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talenlee · 2 months ago

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How To Be: A Bunch Of People From Arcane (Season 1) (In 4th Edition 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.

This one gets really big and sprawling pretty quickly, here, hey, we’re going to talk about the characters from Arcane. Oh, and necessarily:

Spoiler Warning: I’m going to talk about Arcane season 1. Doing so I’m going to imply that I didn’t think much of Arcane season 2.

Examining Arcane

I’m looking at season 1 of arcane. Season 2 doesn’t bring anything to the story that’s interesting, to me. It’s a single season of television, it’s nine episodes long, and I really enjoyed those episodes. Where that series took the paper plate puppets of the League of Legends mascot combat franchise, a range of Sanics The Hedgehogs but they’re actually hot, and then used the general outlines of those characterisations to tell a story about class disparity and the coherence of morally acceptable violences.

Show rules.

Arcane is a series with a bunch of vibes, but those vibes have needs. It’s a magepunk story, where there’s a lot of things that are meant to evoke the look of a modern city, the conveniences of them, but with magic rather than an industrial people-population based, economic exploitation model to get you there. It’s a place where big systems are still moving against one another and the movements of individuals can make or break the change between stories but none of what they do gets to transform or erase those systems. Economies and nations and the movement of wars and the economic engines of those wars, they’re still present, but you still can make a difference in your life, for the people around you, and maybe carve out a little well of light in a great big unfeeling void. A point of light, if you will. It’s also a way you get wizards with shotguns and railroads powered by crystals happening, and turns out that that’s a great vibe for a 4th edition game.

But Arcane is also a limited run series, with nine good episodes that I liked and watched, and in that, there’s a bunch of characters, some really good mascot costumes you can jam onto a D&D character, with wonderful, cool, exciting cool art that you can use as an inspiring base for what you’re trying to bring to a table.

The Basics

Look, we’re doing something different today. This isn’t about the builds I’d hand you, with a deliberately vague chain of possibilities that you can snap together the way you want. This is going to be about how I would approach three of these characters that I like, and consider the ways I’d handle them when I’m pitching to a DM. This is as much about telling people ‘here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s what I’m looking for.’

Do you do that? Do you approach a DM and say ‘hey, here’s stuff I want in the setting, can you use this?’ Not every DM is going to want that kind of thing but being able to be specific is really useful. In a game I ran I asked the players to each give me three secrets about their character that could be fair game for me to use as hooks in the narrative, and those wound up being wildly varied in their outcome. Being given ways to connect to the aims of a character is really useful.

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.

Viciously Violent Vindication

Vi is the most obivous high-profile character to make from Arcane. This is reasonable, because she rules, and because she is dripping with main character swagger. There’s an obvious way of engaging with the world (physical violence), a robust set of needs (she’s not a big thinker or technical problem solver), and even an obvious character flaw (she fucks cops).

Vi is obviously strong, and she’s into pulling attention onto her. While she may use magical technology to do more, she’s not going to know rituals or rites. This isn’t to say she’s stupid – she’s actually quite cunning, as highlighted in the first fight we see her in, where she criticises a teammate for giving up information they don’t have to and shouldn’t.

Fighter, Battlerager talent

Heritage, I’d grit my teeth, um and ahh about it and take Goliath. If the DM asks me otherwise, I’d ask how flexible they are about how Dwarves stand. Failing that, I’d take Human, because ultimately, Vi is a baseline member of the culture she’s in. Where every major character is ‘a human,’ Vi being a human is fine.

Main stats are Strength and Constitution, with Wisdom as third. Intelligence and Dexterity are not very important, which means that her Armour Class and Reflex defense are not going to be great, but we’re also hoping to sponge through nasty effects wiiiith…

Take powers with the invigorating keyword. With the Battlerager Talent, that means on each attack, she’ll be getting double her Constitution modifier in Temporary Hit Points.

Weapon choice is another place to talk to the DM. See, Vi classically uses a big pair of smashy fists. They’re not really like hands though, because hands are capable of grabbing things, and Vi is much more just punching things with these huge hands. I’d talk to the DM and ask them, if the weapon occupies both my hands and makes a huge impact, can I treat it as a Mordenkrad. That’s a Superior hammer that deals 2d6 damage, at Brutal 1.

The result is a tank character, who runs around in light armour, and who blocks with her face. Vi doesn’t really defend herself as much as she walks face-first into being punched.

Then the questions I’d throw at the DM:

The place the story’s going to start needs to be importrant to her, like she’s a kind of locally known character. Not necessarily heroic or famous, but like, the toughest girl at the bar she frequents. Is the campaign going to focus on a space or start there and move on from there?

She’s defined by an immense failure in her past. Most people who know her by reputation think well of her, but she has a hard time handling praise or positive attention because she’s too focused on the ways she failed her ambitions. Is there a major incident like an uprising or a rebellion that I can tie her into?

Something put a gulf between her and a family member. I’d rather have this tension be with another player character, but if there isn’t anyone, is there an important NPC she can have a tie to?

Jinx’s Justified Jigsaw

Jinx, the character, in League of Legends, is really obviously some kind of striker. She has bombs and guns and if I bothered to open that wiki I bet that’s the kind of thing she’d be good at doing. I think ranged nonmagical damage is the least interesting thing you can do in a D&D game, so where I start with the image of Jinx, I’m going to then take it in a direction I’d like. They haven’t given me a chaingun tank, but there is a leader supprot-style character that I like a lot that uses ranged weapons, and that’s the Artificer.

Artificers also line up well with Jinx as an Intelligence-based character who uses the Arcane power source. I mean the anime’s named after it. Artificers bring a huge basket of cool stuff; there’s a ritual book, there’s turning daily item abilities into twice-daily items, and the Artificer has probably the single best at-will attack power for people who can take advantage. Magic Weapon is incredible.

Artificer class!

Heritage-wise, I’d talk to the DM about the brand-specific Githzerai. The stats line up with what I want (Intelligence and Wisdom), and has the ability to push through mental attacks that can be really good for representing a character retaliating against mental attacks. On the other hand, Githzerai have a really specific visual aesthetic, and I don’t like it. Devas are also a good option, and their heritage ability looks like ‘getting lucky,’ more or less. I’d probably theme the necrotic resistance as being ‘I have been mucking around with dead bodies a lot, so I’m used to it.

Main stats are Intelligence and Wisdom.

Weapon of choice is a repeating crossbow. This is a weapon focused build. The repeating crossbow is the most ‘chunky mechanical’ feeling weapon for this kind of attack, and it gives that cool, chunky feeling of ‘reloading’ with a big magazine.

The power choices are going to have to fit around Magic Weapon. The default best power to use, at every chance, is Magic Weapon. I don’t need any other single-target attack that buffs an ally, any encounter or daily attack needs to be considered for area damage.

I’ll be looking at the White Lotus feats, since this is a character who’s going to overwhelmingly using an at-will ranged attack standing next to an ally.

And with that stencilled in, I’d look to these questions:

She wants to be close to people and have people who she can rely on but she’s also going to be a real asshole to people because she doubts them. Are there any players who aren’t okay with that dynamic and would like me to have that not affect you?

This character may have committed some terrorism, in a way she feels pretty justified. It’s more important to her that someone accepts that she did what she did for a good reason than to accept that she did the right thing. Is there room for that kind of thing? Can you, the DM, at least leave it ambiguous, and not have anyone come down hard on ‘these acts were definitely bad’ or ‘these acts were actually good?’

This is a character who needs downtime to make things, to buy rituals, and to work on things. She’s meant to feel like a researcher, a geek with a workshop. Is that going to be a thing we can do in this game, and if it’s not, can I facilitate it with a sort of portable tinker’s kit?

Ekko, Ekko, Ekko

Alright, now let’s get the timing down.

Ekko, in Arcane, is not a character who is shown to have explicit time powers. The game, Leage of Legends, is a game with time travel powers and blinks and whatnot, and that’s fine, you know, what the hell ever, but Arcane is not a place with time travel (yet, I know, shut up). Instead the show represents Ekko’s time travel powers, his mastery of time, as being about something in the way he attacks, the way he fights. He plays things out in time, he plots them out, in an instant, and then he acts. We only see it once in Season 1, with Ekko fighting Jinx based on mapping out a memory then crushing into her in six seconds. Because of this, I dont’ want to play with time-zippy powers (oh hi, Battlemind).

This is a great way to represent a melee weapon character who uses a mental stat – either Wisdom or Intelligence.

And

Class: Swordmage

Important stats, Intelligence first, Constitution as a backup, and then Charisma because he’s really cool and to round out the non-armour defenses.

Heritage: Eladrin. This is very specifically to play with the Eladrin Swordmage Advance feat, and the chain that leads to Fey Charge in Paragon. That’s going to need multiclassing to fighter, but there are good feats for that.

Weapon of choice is a longsword, which is how Ekko wields his pipe-like weapon and he’s shown with a sword.

I also want him to have Ritual Caster so he can do the same long-term complicated projects as Jinx.

Then:

In my mind this character is part of an underclass, he has some kind of safeness to his life. Is there a chance that there’s another player in the group who can be from the same safe haven as him, maybe with a place they can have lively conversations about method?

Is there room for this character to have been foraging/earning money through gang activity? What can I do that represents having that kind of support, like maybe access to a good market as a little extra bit of flavour?

Conclusion

That’s a bunch of words, and I’m not making Caitlyn, she’s a cop.

(Also because snipers aren’t that interesting to me in 4th ed D&D).

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 · 5 months ago

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How To Be: Vivien Reid (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

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.

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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