I’m a long time Dungeon Master who got a fleeting and unique opportunity to be a player in a game when one of my friends decided to take a turn behind the screen. I gave him my copy of a module I hadn’t read through or played in as of yet (Curse of Strahd w/ some homebrew elements) and proceeded to, for the first time in seven years, create a player character of my very own for a campaign that I was not running.
*I should preface this by saying that we implement a good amount of homebrew rules in our games, so some things I mention might sound a bit out of key with core rules!*
Suffice to say, I was nervous. I was used to being able to create unique and interesting characters by the truckloads and implementing them as I saw fit while DMing, and yet now there was so much more permanence to what I was making that I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to potentially last.
The first thing I decided was that I wanted to play an Artificer. Since the UA release, I had been fascinated by the potential of the class, and mostly because I was drawn to the theme (being an avid steampunk fan). However, I had problems with how stagnant the construct companion was, until I came across a revision of the class (https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1493/78/1493789345926.pdf). I instantly fell in love with this version and decided to take it for a spin at the approval of our new DM and a few balance tweaks.
I then proceeded to roll for ability scores and...well, it didn’t go so well. I came up with the following: 4, 6, 17, 14, 7, 14. Normally, any sane person would ask to reroll. Pretty crazy extremes there, but instead of being disheartened, I took this breakdown as an opportunity to try something exciting. Seeing that gruesomely low 4 inspired me with the idea of playing a character with a serious physical disability, a real challenge to test my role-playing skills and game mechanics competency! I settled on Brittle Bone syndrome, putting the 4 into my constitution and went over some special rules with the new DM over how it would effect my character. The other low scores I decided to put into Strength (6) and Dexterity (7), completely shutting me out of any physical confrontation and more accurately representing just how much the disease affects my character’s ability to interact with the world around her. The 17 naturally went to Intelligence, and the remaining 14’s to Charisma and Wisdom.
Now came my Race. After some consideration and some inspiration from one of my favourite characters from the Guild Wars franchise (Taimi, who suffers from a similar condition), I decided to go Rock Gnome mostly for the tinkering theme and also because I had an idea brewing for how to overcome my character’s crippling disability in combat that would require a Small/Tiny character.
This choice brought my Intelligence to a staggering 19, and also bumped my constitution to 5 (woo!), and that is where my ability scores currently rest.
Now, because of the nature of this disease, and some time spent studying how it works and some real life accounts of its progression and how people live with it, the DM and I made a set of rules regarding how my character’s fragility is to be treated as best as we could translate to D&D rules:
I cannot utilise weapons nor don armor
I do not benefit from increasing my maximum hit points upon levelling up
I cannot increase my CON/STR/DEX scores through ASI until I find a cure/treatment for this condition
My speed is 5 and I cannot take the Dash action
Sounds terrifying right? What use could this character possibly have in a party of murder hobos going off to face a vampire lord in the dark and dangerous land of Borovia? The answer: M.A.C.
Mobility Assistance Construct, or Mac, as I’ve come to lovingly refer to him, is my artificer’s mechanical construct companion, acquired by choosing the Mechanist subclass. I cannot express how much I love this revision, and how much customisation it has opened up to building the construct and the potential for upgrading it in the future. I sincerely hope the official release is closer to this iteration.
I decided, much in the vein of the aforementioned Asura, to have my little fragile gnome ride around inside her giant iron and brass golem as a mobility-assistant/literal-bodyguard. I gave Mac the Bipedal structure and the Strong build (setting his Strength to 16, and his dexterity to 13).At first I thought since his priority was to protect me from harm, I would have his CON be the higher stat, but at level 6 a modification called Upgraded Build becomes available, increase another stat to 16 (which I would choose CON), so I felt that the greater value at this lower level would be to have Mac hit harder and have that vital +1 to AC from DEX and then become a mountain of hitpoints after level 6 and beyond when things start hitting back much harder.
Additionally, since the party was starting at level 3 I was able to immediately give him 3 upgrades. Naturally, I had to choose Harness so my gnome could use him as a vehicle and protector (I explained it similarly to how GW asura ride around in their golems, with a sort of polyurethane window in front so they can see and steer their construct but still have “full cover” excluding line of sight). Second I chose Larger Chassis, making Mac a “large” creature and upgrading his Hit Dice to a d10 to supplement him only having 10 CON for now.Finally, Mac received Reserve Power, since it is the only mid-combat method of healing a construct and I felt that my character would prioritise Mac’s well being over the rest of the party’s.
At that point, all I had left to do was give my poor little gnome a background and some spells. It was an easy pick, getting only 3 and having a whopping 2 1st level spell slots. I took Shield of Faith, Cure Wounds, and Alarm as they seemed to be the only useful things my character could effectively accomplish from her position in the party. The focus on the cleric spells made me decide that she was perhaps religious to a degree, but likely in a non-theistic way. I wrote her as being very spiritually aware of the natural order, not quite believing in a particular deity, but instead believing in the energy that connects all life (think Techno-Magical Buddhist). Now, at the moment of writing this (before the first official session of this campaign), our party has no healers besides my meagre 2 1st level cure wounds. I feel that, depending on the progression of the character, she might go towards the cleric route at some point in the near future, so I’m keen on leaving that door open. Having found nothing in the world of science and magical theory that could help her, perhaps she turns to faith as a last resort?
Naturally, the best background for a character like this is usually Guild Artisan. I went with that in the end, but felt that, because of her condition, she may have never been taken too seriously by her peers, so she would have grown up somewhat standoffish, and perhaps a little goofy, making terrible quips with horrible comedic timing (so many Dad jokes), garnering her the nickname “Cheese”. Eventually, as she grew into her mid-teens, she began conducting experiments on live subjects in her search for a cure for her condition and thereby being excommunicated from her home for her perversions against nature, even though she felt she was doing nothing wrong. After having successfully completed her golem assistant, she began traveling the world for alternative treatments and more “open-minded” potential partners, until one day she came across tales of a place where such knowledge may perhaps exist, in the far away land of Borovia.
And thus begins the story of Tesserine “Cheese” Lomok and her best friend M.A.C..
I hope to use this as an opportunity to explore both the mechanical and physiological aspects of a character with this condition being forced into the “fight or flight” circumstances made so common in a TTRPG, and most of all hope that it opens the topic up to the community as a whole for an interesting discussion on the idea of playing and writing characters with disabilities.
*I will update this page after each session to further record her progression (or likely tragic end). Please note, i have not ran, read or played Curse of Strahd before so NO SPOILERS for the module, please and thank you.
I look forward to reading about Cheese's journey! This was a very interesting read and created some opportunities for me to reconsidering PCs and handling limitations. Thank you for that.
I’m a long time Dungeon Master who got a fleeting and unique opportunity to be a player in a game when one of my friends decided to take a turn behind the screen. I gave him my copy of a module I hadn’t read through or played in as of yet (Curse of Strahd w/ some homebrew elements) and proceeded to, for the first time in seven years, create a player character of my very own for a campaign that I was not running.
*I should preface this by saying that we implement a good amount of homebrew rules in our games, so some things I mention might sound a bit out of key with core rules!*
Suffice to say, I was nervous. I was used to being able to create unique and interesting characters by the truckloads and implementing them as I saw fit while DMing, and yet now there was so much more permanence to what I was making that I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to potentially last.
The first thing I decided was that I wanted to play an Artificer. Since the UA release, I had been fascinated by the potential of the class, and mostly because I was drawn to the theme (being an avid steampunk fan). However, I had problems with how stagnant the construct companion was, until I came across a revision of the class (https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1493/78/1493789345926.pdf). I instantly fell in love with this version and decided to take it for a spin at the approval of our new DM and a few balance tweaks.
I then proceeded to roll for ability scores and...well, it didn’t go so well. I came up with the following: 4, 6, 17, 14, 7, 14. Normally, any sane person would ask to reroll. Pretty crazy extremes there, but instead of being disheartened, I took this breakdown as an opportunity to try something exciting. Seeing that gruesomely low 4 inspired me with the idea of playing a character with a serious physical disability, a real challenge to test my role-playing skills and game mechanics competency! I settled on Brittle Bone syndrome, putting the 4 into my constitution and went over some special rules with the new DM over how it would effect my character. The other low scores I decided to put into Strength (6) and Dexterity (7), completely shutting me out of any physical confrontation and more accurately representing just how much the disease affects my character’s ability to interact with the world around her. The 17 naturally went to Intelligence, and the remaining 14’s to Charisma and Wisdom.
Now came my Race. After some consideration and some inspiration from one of my favourite characters from the Guild Wars franchise (Taimi, who suffers from a similar condition), I decided to go Rock Gnome mostly for the tinkering theme and also because I had an idea brewing for how to overcome my character’s crippling disability in combat that would require a Small/Tiny character.
This choice brought my Intelligence to a staggering 19, and also bumped my constitution to 5 (woo!), and that is where my ability scores currently rest.
Now, because of the nature of this disease, and some time spent studying how it works and some real life accounts of its progression and how people live with it, the DM and I made a set of rules regarding how my character’s fragility is to be treated as best as we could translate to D&D rules:
Sounds terrifying right? What use could this character possibly have in a party of murder hobos going off to face a vampire lord in the dark and dangerous land of Borovia? The answer: M.A.C.
Mobility Assistance Construct, or Mac, as I’ve come to lovingly refer to him, is my artificer’s mechanical construct companion, acquired by choosing the Mechanist subclass. I cannot express how much I love this revision, and how much customisation it has opened up to building the construct and the potential for upgrading it in the future. I sincerely hope the official release is closer to this iteration.
I decided, much in the vein of the aforementioned Asura, to have my little fragile gnome ride around inside her giant iron and brass golem as a mobility-assistant/literal-bodyguard. I gave Mac the Bipedal structure and the Strong build (setting his Strength to 16, and his dexterity to 13). At first I thought since his priority was to protect me from harm, I would have his CON be the higher stat, but at level 6 a modification called Upgraded Build becomes available, increase another stat to 16 (which I would choose CON), so I felt that the greater value at this lower level would be to have Mac hit harder and have that vital +1 to AC from DEX and then become a mountain of hitpoints after level 6 and beyond when things start hitting back much harder.
Additionally, since the party was starting at level 3 I was able to immediately give him 3 upgrades. Naturally, I had to choose Harness so my gnome could use him as a vehicle and protector (I explained it similarly to how GW asura ride around in their golems, with a sort of polyurethane window in front so they can see and steer their construct but still have “full cover” excluding line of sight). Second I chose Larger Chassis, making Mac a “large” creature and upgrading his Hit Dice to a d10 to supplement him only having 10 CON for now. Finally, Mac received Reserve Power, since it is the only mid-combat method of healing a construct and I felt that my character would prioritise Mac’s well being over the rest of the party’s.
At that point, all I had left to do was give my poor little gnome a background and some spells. It was an easy pick, getting only 3 and having a whopping 2 1st level spell slots. I took Shield of Faith, Cure Wounds, and Alarm as they seemed to be the only useful things my character could effectively accomplish from her position in the party. The focus on the cleric spells made me decide that she was perhaps religious to a degree, but likely in a non-theistic way. I wrote her as being very spiritually aware of the natural order, not quite believing in a particular deity, but instead believing in the energy that connects all life (think Techno-Magical Buddhist). Now, at the moment of writing this (before the first official session of this campaign), our party has no healers besides my meagre 2 1st level cure wounds. I feel that, depending on the progression of the character, she might go towards the cleric route at some point in the near future, so I’m keen on leaving that door open. Having found nothing in the world of science and magical theory that could help her, perhaps she turns to faith as a last resort?
Naturally, the best background for a character like this is usually Guild Artisan. I went with that in the end, but felt that, because of her condition, she may have never been taken too seriously by her peers, so she would have grown up somewhat standoffish, and perhaps a little goofy, making terrible quips with horrible comedic timing (so many Dad jokes), garnering her the nickname “Cheese”. Eventually, as she grew into her mid-teens, she began conducting experiments on live subjects in her search for a cure for her condition and thereby being excommunicated from her home for her perversions against nature, even though she felt she was doing nothing wrong. After having successfully completed her golem assistant, she began traveling the world for alternative treatments and more “open-minded” potential partners, until one day she came across tales of a place where such knowledge may perhaps exist, in the far away land of Borovia.
And thus begins the story of Tesserine “Cheese” Lomok and her best friend M.A.C..
I hope to use this as an opportunity to explore both the mechanical and physiological aspects of a character with this condition being forced into the “fight or flight” circumstances made so common in a TTRPG, and most of all hope that it opens the topic up to the community as a whole for an interesting discussion on the idea of playing and writing characters with disabilities.
*I will update this page after each session to further record her progression (or likely tragic end). Please note, i have not ran, read or played Curse of Strahd before so NO SPOILERS for the module, please and thank you.
Much Love,
Arsicane
Thanks for sharing this! I've only skimmed it just now but I'm excited to dive in.
DM: The Cult of the Crystal Spider (Currently playing Storm King's Thunder)
Player: The Knuckles of Arth - Lemire (Tiefling Rogue 5/Fighter 1)
I look forward to reading about Cheese's journey! This was a very interesting read and created some opportunities for me to reconsidering PCs and handling limitations. Thank you for that.
Valaith "Rimehand" Kalukavi - Chronicles of Arden
Very interesting! I'm excited to see how this turns out.
Looking forward to the adventures of M.A.C. and "Cheese."