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talenlee · 2 months

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How To Be: Joker from Persona 5 (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.

When I plan for the year in front of me, one of the things I like to do is put ideas in the schedule for much later in the year, so that when that time of the year arrives, I have something challenging to work on with a lot of time thinking about it in the lead up. I apparently wrote down ‘Joker’ at some point in 2023, and then… didn’t think about it much. After all, what kind of character is Joker? A chaotic, clownish fool who gives a lecture from inside a police station’s interrogation room — what was I going to do? He’s a cipher, he’s a mystery, he’s an enigma, and whatever we know about his backstory is inherently untrustworthy.

Well, at least we’ll put on some cool music when we do it.

Oh wait what do you mean I put ‘in Persona 5’ in the blog title, that’s going to give away which Joker I mean, oh dang. Anyway.

Analysing Joker

Before we can start talking about how to represent a character we have to look at the character as they exist in their original text. This immediately presents a problem when you translate a a character like Joker. See, Joker is a Persona protagonist, which means that they are nearly a blank slate. Oh, I mean he is a blank slate. I mean, I dunno, something about that name makes having pronouns in the first place feel like an inappropriate overstep. Still just because I interpret Joker on sight as a fundamentally agender queerbo cosplaying whatever identity they fancy, that doesn’t mean you’re going to. It’s the least important part of the character for this build.

Point is, JRPGs that are like Persona 5 tend to try and make the protagonist an everyperson player character that you, the player can guide through a certain narrative, and their input or choices are largely unnecessary; that is, most of them just do what they’re told or presented with a series of non-choices. Not just the classic ‘but thou must!’ story, but even characters like Butz from Final Fantasy V are rarely asked to make choices based on their values because they’re being confronted with a linear series of requests from a secondary character. This isn’t to say all JRPG characters are largely blank slates, but Joker very much is.

What there is of Joker in Persona 5 is mostly about the kinds of choices the game presents you with. Fortunately, there is a common thread of characterisation and behaviour there. It’s not like a truly freeform thing like, for example, a Dark Souls character who doesn’t even have a meaningful mechanical thread to hold them together. Joker is a thief, he’s capable of being sassy, and he’s an insightful planner. He uses knives, and sometimes guns, moves quickly and freely, wears a mask, a longcoat and maybe has wings.

More than that is going to be challenging, but the good news is it’s kinda not important, we don’t need anything else. Oh, there’s more stuff, if I wanted to dive deep into a very thoroughly written wiki, but that’s the exact opposite approach to this that I think is helpful. See, it wasn’t my plan to dedicate two of this year’s How To Be entries to the task of reading enormous wiki pages written by people who see a comprehensive sequence of events one after another as a meaningful explanation of who a character is. There’s just something about the fandom space of wikis that seems completely allergic to the notion of considering a character’s inner life or things they care about versus caring about a bulleted list of every single game memorised step by step, which, you know what, to some extent, you do you, Fandom contributors.

You absolute weirdoes.

Instead, the plan is to follow a much purer version of what it means when someone produces pictures of a character and says ‘I want to do what they do.’ They’re thinking not about the canon narrative of the character, but typically, the prototype of what that character is in how they’re presented. In much the same way that fanfiction boils a character down to their most memetic moments, How To Be is trying to capture a character in the moments you most want to ensoul.

If you show up to the table with Joker’s character art in the image section of your character sheet, you’re not here to have a conversation about menus that go click and animate nicely, you’re probably here to play a ridiculously hot boy who is also a bird, a thief, and the centre of attention whenever he wants to be, and absolutely unnoticed when he doesn’t want to be. It’s fascinating in that this is composed out of a superficial interest (this character looks interesting) and then involves a deliberate attempt to add depth to that interest (this look implies things).

With that in mind, then, here’s our First Principles for Joker.

The Basics

Joker wields two weapons, wears light armour but not no armour (coat and mask), is personable, witty, and driven, and he’s a leader in his group. A literal demonic conspiracy is what keeps his natural charm from taking over the world and all of those things cook together to present a character with a reasonably simple set of parameters to build in.

No heavy armour

Wields two weapons

A mask that’s important

Charismatic, intelligent, and perceptive

With that, there are some build options that are best considered in terms of the role you want to fulfil.

Defender

Your options for a defender who wields a knife have to get a little deliberately weird because knives are typically small, light blades and most defenders don’t tend to wield those. Not that they can’t, and light blades are a good category, it’s just that you might need to look at ‘knives’ and ask yourself how close you care about that specific idea.

I don’t think I care very much about the idea of treating a longsword and shield as a knife and the mask; the pieces are there, they’re attackable, and they both have similar purposes, and neither puts exceptional demands on the character mechanically. A DM can happily mess with both without needing to change any rules. To me, that’s a simple theme shift. Take a sword-and-board Paladin, use Charisma melee powers, and maybe even look at poaching the mount from the Cavalier with a power swap feat.

If you are a hardcore ride or die no-way-no-else option then the Paladin – the default Charisma-based melee defender – is going to need to rely on something other than its weapon attacks to punish people. Good news, the Paladin has Divine Challenge and Divine Sanction to manage both of those things. This pushes you towards a high-Charisma, highly mobile build of the Paladin sacrificing melee damage for spellcasting power, but it does open up dagger implement options for your divine powers, and the Accurate Dagger, which is neat.

Controller

I cannot believe I am saying this but in Heroes of Shadow, the Essentials lines presents the Binder Warlock.

I know I know I know, that book sucks. It’s got the Vampire and the Blackguard in it, those are not good classes. And I don’t think the Binder is a great class. It’s building on the Warlock, which has always been a class struggling to pull ahead of its contemporaries in the base classes. Not a bad class – few classes are bad – but less of an outright damage beast than other strikers.

The Binder sidesteps the Warlock’s problem by instead focusing on controlling enemies – dealing with larger groups of minions and having powers that deprived enemies of actions or made the actions they had inefficient. And at that, in terms of sheer ability to make a single target’s life difficult, the Binder is pretty good. What’s more, because the Binder gets powers with levels from the Warlock spell list, the Binder can just pick up Warlock powers, instead of being locked into a small number of specifics along with their starting package.

What’s more, the Star Pact even gives you stealth and free movement around enemies’ behaviour, which plays into the roguish, playful vibes here. Intelligence and Charisma are important stats, take a dagger as your implement, and when the time comes to pick your powers, grab stuff from the core Warlock books, like Curse of the Dark Dream and Shadow Tentacles. You can also build to play with the Charm and Psychic keywords. Check out Psychic Lock in the paragon tier for a reason to care about doing psychic damage.

Striker

I imagined when I started that our parameters would present a serious barrier for the striker role. Charisma is typically a spellcaster stat, and strikers that use Charisma are typically using it to cast spells, throwing energy. That’s fine and all, but it somehow seems out of type for a Striker version of Joker to have knives and not use them.

Guess what?

There’s a knife sorcerer.

Oh, the knife sorcerer is still a sorcerer, they still blast things and have access to blasts and bursts and all sorts of classic ‘fistfuls of dice’ style blaster platform. But it also has along with that, a melee basic attack that can be typed, an encounter teleport, and you don’t need to commit hard to using these things to make them good, they’re just solid on their own if you’re already starting from the position of ‘I want to hold daggers.’

If you take this route and go Storm Sorcerer, the character immediately slots into the space of a Mark of Storm build; you have a melee basic attack that shoves people away from you, your flights last longer and all your area effect lightning attacks can be used to sculpt the battlefield. But also because you’ve got a melee basic attack that’s not worth nothing, you can build for powers like the White Lotus line of Arcane power feats that punish people for retaliating against you.

It’s a nice, snug package, it all works together and none of the parts are bad without one another.

Leader

And really, this is is what this is all building up to.

As a leader, Joker can be a bard. Bards are great. Bards are in fact, amazing. Bards are so good as leaders that you can kinda just wing it with your powers. If you start with a Bard as your base and focus on the melee powers, you’re pushed towards the Valorous bard, which in turn means you’re going to be producing a lot of temporary hit points for the whole group, and your powers can focus on playing with that.

But also.

A bard has access to the amazing feat Combat Virtuoso. Combat Virtuoso lets you use your Charisma in place of the attacking stat for other powers you have, if you got them through multiclassing. Which means that a Half-Elf bard with Combat Virtuoso can have Twin Strike that feeds on Charisma. That’s spicy. But also you don’t even need to be a Half-Elf. If you multiclass Ranger, such as with Warrior of the Wilds (with the less strict requirements and a single-turn Hunter’s Quarry bonus in it), you can then use the feat Martial Readiness to swap one of your bard At-Wills for Twin Strike.

“Hang on,” you may say, “That needs a martial at-will attack power to swap.”

Okay, take any of the Skald Aura powers, which, for some reason, are listed as level 1 At-Will Bard attack powers. You can take them. And then you can use Martial Readiness to swap one for Twin Strike. At level 2.

This is obviously very silly, but it’s a way to get access to this trick – Twin Strike on a charismatic, magical supporting leader type – very early. Twin Strike’s really good, and it’s worth building to play around with.

Conclusion

Joker is a really sweet look and for this kind of exercise the problem was much more about finding ways to make a character who could justify it than it was trying to ensoul his specific ideas in a game. But the joy of this exercise is that each of these variations still carries within it something of the promise of Persona. There’s the mind-melting of the Binder, there’s the dashing team leader of the Bard, and there’s even room for the high-damage, high-impact flashiness of a sorcerer wielding those cool daggers.

Fun exercise, I liked it a lot.

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

#How to Be #Games #Making

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