Tabletops Blog

I wrote up a pretty good description of the last session yesterday, but since it was the first session writeup I had to set up a lot of backstory. Thus I didn’t really get a chance to go into much detail about the characters in my Eberron campaign, nor my players. So here’s a quick blurb about each character, as well as a simple profile of each player.

The player archetypes I mention are those described in the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide, which has as good a list as any of player types. (Trying to fit people into neat little categories is always a pretty futile effort, as you’ll see, but the eight categories the DMG lists aren’t mutually exclusive.) In alphabetical order:

• Dexter, a changeling fey pact warlock, played by ‘Cort’. Telling Dexter’s backstory would really be telling tales about dozens of “people”–he is a consummate chameleon, and his true past remains a mystery. Dexter’s darker urges (the sort that eventually lead you to making a pact with powerful fey creatures) send him adventuring, and he has absolutely no qualms about killing anyone or anything that threatens him or his friends, but when things get rough he still usually picks the ‘heroic’ thing to do. Usually.
  (Player archetypes: Explorer, Power Gamer. Cort is fantastic at optimizing characters–Dexter had a +13 Bluff check at first level!– but he also enjoys discovering things about the world and being ‘Batman’ (he always has something up his sleeve.) Tends to play characters who are very good at ferreting out secrets, one way or another.)
• Guy, a human illusionist wizard, played by ‘Tucker’. Guy is a social pariah, due in equal measures to his aberrant dragonmark and his complete lack of social skills. He recently spent a few years with a clan of dragonborn in the Blackcap Mountains in northern Breland, where he met and befriended Torrin.
  (Player archetypes: Instigator, Thinker, Power Gamer. Tucker also loves making powerful characters, and for him it goes hand-in-hand with his Thinker attributes. He’s always looking for the most optimal choice at each opportunity for a decision (which is one reason he’s an excellent chess player, too.) However, he’ll happily leave that behind when the opportunity to do something presents itself (even if it’s not entirely in-character). Once he’s started something, though, he’ll often roleplay situations out rather than turn things into dice rolls. Really, he’s balanced perfectly between Instigator and Actor in that regard.)
• Koh’Rel, a warforged battlerager fighter, played by ‘Bobby’. Koh’Rel has given up the name his Cyran manufacturers gave him in favor of a Giantish name. He fought for Cyre in the Last War, escaping destruction only by virtue of being imprisoned in the Mror Holds and practically forgotten there. After his eventual release, he found himself without a country (and with some contempt for all Cyrans anyway); he trained briefly in a monastery but soon left to find a different destiny. He now seeks a way to Xen’drik, hopefully on a wide, straight road paved with dwarven corpses. He hopes to prove to himself that he has a soul before he gets there.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Storyteller, Explorer. Bobby might be a better powergamer than even Cort–an engineer by trade, he’s constantly playing with numbers. But Bobby’s methods are different from most ‘munchkin’ powergamers: He tends to think of an interesting character, create a fascinating story and set of goals for that character, and then find ways for that character to have the best possible numbers that make sense for it. He also loves delving into the histories of Eberron (and worlds of his own devising), and acts out everything–he’s the only one of my players who describes every attack in fights.)
• Torrin, a dragonborn tempest fighter, played by ‘Noah’. For reasons unknown to all but himself, when Guy was eventually forced to leave the clan of dragonborn who had sheltered him, Torrin followed. Since then he has carefully kept Guy safe in some very dangerous places, usually without complaint. Quick and devastating in combat, he is otherwise reserved.
  (Player archetypes: Slayer, Watcher. Noah is actually pretty new to tabletop RPGs and is still coming out of his roleplaying shell. As a result, he tends to fall into the Watcher category in non-combat situations, although sitting back and thinking often gives him time to think “outside the box” and come up with interesting ideas. Combat is where he really shines as a player–he dives right into it with gusto.)
• Vance, a human artificer, played by ‘Don’. Vance is curious, fearless, always interrupting with questions and comments, and always willing to take things apart to see how they work. He’ll spend an entire day walking the streets of a town to find patterns in the tilework or to study its bridges, or incessantly asking a craftsman questions about his creations. He might be annoying (when not sicced on others), but he’s in many ways the moral compass of the group: No matter how wild he might’ve been acting a moment before, he’ll almost instantly drop everything to help someone, and the rest of the party follows without question. He’s an excellent alchemist too, though the party isn’t entirely comfortable with someone who acts like the world’s only half-gnome, half-kender alchemist.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Instigator. In this game, Don dives head-first into his character and doesn’t come up for air, and is always finding something to do. This threw me for a loop at first, since in the game Don runs combat often comes first, but he’s apparently got very different styles as a player–in fact, he often seems to want to avoid combat.)

Sharp readers will notice that I’m simultaneously blessed and cursed with five players who between them cover all eight of the 4E DMG’s player archetypes. That’s been a pretty big challenge for me–it’s often difficult to find something that engages people with such different styles of gaming–but when it works the payoff is tremendous.  It also means that they tend to think in different ways, leading to several instances already where the players have gone in directions I never expected. (That’s even harder to do in my game than usual, since I run it online and have to have all my combat encounters mapped out ahead of time!)

The other interesting thing about my players is that they’re all math-and-science guys. Cort, Noah, Tucker and myself all work in the IT industry (not at the same company, for the record); Bobby is a civil engineer; and Don’s got a degree in physics, which he uses constantly (he works in a custom glasswork shop and is pretty much constantly doing calculations to make sure he’s turning out the best-quality work he can.) I’ve got actors and costume designers and librarians in the D&D game I play in; thus far I actually haven’t been able to pin down a lot of differences I can write about, though they’re definitely present. It’s a good contrast that helps work both sides of my brain.

At any rate, I hope this helps you flesh out subsequent “actual play” posts; I’ll henceforth be including a stubbed player/character matrix in each AP post to help newcomers keep things straight. The next session has been moved up to this Sunday, so more will be coming very soon!