Fitting Through the Door

You’ve seen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, right? So you remember Xenk. How could you not remember Xenk? Xenk is there to make an impression, a very particular impression. Xenk is pure. Xenk is powerful. Xenk is beloved. Xenk is beautiful.

Xenk is a paladin in the tradition of D&D paladins, a tradition that equates Charisma with attractiveness. (In the 1980s, there was a brief and embarrassing detour into quantifying appearance under another ability score, Comeliness, but that’s best left under the rock it crawled out from.) The stereotypical paladin stands with perfect posture, armor gleaming, hair flowing, ready to take their place in a stained-glass window or on the cover of a romantasy novel.

Some characters are such products of their settings, there’s not much point in trying to translate them to another system. Take my paladin character, Ruyermo Aporreado, whom I’ve played in a couple of convention games (and in Baldur’s Gate 3, in which I gave him the Old Floppy Hat and never took it off him for the entire game). Ruyermo is another product of my ceaseless impulse to subvert stereotypes, a retort to the tradition that produced Xenk. The stereotypical paladin is beautiful; Ruyermo is ugly. The stereotypical paladin receives public adulation; Ruyermo is humble and prefers to work in the shadows. The stereotypical paladin is a lawful stick-in-the-mud; Ruyermo is defiant of authority. With the stereotypical paladin, what you see is what you get; Ruyermo happily allows others to mistake him for a beggar or a thug. When I created Ruyermo, the Forgotten Realms was D&D’s default setting, and one deity stood out clearly as his most logical patron: Ilmater, the One Who Endures, patron of the suffering, oppressed and persecuted. I even created an entire subclass in Ruyermo’s honor, the Oath of Deliverance.

Could I take Ruyermo and export him to, say, Pathfinder? Yes, although in the translation, he’d gain some and lose some. Under the 2019 Core Rulebook, his class would become “champion,” and because he’s chaotic good, he’d be considered not a “paladin” but a “liberator,” a title that definitely suits him. But the deity the CR associates with the liberator is Calistria, a god of attraction—hardly a fit for a man who hides his unsightly face under a hood. There’s no deity in the Pathfinder pantheon that epitomizes humility and sacrifice the way Ilmater does in the Forgotten Realms pantheon. What’s more, the champion class is absent from the 2023 Player Core, and the remastered edition does away with alignment altogether, so it’s not clear whether the liberator cause—or the paladin cause, for that matter—will even continue to exist. In a game without paladins, is there any point to playing a character created to subvert the paladin trope? (I could ask that same question about any attempt to port him into a non-swords-and-sorcery game. Sure, a cyberpunk game could absolutely accommodate a dirtbag radical folk hero, but he wouldn’t be a dirtbag radical folk hero wielding divine power, which is just as much a part of who and what he is.)

One system that could handle Ruyermo better than most is Fate, because he’s such a high-concept character to begin with. A suitable trouble aspect would be “Can’t Keep His Mouth Shut”: Like many leftists, he can be preachy and abrasive. I might choose Empathy as a Great (+4) skill; Fight and Will as Good (+3) skills; Deceive, Provoke and Stealth as Fair (+2) skills; and Notice, Physique, Rapport and Shoot as Average (+1) skills. I could take all three Empathy stunts (Lie Whisperer, Nose for Trouble and Psychologists) right off the rack, or I could create a couple based on the Oath of Deliverance Channel Divinity powers Beneath Notice and Speak Truth to Power. Other aspects, however, would depend on what other characters were in his party. His relationship with his patron deity would have to be part of collaborative setting creation—I, my fellow players and my gamemaster would have to agree that an Ilmater-like power existed and bestowed Ruyermo with supernatural powers.

Pedangmenari, a lanky dragonborn Swashbuckler rogue, originated from a spreadsheet I created in 2017 to randomly generate character concepts. I’m not good at coming up with ideas from scratch, but I’m very good at coming up with ideas from prompts. In Pedang’s case, the prompts were “Male, Other, Rogue, Sailor, Good” (“Other” meant other than human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half-elf, gnome or half-orc), and I ended up using him as an NPC in our Tomb of Annihilation game. He also has a direct tie to the Forgotten Realms setting: He worships Tymora, the deity of luck, and is so deeply devout that she rewards his worship with her blessing. Yet he translates better to other systems than Ruyermo does.

First, lots of pantheons include a deity of luck—and even in a setting without a pantheon, belief in “Lady Luck” or some equivalent entity can be so heartfelt that, for the sake of a good story, it comes true. Second, lots of systems include some sort of mechanic to account for a character with absurd good fortune. (In this respect, although Pedang was created for D&D 5E14, 5E24 has the upper hand: It classifies Lucky as an Origin feat, whereas in 5E14, a player character can’t access it until level 4.) Third, aside from his uncanny luck, he’s a simple character. He’s a finesse fighter, athletic and acrobatic, with an ever-cheerful demeanor, disarming sincerity and a very poor ability to assess risk. “Failure with a benefit” systems were practically made for him. He doesn’t even have to be a dragonborn, necessarily. He could just as easily be a lizardfolk, an alien or just some goofy foreigner. (In our ToA game, I arbitrarily decided to voice him with a Belter accent, to signify that he came from some faraway place the PCs had never been to or even been near. In a game of The Expanse RPG, he’d probably be an actual Belter.)

After looking at these three data points, I’m starting to form a hypothesis. To translate a PC into a given RPG system successfully—for them to “fit through the door,” as it were—I believe I have to be able to answer “yes” to three questions:

• Does the character’s “one main thing” make sense within this system and setting?
• Does the system faithfully reflect the rest of the character’s fundamentals—ability contour, combat role (if any) and constellation of skills?
• Can I tell the character’s story in this system and setting, and does their personality come through intact?

For Garregwen, my wood elf Battle Master fighter, Pathfinder surprisingly fell short on all three questions. Nothing in the fighter class’s feat tree was especially relevant to glaive fighting. I was able to give her the ability contour I wanted just fine, but the system actually forced me to give her more skills than I thought were necessary and put what I felt was an excessive emphasis on them. (Also, in trying to choose from an overabundance of skill feats, I messed up: Titan Wrestler isn’t about tripping big foes with a weapon. It’s about plowing directly into them and throwing them to the ground. Not Garregwen’s style.) Meanwhile, Pathfinder didn’t seem particularly concerned with her personality or backstory at all, reducing her past as a sergeant in an elite guard unit to a couple of attribute boosts, an Intimidating Glare and more of an interest in military history than I’d ever imagined her having.

The Cypher System incorporates Garregwen’s “one main thing” very well without getting into the weeds of crunchy mechanics, and her other fundamentals come through, too. The only way it falls short is by requiring me to spotlight one personality trait to the exclusion of others. Shadowdark isn’t interested in her story or personality (or anyone else’s); it wants to know how good she is at taking valuable things from dangerous places, and to that extent, it represents her fundamentals with adequate accuracy. However, her one main thing, glaive fighting, is reduced to Weapon Mastery, a talent she shares with every other fighter. No technique is suggested, and nothing differentiates the glaive from any other two-handed weapon that deals 1d10 damage, such as a warhammer. In fact, I had to add the glaive to the game myself.

Court of Blades allows Garregwen’s one main thing but doesn’t center it, because it’s only tangentially relevant to the game’s “action drama” genre; it centers her other fundamentals instead. It makes room for her story and personality, but to a great extent that’s a matter of luck, because her story and personality happen to fit within it already; it also places more of an emphasis on characters’ indulgences than I think is quite right for her. Orbital Blues’ answer to all three of my questions above is, “Not really, no.” And D&D 5E24, like a car salesman, says to the first two questions, “Sure, I can do that—and you’d like to be able to do this thing as well, wouldn’t you?” and then doesn’t acknowledge my replies. Glaive fighting isn’t represented any better by adding the Graze property to the weapon, or by letting me decide that today I’d rather have Garregwen be a halberd expert. Her fundamentals aren’t reflected any better by making me take away one skill or feat or language and replace it with a different one, or by giving her spells that I never asked for. And while I can still tell her story just fine (as long as I retain the memory of lore that the game seems to have chosen to forget), her personality fades like an old photo left in the sunlight.

Ruyermo was a bit of a misfit even in the system he was created for: Oath of Devotion was adequate, but I needed to create the Oath of Deliverance to make Ruyermo fully Ruyermo. His “one main thing” doesn’t translate to any other fantasy setting I’ve found, because I haven’t found any that includes a god of the downtrodden. Instead of swords and sorcery, he might actually do better in a game with a modern fantasy setting, perhaps taking the form of a pious drifter who worships “Dios del obrero, Dios desempleado, Dios del pobre, Dios del triste.” His fundamentals and his personality are adaptable to just about any system or setting, but there’s no room for him in any genre that excludes divine magic, and that divine magic has to be able to accommodate a kind of liberation theology. Fate, as a system, can handle him, but only if my GM and the other players at my table go along with it.

Pedangmenari, on the other hand, simply needs a luck mechanic. If it’s there, he flies; if it’s not, he doesn’t. D&D has the Lucky feat. Cypher has the Lucky descriptor. GURPS has the Ridiculous Luck advantage. Importing him into any of these systems is a breeze: Once the mechanics for his uncanny luck are squared away, completing his buildout as a highly mobile duelist is a trivial exercise. In Pathfinder, however, the path is circuitous, and the effect is less impressive. Exceptional good fortune is the exclusive province of the Luck domain, which means Pedang will have to multiclass into cleric to gain access to it. I don’t mind that—his luck does come from his extraordinary piety, after all—but it does entail his being less effective as a swashbuckler over the long term (in Pathfinder, he’d be a swashbuckler, not a rogue), and like the Lucky feat in 5E14, it doesn’t kick in until 4th level.

As I explore the execution of character concepts in various systems, then, these will be the three aspects of a PC that I’m focusing on: the one main thing, the remaining fundamentals, the personality–backstory. We’ll see how well this schema holds up—especially as I look at PCs who don’t originate in D&D.