Giving your D&D players Rivals!
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- *anime rival voice*: smell ya later! Every time i've run longform campaigns in D&D I have given my players a rival team to befriend/befoe/belove. How do you go about doing that in DnD, and why?
Check out the rival team creation guide HERE!
docs.google.co...
Video Editing by the amazing Bia: / bnazf
Writing, Illustration, and Narration by me: / antodemico 
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What if we had a ship-teasing, thinly-veiled-ridden swordfight duel at midnight over the roofs of the city?
haha just kidding
Unless? 👀
Sir you are writing the kinds of campaigns I long to be in ಥ_ಥ. Btw used your phantom rogue character idea for Belinda as my PC in Icewind Dale. I kept the cinnamon role aspect but amped up the creepy cute factor (think Sadako from The Ring but super friendly lol). She's been so fun to play!
this... is filled with tumblr energy.
Place and time ??
You laugh, but I introunced a narrative foil for my warlock and now he dreams of kissing the guy under the moonlight.
My first reaction to end of this video was gonna be "you forgot the most crucial part of rivals..... ROMANCE".... but then you post this banger of a response and now im beat 👀
i literally met my party's rival team in a session today so this is perfect timing... i hate them so much and it's so good ♥
I'm a dm in the process of planning the rival team for my party so I couldn't agree more
Can't believe this, I was building the rivals and planned to introduce them in 4 or 5 sessions, I'm adapting them to appear sonner now I had material to work with.
Ha same! Just made the conceptd of the rivals today 😂
This was fantastic! Thank you so much. I can't wait to try this out in the campaign I just started running for my friends. Love you, Antonio!
The absolut taste of mentioning Preminger, still not over it
I once had a really good rival during a game session. I was a down-on-his-luck knight who was press-ganged into a criminal organisation and saddled with a crew that mostly just saw me as a tool (I'm kind of masochistic)
Meanwhile my rival was a gambler with Fallout New Vegas levels of high luck that had a party of loyal followers and was overall really cool. I think what amplified the experience for me was that the gambler guy was played by my friend (a Player Character as a rival? Funnier than you think) who did such an amazing job at portraying that sort of confident trickster kind of guy. Honestly I was rooting for him half the time, the other half I was suffering
We never got to finishing the campaign but it was fun as hell
Sarella and Dario? someone's been reading A Song of Ice and Fire
Amazing video!! You're giving me so many ideas. Unfortunately since I have a lot of players, it's a bit late to do the rival thing, though I do have an NPC later on who I can mold.....and also you've given me ideas to make my NPCs who are travelling with the players less static. In the meantime each player will serve as each other's foils which is nice.
That moment when you watch DnD content for help with your campaign and not because it's also entertaining
I love your videos homie. So glad I found you
Super great stuff! Can't wait to try it out! Thank you very much
Best video yet, ur family must be proud :D
Makes me think of the character Argath Thadalfus, from Final Fantasy Tactics. His arc doesn't go on long enough for him to be a rival in the same sense you've described here, but he is a great foil for the protagonist in that they are both young sons of noble families and even fight on the same side for a time but they have very different ideas about social hierarchy and their place in the world.
Anyway great stuff and I will have to remember this the next time I run a game. :)
This has given me amazing ideas so thank you
Love the content.. really wish the artwork of the teams was in the pdf, but oh well. Thanks for expanding on this topic!
Great video, thank you for the ideas!
My players are gonna love this¡¡¡
The only problem I've had with rivals is that my players always kill them very quickly. Then make sure there dead.
Been catching up on this videos and I gotta say, I'd play a RPG with your art as the world/characters.
Get on it.
Now.
Another cool idea is to have a conflict triangle involving the hero(es), the villain(s) and the rival(s), bonus points for having the "enemy of my enemy" moment, give your players one or two chances to temporarily join forces with their rivals to defeat the villain, depending on how the players treat their rivals have the rivals join the Villain or the Heroes
Yo.. you just saved me from trying to think up this plot hook, holy hell man ty
Came to the comment section to say exactly this. The "this one time..." moment can be so good.
I was thinking even in this video, using the example characters, that the villain team could be like:
Cyrilla's personal villain is an eldritch knight/warlock who used his force of will (and some backroom deals) to bind the other Dwarven nobles to his ambition, and is so corrupt that he allows his nobles to wreak havoc on the kingdom - the same kind of havoc as her father. Alois' personal villain could be the right hand of this tyrant, a knight whose sense of honor has him do everything the king demands to the letter, even if it's fucked up; He never refuses an order, and has made himself a loyal ally. Turmeric's could be an assassin who, like Turmeric, never knew his parents and was born in a gutter, but the Usurper saw potential in him and raised him as his own son like an adoptive father. He now serves the Usurper loyally, feeling like he owes him his life for raising him from poverty.
Uses the same model as Pointy Hat proposed (an opposite, a mirror, and a mix) but they're just straight up villains that the rival party would *also* have a reason to hate. Alois and Fornata would hate the deeds that the right hand of the Usuper would do because they'd be so fucked up, Cyrilla and Dario would hate the Usurper because, in Cyrilla's mind, he'd be destroying her father's legacy, but in Dario's mind, he'd be another tyrant but worse. For Turmeric and Moira, Turmeric would hate that the Assassin got the opportunity that he never had, to have a parent, and Moira would hate that the Assassin just *listened to* and *obeyed* their parents and would be confused by the sense of duty that he feels to the Usurper.
Also @Pointy Hat, followup video about creating good villains? I liked this one a lot.
I think another triangle that could be fun is like the Pokémon rival method.
You have one you counter, one that counters you.
Maybe a more antagonistic force and a more friendly competition.
Like one team will buy you a drink and swap stories with you. After a successful dungeon crawl, challenging you to drinking competitions, or “which team can catch the most bounties, winner gets half the losers earnings”
The other might be like Gary muddafuggin oak and challenge you to duels right after a dungeon. Then call you a “edit for RUclips” for losing.
Oh totally. Even had the rivals become a lot stronger during a period of time the party was missing or they were far away on an adventure.
When my party went to the feywild, they returned only to hear how strong they became, and they tried to challenge the Campaign villain, and one member of them died and their leader lost an arm.
Later on during another Villain's arc, that villain encountered the rivals, and that gave time the players to escape the scene with the npc they were trying to rescue from a public execution, and my players stopped halfway through and said; "wait. We still don't want to leave. We want to know what happens, and who wins!"
I will never forget that session, they were truly hooks and for many sessions, I left the mystery of who won that fight and my players were trying to investigate what happened
I like the idea of the cleric/healer that doesn't have a rival in the rival team, and when the parties fight the two clerics just sit on the same rock healing their party while complaining to the other about all the stupid stuff they had to fix.
Better yet... They are lover
That’s a fun interaction, I love it
Hardly a fortnight ago, the orc sired moron drank a bottle of alchemists fire Thinking it was ale. By the gods, it would be easier to train a displacer beast to use a litter box...
In our Call of the Netherdeep campaign, the pre-made cleric ended up becoming a solo version of that. Our PC party was oddly-numbered and perfectly paired off with the rest of the pre-mades EXCEPT for their cleric, who had no foil on our side. So every time we interacted, their cleric ended up playing the third wheel / beleaguered parent chasing after both parties to mitigate the gas-fire the rest of us would inevitably become.
It honestly made the odd-man-out cleric somehow a foil of the whole of the rest of us, and made the rivalry interactions that much more entertaining. That experience and watching this video is making me want to deliberately add odd-man-out characters for the rival party in future games of my own.
I Love this.
Antonio, you’re so creative and hard-working, it blows my mind. I’m so happy that you make videos for people to tune into to enhance their roleplaying experiences.
You should be so proud of yourself
Right? It’s insane that this level of content is free!
One of my favorite rival teams was the first I created. It was entirely to prevent a TPK in a low-level dungeon. The PCs were pretty deep in the dungeon and after a few bad rolls they were ALL making death saves as the monsters loomed over them. Then another adventuring party showed up at full health (because most of the dungeon was already cleared!). The players HATED that they had to be rescued so THEY made this adventuring party their rivals!
Thats an awesome idea!
ya know thats amusing that things went THAT way as it is but in a world were adventuring is completive as can be i can see this happening
Sometimes the players do the work for you. USE IT SHAMELESSLY!
@@Zaprozhan indeed infact sometimes theres just in party rivals who will GUTTERISE eachother into problems and then if it gets the entire party into a mess they will have to unfuck the situation
This is one of the options created by the existance of a Rival team, a "Don't kill the party move" that offers more roleplaying options going forward, as long as not overused. But if these sort of things are creating too much vitrol in the party, one opposite trick would be an adventure hook in the form of a half dead Rival team member stumbling up to the party and after some back and forth swallowing their pride to ask for help because the rest of their team were taken prisoner and the PC's are the best chance they can see to save them.
I thought of a funny rival being a necromancer wizard who is jealous that one of the PC's has such a large group of friends so the necromancer summons and takes control over undead to have their own friends. The further you progress in the game the more powerful undead they have like at the start they have a skeleton or zombie for each PC -1their idle. Then they slowly turn some them into stronger undead such as wights, ghouls and vampires.
👍
Brilliant
Maybe a more interesting twist on this could be the Necromancer literally wanting the PC's friends. So they kill them and then raise them! Yippy!!
You mean wraiths, right?
@@Victor-um9ce I mean the necromancer could also control wraiths but my typo was meant to be Wights as in the undead that can have 12 zombie servants.
Remember, you don't have to make rivals for the group ahead of time. You can turn an npc that a player has interacted with into a rival. This way you can see what basic premise the players respond to, then build from there.
I think this is a very good approach, as the players start to remember them and have personal grudge.
I think it would be cool to mark off a few NPCs as potential rivals, and have those who the players seemed most interested in show up again as rivals
Especially in a new champaign where you haven't gotten a handle on how the PC's will be running their character. If you find that one of your NPC's is making sparks fly with one PC, that's a good foundation, to expand from.
Yeah that's probably a better way of doing it, naturally there's gonna be NPC's the players dislike and it's fun to make the players hate those NPC's even more.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, inspires more murderous hatred in my players than me trying to set up a rival team for them to face. Like, I don't know why they always jump straight to "we must slit their throats in the night" mode... but they do. Always. It's kinda frustrating....
Aww :(
Have you tried leaning into that expectation and used the rivals to bait your party?
Maybe you could have the local authorities get mad at the party for straight up murdering other adventurers? That might make your players calm down
Some DMs adopt the rival team so much that they switch to a DM Vs player mindset, backing the rivals over the development of story (together, not the DM alone). I'm not saying it's what you're doing but perhaps consider it. If players who play for freedom feel like they're being restrained they'll often lash out as murder hobos.
The villain has been observing this behavior and sets up a team of assassins to cosplay as a foil party
Rival players can be very dangerous narratively, as their very existence questions protagonists in ways not every player wants to deal with. For example, the player behind the dwarven princess in the video may not have any desire to explore what her rival brings to the table, opting instead to just goad them into combat and kill the perceived 'disruption' to their character's planned arc. It's a good idea to let rivals occur naturally, or at least broach the subject with a player before trying to give them one.
I feel called out by the Wizard Apos'Trophee Hyphen-Name, and I am here for it. I need a Wheel of Goals for villains to let the players spin for what is happening.
Maybe use a different wheel, that wheel had 1 "WW3 analogy" and the rest were "destroy the world".
I gave my players a Cambion Rival, he fought them 1v5 at like level 2 (he had no armor) with no magic items. Quite close, and they won. He escaped with his superior flying speed.
They met him a few times after, mainly doing his own thing.
Any he made his own little party that is doing many quests the party ignores, they even worked together once.
To keep up with the party, he also gained levels at Barberian (his AC is made from DEX+CON+CHA ;))
He mainly focuses on gainning political influence and getting in with the important tribe leaders
I absolutely love how both Moira and Turmeric have round animal companions
and Adaine
Vodar nice profile picture
Turmeric's little buddy came part and parcel with their Urchin background. Moira's familiar? Purchased from a pet store for the aesthetic.
one very important thing, a "devil is in the details" kind of thing, is that it is VERY important thing actually know your players characters before even considering a rival. i'll say to give your characters a session, or two, or half the campaing ok maybe not that much, to get to know yout players, what they actually do what they actually think how do the actually react, it's never easy to get any of that on the character sheet the first time without some experience precisely because characters are always iterating upong themselfs while playing. your paladin may have syad that he is the shining face of honor and piaty but maybe the player themself isn't actually aware of sayd details and missed an oportunity to help someone or an insult to the crown simply flew over their head whem they heard it idk, a very important and specific detail that informs that a rival atacking sayd desire may not be able to fully succed in their objective but a ruval constructed in other direction upon the same character might have a bigger impact.
but still, rivals are their own people even if the narrative role they have isn't "as strong" as it can be, and it can also be worked arround in the same self iteration and improvement the character they are reflecting is going throw.
be careful and have fun, after all that's always the goal
I appreciate that Dwarven girl's beard quite a lot
This! I almost teared up. More dwarven women with beards!
I assumed it was a joke like she's played by a guy.
Dwarf goatees are very underated 👌
@@vukkulvar9769 Naw dude, classic tolkien. Dwarven Women have beards, which is why people think that dwarves emerge from stone. From the Hobbit.
@@greysonjones5429 Except of course that Amazon fucked that up
What if, hear me out, what if we had a Wizard Hat tier list? I honestly believe humanity needs it.
I ran a rival group delving into the Underdark alongside my party once. At first, tensions were very high. They travelled together for the majority of the time, but they weren't as high levelled. Instead, I built them to be perfectly working together while the party still had a few issues with communication. Instead, they were proactive and had strong opinions, as the rival teams were all basic copycats of the party, with classes switched. The rogue-sorcerer became the bard, both being the heart. The Coffeelock became a cleric. The cleric and bard had a small fling, where as the Coffeelock and rogue-sorcerer were an active thing. They spoke about relationship stuff during downtime. The ranger became the... ranger... Different subclass. Planeswalker to horizon Walker, and from skeleton to aasimar. Lastly, our cleric, which became the eldritch Knight. Firbolg to Goliath. They had similar backstories to the party, but they were all based around a prominent location the party was exploring, where an elder Evil had touched the earth and permanently scarred the land. Had a lot of fun making new aberations for Y'chak.
Anyways, the party had a lot of fun bouncing off these NPCs, and without prodding, they gravitated to their counterpart, as well as the party's leader, the dwarf cleric. When they had to split up, I swapped a character out for a doppleganger, and that doppleganger was caught within minutes. The problem was the doppelganger was hunting the party and had his own group of baddies actively hunting the party down for main plot reasons. Long story. However, because they got caught early, the rest of the enemy party wasn't ready, leading to a 7 v 2 against a monk and hexblade. The monk and hexblade where higher leveled than the party. Level 14 to the party's level 9, and the rivals' level 7. With the numbers advantage, the doppelganger monk fled, covered by the revenant hexblade, who perished for the 4th time. Suicides, killing the rival ranger. One revivify later, and the only question was what happened to the eldritch Knight....
He was killed hours before, body lost in a river.
He was revived via clever use of a homebrew item that summoned a Coatl to aid the party, and brought back to life later by the party's cleric, his foil.
god damn ur pfp goes so hard
I appreciate that you've given the dwarven princess a beard. It's a travesty what they did not giving dwarven women beards in rings of power
Of all the things to cry about
@@jonttopia Of all the things to cry about this is by far the greatest offense.
Not actually confirmed in any Tolkien work. Only implied as a joke in the Jackson films, which itself was possibly based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books in which (as part of the satire of Tolkien) all dwarves do indeed have beards.
No really, it’s an assumption based on a parody of the original work. I used to get this wrong too.
@@intergalactic92 Appendix A: "Indeed this strangeness they have that no Man nor Elf has ever seen a beardless Dwarf - unless he were shaven in mockery, and would then be more like to die of shame than of many other hurts that to us would seem more deadly. For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike; nor indeed can their womenkind be discerned by those of other race, be it in feature or in gait or in voice, nor in any wise save this: that they go not to war, and seldom save at direst need issue from their deep bowers and halls."
@@jonttopiait was something unique to their race that a lot of people apparently liked, in a fantasy setting people tend to like the things that edge more towards fantasy rather than just normal humans, it added a sense of humor or intrigue to the dwarves that was stripped away.
I dont personally care, im just saying i understand why some do, I mean it was the 1st female dwarf pictured on screen and they willingly chose to subvert everyones expectation without replacing it or justifying it. I mean we could all just pretend she does in fact have a beard comparable to malw dwarves its just not on her face to preserve the humor at least.
Gosh Darn It, you constantly impress me. Rivals, Angels, and pop singers (burlesque bards with fan blades). I'm not surprised that your views are getting close to the 100k, because every aspect impresses me: Animation (Love your aviator btw), voice (made for voice over - figure you either L.A. or Miami), and number one...your creativity. Gosh, that's where it gets hard to quantify. Creativity. You have it and your whole production shows it in spades. Keep up the great work, your steady growth in subscribes, shows that you've got "it". Now, get sponsors.
Zuko and Aang is a fantastic example of god tier rivals
Had a tough day and this really cheered me up. Thanks pointy hat. Love the vids.
HI! I LIKE SHORTS! THEY'RE COMFY AND EASY TO WEAR!
Your content is excellent. Thank you.
I would love to see how you portray "Pointy Hat" as: an NPC, a Monster, and a magical item.
I personally have always been an item and a person
the problem with the Rival system is that PCs die. will that make the rival just keep living & declare victory? will the DM have to make another NPC to rival the new PC?
The Rivals have their own lives and struggles. So if a PC dies, maybe their Rival dies as well. Maybe they're crippled and have to find a replacement for themselves in the group. The same thing your party has to do, their party also has to do. They aren't magically better than you with infinite resources, they have to work like you have to work. In fact if a PC dies, maybe their new character could be their rival and so they have a complete history for their new character, including leaving the Rival Group to join the PCs.
@@LupineShadowOmega I think it'd be good if the rival PC left the rival group, opening up a spot for the rival of the new PC. That way you still have the old rival you can keep in your back pocket for later. Just because they aren't a rival anymore doesn't mean they won't pop back in eventually! Hell, if you do it right you could tug at some heart strings as the characters are reminded of their fallen comrade whenever they show up.
@@seasnaill2589 Also an option. In fact you could have it both ways and have the rival leave to join the PCs in tribute to their fallen rival. Maybe they say yes, maybe they say no. It could lead to a bad end for them, or it might be a point of contention with said character later.
The possibilities are as endless as the group's imagination. Which is why I feel like worrying about if someone dies is sort of missing the point. Because sometimes someone dying is just another story to be told.
@burneraccount LMAO
The rivals don’t have to be a direct 1 to 1 mirror. It might be an idea to kill a couple of rivals in advance to show that PC death is possible. You have limitless power as the DM. Use it.
I'm going to introduce a rival to my party's warlock: and it's his older brother. This video gave me everything I need to make this rivalry dynamic and fun!
ooh that’s cool i’m using a warlock and i want to ask my dungeon master if my character can meet his older brother which is a paladin it would be really cool because my character is kind of a demonic version of a paladin!👍 also my character grew up in a rich family of monster hunters and he is the only one that is weak and have no special powers and his goal is to somehow defeat lots of monsters and prove his worth to his family and his big brother is an extremely talented and powerful paladin i definetely think that he would be in the middle of the spectrum.
I’ve got a character whose main flaw is he’s overprotective and doesn’t really believe others can take care of themselves. He constantly worries about everyone, even one of his siblings who’s got a really safe job as a baker. A sibling just existing in another party would be a great rival
Dude, you are awesome, the editing, the drawings, the references, the jokes... You deserve every single subscriber and like
I adore your art on this episode. Top notch. Also, I used your Hag and Tiefling ideas on my campaign and it's great, you, my dude, are a genius.
the little chibi illustrations of the party are SO good!!! I love it
Outstanding content. This series might be even awesomer than your DnD with a twist. They’re both great, actionable, and entertaining. Thank you!
Correction: not all villains are antagonists. Villain protagonists are possible. Which would make the hero, the antagonist.
I'm am so happy your Dwarven princess has facial hair ❤️❤️❤️
pointy hat you are overthinking, sometimes the most mundane things are the strongest rivalry points, for example, what goes first, milk or cereal
It’s cool to see that I’ve had the same idea of giving my characters rivals!
I’m going to play a warforged bard who decided to abandon his life of violence to pursue his newfound passion: music. But his foil is his former commander who zealously believes it’s the purpose of a warforged to live and die as a soldier (and begins hunting his former comrade because in his eyes “you serve no purpose”).
I love your videos so much! It's not just the very interesting content, but also your edgy humor & superb editing skills.
0:04 head canon, that's what you look like now :D
Based Pointy Hat with a pro public transportation message
Always love your video hat man. I've put some of your stuff in my games!
You deserve the success you’ve gotten recently look forward to your new videos
I dm’d a campaign with two parties in the same storyline, one week party 1 had a session, the next week party 2 had a session and one week, both parties came and it turns out I collected party 2 to be rivals, so it was team vs team, and the parties loved it.
I always get excited whenever I see a new pointy hat video. Seriously, I love all of the stuff you make!
Rivals are so fun if you have players that get invested in that sort of thing.
ive been doing this and it is honestly so much fun. when in need of inspiration, anime is v helpful!
You are quickly becoming one of my favorite dnd creators. You are amazingly creative ane put so much love into your work. Your energy and passion is honestly contagious, thank you for your work.
How do you reveal this very complex and detailed volume of information to the players? Will they sit still for pages of boxed text?
That's exactly what i thought. The players don't know anything about their destined rivals, they don't have their backstories and it doesn't really make sense for those self proclaimed rivals to just show up, monologue and know everything about the heroes. Basically i am asking the same question, how do you integrate them organically? how do you get to the point where the players know about the rivals and vice versa?
As I said, the rivals are not a one off encounter. Ideally, the players should be seeing these rivals pretty regularly. There are many occasions to convey the gist of a character in one or several of those.
Have them working behind the scenes, perhaps doing quests that the party dont do? Or maybe as a group that is trying to earn fame in ways your party isnt whether its fame or deeds. Or even, the bbeg hires them on without revealing himself, using manipulation or a vast network of contacts to basically paint the pc’s as “not as good as they act” so they have conflict throughout the game.?
This is one of the few acceptable ways for a DMPC to exist.
This is INCREDIBLE material. I'd honestly never thought of non-villain antagonists in D&D, and I absolutely love this concept and how you approached it. Thanks for this video!
I've always thought it'd be fun to have a rival party who while not particularly effective in combat, are a band of talented acrobats and illusionists who constantly try to upstage the party with elaborate staged battles and performances.
Dude, I cannot believe your timing. I was preparing a rival team (with a really silly name gimmick) but was having trouble figuring out their personalities. Now I have a good source to do so, I'll probably play that card a little earlier than I had planned, to give my gang more time to expend with them. Big thank you, great material as always.
pd: I'm also using the Dragontouched idea, plan to have my gang taking part in their revolution. Huge thanks for that too.
I adore all of these characters you made so much!!! Their designs are so good, especially Darios, Cerella (not sure how to spell those names XD), and Turmeric. I especially appreciate Cerella having a small beard and Turmeric being non-binary and how naturally those things are presented. The names are great too, my favorites being Cerella sounding almost like a condensed version of Cinderella and Turmeric just straight up being a spice and presumably a name they chose themself.
Being non binary actually makes sense in DnD because it's all pretend
I love them too. It felt a bit weird when you described the PCs, because they sounded like the adventuring party in Hidden Fortress.
Where did the idea that female Dwarves would have beards come from?
Male humans have beards, female humans don't. So, why do people think female Dwarves would?
Is it because of the emphasis put on beards in Dwarven cultures? If so, that still doesn't make sense, as plenty of Human cultures view facial hair as a status symbol, too.
Is it just a joke that people take too seriously? Probably.
Dwarven women have beards because it's just seen as beautiful as their male counter parts. Beards aren't as worshipped in the human society as in the dwarven one
3:30 I love how all the options are "Destroy the world" except the "WWIII allegory"
that's it, those are all the options
Thanks for including an enby!!
(Any/all)
I tend to make the rivals strong counters to certain party members while being neutral, and weak to others to create an interesting dynamic in combat.
I don’t like that the princess gives up being queen that easily. She seems more like the type to become a benevolent monarch in order to right her fathers wrongs
The Premanger reference earned my subscription. Marvellous taste.
My DM did this after I gave him the sob backstory of my character; basically a character my Tiefling Paladin thought was dead, wasn't...I really love him for it...
Okay but the princess with a beard and the one that uses they/them pronouns ✨ I adore these little details! Thank you for that 👉👈
I also love the overachiever tho, he's so cute
In my own personal Exandria game, I made a 'mirror' team of rivals that reflects a lot to my players' characters. Just making them was so fun, thinking of arcs to intertwine with theirs and personalities to 'mirror' them. I absolutely love what you made and love within this video of what are rivals, how to use them and how to make them in ones own game.
We are going to celebrate hard when we reach 100K and rightfully deserved for the amazing content ya make. The characters and rivals you made, GOD I LOVE THEM SO MUCH AND THE ART IS ADORABLE! I relate so hard to the Royal Knight and Blacksmith Revolutionary, also just an absolute sucker for a run away rich Pirate gal! Mi pana eres el mejor! Y mucho suerte con todo! 💛
I'm still upset that *THE BLUE HALF-ORC* rival in the *EXANDRIA* setting module made by *MATT MERCER* isn't the child of Fjord and Jester
Seeing Serena joy is weird to me, I see her as a straight up villian not an antagonist. Unless I'm missing something new from the new couple episodes
Nope, you're still right.
A villain is almost always an antagonist. It’s just that not all antagonists are villains. An antagonist is just someone opposing the protagonist/main characters, so they’re usually villains
while i agree whole heartedly, your missing one part of a foil. foils have to be similar. they have to be very alike to be a foil. look at hamlet, fortinbras, and laertes from the play, well, hamlet. 3 different characters, but they are all people of noble decent whos dads were murdered and swore revenge. they all, however, persue that revenge differently. thats what makes a foil. a character can contrast a character without being a foil, but a foil has to be similar enough with one key difference. sorrey for the ramble
He explained how much I love frozen unironucalky because of how its two mcs are antagonist to each other. (plus idina & Kristen) I like it a lot when I look back at it.
Yes. It is perfect to highlight the difference between an antagonist and a villain. Hans is the villain, but he never gets in Anna's way until the very end.
Great video, but something was really bothering me around 9:10 . That being, Spock and Kirk are not foils. Spock and McCoy are foils. Kirk unites the two. The three characters are like 1 brain-Spock is the logical part, McCoy is the emotional part, and Kirk is the personality in charge of it all. If Kirk allows one to be in charge over the other at all times, problems will arise, so he must balance logic and emotion.
I love that the party is she/her, they/them and cool -definitely not pointy- hat
Me: plays vidya while listening to video
Antonio: "the evil guy who plans to destroy the world by starting a war against the concept of buses, trains and building bad transportation infrastructure"
Me: - huh, thats surprisingly specific and sounds like evil overlord Elon Musk. -
/alt-tab
- hey would you look at that! -
but to be fair Elon is a better villain for Werewolf the Apocalypse, and I will stand by this until my last dying breath
I notice you didn't go over the third type of foil, a cautionary tale, someone who is supposed to be a warning, a "this is what you could become if you go down this path" sort of thing, like Darth Vader in movie 5, the vision in the cave and the warnings about the dark side, he is a warning for what you become if you give in and embrace the dark side.
I'm currently running Call of the Netherdeep for my players and the rivals have been a pretty good aspect of the campaign. My players are on friendly terms with them so it's less of an antagonistic scenario (my players tend to play friendly characters so it just happens) but just having them in the game has added more opportunities for RP and a sense of urgency because the rival party are also trying to accomplish what the party's goal is. They've been working with the party so far but, later on, they're going to be joining a rival faction and there's a couple more things I'm going to do to make it more adversarial.
Personally I think body horror can be done VERY well... But i also thibk it should be something the players witness not experience
I think im going to make a team of adventures pretty much the opposite of the pc party like a pc is a blood hunter and a dmpc is a cleric barbarian vs rouge stuff like that
Steve is the guy that convinces you to play Minecraft for like 2 weeks max and then never touch it for a year
This video is an absolute goddamn gold mine of DMing advice. You, sir, are awesome and you should feel awesome. I inadvertently already came up with a rival character for one of the players in my upcoming campaign before I watched this, now I'ma make up one for everybody else.
How do you do rivals in a published campaign like "Curse of Strahd"?
i personally believe a villain can be a protagonist(its just hard to write well)
though its far more intriguing to write a anti-hero protagonist trying to grow into a full hero in my opinion
You made Aloise a reference to PewDiePie, didn't you? He has the same face and even has the brofist as a clamp for his cape
Idk if im playing dnd wrong now because in my campaigns i only have one friend that was willing to give dnd a try and he loves it now but its only him and me so do i need more people?
Kinda love your taste in bearded dwarven women in your videos. It's a good touch.
If you believe in yourself and with a tiny pinch of magic, all your dreams can come true
Last time I went for a rival arc my players tried to kill them right away without giving them the chance to do any appeal... I barely could tell about their background except for the one they kept alive to torture and get information from...
Sounds like a good reason for revenge.
I gotta say: I LOVE your videos. It really meakes want to GM something, but I'm really insecure about my GMing skills (tried a couple of times, falied). Maybe one day I'll just compile all the cool stuff you put out and try again xD
1:37 OH GOD YOU JUST GAVE ME PTSD MY SISTER USED TO ALWAYS WATCH THAT GOD AWFUL MOVIE YEARS AGO AND I FORGOT ABOUT IT AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!
The only time I give my players a rival is when I want to feel like a PC and not a forever DM.
I just realised that I accidentally did this for 2 of my pcs so I guess I should do that for the 3rd one
funny enough. (homebrew) the Rival of my Orc Barbarian who was cursed to be immortal until his task is completed by the god to hunt and slay a Magical Golden Haired Fox that has the power to grant wishes, a critter who is able to go there other worlds to escape. however whatever world the Fox goes, the Orc will always follow, and even if the Orc is Slain, he will always return until the task of hunting and killing the powerful critter is completed so he can be granted a true death and stop reserecting or reincarnating into another being who will continue the hunt.
the Orc is Good and usually LN/LG but in combat he is Sadistic bringing him more to TN/CN, however serves the gods faithfully and without fail. whereas the Fox who was trying to help others, and often warns about the wishes and his high level of magic of divine and geomancy. he is CG but due to the Fox being a magical being who is essentially a demigod (but he can still bleed like any mortal) and him being hunted by a unstoppable force (not even death will stop his mission) and the Fox only wants to help people yet is wanted dead by the gods adds alot of dynamics. The Critter also doesnt want to fight the Orc either and wants to try to make peace.
So basically a Mody Dick Story and the point of view of Grendel
I am so dissapointed you didn't name this series "Just the tip (of the hat!)"
"There shouldn't be a main character in DND, that's the wrong way to play it"
all the people who play ttrpgs by themselves or with just 1 player:
"guess i'll die then"