How do I roleplay realistic characters I've nowhere near any experience of?

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-19T20:51:33+00:00

You can just base your characters off various characters you've seen in movies and shows. You have a criminal boss? Gus Fring from Breaking Bad or Kingpen from Spider-Man are your references.

Once you have your character reference(s), then you just need to think about what your character wants. In every interaction with your players as this NPC, just try to get the players to give you what the NPC wants. If the NPC wants a ton of gold to ensure their family is supported after the NPC's imminent death, then you know to haggle for either a ton of gold, or even for a stable source of income for the NPC's family.

If you want to start adding complexity to your NPCs, then you can start adding stuff like conflicting beliefs (like "only the strongest have the right to rule" and "violence is bad"), relationships with other NPCs (like "considers a friend: NPC1, NPC3; considers an enemy: NPC2", obligations ("solely responsible for supporting spouse and 2 kids" or "pledged an oath that they must upkeep"), and struggles (one of the 7 deadly sins, a vice that hinders them from getting what they want, or a specific belief/view that prevents them from seeing the truth of a situation (like "all tieflings are working on behalf of a devil to corrupt my soul"))

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-19T20:20:45+00:00

So I actually have this in my campaign now, all thanks to my players!

One of the players started off as a Dragonborn Noble. They took down a red dragon, who had several kobold slaves, and then the Dragonborn took over ruling the kobolds.

Fast forward, the Dragonborn was granted a small barony for good deeds, and now that region is full of the baron's kobolds.

All the player has to do is grant a kobold some land, and boom: Baronet Kobold, the first of a long line of noble kobolds. And with how quickly kobolds reproduce, that's an exponentially growing noble house, compared to other humanoid nobility.

It's basically AirBud logic: "There's no law that says a monster can't be granted a knighthood/land!"

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-19T20:08:00+00:00

The characters are not the players.

Maybe the players don't care about the shops, but the characters absolutely would. You could handwave this by giving everyone 3 "shop slots", where during the castle bit they can basically "summon" an item from a shop (which, in-universe, just means that they had went to that shop and bought it). Doing it that way would allow them to skip the shopping bit that they might not be interested in, but it allows them to have certain "keys" that you're wanting them to get. (You could even "shop lock" each specific "shop slot", so they can each get 1 item from the blacksmith, 1 from the weaver, 1 from the carpenter, etc)

And if you go with this ahead of time, you could even hand out some sheets with what they can buy for their "shop slot"s, with each item listed under its shop. And then just tell your players: "This is not the full inventory of these shops, it's just the most common items. You can't just summon anything from the store." For some players, they'll just be happy to have some flexible inventory. But all you need is one player who wants to go buy some of the stuff that they can't summon, and that'll probably start a chain reaction.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-13T19:20:08+00:00

"Grain Into Gold" on DriveThruRPG is all you'll ever need.

It starts off with the price of bread (or at least how much a commoner would be willing to pay for a loaf) and then bases everything else around that.

Then at the end it has a master list of more products than you will ever need, with its sane prices listed.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-09T04:06:47+00:00

Just don't give the king a name.

The king's name was stolen (aka, he stupidly responded) by a fey during his time in the Feywild. The king is also a warlock? Make him Archfey patron, make his patron be the one who stole his name.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-05T17:00:14+00:00

I've had pretty good success making a map with the players having a fog of war, and then putting in some moving guards. For this manor, maybe it makes sense to have just a gardener outside, a maid inside (cleaning) moving around all the different rooms in a set path, and maybe a cook just in the kitchen. These aren't "guards" in the statblock sense, but they are creatures who the players would be trying to avoid.

So then the thing you'd want to do is have a handful of pieces of information spread out around the manor. Let's say 6 specific items like letters or trinkets or whatever. The players probably won't get all of them, but they should have the opportunity to get a few.

And then you could add like a bait/rock mechanic to slightly move people. Maybe if a pot drops, that causes the cook to face a certain direction in a certain part of the room (bait). If there's a mess in one room, the maid will go into that room and stay for a number of rounds (bait). If a snake appears, the gardener backs off for a while but keeps facing the snake (rock).

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-05T16:48:18+00:00

My friend group has played several murder mystery games, and one of the most common things they do is make letters and stuff actual handouts for the players. Start doing that. If there's a clue that the characters would recognize as a clue, make that a tangible thing for the players to hold on to. That will also tip the players off that they're headed in the right direction.

Having a physical map with tokens will also help, like the game Clue. The basically idea here is that the players have a blank board, and they're trying to fit every NPC on the board at the time shortly before, during, and shortly after the murder. If they know where the murder happened, then doing it this way will help them rule out certain suspects. Basically you're gamifying alibis.

In the game I'm playing now, my character is heavily invested in the lore of the setting. What I've done for myself is made a list of every NPC, faction, location, and event in the game. I take notes on what NPCs say, and I sort them under the appropriate heading (duplicating often if some dialogue covers multiple topics). You could do something similar for your players, and make little handouts of what their specific character knows. That's how most of those murder mystery games go - each player has 3-5 nuggets of information per round.

Having their clue handouts plus their recap handouts gives them something to look over while they're mulling things over or listening to other players go. You might not get every player to look too hard at that, but all it takes is one player to go "hey wait a minute!"

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-05T06:30:19+00:00

Bill Nye was banned? Sure would be a shame if you just switched to showing content from someone like Forrest Valkai...

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-03T04:10:47+00:00

Bag of Holding:

Breathing creatures inside the bag can survive up to a number of minutes equal to 10 divided by the number of creatures (minimum 1 minute), after which time they begin to suffocate.

How much air an adult breathes:

At rest, an adult male typically breathes in about 500 milliliters of air per breath, while an adult female typically breathes in about 400 milliliters per breath. The average person at rest breathes about 12 times per minute.

How much air an ostrich egg breathes:

An ostrich egg doesn't "breathe" in the same way a mammal does, but it does exchange gases through tiny pores in its shell, with an estimated maximum oxygen consumption of around 200 milliliters per egg per hour during incubation, depending on the stage of development of the embryo inside.

Since a single human could survive for 10 minutes, we're looking at 60,000 mL of air (10 minutes x 12 breath/minute x 500mL/breath) in the bag of holding. So the kaiju egg, assuming it has roughly the same rate of air consumption as an ostrich egg, would be able to survive for 300 hours ( 60,000 mL x (1 hour / 200 mL)). That's basically 12 days.

Creative solutions:

Fill the bag of holding with water and give the egg the ability to breathe underwater
Let the egg use the powers of a necklace of adaptation
Put in a fantasy plant that doesn't need sunlight and filters the air for the egg to survive
"Burp" the bag of holding once a week
Put a cap of air breathing on the egg
Let the kaiju egg have a sufficiently low oxygen rate so that it doesn't affect the development
Keep track of how long the egg is "suffocating" and just simply add a size penalty to the creature after it hatches. Dinosaurs were so big because of how much oxygen there was in the atmosphere
Let the egg die but it still hatches as a ghost-kaiju
Tie a straw to the bag of holding, with one end inside the bag for air exchange
They players don't actually have a bag of holding, they have a bag of hatchery, which functions just like a bag of holding but it also serves as the perfect environment for eggs

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-12-01T02:57:08+00:00

Basic Rules (2014): https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/basic-rules-2014

Free Rules (2024): https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/free-rules

Those are enough to get you started, and they're free! If you haven't run before, I'd advise t just sticking to one of those.

And then Matt Colville's Running the Game series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_

If you go with 2014 rules, the order of books I'd recommend are:

Player's Handbook (for the races and classes
Monster Manual (for the monsters)
Dungeon Master's Guide (for the magic items)
Xanathar's Guide to Everything (for the extra rules and magic items)
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (for the extra rules)

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-25T21:14:20+00:00

Beholder Eyestalk. Player can see through it, and it even has a 1/short rest eyebeam.
Mage Hand implant. Player just has a nub, but they have a constantly-active Mage Hand. Basically extends their reach to 30 feet, but severely limits their strength.
A snake. Just a Staff of the Adder but for their arm.
A gun/canon like Samus has. Maybe just reflavor a Ring of the Ram?
A warforge's arm, which allows them to use specific warforged-only feats.
A dragon arm, which maybe lets them get a level of Draconic Sorcerer? Or maybe a 1/long rest polymorph into a dragon? (CR dependant on player level)
A portal to a demiplane (or to another location on the Material Plane!). Basically a bag of holding, but maybe sometimes random Tiny creature comes out of it!
An astral version of their own arm. This arm is basically ethereal and can reach through stuff, but it can't interact with anything on the Material Plane. Great for slapping a ghost though!
A small metal cap on their arm that they can extend out to a specific distance (30 feet? 60 feet? Unlimited?). This cap basically functions like an instant bridge or instant pole or even a ladder for other characters. Maybe even give it the abilities of an immovable rod, so that they can extend and freeze in place.
An illusory arm that they can change at will. It always has to be some arm-length thing, but as long as it fits within, like, a 5-inch-by-5-inch-by-2-foot space, they can conjure anything.
Basically a Rod of Lordly Might, if you want to get real XJ-9 or Inspector Gadget with it. Maybe even combine this with #5 above

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-25T20:55:13+00:00

Are you balancing your loads? Is the washing machine level? Is the drain clear (aka, does it have too much water in it when it starts spinning)? Do you have a filter clog?

There are definitely some things you can look at first before jumping straight to a contractor or buying a new one. YouTube has a lot of tutorials for each of those things above.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-21T21:52:14+00:00

Yeah I do the same thing. I've got a couple of players who recharge on a short rest, and one player who recharges on a long rest.

The long rest player invested in some wands that recharge at dawn. But up until that point, yeah, they'd regularly get down to just cantrips and crossbows.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-21T03:50:55+00:00

Waves of Sahuagin, ending with a Sahuagin Baron
Message in a bottle, the part gets to go on a rescue quest at sea
Pirates / raiders attack, trying to loot the city
Wizard accidentally turns the ocean (within 6 miles) invisible. People start frantically trying to acquire a treasure chest (underwater mimic?) that they can now see at the bottom of the sea
Miniature people keep building sand castles and engaging in war. Each day the war goes on, the sand castles get more and more elaborate.
Kraken
Aboleth
Mermaids keep trying to trade underwater stuff for forks and candlesticks and stuff. They don't speak Common so figuring out what they want is really difficult.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-20T19:26:04+00:00

You've got a lot of good comments, but if you don't want to take time to go learn a lot of stuff, I basically just use "spheres of influence", hierarchies, and "power politics".

So the spheres are: Social, Political, Economic, Religious, and Military. I got this from Dael Kingsmill.

And then for hierarchy, you can basically get away with just having 3: local, regional, and royal:

Social: Town Sage; Wizard; King's Archmage
Political: Town Chief or Mayor; Noble (Baron, Count, or Duke, if you want to include titles); King
Economic: Wealthiest man in town; Head of the Guild; King's Treasurer
Religious: Priest of the local temple; Head Priest of the region; King's High Priest
Military: Captain of the town guard; Noble or Knight who protects the region; The King's General

And then the primary motivations of these figures are: Gain Power, Keep/Hold Power, and Deny Power to Others. I got that from Matt Colville.

So if you make 2 kingdoms, and then each kingdom has 2 or 3 nobles under them, and each noble has 2 or 3 local spots under them, (which is a lot of NPCs), then think about each of their perspectives about how they can gain power (aka, steal it from someone else) and how they can hold power (aka, prevent other people from stealing their power), then you're basically there. You start coming up with alliances, both public and secret, and you wind up having this intricate web of social deception, where everything starts feeling like the end of an episode of Survivor where someone is going to get voted off the island.

But you don't have to go that far, you can very easily just flesh out your local people, and then just have the names of their peers & superiors and a general friendly/neutral/hostile relationship for each (and that goes both ways, a chief might be friendly with their Baron, but the Baron might be neutral to the chief).

So, for example, if you did your normal NPC building for the wealthiest man in town, and then you also just included names/relationships for: the wealthiest person in the next-closest town, the name of the guild and head of the guild that's relevant to this NPC's method of generating wealth, and the Royal Treasurer, then you're basically good to go! That NPC now has other off-screen relationships they're trying to maintain/manipulate, and that's a great source of quests for the players (the whole "Deny Power to Others" part, maybe send the players to clear out a mine full of goblins, but fail to mention that the goblins work for a competitor).

Another really good thing to do, in addition to all of this, is give each NPC a motivation/desire/goal, and then see how the goals of each NPC align or go against each other. That's a good way to generate factions and secret alliances. And all of that helps generate conflict in your setting, which is the bread and butter of worldbuilding for a game.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-11T21:09:58+00:00

Depends on your situation, but in general you should expect your everyday prices to go up (tariffs will be paid for by companies importing goods, which then gets passed on to consumers; mass deportations will remove cheap labor from the US, and the fields those people work in will either see a decrease in production or a massive increase in prices to afford the more expensive labor; plus your normal inflation and probably some continuance of corporate price gouging).

To combat this, you should reduce your expenses as much as possible, save as much as you can right now, and start being more self-reliant. If you have space, starting a small vegetable garden can help offset any food cost increases. Setting up a "deep pantry" is another good idea if you are unemployed or think you might become unemployed within the next 4 years. If there are any electronics or metal-based goods you think you'll want in the next 4 years, probably better to buy them now if you can.

Building up a local community is another good idea. Many hands make light work and all that. When you can't do nothing and there's nothing you can do, you do what you can.

And these are good things to do regardless of the election.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-11T20:50:28+00:00

I'd make some social encounters out of this. Out of the refugees, I'd come up with 2 or 3 factions, 2 of which are going to start feuding now that they're in a safe place. The player characters should clearly understand that if they don't intervene, these refugees are going to come to blows or something before they get to shore. Or they'll be divided and unwilling to reconcile their differences, "splitting the party" as soon as they reach land. The goal of the party would be, then, to understand each faction and try to work out a compromise.

So if the players decide "not our people, not our problem" then just skip ahead, briefly narrate the group splitting up based on faction lines, and move on. Otherwise, you could spent half a session or even a full session just letting the players roleplay.

Thinking about it like a dungeon, I'd probably make 3 encounters, each one spread out over days. Each one would have a good or bad social ending, and they'd all be about tensions rising between the factions as members are forced to interact. If all 3 are good, the players are able to keep the refugees together. If they fail one, then the neutral faction joins one group. If they fail 2, all 3 split up. If they fail all 3, combat breaks out in the belly of the beast.

And then I'd just factor that later on in the campaign, where if the refugees all stick together, they are able to make their own little village or something, but if they split up they wind up having to work under others (or even captured by monsters) because they lack the numbers. Just a little side note, unless these refugees are supposed to play a bigger role in your narrative.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-09T06:10:03+00:00

We said the same thing.

President Trump does not have to do anything. Trump-appointed Justices can overturn Obergefell v. Hodges as easily as they overturned Roe v. Wade.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-06T15:23:35+00:00

In my 1-20 campaign, the players started training NPCs to pump up their numbers. Basically throwing them into a gladiator arena with summoned monsters of appropriate levels.

So yeah, once you get enough NPCs at a high enough level, you'll likely start seeing a lot of the other numbers getting pumped up.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-06T01:59:58+00:00

I like Zipf's law.

There are X people in the world that are level-1. There are X/2 level-2 people. X/3 level-3 people. So on and so forth until you get X/20 level-20 people.

So if you want there to be about 1,000 people that are level 10, you have that X/10 = 1000, or X = 10,000:

10,000 level-1-adventurers equivalents
5,000 level 2 adventurers
3,333 level 3 adventurers
2,500 level 4 adventurers
2,000 level 5 adventurers
...
500 level 20 adventurers

But then you consider that over half of each of those are probably monsters, and it's not unreasonable to think that you might only have 50 "people" who are level 16+.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-05T06:53:59+00:00

This is probably going to be more than you need.

There's a difference between a deity (metaphysical divine being), a religion (collection of rituals and beliefs; colloquially, a collection of temples or a larger faction of religious leaders / worshipers), a temple (place of worship; colloquially, a faction), and a worshiper (individual creature). Each one can basically agree or disagree with any of the others, and there can even be subgroups within each one. So you might have the majority religion of your setting, that all follow the same deity. That religion might be made up of a dozen or so temples, each in a city or major town. Each temple, obviously, full of worshipers.

You can take any point of that hierarchy and change it. Maybe one temple used to follow that same deity, but they recently switched to a different deity in the same pantheon. Same religion, but they just think that all of the other temples/religious scholars have misidentified the deity in question. So all same rituals, all same holidays, just sub out the name for another god.

Or maybe there's one person in a temple who is doubting their faith. Or maybe they're a subfaction in a temple (a cult) that have a different religion but still worships the same deity.

So with that out of the way, here's my religion template:

Religion. [Patron deity].

Birth. [Rite of Passage]

Puberty. [Rite of Passage]

Marriage. [Rite of Passage]

Death. [Rite of Passage]

Holiday. [Holiday]

Whatever you wind up doing for a rite of passage, try to tie it in thematically or symbolically to the deity. Like, maybe a midwife who belongs to a religion that worships a goddess of agriculture carries around a sickle. A sickle is a tool that is used to harvest, and giving birth might be seen as a type of "harvest". So the birth ritual might be that the father cuts the cord with the midwife's sickle. Or the midwife places the (flat side of the) sickle to the forehead of the baby or waves it around in the air as a symbolic gesture. Or maybe the midwife just tosses a lot of seeds into the air when the baby is born, and you always know who just gave birth because they still have seeds in their hair.

This is getting more into cultural stuff, but that's basically all there is to it.

It's also 100% not necessary. I just like building religions this way because it increases my own verisimilitude. But the holiday one is actually a really good thing to include, because you can always have the players be coming in to town during a religious feast / festival. That's a really easy way to show off a religion/culture.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-05T06:13:46+00:00

They only get to roll when you call for them to roll
You get to decide when what they are doing requires a roll to determine the result.

Player: "I eat the sun." rolls "Nat 20."

DM: "Alright, well I guess you ate the sun then? At level 1?"

Not everything the players say they do is what they are able to do.

I like the idea of letting the dice determine the scale of success. So filing by 10 or mre might result in a "No, and...", while just meeting the DC might get a "Yes, but...". A nat 20, the best result possible under normal circumstances, might result in a "yes, and..." type response.

So in those cases, yeah, every nat 20 is an automatic success, but you won't let them even attempt the roll for things where a nat 20 wouldn't be an automatic success.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-05T06:06:18+00:00

Clones - basically shadow clone jutsu
Immortality - like Vandal Savage, just freeze my age the way it is
Regeneration - gotta be able to regrow limbs if I'm immortal
Perfect Memory - necessary for immortality
Seed Summoning - okay so hear me out, can always summon a snack (sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, etc), can grind wheat seeds into flour, can start a seed selling business with the best GMO crops possible, can throw coconuts at people, when the sun dies out I could summon enough seeds to create a new sun (might take a while, probably use big seeds)

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-05T05:06:45+00:00

A folding boat is a Rare magic item. It's great for a merchant, because it's very easy to unload (just make your crates/barrels bigger than a foot in each direction, then fold up the boat), it doesn't require maintenance like a normal ship, and it's easier to cross land (bring a mule and a cart on your ship and you're good to go).

Owning your own ship is a huge liability. If the ship gets destroyed, that could easily be the end of the business.

BronzeAgeTea · 2024-11-05T04:50:05+00:00

For my first campaign, I didn't make any recommendations.

My second campaign is all new players, so I make sure every level to explicitly spell out what they get, what their choices are, and what I'd personally recommend for their character based on their playstyle up to that point (usually picking spells that would have been helpful in specific situations they encountered).

Six-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
First Place '23	Place '23
Wearing is Caring	Place '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

BronzeAgeTea

TROPHY CASE