Most of the main characters played in Dragons and Things were created years ago for the digital series, Walking In Circles. Transitioning these characters from their on-screen personalities to their in-game incarnations was an interesting process that forced me to think about each character from a new angle. As a massive tabletop gaming nerd, I was excited to tackle this challenge, but there were definitely some unexpected turns in the process.
In a typical Pathfinder campaign each of the players creates their own character with a race, class, and backstory that they decide on before the first game session. As a GM, I offer assistance and some restrictions based on the story I’m trying to tell, but for the most part I stay out of it and give the players creative control.
For Dragons and Things, we did the exact opposite. The characters were lifted directly from Walking In Circles, and so who they are was pre-destined.
For Eric Radic (Krag) this was no problem at all. We always say Eric is Krag, and his character was going to be a straight up hack and slash barbarian who stood up front and crushed bad guys. It was his natural play style, and it was an easy fit for him.
Alex was another no-brainer. We decided we were only going to use one actress for the live stream and ditch the changing faces, but from there it was a matter of building a sneaky stabby rogue that Diana Restrepo was well suited to play.
All I needed to do was translate each character’s basic attributes into stats that fit the Pathfinder mechanics and for the most part it was straightforward. Krag was going to be strong, Markus was going to be smart, Alex was going to be stealthy, and Quigley was going to be… a problem.
In the show, Squire Quigley is demonstrably incompetent, with no real skills and gets knocked out of every fight in the first few seconds. He gets by on raw enthusiasm, blind luck, and the fact that his companions are by his side to do the heavy lifting. The issue is that in a game like Pathfinder, a character that can’t fight, doesn’t have any magic ability, and generally annoys everyone around him ends up being unplayable. WIC Quigley would die fast, and accomplish little unless I took some liberties with the character and beefed him up into a competent fighter.
Luckily, Ben Burch gives such a bold flavor to Squire Quigley that a fan barely notices the disconnect between WIC Quigley and DaT Quigley. Squire Quigley still feels like the over-eager boy diving head first into a shallow pool every chance he gets thanks to Ben’s play style and ability to stay true to Quigley’s origins.
Ben himself gets aggravated with this because of all my players, he has developed the greatest passion for Pathfinder. He wants to play smart and use tactical acumen, but Quigley’s personality forces him to make silly decisions that get the party in deep trouble more often than not. He’s a good sport, and I know he really likes playing Quigley, but there are plenty of times he has spoken to me outside of a session saying “I knew that hallway was a trap but, Quigley strides boldly forth.” I know, Ben, and let’s face it, it’s more fun this way.
Markus proved to be a challenge for a different reason. While the rest of the cast was very inexperienced with tabletop gaming when DaT started, Adam Rady (Markus) had been playing for years. He knew my games, my storytelling, and how Pathfinder worked.
When I created Markus as a Pathfinder character, I did something every player hates. I gave him a negative attribute.
Every character is constructed of basic statistics that represent their raw ability. They have strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma and these statistics are the foundation that the rest of the character is built upon. As a wizard, Markus needed to have a high intelligence, and pretty much nothing else. In WIC, he’s abrasive, lazy, and physically unimpressive, but the trade off is that he has what he calls “The Power of the Universe” at his command. On Markus’s character sheet, that is reflected with a wicked high intelligence, and pretty poor everything else.
Adam did not particularly like this.
Specifically, he felt that having a low charisma just didn’t fit with the character. I completely disagreed. To me, Markus’s inability to keep his mouth shut and his constant irritating quips would translate to a naturally unlikeable character. Adam felt that Markus was more charming than that, and that his charisma should be higher.
I think it really came down to two major factors:
1. Adam is biased towards Markus as the actor who plays the character
2. Small numbers bad, big numbers good.
Low charisma would affect Markus’s ability to lie, be diplomatic, intimidate people, and negotiate. These aren’t even things Markus would necessarily need to do, but any GM knows that when you assign a penalty to a player in Pathfinder, no matter how insignificant, you’re going to hear about it.
In the end, I stand by my decision as Markus is not only insanely irritating as a person, but his magical abilities make him one of the most powerful characters in the group in almost every situation.
My last major hurdle was creating Leera, because she was the only character in the main party who was not going to be imported from Walking In Circles. She was going to be a totally original character, played by an actress I had never worked with before. The entire cast to this point had had very limited experience with tabletop gaming save for myself and for Adam.
We managed to play a few practice sessions with Eric, Ben, and Diana prior to sitting down for our first live streamed session, but Ashley Seal (Leera) was a different matter. She had never played any tabletop RPGs, and she had been cast just prior to our first show without any opportunity for us to really teach her what was up. I did spend some time on the phone with her trying to explain how things worked in Pathfinder, but to anyone familiar with the complexity of the rules I might as well have been trying to teach Ashley a new language in one sitting.
The reason this made creating Leera difficult was the complexity of the role she was stepping in to. We needed a healer and support character, which is handled best by clerics, but clerics have access to a list of powers that is long and complicated and tough to swallow for someone who didn’t even know what Pathfinder was a few days before they sat down to play. In a perfect world, I would have given Ashley a much more simplified class, for her first time at the table. A fighter, for example, is considered one of the best newbie classes. However, since we were translating characters from the show into the game, Ben was already a fighter and her character wouldn’t have stood out.
I solved this problem by giving Ashley a dual class. That might seem like it would ridiculously complicate things, but her second class was monk. Monks are martial artists, they don’t use equipment, they don’t have magic, they just punch. It was simple. This reduced her abilities as a cleric because she was split between two roles, but that’s what I wanted. We were putting a much simpler list of spells and powers in front of her.
It was perfect at first, but now we’re in a weird spot with Leera. The show has gone on long enough that the characters have all advanced significantly, and now that Ashley is more comfortable with the game she’s ready to delve into the heavy cleric spells. However, she doesn’t have access to a lot of the powers appropriate to her level because of the monk levels.
It’s definitely created a challenge for the party who is now dealing with big monsters and small heals, but truth be told I enjoy that aspect of the game. I like the tension of a tough battle that they struggle with.
As a GM, translating characters from WIC to DaT had a lot of pros and cons. I feel like players are far more invested in a character they designed than in something that was pre-generated for them. However, when we sit down on Friday nights for another stream of Dragons and Things, I see a couch full of people excited to step into the world we’ve created together, and I know that in the end we’re all having fun.
Remember, if you want to join in on that fun, join us every Friday at 6pm PST for Dragons and Things.
Oh yeah, and watch Walking In Circles when you get a chance. I think you might like it.
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