Hi, I’m Kimpak and I’m a PC

Player Character that is. I thought I’d take a minute and give my advice on how to be a better player character for D&D or any other pen and paper RPG. First I’d like to point out this is purely my opinion. Every person is different and will play their characters differently, so take these ideas or leave ‘em, its up to you.

First, and I consider this to be most important, don’t be a munchkin. What is a munchkin? A munchkin is a player who min/max’s stats, taking a 5 charisma to make a 30 strength or something equally stupid. A munchkin is someone who pores over every obscure book looking for feats, skills, magic items to make their character do something unbelievably lame, like being able to boost the jump skill enough to jump 40’ in the air and land harmlessly. Or manage to tweak battle stats to deal 200 hp of damage every hit and crit on a 10-20. Its about as much fun as playing a video game with the cheats on…its not. Some kids like that sort of thing I guess, but it completely breaks the balance of the game, thus making it extremely lame for those of us who don’t tweak.

Second, don’t be afraid to participate. The more you engage yourself in the storyline the more enjoyment you are going to get out of the game. There is an RPG club that always runs a tournament at GenCon called NASCRAG (National Society of Crazed Gamers) who advance you or your party they base it off how you played your character not how far you advanced in the module. This is great fun. Make up a voice, try out an accent, get into the role.

Make up a history for your character and let your DM know what it is. J.R.R Tolkien’s stories are so great because he came up with a 500 year history of middle earth. Therefore each character had a complete history with genealogy and everything. You don’t have to be that detailed, but try to come up with something, at least how and why you chose your particular character class. What things lead you up to this point in your career. Do you have an ultimate goal? What motivates you to do quests? Do you have any family still alive? Do you have an arch enemy? Or you can go a different direction, your Jason Bourne and just woke up one day and know nothing about your history, you have all these skills but don’t know how you got them and are now desperately searching the world for answers to your past. A good DM can take any of those elements and run with it, making the game more memorable and fun for all.

Understand the class you are playing and don’t just stick to a cookie cutter model. Don’t be just a big dumb fighter for instance. Look at all of your skills and feats and pretend you’re MacGyver and those are your random tools. What can you create with a matchstick and chewing gum? For example, I had a Dwarven fighter that eventually was going to prestige class into a Dwarven Defender. Fighters don’t get much for skill points and have a very small selection of what they can choose, one of those is craft. Nobody takes craft, so I decided to take it, what the hell. And it turned out that our characters were fairly poor, I would find a scrap metal and craft it into armor, then one of our party members with a high Charisma would talk it up and sell it for a nice profit. BTW the character was female and my character made her a chainmail bikini to help w/ the Cha check, lol. Anyways, that’s just an example of how I took a usually crap skill and turned into something awesome for the party. Also make sure you carefully read all of your class’s special abilities and feats so you can take full advantage of them. Look for skills and feats that compliment your class. Learn how all the special combat actions work, bull rush, sunder, cast defensively, trip, disarm and overrun. Even if you don’t have the improved versions of these as a feat they can still be performed and can save you in a sticky situation.

Work with the party. Game sessions can get tedious if you stay in the background and plot to backstab the party. The exception is if that’s what the campaign is specifically designed for, if it isn’t you’re just annoying everyone and bogging down the game. Barring the specific evil campaign, I find that working together as a party to accomplish tasks is a lot of fun. This is very important so read the next sentence twice. Don’t be a rules lawyer! If you have a great memory or otherwise have nothing better to do than memorize obscure rules or every spell description in the game, keep it to yourself unless asked. Too many rules will also bog down the game and finding loopholes in the rules is like using an exploit in a video game, its cheating. The rules of DnD are just guidelines, they are not the gospel. There are only two solid rules to remember. Rule number 1. The DM is always right. Rule number 2, if the DM is ever wrong, refer to rule number 1. If the DM has to hack the dice, or has to tweak a rule or simply unaware of a rule and breaks it anyway…let it be. Now, even more annoying is when you pull rules on other players. I was in a game like this once and everybody wanted to kill the bastard. For instance, my wife who was a Ranger cast entangle in a cave, the DM didn’t even think twice and started rolling saves for his monsters. With out skipping a beat our friend the rules lawyer pipes up “You can’t cast that spell in doors because there are no plants around”. Shuddup your mouth, the DM was already letting it slide and you want to gimp your own party due to a technicality. Later that same game our Druid cast call lightening again the DM started rolling saves and again the rules lawyer pipes up. “You can’t cast that indoors” However this brought the game to a screeching halt because now everybody had to look the spell up because we were all pretty sure that you could, indeed cast that spell indoors. Turns out we were right and he was wrong. Now why would you argue against your own party? You’d be surprised how many people want to follow every letter of the rules. I urge you not to. In my games if it takes longer than a couple minutes to look it up, we make it up.