to do this month, this December, was to look at the games I got, in what stages they are at, and determine what can I do with them in this last month to place orders for the rest in the hopes they’ll be available and my decks will be clear for next year to continue this process.
Presented then is a list of the games, based on the order I want to talk about them.
Continue Reading →Prototype 22.11 – DIY Touhou
Doing something different this time.
I am first up going to tell you what I wound up making and show you some examples of it. I’m going to explain where it’s at, and that’s all going to come before the fold. The full diary, which is a repost of material written over on my Cohost, is going to follow after. And we’re going to talk about sites like Cohost at some point in the next month or so, wew lord.
What I made this month is a prototype game design for a simple card game with a homogenous play form, focusing on hand management built on a classic mathematical puzzle you might see in the games Spot It and Dobble. The game has room to expand mechanically if it needs it, with each card having room for a rule or game mechanic to add to each character.
The game is composed of a deck of functionally similar cards; each card has a unique front and back. Each front face shows an alchemical summoning circle that describes a reading of a calamitous time, and a description of that in a set of keywords. The back face shows a magical girl from a mystical other realm (with art from the Touhou AI art bot) who represen two of those alchemical symbols and two of those key words.
The first turn of the game, you deal a number of these cards so their summoning circle faces are visible to the table, then deal each player a hand of magical girls, back-face-up. The deck is passed around from player to player, who get to do things to manage their hands, while they try and build a hand of cards that lets them ‘claim’ one of the quests as done.
That’s the game play experience, and cycle. I like that this needs no special components, and if it’s put in to a tuck box, it won’t need tons of setup. I also like that this prototype has room to develop: Each card could have a unique mechanical rule, a flavour or name joke, and the list of adjectives and alchemical symbols gives a lot of room for non-meaningful differentation.
Good idea, I like it, I did not get the time to order a prototype, but thanks to practice on Straight Outta Tucson, I have a tool available to me that can make turning this from ‘list of filenames’ to the actual cards very conveniently.
Dev diary follows!
Continue Reading →T-Shirt: List Jokes
It’s November, we’re all tired, have some shirt designs I dreamt up while I was doing the shopping and picking through cauliflower
Here’s a joke about how Final Fantasy 14 kills off cool women characters for no good reason. Here’s a version with white text, and one with black text!
Here’s a joke about Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Here’s a version with white text, and one with black text!
Here’s a joke about how we must sound to people outside of the fandom! Here’s a version with white text, and one with black text!
Game Pile: Straight Outta Tucson
Desert Bus was last week! It’s a cool event that raises money for the Childs Play charity, by playing the game Desert Bus. The more you donate to the event, the longer the event runs, and that means they have to play the game longer and if you weren’t aware, Desert Bus is a shockingly boring game.
What this means is that the whole streaming event is someone playing a dreadfully boring game and doing anything they can to be less bored – with their friends in the room. It’s a festival of events of busking, comedy performances, dramatic readings, a few D&D games, quiz games and also kinda a long-reaching slow-rolling combination of a con and a podcast. And mixed in amongst that there’s other events, including a game jam!
And I submitted a game to it this year!
The game is called Straight Outta Tucson, and it’s a simple little affair; it’s completely free to download and play, and we may be seeing about putting it up on some print-on-demand services as a cost-and-shipping-only option if you want a professionally made copy.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about what was involved in making it.
Continue Reading →2,000 Days
This post marks the point at which press.exe has had a daily post every day for 2,000 days.
Continue Reading →How To Be: The Very Best, Like No-one Ever Was (Dun Dun D-Dun) (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.
You know, it might just be because I’ve been thinking about pets and subordinate characters, what if the inspiration for your character in a 4e campaign is being someone who has for some reason, a monster that works at their side? What kind of character can produce monsters out of nowhere – like they can just pull them out of their pocket?
