How often do you get "ah ha!" RP moments as a PC?


Gamer Life General Discussion


I generally DM, but recently got the chance to play in Rappan Athuk. I've been working consistently to build an interesting set of behaviors for my character.

I play a master summoner. Our last session ended in a cliffhanger in which we may or may not be about to get into trouble with something that got brought to the material plane by bad guys and subsequently broke free and mauled them all. I was grumpy to end the session right at the exciting part, but later was chatting with other players when I had a great RP breakthrough.

What if I played my master summoner as someone who was dedicated to helping creatures get back to their home planes? Seems really fun to work out and you could easily spin most conjuration magic as essence calling instead of soul calling.

For those of you who PC often, how frequently do you get RP ah ha's in the middle of a campaign?


I think that I know the feeling. I was still 'getting to know' my character, a dwarven inquisitor of Torag. I had a vague outline of what I wanted from him. Unknowingly racist (I think that I surprised the half-orc player at the table when I said to him "You're not half bad...thought you aren't half right either" after he did something effective. That, and playing up the 'conversion' inquisition.

This cockiness came to a screeching halt. I put forward a questionably moral plan that would have easily killed some potentially hostile NPCs. Something that the paladin and the cleric in the party were right against.

Well...everything went wrong for him in quick order. He put on a cursed belt. He got diseased. The big bad was a chaotic elemental, and despite praying to Torag he spent the entire fight confused (and the target of its mind flaying attacks). After the session he spent all of his gold to remove the belt...and then with the disease failed fortitude check after fortitude check. Even with another party member paying for healing, he just couldn't catch a break. He was on his way to dying from it due to the string of bad rolls...

...and that is when the "ah-ha" RP moment hit me. In that moment I 'got to know' the character, and his backstory/motivations/weaknesses came to me.

Its one of those moments where you are really happy for a string of bad luck because it really helps make the character. If he had spent that session kicking arse and taking names, I'd be much worse off from it.


Still getting to know your character is a great term for it!

I think I'm most interested in polling other frequent players to understand how many of their characters they experience this growth in.

I could imagine playing an entire campaign with a pretty shallow RP, but I'm really enjoying going much more in depth.

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