What I’m talking about is not letting yourself be tied down to what’s written in this or that book for a rule, or what the predefined content of the game is. Let me give an example that came up in my Rime of the Frost Maiden game this past week that I think illustrates what I mean. Spoiler warning for Rime of the Frost Maiden I guess.
One of my Players generated the Slaad Tadpole secret during character creation. What are these secrets? Rime of the Frost Maiden has a bunch of secret backstory stuff PCs can start play with. Some rather mundane, some pretty out there. My group ended up rolling some rather cool ones including this player having been implanted with a Slaad tadpole prior to the start of the adventure.
The player in question has been adventuring as a custom class I’ve made called a Sanguinor, a class based around using hit points and hit dice as resources, mostly involving blood magic and the manipulation of vital energies. This leads to a lot of strange body horror type situations that his adventuring companions have been numbed to over time though their horror is occasionally refreshed.
Okay, background information out of the way on on to the point. This week that character died screaming in horrible agony.
After weeks of escalating chest pains with no solutions sought, the tadpole burst forth from the character’s chest cavity in a spray of screams and gore, ending his life as it begins its own. The party didn’t really understand what was happening. Was this intentional on his part? Did one of his spells backfire horribly? Travelling with a blood mage is strange so they often don’t know what to expect or how to react to the things he does.
With no Revivify prepared or the materials at hand, there was little the group could do for their now fallen comrade as the creature slipped away to finish its maturation process elsewhere in the fortress they had invaded.
While the party finishes clearing out this fortress and perhaps comes up with some scheme to resurrect their fallen ally, the Sanguinor player needs a new character to play in the interim. Introducing a new character in the middle of a dungeon can often be ham fisted and forced but I always try my best to make it interesting.
When the player asked what they should make as a character to continue this leg of the adventure I noticed they didn’t seemed super enthused about playing a bog standard PC that the party meets randomly in the fortress for “reasons”. So I suggested they play one of the Duergar warriors that have allied themselves with the party to overthrow their insane overlord. That or they could play the Slaad that just killed them.
“Both of those sound cool, but how would it work? Neither of them are playable classes.” Notes my observant player.
This is where understanding that the game is what happens at the table, not what’s written in the books that can make all the difference in someone’s enjoyment of D&D.
“You just tell me you want to do it and I’ll worry about the how later.” Is all I said in response.
“Okay, I’ll be a Slaad!” They reply back with some enthusiasm.
Now I’m going to have to figure out how to make a playable character class out of a monster stat block and will probably lose sleep thinking about it the next week or two. But seeing the player enthusiastic about being something completely unique makes it worth it, and the pain of losing the character they’ve spent the last few months with is already fading.
As long as it isn’t going to ruin someone else’s fun, or completely disintegrate the verisimilitude or an important idiosyncrasy of the world you’re presenting, just figure out a way for awesome and strange stuff to happen. Other kinds of fun have all sort of limits imposed upon them, the greatest part of tabletop is that you’re only limited by what you can think of.
POST SCRIPT THOUGHTS:
I haven’t actually had the player decide what variety of Slaad their tadpole will grow into. But my initial thoughts are if they decide red, I’ll just smash together the existing Red Slaad monster block with some stuff from a Barbarian. If they say green it’ll probably that smashed together with some extra wizard stuff. Slaad in their monster stat blocks clearly lean towards certain classes but with their own twist based on their innate species abilities. Shouldn’t be too difficult but knowing which colour will at least let me get started.
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