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D&D Ideas — Transformation

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Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is transformation, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of transformation we’re changing lovable animals into ruthless mobsters in Zoo Mafia RPG. You can get Nerdarchy the Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

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Quaff a draught from the week that was! Unroll some new magic scrolls, uncork new potions and follow along on our quest to hack RPG systems plus our weekly hangout, a live chat with an industry pro and our Zoo Mafia live playtest continues to round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

My mind goes to two places when I think of the transformation topic for 5E D&D especially — the Shapechanger monster subtype and the transmutation school of magic. A third thought that comes to mind is in a more metaphorical sense.

We’ll start with the metaphorical sense and the idea of transformations happening within the stories we tell, especially to the characters themselves. Having your NPCs change and grow over the course of a campaign can be a huge way to get your players invested in the games you run. Of course fast transformations of the character of your NPCs can be fun as well like having a villain come to the aid of the players out of nowhere. These villains could easily succumb to all the same things a friendly NPC does but instead of turning against the players their goals could now coincide with them.

There’s also the possibility for a beloved NPC who betrays the players. These kinds of moments in games can be epic and live in the memories of your players forever. Of course you want to use them sparingly or your players will become numb to them and these tools will have less impact when you use them.

Using friendly, even beloved NPCs against your players dovetails nicely into monsters with the Shapechanger monster subtype. Vampires and lycanthropes could literally be the beloved NPC who was changed against their will. Other Shapechangers like doppelgangers can take the form of the NPC and replace them.

Spellcasters have two ways of indicating this kind of transformation. First off there are many spells that can change someone’s appearance. Another way a spellcaster can enact one of these transformations is by controlling or altering the mind of one of these NPCs. No matter the mechanics to make it happen, transformation is a great plot device.

5 Plot Ideas

  1. A beloved NPC becomes allied with dark forces or against the players.
  2. An enemy NPC turns away from their life of villainy — is it a ruse or a true change of heart?
  3. A friendly NPC is accused of a crime and they have no idea what happened — can the players figure out what is going on?
  4. Villagers spontaneously change into animals, older or younger versions of themselves, become gender swapped or some other transformation against their will — can the players figure out what’s going on and will they succumb to these transformations?
  5. The players wake up in different bodies after spending the night someplace new. Choose monsters like minotaurs, umber hulks, manticores, pegasi, unicorns, displacer beasts and so forth. Let them play an adventure using these monster stat blocks as they try to solve a mystery and find their way back into their original forms.

From Ted’s Head

The powers of transformation are crazy and only limited by the power of your imagination. Transformation can be many things and by definition it is literally one thing becoming another. I am going to approach this topic from three different ways so you can get the most out of this topic.

The first aspect is a transformation of character. Whether you have a good guy turned bad guy or a bad guy turned good guy there is going to be a sort of transformation. It could be entirely a mental transformation or it might be prompted by physical abuse or neglect. However this transformation happens a switch happens either for good or ill. I have heard of stories where the bad guy was mistreated by good guys one too many times and I have seen the heart of a villain warmed and standing down without a fight.

The second type of aspect I want to talk about is a minor transformation. The perfect examples are creatures like hydras. A hydra has a minor transformation every time it takes enough damage to cut off a head. This of course causes two new heads to grow. The number of heads affects several things within its stat block making it a hard foe the longer it fights. This mentality can be incorporated into designs of big bosses. Whether you want to have a physical or magical manifestation of this change of power it should be obvious something has changed. I have also used terrain as catalysts for change like this. The use of terrain gives the players the opportunity to either prevent or shut down the transformation of power.

Lastly I wanted to look at anything that would be a major transformation. A major transformation is not an alteration to a stat block but when a creature changes into a whole new stat block. Not to give any spoilers as to what adventure it is in but one encounter has a creature that goes through this physical transformation not once but twice. This process can be done for any kind of big bad and make for truly memorable encounter.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

During the live chat Nerdarchist Ted asked me the first thought that comes to mind when I hear the word transformation as regards D&D and it was sudden transformations to break state during a game. I’m a big fan of transforming relatively innocuous situations into tense or dramatic scenarios through rapid change.

For this week’s editorial I’m approaching the topic from the completely opposite direction both in pace and perspective. I’ve been playing D&D for nearly four decades now. During this time D&D itself and the hobby as a whole has undergone tremendous transformation — and I have too.

After all this time with the changes in editions and views on D&D I recognize how I’ve transformed — especially considering my role as a professional working in the RPG industry. Thinking about this time as a whole in a lot of ways this change turns out cyclical in the sense I’ve come back around to my earlier place as a gamist who enjoys the individual games with which I’m personally involved. When I was younger I loved playing D&D with my friends and did not think much upon it beyond those weekend get-togethers. This is where I find myself landing more recently too (which makes working in the biz tricky!).

Courtesy of the internet, actual play videos and the extraordinary growth of D&D over the last few years the allure of participating in this larger and broader community felt natural. Now I could connect with the people who created these games I’ve been playing most of my life. Thanks to open licenses I could even create, share and profit from the stuff my friends and I made for our D&D games. As an extension of all this I transformed my career path into a space a younger me never even considered.

But I’ve got to say I haven’t quite aligned with the way the hobby and particularly 5E D&D transformed the last few years. When I say I’m a gamist my interpretation is starting and ending with the rules of the game I’m playing. It’s why I prefer 4E D&D over all the other iterations of the game, which makes sense since it’s the most different and distinct of all the editions. I enjoy storytelling and drama and all that too but the foundation of my enjoyment lies in the rules. It’s been challenging for me to reconcile with the emergent view that 5E D&D in particular is less an actual game than a shared experience. (I’m also somewhat cynical so to me it’s more about marketing and industry dominance for WotC to foster this notion than any other motive.)

During the last few years I’d transformed into an industry professional for whom all those ancillary aspects of the game became more important than the actual game itself. I cannot identify a turning point but sometime between then and now this began to not sit quite right with me. If I’m honest it’s been a struggle to navigate these perspectives. I try to tune down all the noise and this has been helpful in working towards a new transformation.

Now I’m at a place where I’m incorporating what I’ve experienced in this newer, modern era of RPGs into the more comfortable and enjoyable perspective I had from my earliest days as an 8-year-old discovering the hobby all the way through the first few years of 5E D&D. I just celebrated my birthday this past week and as a now 45-year-old nerd I’m working on transforming once again.

*Featured image — Catch up on our live playtest over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel and subscribe to the special Zoo Mafia newsletter for updates, previews, free Quickstart Rules and more here!

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