Make It Your Own

This is the unexpressed tenet of all roleplaying. On an earlier post, my good friend Mark expressed that if you’re not having fun, then what’s the point? I couldn’t agree more; however, there’s another point I’d like to add to that. If there’s something you’d like to accomplish as a player, whether it be in character creation, roleplaying, or combat, you shouldn’t always let rules tell you that you can’t.

For example, in our new Eberron game, my friend Dave wanted to play a Shifter. However, he wanted to play something similar to a wolverine rather than the listed wolf (longtooth) and tiger (razorclaw). Historically, there has never been a were-wolverine, so we had to think of a way to make this work. After some thought, we decided that if a longtooth and a razorclaw were to breed, the hybrid might resemble a wolverine. So when we made the character, he picked and chose abilities from the two shifters to make his hybrid.

Back home, in our ongoing campaign called “Fire And Ice”, we had to face a super-advanced cryohydra. If you’ve never before faced a hydra, you must cut off all of the heads and carterize the wounds in order to kill it completely. My level 17 monk found a way to jump on its back, and with a ki-focus longsword and the whirlwind attack feat, could legitimately strike a large number of heads all at once. Obviously, there are no rules for this, but our speechless DM allowed me to hit half of the heads at once. This provided a cinematic solution that also allowed the DM’s creation to wallop on us for a few rounds.

I encourage anyone to step outside the box a little bit, challenge these “rules” that have been set forth. In the mighty words of Captain Barbossa, “They’re really more like guidelines…”