Bad Characters for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

Whenever I make a character for a role-playing game, I try to make them good at something. I often try to maximize their effectiveness in one area, to make them excel. When I make a barbarian, I want them to be as effective as possible in dealing melee damage. When I make a wizard, I want them to have many spells, and to be able to utilize them effectively. Additionally, I want my characters to have a few other strengths and talents to make them useful. My characters are meant to survive the adventure, defeat their enemies, and conquer their challenges. 

These are not such characters. They are the opposite of that. They are very bad at a few things and mediocre at everything else. Many of them can't even multiclass effectively, as they don't meet the attribute requirements to try to be anything else. These nerds are stuck being crappy characters until at least level 5. These characters are the opposite of optimized; they’re vandalized. Making these characters was surprisingly refreshing, after years of optimizing and trying to wring every little advantage out of a character. I recommend it to any veteran of character creation as a fun challenge and mental exercise.

These characters are made in such a way that they're bad at what they're supposed to be good at, and only mediocre at anything else. The barbarian is weak in melee combat. The wizard is bad at casting spells (and can't cast many). The would-be bard is actually a sorcerer, and is repugnant and bad at music. The monk is bad at fighting and isn't all that wise. I’ve taken advantage (disadvantage?) of custom backgrounds, the variant human race option, and monstrous races from other 5th edition books to make these characters as bad as possible. 

They each have a backstory that shows how they got to this state, and it's often a tale of woe. Some of these characters are complete assholes and deserve to suck at their profession. Others are unfortunate victims of circumstance.

Most of these characters have a high constitution. I'm not trying to say that constitution is a useless attribute - higher constitution scores are good - but it's not essential to any class, it isn't a prerequisite for multiclassing, and usually only gives you a few more hit points and a better chance on some saving throws. After all, a battle is won when your opponents are dead or defeated, and if you can't effectively overpower them, a few extra hit points aren't going to help.

These characters have all been made by the official WotC Adventurer's League standards (legal custom backgrounds, only one book besides the PHB), so you could play these poor bastards in an AL game if you wanted.

Now meet Bethyl, Dinki, Jeggory, Prizella, Shump, and Weynard.




Bethyl
Bethyl Character Sheet PDF
Bethyl is a very old hermit woman. She spends her time in small hut in the Neverwinter wood. She is obsessed with health and purity, and as a result is very healthy, but also very skinny. She has her own peculiar system of living, with a very restricted diet and a constant regimen of strange exercises and self-defense techniques; none of this serves to make her stronger, but it has contributed to overall great health. She knows druidic secrets she claims was taught to her by the trees; she uses these powers to purify her daily meal. She claims the fish and the rabbits taught her how to fight. When she is challenged on any of these beliefs, a terrible argument ensues. For fun, she sneaks around the forest trying to find people and animals, so she can lure them into conversation with a few magic tricks, then segue into preaching her way of life and selling her herbal poultices.



Dinki
Dinki Character Sheet PDF
Dinki is tiny, even for a kobold. Smarter than most kobolds, she had the misfortune of being fully aware of how poor her situation was, being a tiny weakling even amongst weaklings; this cursed her with a terrible and bitter rage. Dinki was part of a travelling kobold gang that would attempt to distract travelers along the Blackford Road with tricks and performances while the others picked pockets and looted saddlebags. One such occasion she was caught stealing from an old lady, who severed her leg with a meat cleaver. The other kobolds ran in terror, leaving her behind to fend for herself. After making herself a peg leg, Dinki has vowed to get revenge on old ladies, kobolds, and anyone that could be perceived as better off than she.



Jeggory 
Jeggory Character Sheet PDF
Jeggory was a big strong street thug from the city of Luskan. One ale-soaked drunken night, Jeggory wandered out into the wilderness, stumbled into a ring of mushrooms, and interrupted a fae dance contest. Jeggory attempted to impress the faeries with some lewd thrusting, and demanded they teach him magic. They agreed to teach him some of their magic, but it was a trick. They sold Jeggory to a green hag, who took him to the faewild. The hag agreed to teach him magic, but nothing else; to get food and water, he had to sell his eye, his ear, and years of servitude to the hag; he also had to agree to a pact to never wear metal again, as a true druid would. After decades of cooking, cleaning, picking herbs, and fixing the hag's stuff, the debt was paid and he was free to return to the mortal world, having been taught a hard lesson about making deals with the fae. 




Prizella 
Prizella Character Sheet PDF
An ambitious entertainer with delusions of grandeur and a terrible personality, Prizella is a healthy and attractive young woman, but completely undisciplined and untrained. She inherited a lute and magical talent from her ancestors but is only moderately proficient in both. Prizella is otherwise reprehensible and cruel. Without exception she resorts to violence and backstabbing when faced with criticism, rejection, or anything short of worship. People quickly learn to do what it takes to get her to leave, or at least get her drunk until the town watch can deal with her. 




Shump 
Shump Character Sheet PDF
A cabin boy on a fishing ship, Shump enjoyed a peaceful and simple life, until the ship was taken by vicious pirates in a bloody slaughter, who then enslaved the surviving crew. He lived as a slave, spending the daylight hours doing the most menial of tasks, and spending the night hours locked in a closet full of books - he had nothing to do but read the tomes that filled his closet space, including a spellbook. Shump eventually became more knowledgeable in various scholarly subjects, including wizardry. It took years, but Shump taught himself all the spells in the old wizard’s tome, and though he wouldn't know it, the spells were varied and random, not particularly useful for an adventurer. One of these spells did allow him to charm a guard and escape. He has vowed to never do anything strenuous again, and if possible, get servants of his own. His plan is to use his meager magical talents to trick people into giving him what he wants.

Mapping to See What Happens - A Savage Worlds Sandbox Hexcrawl

Greetings! It’s been a while since I endeavored to try out Ben Wray's Dungeon World hexcrawl idea, but I did say I would report on my findings, so here it is.

For those of you who are into the whole brevity thing, here’s the summary: Use the Dungeon World steading system to create a deck of steading cards and deal them randomly onto a grid map. It’s a fun and easy way to make a living world with a crapload of adventure ideas. Give it a try.

Ben's original idea

As promised, I gave Ben’s idea a whirl, with a few twists. Since I would be making this map during the second gaming session, there were a few steadings (steadings are what Dungeon World calls any civilized place where you're relatively safe from monsters) already established and would be non-random. Also, rather than create a map for a Dungeon World game, I used this system to create a map for a Savage Worlds game of a most unusual nature. I think you’ll find, as I did, that the steading system is game-agnostic enough for this purpose.

                                                     
        

First I made a spreadsheet with 24 steadings - six villages, six towns, six keeps, and six cities. Then I randomly assigned each steading an advantage and a problem, then statted them out according to the rules. I removed one town, one keep, and one city (the ones I thought were least interesting). I did this because there seems to be a resource flow schema to the steading system. Villages have resources; towns buy those resources and sell them to villages, other towns, and cities. I discarded one of each steading that wasn't a village to keep the amount of resources on the map high and the size of the steadings low. This made a setting like the Wild West, with lots of opportunities to grow and exploit resources, but also great wilderness and low population.

Overview of all the steadings I generated - this alone is very helpful

Once I had a list of steadings I made a list of steading names, some taken from the Dungeon World book, some made up. Some of the best ones I got by browsing through the Google maps of the United States and looking for unusual town names  -  I've always loved the sound of Texarkana. Then I tried to get a feel for each steading and match the name to the feel. I've got a village on a major trade route? Let's call it Wetherford, for the river it crosses over. A town at a major crossroad with a bustling market got the name Junction, for where the roads meet. The large and wealthy city that traded with every steading nearby was named Central, not to indicate its position on the map, but rather it's self-perception as the hub and focus of all commerce.


After every steading had its stats, tags, and an evocative name, it started to look really exciting. Just the list alone started to inspire ideas, NPCs, events, etc. The final components needed were the six cursed places, which were renamed to fit the post-apocalyptic/trans-dimensional setting. I cut some index cards in half, wrote the name of each steading and cursed place on a card, added eight blank cards to complete the 32 card set for a 6x6 grid, and thus armed, went to the second gaming session to create the map with my players. 

Since this was the second gaming session, and we had described one village called Tallpines and a city called Dodge, I picked a village and a city that looked like they could be Tallpines (plagued by monsters? Why yes, that sounds like it’s next to a cursed, misty city ruin) and Dodge (militarized and overcrowded? definitely). I thew down these right in the center of the board. I chose the center because I believe the PCs should usually start in the center of the map - what's the point of building a map if they can travel a few hours and walk off the edge of it? I shuffled the index cards and dealt them out onto the cardboard, from left to right, and from top to bottom and here's what I got:

At first it was a little daunting, as things didn’t match up the way I imagined they would, but that’s the point of randomizing, isn’t it? To see what happens, to not know, to have to deal with the unexpected. I entered the results into a Google Sheet for safekeeping, and I have been studying it ever since, enjoying the questions it creates. Why is this steading like this? How can it be that way, despite its position on the map? The answers to these questions are always fun.

Each square is approximately 24 miles, or one days travel on foot, requiring one ration.

I love having this map out on the table while we play. It lets the players see where the steadings are and read their evocative names, inspiring their vision of the setting, but it also conceals all the cool secrets that I know about those steadings. It’s inspirational to the GM and the players, and helps to build both a living world that everyone is helping to create, but also a mysterious world with some interesting and dangerous secrets for the players to discover.


The whole experience is very reminiscent of my days playing Fallout 2, travelling the vast grid between Vault City and the NCR, and seeing what happens on the way. Needless to say, this creates tremendous feels of a positive nature. Next time, I'll talk more about why that's a great thing, and why I'd like to see more Fallout 2 style games on both the table and the screen.

As we play, the players discover all the shit that I’ve planned, and I discover how they react to that shit. They spit out ideas and I jot them down. I save them like precious metal ingots to be later forged into adventurous ideas. It’s glorious.

Next I’m gonna get into the wonderful weird world of planning and playing a game about rifts that’s nothing like the game Rifts.


Here's a link to the Google Sheet with all the mentioned documents.


Cheers! Thanks for reading. What do you think? Add your voice, friend!