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talenlee · 5 months ago

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How To Be: Vivien Reid (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.

Magic: The Gathering is a fascinating nerd franchise. It is probably as a single entity responsible for the most paid high-level fantasy artists in the world making a living these days, and that art is being made in service of straight up enjoyable, indulgent nerd garbage, a sort of prestige pulp presentation. What’s more, thanks to the way that ideas of inclusion and diversity being marketably valuable, that means it’s also a game with a bunch of high profile fantasy art characters designed by top-level character designers to get that same high quality fantasy art that has multiple characters that are non-white, women, and non-white women. That gives us Vivien Reid, a character I can tell you about as a backstory about a lost world and a planet of ghosts, or as a selection of about four cards that are pretty good and one major story spotlight that absolutely sucked pants because nobody making it seemed to understand what would make the story good.

Examining Vivien Reid

Just to get things out of the way, up front, let’s all just take a moment to appreciate that Vivien Reid looks incredibly cool. As a character, the aesthetic of the character is just top down, ‘cool and good nature-archer badass character,’ and she’s got this added aesthetic element of ‘a bunch of cool ghost animals hanging around her.’ The point of a Planesewalker in Magic: The Gathering is that they’re characters who need to project a lot of identity immediately and then have that projection explained by mechanics. Vivien? Bow. Ghosts. Badass. Bang, that’s everything.

This is a problem, we’re going to get to it later. For now, let’s just put together our list.

Vivien Reid has a bow

She fights with ghosts.

She’s physically adept, she has all her arms and legs and presumably her fingers and toes.

If we look into the source material in Ikoria’s Sundered Bond, we can add something to her characterisation and personality, but that book sucks. Sorry, I mean, it is also extremely bad. It’s a story about a plane full of monsters where Vivien goes to befriend a cop who doesn’t even name his pet. Based on that, let’s forget Sundered Bond.

If we look at Vivien’s cards, we can add to it that she supports people, leading calls, and improving their ability to fight. Also, we can point to the way her abilities tend to work: Typically, Vivien gains loyalty and spends it in a big event. She can summon more monsters sometimes, she can start fights, sometimes, and she can wreck enemy weapons or magic, sometimes. There’s quite a bit here, like, there are many things you can fold together.

If we look at her voice and fictional presence in the game, as expressed by the flavour text on other cards, there’s an extra thing, which is… Vivien is really intelligent? Like, she has a lot of information in her head, and a really driven curiosity about things in biology. She’s on numerous pieces of cards doing flavour text that explains really specific details about animals, with a sort of Steven Irwinish ‘oh gosh isn’t this fun and funny’ kind of vibe. This voice also shows that she’s good at projecting her personality and her interests, which also suggests a brilliant charisma, too. There’s even some philosophical reflections on civilisation and power, which could be the foundation for a lot of wisdom.

Point is: Vivien has a surprisingly good explanation for a mental stats.

Bending Like A Reid

Hmm, let’s see about the things that are going to be easy and consistent with this particularly broadly spread set of build options. First of all, her equipment isn’t remarkable. Armour, just use the best you can. Use the gear that improves your non-armour defenses and works well for the class you wind up picking.

Weapon on the other hand, that gets thorny. Because obviously, Vivien uses a bow. But Vivien’s bow lets her fire ‘monsters’ at people, which isn’t what you can normally do with bows. You may not have ever noticed someone launch a witch or whatever with a longbow. For builds that use implements, normally I try to make sure the ‘weapon’ they use is actually an implement, usually by using Swordmage tricks. Thing is, bows? Nobody’s set that up already. There’s no feat obviously set up to say ‘hey, you can use a bow as an implement,’ which is weird.

All of which is to say, any implement based Vivien is going to use an implement that probably looks a lot like a bow. And to be fair, Vivien’s bow doesn’t behave like a real bow, it has no string.

Glossary Note: Conventionally, the term used in D&D for this mechanical package is race. This is the typical term, and in most conversations about this game system, the term you’re going to wind up using is race. For backwards compatibility and searchability, I am including this passage here. The term I use for this player option is heritage.

We can sort out Heritage pretty easily at least. Vivien isn’t a heritage that deviates strongly from the human base. In pure fundamentals, she’s a Human, they say she’s a Human, and that means that if you want to minimise the choices you have to make, she’s a human, take human, pick the stat you want and go for it.

Still, there is room for another detail here: The Wood Elf. Wood Elves are like Elves, get all the same features (with some swappable powers, you very much do not need to know about because you’re not going to take them), but their stat spread can be Wisdom and Dexterity. These are going to be the important stats to all the builds, because turns out those are both going to be important stats for my pre-built packages for you here.

Build 1 — The Bread

First of all, the simplest way to represent VIvien Reid is with a Ranger. She is a lady who walks through the forest, is connected to nature, and she shoots things with a dangerous longbow. Easy enough, just focus on the Ranger elements of her character. The bow ranger is less good than the two-weapon Ranger, but there’s almost nothing bad in the Ranger’s options.

The ghosts are a little more tricky to get. Again, operating on the assumption of the easiest way to do it, there’s the Fey Beast Tamer again, one of our all purpose powerful themes. If you want to play with more spirits, like to make sure it feels like there’s multiple elements going on, you can also multiclass Shaman with the feat Spirit Talker. Taking Spirit Talker lets you summon a Spirit Companion, which blocks a square, it’s a fine power (we’ll talk more about it) as a feat, and then you can use it with the Watcher Spirit to grant an attack to someone in a melee space.

Between the Fey Beast Companion (you’re taking the Owlbear right) and the Spirit, you can even block a fairly substantial bit of space on the battlefield. You just need to retheme your Baby Owlbear as something more appropriate to Vivien like a ghostly leopard or a ghostly jaguar or a ghostly ocelot or a ghostly puma or a ghostly caracal or a ghostly bobcat.

Build 2 — The Eggs

Vivien is literally referred to as a Shaman, and in 4th edition, the Shaman summons spirits that can stand in the way of enemeies and keep them from entering squares, supporting allies, and even granting attacks. The Shaman is a good Leader, it’s a powerful character, and like, I don’t say this often, but all the Shaman builds are cool and good. The Stalker brings damage, the Protector is a pseudotank and can even foist marks onto the Tank, and the Watcher can grant attacks. Straight up, pick one that looks like it looks good to you.

The way this works is that you summon a ghosty beast and plant it next to things, then attack through it. You can attack with your own melee weapons, but through the Spirit with the right magic items – meaning you effectively have two forms of melee reach. People can attack the Spirit to get rid of it, but that involves spending a bunch of damage on a thing you’ll just re-summon and they need to kill it in one hit or they achieve dick nothing. If you’re mostly focused on the animal spirit part of Vivien Reid, then this is the side to focus on. The Spirit Companion is like an unkillable wall, a thing that you can plant down in places and force people to move around it, or you.

The Shaman’s biggest weakness for representing Vivien Reid is that they don’t use bows. In fact, they kind of can’t use bows. In fact, I went through a lot of hoop jumping and tried to find any way that, using only extant game pieces, the Shaman could use bows. Turns out that nope.

If you go bard, or monk, you can do something like that? And those aren’t bad tricks to pull off? But the actual archery element, the idea of using ranged attacks as a Shaman, rather than implement attacks, is just a hard no. It’s weird to hit a wall like this in a game like 4th edition where so many options got SOME support.

Build 3 — The Breaded Eggs

Okay, so if the Ranger does the good bow attacks, and the Shaman brings the spirit…

Why not a Ranger and a Shaman? After all, the Ranger build suggested multiclassing Shaman. Rangers need Wisdom as a secondary stat, and Shamans can take advantage of Dexterity to have a good armour class in their lighter armour. What if you take a Ranger and Shaman and kind of … moosh them together?

I like Hybrids but Hybrids are complicated, and I think ‘approchability’ is the best thing I can give you, a stranger, in trying to build things for this game system that, statistically, you do not play. The thing with Hybrids is you can do some cute things by sticking together (say) two Defenders to have a wide variety of Defender options, or two Leaders to have some interesting combination of Leader options. Strikers it doesn’t tend to work, but there you have a Hybrid as an ‘interesting, but weird, representative of its role.’

What we’re looking at here for Vivien is a Hybrid Shaman-Ranger, where I would recommend making her a 80% Ranger, and the remaining 20% is just Shaman. Shaman has a lot of minor action powers, it has a lot of things it can do without spending much effort to support it, so if you focus on a good Dexterity to support your attack and a decent Wisdom to support the attacks there, you have a Ranger who can occasionally heal, block a square, and have utility powers like Claws of the Eagle or Spirit Sacrifice.

Now, this is asking to add the Shaman utilities to the absolutely gonzo arrangement of options for the Ranger, but importantly, it will feel like Vivien throwing ghosts at people.

Junk Drawer

You know what summons things and attacks at range…? The druid does that. But joking aside, there’s also the option of just using the Hunter, which is a ranged control type. It’s very simple and straightforward and doesn’t do anything weird there. I don’t like the idea of turning her into a Beast Mastery ranged attacking Ranger – I think that’s a very basic binch version of what Vivien is, but if you want something that’s as simple as possible, it’ll be that.

Conclusion

Vivien is a very cool character but that coolness is purely just projection. We’ve had a few stories with her that hold together more or less through ‘hey, she’s neat and look at how cool she looks.’ This is perfectly good for a character that exists to offer flavour to a mechanically complex strategy game. But it also means there’s a vibe that the character’s design projects, and the challenge present here is can you convey that with your build. The important thing is to look at the picture you’re using and ask yourself: If I show this to someone, are they going to go ‘oh, that’s your character? Dope.’ And not, ‘oh, is that your character? I didn’t know she could do that.’

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#DnD 4e #How to Be #Dungeons &amp; Dragons #Games #Making

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talenlee · 3 months ago

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How To Be: Kaedehara Kazuha (In 4e D&D)

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

His white hair flutters; the river spins in its slow and wending way around him, the wind dancing with its surface. The stone beneath him is cool, his clothing resting and barely shifting by his breath. Head forwards, he contemplates the world full of complicated feelings.

A sigh;

his lips part;

and he speaks, as if to the trailer;

There’s literally no difference between good things and bad things. You idiot. You absolute imbecile.

Let’s talk about a Genshin Impact character.

One of my favourite things about this series is the way that every time I kind of ‘use up’ a source material, there’s always more stuff that I can explore. There aren’t a lot of characters in Breaking Bad to work with, because once I lay out the concepts for handling Lalo Salamanca, that’s pretty much how everyone else in his universe works, and the rest is how to deliver a thematically appropriate vibe. For every time I move on from one source material, though, I also trip and fall down face-ass-forwards into a chasm of choices.

Like Gacha games!

And now I want to make it clear, this is not an article that wants to encourage you to play Genshin Impact. I would never do that. Genshin Impact is a free-to-play gacha game which uses every single trick in the book to encourage you to get into it because it’s free, then make the experience both very rewarding and then edge you with that reward opportunity unless you just, y’know, maybe, open your wallet and pay for something, which, y’know, it’s only five bucks, why not give it a shot and now they got ya. No, I do not want to talk about Genshin Impact because I want you to engage with it as a game. I think that you should engage with it the way all sensible people do, which is as a source of character designs for tabletop RPGs and pornography. There are whole wikis and image storage sites dedicated to the latter, and the former?

Well, that’s what this article is about.

Examining Kaedehara Kazuha

Alright, Kaedehara Kazuha. What can we tell about this guy without ever having to download the game and roll dice until I get to play around with him? First of all, there’s a wealth of material about this character on Youtube, and it is, best as I can tell, produced by a small army of Text-to-Speech shorts machines that seem to be unified in liking middling centrist language modes and also kinda hate women. Not great, but it does give us some information that’s useful about the mechanics for how Kazuha works.

First complication in transition: Genshin Impact is (basically) a solo-wandering adventure game, where you are nonetheless bringing a team of characters around and hot-swapping between them, in the vein of the one true text and execution of this system, the 1989Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. You run around as a single character but any time you want the other character to do things, your character bszhworps into another character. Cool! This means that you get a team based game without any of that inconvenience of a team, I guess.

Now, this stuff is all presented in wikis and player guides, and that, that’s the language of idiot game mechanics. That’s easy. It even gives us a play pattern, and we can work with that. Kazuha notably is a dude with a sword who moves fast, has jumps and a kinda-teleport. There’s a thing he does that pulls enemies in, and he can then plunge down and hit them all, and another move that lets him turn an area into a controlled zone that does damage over time. That’s what I can parse from the extensive spreadsheet that serves as a mechanical wiki page for this li’l guy.

Step aside from that though, let’s look at the lore, and oh.

Oh, no.

Oh this is a sequence of every event that happens to this character.

That’s not really what I’d look into as a character? Like, a characterisation tends to be less about ‘what they did in every sequence of events,’ but rather ‘what is their inner life and where does it explain the way they make choices they do,’ and ‘what are the conflicting wants this character has to balance?’ but that’s okay, because it’s a gacha game.

Kazuha is essentially, a boy who lost his family, because they were killed, and now he’s fighting the villainous usurper of that location. I dunno, you get some wandering prince vibes, but also he’s a samurai, you can call that shot how you like it. Notable, though, and this is very important: He is very hot.

The Basics

For all of these builds there are some unifying traits. Kazuha uses a katana, which is a one-handed sword you can wield two handed. He doesn’t use a shield and he doesn’t mix up what his off-hand is doing. To this end, I view this as a two-handed sword. If a weapon group comes up later that really, really wants to use a one-handed weapon, that’ll slot in, whatever, for now.

Greatsword, if you don’t want to spend feats picking up a special weapon, or a Fullblade if you do. The gap between these two isn’t actually that high, but you might find a build with more feats at a lower tier. If you are the kind of player who likes Brutal weaponry or ways to get the Brutal effect, fullblades are a little bit better, but either way. Best big sword you can afford, but don’t chase them very hard.

Armour-wise Kazuha doesn’t seem to wear ‘armour’ as you’d define it in most things, but he is wearing an arm guard, shoulder guard, and boots. Saying he is ‘armoured’ isn’t inappropriate, and you can interpret it as heavy armour (because there are people in his setting running around with nothing) or light armour (because it covers barely any damn thing). No big ask on this front, but also, no unifying pattern; it’ll probably be determined by the class you build into.

Heritage is similar, in that you’ll probably be picking up something that looks pretty blend-in human that has the stats you need for the class you pick. Humans, half-elves, elves, deva, eladrin, those are all pretty likely options depending on the stat you need. Things where you’re meant to stand out as a member of that heritage, like tieflings, goliaths, dwarves and dragonborn, probably not. That informs our class choices too, so we won’t be looking for powerful heritage synergies.

What we do want as a point of synergy is that hey, Kazuha does wind based stuff and part of that wind based stuff is that he can pull enemies around. Why, it’s time for us to bust open the Mark of Storm stuff. To simplify, if you’re using an attack that does lightning damage and you have the Mark of Storm, you get to slide people. These slides can then be amplified and synergised with – if you say, have an attack that knocks someone prone, if you do it with a lightning weapon, you can then afterwards, slide them out of melee, so on their turn, they can’t just get up and punch you – they have to get up and spend an action getting close enough to punch you. There’s more in the Thor article so linked.

Finally, weirdly, there’s no strong vibe as to how Kazuha does things. While he has a poetic nature and contemplative soul, there’s not a lot of sign that he’s a druid or a wizard or a cleric or something. I don’t get the impression he does what he does because he petitions wind spirits, and if he does, it doesn’t show up on any wikis. This means there’s not a strong power source, but there is a visible effect. It seems a bit unlikely that Kazuha is a straight martial character, but it also seems unlikely that he casts spells and keeps a spellbook.

Finally, one thing that might be nice to consider as you advance these characters is the feat Heavy Blade Opportunity in Paragon. This feat means that at-will powers (where all three builds have some goods) can become good ways to ruin enemy turns, which works well with the Mark of Storm stuff and plays into the theme of ‘I put the enemies where I want them.’

Mudamudamudamuda

First port of call is a Battlemind. The Battlemind is a build that wants Constitution and Charisma, which means that you get to be a physically dangerous (and tough!) character, without the character needing to be obviously ‘strong.’ For a character that’s meant to invoke the feeling of being a wind-blown expert samurai, the Battlemind lets you have ‘strength’ in combat terms, without ‘strength’ in the vein of being able to dead-lift a horse.

The Battlemind has a lot of ways to fork outwards, especially since it has pushes and pulls of its own. Consider the interaction between Mark of Storm and Lodestone Lure: the lure can yank an enemy four squares over to stand next to you, and then you can use Mark of Storm to slide them a square away from you. If you get the item Rushing Cleats, you can even do this without augmenting – the cleats improve the pull on Lodestone Lure and the slide on Mark of Storm!

The normal thing I see people look to pick up with Battleminds, and the power I find the most exciting in this context, is Brutal Barrage. Brutal Barrage is a cool power that lets you multi-attack and that means it interacts cutely with vulnerability or on-hit effects. I don’t know, though, if it really feels like it interacts properly with Kazuha’s vibe. It’s definitely a lot of small attacks in a row, while Kazuha seems to be more likely to do single big hits.

And of course, obligatory: Battleminds have the level 7 pair of attacks, Golden Claw and Lightning Rush, which both are good for controlling enemy behaviour, but are also great for representing a character who moves very fast and interrupts enemies.

The Technically Divine

Big weapon? An interest in sliding and positioning enemies? Magical but not spellcastery vibes? Have you seen my friend the Avenger?

The Avenger is an extremely lightly armoured melee damage dealer (asterisk but c’mon, it’s mostly melee) that doesn’t rely on the strength stat and drives with force of personality. You would have to give Kazuha a personality to make that work, but I believe in you.

The Avenger doesn’t pull in large groups as readily as the other builds might, but that’s a function of it being a melee damage dealer that wants to focus on single things at a time.

What you get in exchange, though is an incredible consistency and independence. Avengers can have huge armour classes in basically cloth, they can pick a single target and make their life miserable, and with the at-will attack Overwhelming Strike you’ll be able to close in on an enemy, knock them back and slide them around.

Also, Avengers fly! That benefits from the flying ability Mark of the Storm gives you!

Ardent Admiration

These are considerations of Kazhua that build off the aesthetics of his appearance. Boy, sword, light armour, all those common traits are present in his character design.

Thing is, if you look at the advertising material it refers to him as a support character who improves the damage of your team. A melee combat character who’s highly mobile, even aerially so, who supports and deals damage with an actual weapon?

We’re going to the Ardent.

I must be careful here, because I love the Ardent so much, and I must not fall into the trap of just presenting a build I would like because I like them. For example, there’s the power Forward Thinking Cut which lets you basically teleport into an enemy’s face and drag along two allies. If you have to take Fey Beast Tamer and claim your baby owlbear looks like Paimon to continue the vibes, it’ll be worth it.

The Ardent also gets to benefit from Heavy Blade Opportunity, if you take it. Being able to daze someone mid-action with an opportunity attack like Impetuous Ruin is very cool.

Junk Drawer

I tease a little about Kazuha as a character, but I want to make it clear, the fact that the character is so general in what he’s about works for this kind of exercise. I could make a case that a really cool build for the character is a Cavalier, and treat your mount as a mystical swirl around you, to play with speed. Also, the way he can make a zone his own is evocative of the Warden.

Conclusion

This has been a rare kind of article like this where this is one of the most over-documented over-arted character I could ever try to engage with. This is a character who isn’t just well known but who has an almost unnecessary volume of very specific kinds of art, and that’s without even delving into wallpapers and fanart.

Kazuha is a character with a practical cottage industry around him, where I can go onto youtube and find drama videos about a gacha character that all have to make twenty minutes to thirty seconds worth of material out of ‘this boy exists.’ Plus, Genshin Impact is such a fascinatingly deep well of characters that are simultaneously visually delightful and characterisationally bland as paper. It’s a really interesting source material to build off and I had to resist the urge to go through and pick up more boys from this game just to fill out the year.

As a character, Kazuha strikes me as someone it would be very fun to play, with a lot of interesting potential, that then struggles to be expressed in the more formulaic space of a gacha game’s narrative procession. I can imagine the kinds of emotional needs and wants that rest underneath that extremely chill demeanour that could be a valuable source of character drama in a story.

You should steal him and make your own and see what about him sings to you.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Genshin Impact #How to Be #Dungeons &amp; Dragons #Games

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