Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Dalavex 08-08-07, 12:49 PM	Long story short, I was playing around with ideas for characters. I came up with villains to thwart the party, heroes to help the party, and other characters they meet along the way. Then I made this character. This was originally going to go into the character development forums, but I have the character developed and just need DMing advice. My players are generally good roleplayers and I could see them trying to do stuff besides attacking her. This character is, simply put, the most fun I've had writing a backstory. NPCing this character will be interesting as well. Her backstory is approaching 5 pages, which is amazing considering I was originally just elaborating on a quick 3 paragraph backstory. So I won't post the entire backstory here (especially since I don't know if my party reads these forums). I have 2 questions that are posted at the end. I split this post into 4 sections: Intro (this), backstory (next), current behavior patterns, then the questions. That way if you don't want to read a section, it doesn't require you to read it to find the end anyways. ---------------------------------------------------------- Short version of the backstory: Anna is her name. She's a human that was born into a middle-class merchant family. As a child, she was able to channel psionic powers even though she had no training. This bothered her parents, so her parents contacted the military to take her away and use her "evil powers". This military sees studied psions as people worth respecting, but this child could use psionic powers with no effort. She was a freak of nature. They labeled her as a demon. And because she was a demon, almost everyone in her house was killed for dealing with demons. (Note: Only the military personnel that attacked her house know that she's not a demon. The rest of the military truly thinks she's not human) Despite considering her a demon, the military kept her around. She was abused horribly for being a "demon". She would be beat unconscious by her superior officers because they were having a bad day and needed someone to take it out on. She represses everything. Emotions, thoughts, everything. She becomes a walking robot of the military, capable of killing people without so much as a second thought. By the time she finishes her training for the military, she is convinced she is a demon (or at least half). She is forced, by her superior officer, to search the house she used to live in as his idea of a joke. She has a disturbing deja vu experience, but can't truly remember why she knows the place. Later, the same superior officer brings one of the survivors from the attack on her house to the headquarters. Seeing this pushes Anna over the deep end and it all comes back to her. She completely snaps and kills everyone in the room with psionic attacks (this includes the survivor that was part of her family). After a short time, she walks into a trap and is captured. Despite this, the military decides that it would be easier to suppress her psionic powers (using certain stationary psionic wards available in the world), bind every one of her limbs together, and throw her into a lake to drown. On their way to the lake, the carriage is attacked by bandits. During the attack, she is knocked free of her bindings, which allows her to get out of the warded transport. Once outside, she kills every guard followed by every bandit. At that time, the players were approaching on the road in time to see the last two bandits drop over dead from her psionic powers. ---------------------------------------------------------- Current behavior patterns: That's where the last session ended. To sum up how she acts now: Anna's general attitude is cold and unreceptive. She won't address someone unless she feels it is necessary. She is quick and to the point with words. She is quick to anger and slow to calm. Anna hates humans. This isn't an exaggeration by any means. When she sees a human, she has a very quick thought process: "Is he dressed like he's in the military?" If the answer is yes, she will attempt to kill with psionic powers without a question. If the answer is no, she'll decide whether they look like they pose a threat. If the answer is yes, she will attempt to kill them. If the answer is no, she won't do anything to them. If they act strange (or approach her in a way that makes her uncomfortable), she will more than likely attempt to kill them. She considers humans the incarnation of absolute evil in the world. Anna has no problem with the other sentient species, though. While she is cold and unreceptive to everyone, she is less-so in regards to non-humans. If she sees humans bullying other races (such as a young gnome, elf, dwarf, or even orc), she will kill the humans before giving the situation any thought. If she were to see one of the other races bullying a human, she would probably ignore them completely and let the human "get what he deserves". The one exception to her rule is children. If she sees a human child being bullied by another human, she will kill the bully regardless of their age, social status, or reason for bullying. Also, she may protect a human child from a non-human bully, although the situation would have to be extreme. ---------------------------------------------------------- So yeah, the 2 questions: 1.) How would you play a character like this? She's not insane, but she's not that close to being mentally stable either. I don't want to sit down at the table, start playing this character and lead them to believe she's this manic mass-murderer (although you could make a case that she IS). I also don't want to come across as just having slight anger issues. 2.) What alignment would you consider this character? I realize "lawful" and "good" are out of the question, but when I tried to come up with an alignment, I was completely stumped. I was going to label her "chaotic evil", but I'm just not sure and wanted some outside opinions. Should I take her backstory ---------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for your advice. I appreciate the time you took to read this enormous post (which originally contained the ENTIRE backstory before I decided to shorten it).
Wight_Chocolate 08-09-07, 12:08 AM	1) The main thing to remember here is this. When it comes to characters with psychological problems, do not make insanity the focal point of the character's personality. Doing this will almost invariably lead to a shallow and unconvincing portrayal. Instead, plan out how you think the character would act if they were not mentally unstable. Assume that the experience that caused them to snap still happened, but that it didn't actually make them snap. Once you've done that, then add the tablespoon of psychosis and think about how that would change what you've set out. 2) That all depends on the degree to which you think she's accountable for her actions. I think it comes down to a choice between Chaotic Neutral and Chaotic Evil. If she has genuinely lost it and has no real control over what she does anymore, go for Chaotic Neutral. She might be doing evil things in this case, but it's also not her fault. If, on the other hand, she's aware enough to think about what she's doing and then do it anyway, Chaotic Evil fits the bill nicely.
CrimsonWyvern 08-09-07, 03:00 AM	1. In any encounters with the party, don't attack them until she feels as though they are a threat, but once they're a threat, eliminate them at all costs. While they aren't a threat, ignore them coldly, threaten them, taunt them if they try to hit you, and only attack when she feels as though they are worth it. If she's ever in town (which I'd doubt, seeing as she would be likely to destroy people there) then I would think that she would attack any person she deems worth it, not caring if any humans were hurt in the crossfire, but avoiding harming non-humans unless it gives a large tactical advantage. As far as I can tell from your character, I would think that she would either avoid attacking any children like the plague, or at least avoid it unless it gave her an incredible tactical advantage. Here's another suggestion for playing the character, take a certain feat that I can't remember the name of from the Feats book, which I'll go into in more detail on the next note. 2. The feat that I was talking about gives your character an interesting little quirk. You no longer have an alignment. It makes your character considered somewhat insane, but not to the point of killing anything you come into contact with. However, it does apply a small penalty to saves against confusion. If you don't use that feat though, I would suggest that your alignment be CN. You would have to be Chaotic, as you heavily rebel against the army, and you clearly don't have the altruism for good. However, as defined by the D&D alignment system, a neutral on the Good vs. Evil means that you don't like to kill innocents, but you don't make sacrifices to help or protect innocents. This would make you evil, but your character often attacks humans, which she considers evil, and often attacks humans only once she has a definite reason to do so, be it being a bully, threat, or part of the army.
Dalavex 08-10-07, 01:48 PM	1) The main thing to remember here is this. When it comes to characters with psychological problems, do not make insanity the focal point of the character's personality. Doing this will almost invariably lead to a shallow and unconvincing portrayal. Instead, plan out how you think the character would act if they were not mentally unstable. Assume that the experience that caused them to snap still happened, but that it didn't actually make them snap. Once you've done that, then add the tablespoon of psychosis and think about how that would change what you've set out. After I read this part of your post, I decided to reword the part of her background where Anna "snapped" to be more accurate to my intentions. She had sealed off her emotions in order to survive her military "training". After she sees a lot of stuff from her "fake memories" and then a survivor from the attack, her mind enters a panic state and the emotional seal breaks. She's consumed by rage, both at the military personnel and the survivor of the attack (for letting the military take Anna [the psion] away). She realizes then that none of the memories she had are fake (although she's still convinced she's not human) and that all of the humans in her life have been nothing but torturing fiends, so that's when she considers humans to be the incarnation of evil. She doesn't kill humans just for being human, though. After the first part of her rampage in the town, she helps a human child. Also, during her "escape" at the end of her background story, she is faced with a soldier who knows he can't win against her. She detects his thoughts and realizes that he is praying inside that his family will be alright without him. Instead of killing, she disarms him and lets him be, feeling that he is "less evil" than most humans. 2) That all depends on the degree to which you think she's accountable for her actions. I think it comes down to a choice between Chaotic Neutral and Chaotic Evil. If she has genuinely lost it and has no real control over what she does anymore, go for Chaotic Neutral. She might be doing evil things in this case, but it's also not her fault. If, on the other hand, she's aware enough to think about what she's doing and then do it anyway, Chaotic Evil fits the bill nicely. This is the part that I really have to think about. On one hand, her violent reactions are more instinctive than anything. She was trained to kill by the military for 7 years of her life, then had the revelation that "humans are evil". When a human makes her feel uncomfortable in a situation, she starts experiencing consuming fear that this human is just like the rest and intends to harm her. The fear turns to anger and she is quick to lash out and kill. On the other hand, she will spare people that she considers innocent and harmless, so she still has enough control to refrain from killing. It's just that she doesn't always exercise her right to let someone survive. 1. In any encounters with the party, don't attack them until she feels as though they are a threat, but once they're a threat, eliminate them at all costs. While they aren't a threat, ignore them coldly, threaten them, taunt them if they try to hit you, and only attack when she feels as though they are worth it. If she's ever in town (which I'd doubt, seeing as she would be likely to destroy people there) then I would think that she would attack any person she deems worth it, not caring if any humans were hurt in the crossfire, but avoiding harming non-humans unless it gives a large tactical advantage. As far as I can tell from your character, I would think that she would either avoid attacking any children like the plague, or at least avoid it unless it gave her an incredible tactical advantage. Here's another suggestion for playing the character, take a certain feat that I can't remember the name of from the Feats book, which I'll go into in more detail on the next note. The beauty of introducing this character to my current party is that none of them are human. I wanted to be careful writing this character into a story because if the party was heavily human based, she would more than likely consider a group of humans a threat, especially considering the situations they are meeting her under. 2. The feat that I was talking about gives your character an interesting little quirk. You no longer have an alignment. It makes your character considered somewhat insane, but not to the point of killing anything you come into contact with. However, it does apply a small penalty to saves against confusion. If you don't use that feat though, I would suggest that your alignment be CN. You would have to be Chaotic, as you heavily rebel against the army, and you clearly don't have the altruism for good. However, as defined by the D&D alignment system, a neutral on the Good vs. Evil means that you don't like to kill innocents, but you don't make sacrifices to help or protect innocents. This would make you evil, but your character often attacks humans, which she considers evil, and often attacks humans only once she has a definite reason to do so, be it being a bully, threat, or part of the army. The part I've been stumped on alignment-wise is the considerations for her mental state. The first being that she looks at humans in a similar light to how most humans look at demons. She sees nothing wrong with killing humans as "all they'll do is cause death and destruction". This doesn't make what she's doing right by any means, though. The second consideration I look at is how her mental state has become more animalistic around humans. After all, they are just evil incarnations to her. I decided to take a look inside the PHB to see if maybe it could help me make a decision and it may have sealed the alignment. I'll post my train of thought for the decision so that if people want to critique my choice, they can say where they would've decided differently.. When I read the description of "evil", Anna matches up with more of it than she does with the "neutral" descriptor. But when I read the descriptions of the typical chaotic neutral and chaotic evil character, she doesn't match up all that well with either. She values her freedom and feels that others should have theirs, but she will not make sacrifices to protect the freedom of others. She will kill someone if it means protecting a non-human's freedom, but she will not put herself in a situation where protecting someone's freedom could result in losing any of her freedoms. She is also very unpredictable, mostly because of poor mental stability. She doesn't seek the outright destruction of organization in society, but she would like nothing more than to see the military that tortured her to crumble to ruins (out of revenge, an evil motive). On the other hand, the book's chaotic evil descriptor includes, "If he is simply out for whatever he can get, he is ruthless and brutal". During her attempts to escape, she was ruthless and brutal like a chaotic evil character. Anybody who she felt threatened by during her escape died. Anybody who she felt intentionally blocked her path to freedom died as well. I think I'll be going with the chaotic evil alignment because of the killings. She may not match up with the chaotic evil description very well, but she is "chaotic" (for openly killing military soldiers for being military soldiers) and has no problem with performing acts of "evil" (such as killing someone out of revenge).
ArgulFraster 08-13-07, 05:49 PM	Damn this is hard. I'm going to have to go with chaotic neutral-and say that sometimes the alignment system can be a bugger to deal with.