LFG | Barbarian | Sundays | CST US | 5E

FG License: Standard
Time Zone: Central Time USA
Day(s) of week, frequency, and time: Sunday, weekly, any time. I work 2nd shift so I could also potentially play a game in the mornings before work.
Term: Prefer long, no one-shots
Voice: Yes

Game System Preferred: D&D 5E
Game System Experience: D&D 5E and PF 2E
Fantasy Grounds Experience: Quite familiar

Looking for a group with a heavier focus on roleplay!

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Hello! I tend to be long winded, so in order to try and avoid this post being super long, I'm gonna attempt to bullet point stuff. You can skip to the beginning of each bullet point if you want to, but there's plenty of juicy details if you read it all!

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About my character: I already have a pretty much fully thought out character I'm wanting to play. There's potential for wiggle room in the backstory of course, but here's the jist of it.

Half-Orc.

Barbarian, Path of the Zealot. This guy is on a path of vengeance, seeking to cut out the "monsters" living among "humanity". He absolutely hates criminals, more specifically those guilty of serious crimes. Rape, murder, kidnapping, and for the most part stealing. Stealing to survive is one thing, but stealing for profit deserves at least a hand cut off. He is ruthless, and has little mercy.

Worships Bahamut. A perfect fit, here's a piece of Bahamut's dogma: Bahamut's dogma was based on justice, nobility, protection, and honor. He taught his followers to always uphold the highest ideals of honor and justice; to be constantly vigilant against evil and to oppose it from all fronts; and to protect the weak, liberate the oppressed, and defend just order. Bahamut advocated a "greater justice" that included fighting against evil and toppling oppressive regimes. He also liked to reward strength of purpose and character in his followers.

Divinely fueled rage. I link him being a Zealot with his worship of Bahamut, and as a result, I roleplay that his rage is divinely granted, by Bahamut. Since "rage" is far more than just being really angry. It's almost supernatural by default, so having it be actually supernatural is a perfect fit.

Chaotic Neutral. A big part of this character is I really want him to ride the line between good and evil. Pretty much everything he does is in the name of good, but the way he goes about them isn't very nice to say the least. He's definitely an "ends justify the means" kind of guy. I'm always searching for ways to make this more complex, as I GENUINELY want him to ride that line- make people wonder if he's going too far- and not just be a good guy that does things in a rough way. I don't want him to be a good guy. I want him to have his flaws.

Background: City Watch. Before becoming a Barbarian, he was a town guard. Nothing too special here, though he did already have a penchant for hunting down criminals and giving them their just desserts. He wasn't quite so ruthless at this point, though. He ended up getting kidnapped one day, as part of a failed raid. He was taken into slavery, then rescued by a follower of Bahamut. This was the catalyst that caused him to become a Barbarian. During his time as a slave, he saw many terrible things that eventually caused a switch to flip inside of him. He became a little unhinged. Assuming the group starts at level 1, he would be pretty well just starting this journey, as he'd be too weak (just from being level 1) to do much on his own. Perhaps for a time he tried to continue working with the City Watch, though it's sort of a Batman situation (or really, the Punisher) where they can't officially recognize him, but they can certainly respect what he's doing.

https://dnd5e.wikidot.com/background:city-watch

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Alright, I hope you found my character interesting! I know I really like them. Now let's get on to some stuff about me.

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About me: There are some real things to discuss here so please, don't skip around.

I'll start with the basics I guess. I'm 26, male, and looking for a long term game. This would likely be the only game I'm a part of, so it would be very important to me. For this reason, there's something I need to be up front about, so hopefully it won't become an issue later on. I hope you stick with me through this part.

I am autistic. Specifically, Aspergers. While I could go for a time and be perceived as normal, eventually it becomes evident that something is off. This usually leads to frustration and complications.

Having Aspergers basically means that I can be pretty bad with social stuff. I have a way of unintentionally getting on people's nerves over time. I'm largely unable to read what should be obvious social cues. For example, when people start to get frustrated with me, and I should take it as a sign to back off or do something different.

At the end of the day, I want to have fun like everyone else. However, I believe I take the game a bit more seriously than most people. This can be a double edged sword. While it can mean things such as wanting to roleplay my character really well, it can also mean that I tend to get hung up on details. I like things to be orderly and make sense. I get that it's a fantasy GAME and people are just here to have fun. I am too. I just like to try and sprinkle a little bit of realism into it where possible. I tend to have long discussions (between sessions) about how things should be.

For example, I once spent a good chunk of time trying to get an understanding of how much the gold in the game was really worth. A perfect example of where this would come in handy would be knowing how much to tip someone, or try to bribe a peasant or a guard. I read through a few articles online, and ended up disagreeing with all of them. I came up with my own system, which simply made use of the income chart. So based on who you're talking to (peasant/guard/noble/etc), different amounts would be necessary to stand out to them. So you just look at the income chart and see what they would roughly be making per day. Tipping someone a day's worth of pay should be quite substantial to them (that would be about $100 or so in real life). Pretty quickly though the party will be swimming in gold and you could bribe a guard with a week or even a month's worth of pay. So yeah, I was pretty satisfied with myself for coming up with this.

Anyway, back on topic. So I suppose the takeaway here is that I will likely require a degree of understanding from the group. I do my absolute best to control myself and I've always been trying to improve. In fact I'm getting ready to start counseling. But there's only so much I can do. It is a genuine disability. And even when people are aware of it and are trying to be understanding, it still has a way of getting to people eventually. I don't want it to sound hopeless, though. I have had people in the past that have understood and never got frustrated with me.

At this point I want to reiterate. I'm here to have fun like everyone else. I do my best to get along with people. I just like to get caught up on details, and I have a way of discussing things which is very combative. When having a discussion, I'm trying to do better about acknowledging things I agree with, or acknowledging that I understand something they said. I tend to skip over that part and just continue on with questions and trying to explain things, which makes it seem like I'm not really listening, when I am.

So yeah. Hopefully I can find a group that's willing to take me on.

With all that out of the way, there's still a couple more things I want to cover!

Now I expect a lot of DMs won't be open to this idea, but please hear me out!

Before I say anything, if you wouldn't mind, I think this guy could explain it much better than I could. So please check out this video! Skip to 2:30 to get past the intro and sponsor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0FiO5b3PPI

So yes, a magic shop. The TL;DR of the video is that magic shops are not nearly as problematic as one would think, and that's pretty much because of attunement. It gives players the flexibility to just get the magic items they want (avoiding metagaming of course), which is fun! Being able to go on a magic shopping spree when you return to the larger towns is fun! Ordering magic items to be created is fun! Coming up with custom items is fun!

Here's why I care so much about this. I think character creation in D&D is a little simple. I have played some Pathfinder and the character creation there is just vastly superior, there's no question about it. Here you pretty much just choose your race, class, and a couple features and feats along the way. So being able to customize your character with different magic items easily, just adds so much more variety to the game.

And it's not like a magic shop just gives you easy access to every magic item in the game. Obviously, you still control what is available. And if there's a magic item that you don't want to exist, then it simply won't, and if it doesn't exist, then there's absolutely no reason for the characters to be wanting that item, because they don't know it exists. Unless they just so happen to be trying to come up with the idea themselves, which already is probably metagaming. Anyway, if there's an item you just don't want players to have for some reason, just be honest about that as a DM and all will be good.

So let me break down a couple of the details of how I see this working. This website is a fantastic resource. It goes over how the players would create their own items. However that is unlikely to happen, we would pretty much just be buying items. The only thing we're really interested in here is the first chart, "Crafting Magic Items". https://www.flutesloot.com/5e-crafting-magic-items/

This chart is a great and simple way to price magic items. Now, because of gameplay reasons, the cost of creating items yourself is identical to just buying it. The only reason you'd craft something yourself was if it wasn't available normally. You can't use the crafting system to get items for cheaper, and you can't make a profit from it.

So this chart shows the cost of everything. 500g for Uncommon items, then every rarity up is 10x as expensive.

So yeah, another reason having a magic shop is so great is because it gives you, the DM, a pretty accurate way to determine how much to reward your party. Since the economy of the party pretty much revolves around magic items, because they're the main thing everyone cares about. For example, if we had a party of 6, you know that if you give the party a reward of 3000g, that's enough for everyone to afford an Uncommon item.

If there was no magic shop, then what really would the party be able to spend their fortune on?

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Following up on this, I have another idea. Now this one I haven't thought about nearly as much, but I still think it'd probably be a good idea. When you look at the income chart, it really gives you an understanding of how valuable gold is. For a normal person (a guard, a carpenter or something), it would take them like 2 months just to save up for a healing potion (50g). https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTh...e_and_economy/

For this reason, I'm starting to believe that the gold cost for these magic items is way too high relative to everything else. Now to be clear, I'm not trying to make them easier to get for the party by making them cheaper. For example, if we were to halve everything, then that'd be 250g for an Uncommon item. So using the earlier example, instead of giving the party 3000g, you'd give them 1500.

The goal here is to just have it make a little more sense. The gold cost for these items starts to get so crazy that it doesn't really make sense. How much does it cost to buy a house? A keep? How much would it cost to buy an entire city? How much gold would a kingdom keep in its coffers? There's no need to come up with exact numbers here. But again, just getting a sense using that income chart, you can understand the absolutely ridiculously large gap between everyone else, and adventurers. With magic items being this expensive, pretty much the main way you'd be able to reward the party, is from looting magic items off of enemies, most of which you'd likely sell.

Speaking of selling the items. So if anything, decreasing the cost of the items would actually be a nerf to the party. It'd make us less rich. Because the costs of the rest of the world stayed the same, but now you only get half as much for selling your magic items as before. In my opinion, doing this just kinda grounds everything.

Now yes, this would make Uncommon magic items a little more common in the world. And I think that's appropriate. There's a lot of rarities after Uncommon, and truly, Uncommon is the first rarity of magic items. "Common" only covers things such as potions and little trinkets that are basically useless.

Here's the thing though, it works both ways. This essentially gives justification for some enemies having magic items. It makes a lot more sense for the bandit leader to be packing an Uncommon item if it's 250g instead of 500g. Otherwise their entire camp could just off the leader, sell his item, and they all go buy a house. You see what I'm getting at?

At the end of the day this isn't really that important, I just think it would make a little more sense.

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So yeah that's pretty much it I suppose! I understand it's probably a bit overboard to go into all that up front like this, but I think it's helpful because, for one thing, it's a perfect example of how I like to get into the details about things. Whereas most people really just don't care and just wanna play the game. That's the thing though. If they don't really care, then they should be pretty open minded to any changes. I think it's just the DISCUSSING part of it that they get tired of. Maybe if I just sorted things out in private with the DM, and then perhaps just make a poll for the party if the DM is on board, that would probably go over a lot better.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, and I really hope to find a long term home!

Still really hopeful to find a group... if there are any DMs out there that would like to squeeze me in. Seems like games that fit my basic criteria (Sundays, heavy RP) are few and far between. Granted I haven't been looking constantly but yeah, 2 months later and still looking. I'm really excited to play this character.