#RPGaDAY 2016 Day 3

What is something you have done with your game character that you are the proudest of?

In the One Piece campaign, I played a masked ninja-like character whose power was that nine spirits lived inside him. They gave him powers and he could control them to a degree, but the cost was that after every rest a random spirit would take control of his body. It changed his personality, skills, and resistances, often to something that wasn’t mechanically optimal (switching to the spirit with +5 to Intimidate was great, except when another member of the party had a higher modifier even after my bonus) or narratively wise (and I insisted on intimidating everything, all the time, no matter who it was or what I wanted to accomplish). As a character and as an intentional counter to new-character syndrome, I was pretty proud of that.

For an individual moment with that character, the party got into a fight on a navy base. A captain had accosted us in an otherwise unpopulated control room with large windows, and we needed to end the fight without killing her. Once we realized she wasn’t going to stop attacking us, we focused on a way to get out. Around that time:

Me: So these are giant windows, right? There doesn’t seem to be anything special about them?
DM: Not as far as you can tell.
Me: And I’m closer to the captain than anybody else. The rest of the party is behind me.
DM: Yeah.
Me: Which means I’m facing away from them.
DM: …Yeah?
Me: I take off my mask.

I didn’t do anything spectacular. I just used an at-will attack that dealt sonic damage, one I’d had since character creation but had never used because it only worked in melee. But because I’d never done it before, the table reacted as though I was removing a seal and I was about to unleash something devastating. The character’s intentionally vague backstory, the layout of the battle, and my known predilection for giving my characters a rarely-used second or third gear, combined with a group of players receptive to all three, turned a mundane attack into a huge emotional payoff.

I did destroy the window. Getting the captain through it was another story.

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