[Channel Teaser]
This Is Why You Should Not Insert Anime Characters In A DnD Game
Hi everyone.
All Things DnD is back with another story.
DnD and anime have a few things in common and can often overlap.
But you should never insert your favorite anime characters into a DND campaign.
Here is why:
The story starts around Christmas 2017.
I've never really known anyone who's played D&D, but I've always wanted to play it for
myself.
As such, I had to learn on my own, and I had to teach it to other people; I ran my first
D&D game for my girlfriend (it was a one on one) around Christmas, and it was pretty fun.
It was so fun, in fact, that I tried playing a few more games, hoping one of my friends
would become interested in replacing me as the de-facto DM, but no such luck.
For around half a year, I become the DM friend, and I start teaching my friends how to play
D&D and I run games for them.
Life is good, but I still want to have an experience as a player.
So around summer 2018, I decided to take a different approach: I go to a D&D discord
group.
I'm in high school, so summer vacation gives me tons of time to find a group I like, and
play in a campaign consistently.
For a few weeks, I mostly lurk around the discord, stalking the 'GM looking for Players'
channel, a bit intimidated by the seriousness of all the games advertised.
As it's my first time as a player, I'm looking for a group of fellow noobies, who won't mind
if I make mistakes here or there.
First mistake.
Eventually, I find someone running a game that fits my needs; to keep him anonymous,
let's call him Craig.
He's looking for someone to join an ongoing campaign, someone who is preferably experienced
with roleplaying, as the other players seem a bit shy when it comes to roleplaying.
Being that I'm a fairly outgoing person and I already have experience with online roleplaying
boards, I decide to hop right in.
I message Craig, I ask him what type of character would fit the party best, and I eventually
come up with Rossu Warkiller, a hobgoblin artificer princess.
Rossu is gonna end up being a blast; but that's a story for another time.
After turning in my character sheet, he invites me to the discord group, and tells me we're
going to be playing on Saturday.
I'm excited.
I spend the entire week perfecting my character, and the day eventually comes that we all hop
into voice chat to play.
I say hi, and immediately, I'm relieved.
The three other people in the voice chat (being Craig and two other players, let's call them
Dave and Keith), sound younger than I am (for reference, I was 17 at the time), and they
all sound very shy and...
Well, nerdy.
Being that I'm an outgoing, charismatic person, I immediately start chatting with them.
Craig, who'd I'd never spoken to out of text until now, turns out to curse like a sailor;
I don't have a problem with cursing, but it seems that every sentence this guy says seems
to have at least one f-bomb or a variation of it.
But overall, he's alright.
Dave is the second person who replies to me; he's a very serious person, and you can tell
he's probably the eldest one of the three.
I ask him who his character is, and he tells me he's playing Icarus, a storm cleric who's
trying to save his boyfriend Apollo, or something.
Yes, that Apollo; he worships greek gods.
The last person to say anything is Keith.
He's a pretty funny, but incredibly quiet, stereotypically nerdy guy.
He's playing an optimized rogue/ranger half-elf named Adraeon, and he seems to be more into
the war game aspect of D&D.
Whenever he roleplays (which is rarely), he does it in chat, I think cause he's embarrassed
to roleplay in front of his parents, given that he uses his living room computer.
So, we started playing.
As I previously mentioned, I joined the campaign mid-way, meaning the players were already
doing something.
In this case, the session kicks off with Adraeon and Icarus on the verge of leading an army
against the main bad guy's army to liberate some generic D&D town.
They do so; painstakingly.
Craig is INSISTENT on using this weird army on army combat system he made up, and it is
the most BORING thing I have ever had to sit through.
No roleplaying, no character's doing anything; just an interaction more or less like this:
Craig: Your valley is being attacked on three fronts, and you have 900 soldiers.
Where do you wanna distribute your troops?
Keith, after five minutes of silence: Uhhh I guess just 300 on each flank.
Followed by shit you not, 30 minutes of pure rolling by the DM, with occasional updates
on our army's HP, morale, and other arbitrary numbers that we don't care about.
NO ONE is into it, and you can tell.
Dave is absolutely silent, hoping Keith will deal with the whole thing, and Keith goes
AFK at one point because of how boring it is.
I sit through the whole thing, still excited to begin with my character.
Eventually, party and soldiers manage to liberate generic-ville, and the party moves in to report
to the lord about their whole quest.
But before this, they stop by the adventurer's guild, go on a little side quest to recruit
Rossu involving a battle tournament, and we end the session for the night.
Not too bad so far, right?
Well, that was just an introduction.
The story I'm about to tell happens a few sessions later.
To bring you up to speed, the party moved from town to town piecing together clues on
the big bad, and we deciphered that he was trying to construct the Dark Spire, a magical
tower that could grant the builder unlimited wishes.
Our quest brings us to the edge of the continent, and we're told that the secret to defeating
the big bad is held in a temple across the sea, in a whole other continent.
We recruit a few more players along the way, including a catgirl sorcerer named Nia (wasn't
actually called Nia but I cannot for the life of me remember what she was called), and a
tabaxi monk nicknamed Snow.
We purchase a ship, and travel across the sea.
Eventually, we make it to the other continent, and Craig says: "You guys see some fireworks
as you approach the coastline.
There's probably a festival happening today."
Obviously a plot hook, but we decide to go with it.
Rossu (who had been tinkering with making an animatronic pegasus for Icarus), suggests
we head into town to purchase a few supplies for her pegasus, and enjoy the festival.
For a moment, I was hopeful that this session would be some fun, roleplay heavy carnival
hijinks.
I was wrong.
As we dock, the first thing we see is an old man.
He stops us on the way to town, and tells us about the festival: "Today, every kid in
the continent turns 13, and they get their grimoire, a source of magical power.
... Except Yami.
Yami's a piece of shit."
Immediately, I think two things: A) Does this mean every child in the continent
is born at exactly the same time? B)
Can this guy get any more obvious about his plot hooks?
We tell him that's cool and all, but we need to buy supplies.
The NPC tells us that we can't go into the festival because we're outsiders, we can't
purchase supplies because the shops are closed, and the only thing we can do is go into the
orphanage slash adventurer's guild.
Yes, the orphanage also serves as the adventurer's guild.
Where Yami JUST HAPPENS to be located.
I roll my eyes, and we all head inside the orphanage.
This is where it gets good.
Once inside, the DM describes a child: Black spiky hair, 13 years old, wearing jeans and
a t-shirt (yes, in D&D), and he seems to be moping around.
The party heads over to him, and asks him what's wrong.
Yami tells us that he's the only child in the continent that can't use magic, and as
such he didn't receive his grimoire.
The party kinda feels bad for him, so we all try to cheer him up explaining how you don't
need to use magic to be powerful: Each party member gives a frankly heartwarming account
of how they rely on things that aren't magic; Snow says he's gotten strong and that's how
he's powerful, Rossu says she's made incredible artifacts with science and research, and we
all try to cheer him up.
Yami stays silent for a few seconds.
Yami said, “I still wish I had my grimoire....
I'm useless.”
Okay, so our stories were shot down.
The orphanage manager (who just happens to be the same old man we saw at the docks) asks
us to go find his grimoire, but the party has other plans.
Rossu being an incredibly motherly character, and deciding that the kid is pretty cute,
asks him if she can adopt him, and gets rejected multiple times.
Each time, the old man just insists on us finding the grimoire.
Eventually this gets pretty funny, so the whole party joins in on the insisting, until
the point that the DM loses it.
He stays silent for a minute, and then asks us in an extremely exasperated voice if we
can just agree to find the grimoire.
"No!" we all say, in unison.
So he snaps, and agrees to let us adopt Yami if we find the grimoire.
We agree, and Rossu immediately starts being a momma hen to Yami, telling him to stay on
the boat with the animatronic servant she constructed, and not get in the inevitable
danger of combat.
Reluctantly, Yami agrees, and he stays on the ship.
With that, we decide to go find the grimoire.
Adraeon activates a spell that'll help us know when the grimoire is close, and we follow
him out of the city, through the continent, in a trip that takes a number of days.
After a brief time skip, we're less than five miles away from the grimoire, and we find
a bandit camp nestled in a valley.
It must be there.
Excitedly, the party ducks behind a mountain, completely out of view of the bandits, who
couldn't see us anyways, given that we were five miles away from them.
We start making battle plans.
Up until that moment, the DM hadn't really given us any opportunities to sneak around,
so we've all been waiting for this moment.
Adraeon decides to enchant our horse-sized dragon with major invisibility, and we all
hop on the dragon, therefore making US invisible given that the dragon is technically wearing
us.
Our planning goes on for a few minutes, until the DM interrupts us, saying:
"You hear a voice coming from the bandit camp saying: WE CAN HEAR YOU, YOU KNOW!"
We tell them to shut up, and start making an attack plan instead.
For some reason, they can hear us from five miles away, but we still have the higher ground.
This goes on for a few minutes more until the DM interrupts us again by saying:"Okay.
The bandits snap their fingers, and you're all teleported into their camp."
That's fine.
A bit bullshit that we don't get to do any saves against that, but it's fine.
Each of us pull out our weapons, ready to fight, but the bandit leader (who is described
as a holographic being of pure magic), snaps his fingers again, and we're wrapped in magical
chains, immobilized.
No problem!
I'm an artificer, and I know Rossu has a magical item that can fix this.
But as soon as I say I reach for one of my tools, the DM tells me I'm paralyzed from
the waist down.
Our monk tries to teleport out?
He can't, because his monk powers don't work.
Our rogue tries to lockpick the chains?
There is no lock.
It slowly dawns on us that this is something we can't fight.
So, we ask: "Is there anything we can do?"
Nope, says the DM.
Alright, fine.
By this point, we've been railroaded into a quest that makes no sense, we didn't even
want to take and we're now paralyzed and teleported without a chance to fight back.
We're all done with Craig at this point; so we just start asking the bandits to kill us,
insulting them all the while.
The bandits laugh, and draw their weapons, monologuing on why they stole the grimoire,
how they hate Yami;
And then, Yami appears.
Now, think of it: Yami got past a combat-made golem, and managed to follow us without supplies
throughout the continent with no combat skills, magic, survival skills, or otherwise.
This kid managed to follow us and avoid detection with only the clothes on his back, and now
he's shown up at the best possible time.
Our very own Deus Ex Machina.
But, of course, given that he's unarmed and powerless, he can only manage to call out
our names before one of the bandits smacks him to the ground.
He begins to insult Yami, drawing a weapon, ready to execute the poor boy.
He's helpless, beaten down, worthless...
It's an anime moment, isn't it?
Of course it is.
All at once, the party understands that the only way we're gonna get through this is through
the power of God and Anime on Yami's side.
We all start cheering him on like if this was Dragonball, yelling "You can do it Yami!"
Despite that, logically, he is very much dead.
And...
After we encourage him enough, Craig says this.
"Yami struggles up, and a black sword materializes in his hand.
The bandit leader says: “T- This can't be!”
Yami raises his sword, and yells out: “Anti-magic pulse!”
The chains disappear, and he begins to cut down all of the magical bandits with his anti-magic
sword.
So, Yami kills all the bandits, saves us all, saves his grimoire, and takes us back to the
city.
This entire session, we essentially did nothing; we arrived at a city, and went on a pointless
quest that could have been solved by an NPC, in which we contributed nothing.
And that's where the story should end, shouldn't it?
The campaign ended a few months ago, a few weeks ago, I was telling my friend this very
story.
He's a weeaboo, just like Craig; and the moment I describe Yami to him, he gets a strange
glint in his eyes.
He asks me to describe Yami to him, and I do.
He asks me if he had a black sword, and I tell him he did.
He asks me if he had a grimoire, and I tell him he did, and that's the exact name the
DM used for it.
With a smile, my friend produces his phone, and tells me to hold up while he googles something.
Then, he showed me a wiki article for an anime called Black Clover, the protagonist of which
is an anti-magic using, sword wielding, 16 year old, spiky haired anime kid who's picture
looked exactly like the DM's description of Yami.
Inserting anime protagonists into your DND campaign?
C’mon.
Just write your fanfic and leave people that want to play DND out of it.
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