Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Rey from The Force Awakens, Dungeons and Dragons-Style



















Can you make a cool character like Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 5e D&D? You bet your nerf herder you can. Umm, spoilers below or something, but why on earth haven't you seen the movie yet? Where do you live? (I'm betting Wisconsin.)

Rey
Class & Level: Monk 1     Race: Human (variant)     Background: Uthgart Tribe Member
Str: 12    Dex: 18    Constitution: 14    Intelligence: 9    Wisdom: 16    Charisma: 13
Hit Points: 12     Armor Class: 17 [1]

Skill Proficiencies: Athletics, Insight, Persuasion, Stealth, Survival
Tool Proficiencies: Tinker's Tool, Vehicles (?) [2]

Feat: Magic Initiate (Sorcerer, Cantrips: Mage Hand, True Strike, Spell: Charm Person) [3]

Abilities: Unarmored Defense, Martial Arts [4]

[1] - There are a lot of solid class options for making a Jedi-like character in 5e D&D. As various boffins on G+ pointed out, valor bard, eldritch knight, or arcane trickster could all work. And Paul V. pointed out this pretty amazing homebrew Jedi path. I went with monk because it seemed like the easiest way to be a Rey-esque character at 1st level without having to wait for things to kick in from later levels. 

The Uthgart Tribe Member background requires refluffing, but just make the survival ability apply to deserts and we're good.

I randomly rolled those ability scores and went with my heart. Rey isn't stupid, but her lack of formal education made Int the dumpstat by default.

[2] - For skills, I picked Athletics because Rey does a lot of running and climbing, Insight and Persuasion because of the scenes where she reads Kylo Ren's emotions and gets one over on the stormtrooper, Stealth because she hides and sneaks a lot through Starkiller Base, and Survival for her desert wastleland origins. I wish there was a way to shoehorn Perception in there. For tools, I swapped out the one from the Uthgart background for Vehicles. If your game has spaceships, make it about that. Otherwise, land vehicles might make the most sense. Tinker's tools proficiency for repairing ships and such, maybe.

[3] - Okay, we need to get some Jedi powerz up in here. Since we get a free feat from picking the variant human as our race, we can take Magic Initiate which nets us mage hand (telekinesis), True Strike (for that moment Rey concentrates and then beats the crap out of Kylo Ren), and Charm Person (for those Jedi mind tricks).

[4] - Assuming we outfit our Reyalike with a quarterstaff (like Rey uses in the early bits of the movie), she gets to make a staff attack and a martial arts attack each round. Average damage if both hit: 16. That's...really good for 1st level! Later on you could pick up a magic shortsword for some lightsaber action and the damage will actually scale as you level up due to Martial Arts.