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View Full Version : A curse for my DMPC.



Ranzear
2010-12-10, 05:52 PM
Starting a game soon and we're gonna have an open chair for DM. I won't be starting the game off as DM but do plan to jump in at some point.

My brazen, tenacious, loudmouth, 'charisma is not a dump stat' character is designed to be a DM's nightmare; he's all about rousing speeches and a crazy intimidation check and generally scaring the pants off friends and foes alike with his brashness and ever-assailing mouth. He likes to intimidate on the first round and then stab all the small-fry in the ass as they run away.

So I think if I jump in the DM chair I want to shut him up, magically, if just to keep some challenge in things. The problem I see is with the usual silence effects shutting down spellcasting. He's not a caster, but I want to be able to handwave when verbal interaction is required (like for magic items).

My idea is a curse that creates a region of stretched arbitrary distance that sound must travel, on the order of 1000:1, where standing five feet away is like being a mile away in distance that sound must travel and thus attenuate. If he or she yells as loudly as they physically can they can hear their own faint voice, and it can be surmised that spell induction and magical items have much greater sensitivity to receive verbal influences.

For all purposes, immediate conversation goes out the window. I once had the only elf in a party and didn't speak common, so resorting to a hasty game of pictionary when I wanted to get an idea across was rather fun. I want to require a full round to scribble down as much as possible on a handy notepad (in and out of game) when communication is truly needed, but it'd be very much against my character's... character to resort to this.

What other fun ways are there to tone down a DMPC, particularly in an open-DM setting where you don't have the opportunity to design a DM-safe character from the beginning?

Grelna the Blue
2010-12-10, 06:01 PM
Some possible curses that might work:


His voice is now high and girlish.

If he's vain, perhaps he loses a lock of hair for every word/sentence he speaks.

You could have him cursed by the fey to always speak in rhyme, or in song, or in rhyming song. That might tend to shut him up, except when he absolutely has to get an idea across.

Ranzear
2010-12-10, 07:59 PM
In the end it's actually less to shut down his effectiveness and more to ensure a reduction in spoilerage.

Or I could just have every encounter be against undead, to which all my characters have an insane fear of for lulz.