This story happened back during 2019 before the covid-19 shutdown. At the time I was playing with a group at College. I found out they had some previous experience with Dungeons & Dragons but I was the one who really got them into it. In fact I was the main dungeon master for the group for the most part before the whole lockdown thing.So after a while of essentially being the only dungeon master of the group I started to get a little burnt out. so one of my players decided that he wanted to run something. as it turns out he'd been wanting to run a Homebrew of his for a while. So after playing through 5e a little bit he felt he had the hang of it with some of the rules down but he still wanted to just run through an experimental game to test hisMetal so to speak. I said that sounds like a good idea. We could just have a nice casual campaign of people who would be willing to play tested for you. After discussing a little further and we decided to be a super casual game however this next part was his idea. so for some of you wondering how casual he wanted the game to be. he decided to do something a little fun. he told the group that you could pick any race so none of that was off limits or anything like that but also since it would be a high seas themed Adventure we would be free to essentially play whatever we like as long as it had a sentient level of intelligence. which essentially means that the monster manual became a nice little addition to the player's guide. so right off the bat you could tell that this was not meant to be a serious game and just a fun little experiment for him to get familiar with the rules. so I spread the word around about the game and got a few people who are very interested in it. At the time we didn't know it but that also included our that guy. By which I mean at the time we didn't know he was that a guy until this game. So we all look at the stat blocks of what we wanted to play, use those as the foundation and then fill their stats. Thankfully due to this being such a relaxed campaign I could finally do something that i had been wanting to do for a while. I decided I was going to play a bronze dragon. While he did specify that he wanted people to keep in mind that it would be a high seas campaign so he preferred us to pick more aquatic themed monsters/ races excetera, he did not limit us to it. so is that in mind a bronze dragon met all of his requirements and preferences. I still okayed it with him first because I didn't want to seem like I was going to be a power gamer or a rules lawyer / meta gamer. He looked it over and he okayed it. side note, a little thing about bronze dragons is that they like to use their polymorphing ability like all metallic dragons do, but bronze dragons due to them being more social creatures tend to like to stay in their prime or form and rarely if ever change to their original. so I asked the DM if you can keep the fact that I was a dragon secret into the rest of the players I would appear as a standard level 1 human fighter. even with this little tag on he was still okay with my character it was pretty chill and cool about the whole thing. so the next time we met it was Session 1 and we revealed our characters. The crew was made of our captain/bard Calypso the siren , The deckhand / Barbarian Gunther the sahuagin (one of the four-armed ones), Safra tabaxi Rogue / Lookout, and finally myself. Povsrabi (pronounced Povs – roby), the bronze Dragon Fighter/ shipwrite. Though in human form I went by the name Jack Rackham. Now to give you some backstory, during his younger years Povsrabi had previously served under a famous pirate lord called Laugh he was known for being a Joker / Blackbeard infused kind of character. In my backstory, Povsrabi was tricked into a service because he thought laugh was a privateer. Only rating Chefs of his country's enemies so that's somewhat following within the good category. when he found out the truth Povsrabi killed and ate laugh. Since then he had been content just to simply stay on his Island ,sink any pirate vessels that came into his domain and made his own horde. How he met the party is that they were already a crew on the and had positioned themselves near the island to wait out a storm. The storm had badly damaged them and they had not committed any acts of piracy yet sometimes Robbie I decided that maybe perhaps he could change these Crews' ways since he had gotten sick and tired of constantly sinking ships and wishing that he didn't have to kill people who could easily have just been persuaded. So he Donned his human disguise And offered to fix their ship that had been damaged in the storm. He convinced them that he had been a shipwright but had been marooned on this island for a few months. Naturally the other players thought this was a good idea to have someone who could repair the shift as part of their crew so they accepted me as one of them. do to him spending most of his life around ships he had gotten quite good at building, designing and fixing ships. For some context, in his world he had made it so that knowledge of Magic while not unheard-of was not known to the Common Man. so seeing an above average Human both in height and build on an Island who knows how to build and repair ships was not terribly suspicious. So we sailed on and after the first two sessions another player (who after a couple sessions drops out which is why I don't mention them due to the fact that they really didn't have that big a part in the story) and that guy joined that guy being safra's player. You see we had recently acquired a bigger ship and we needed some extra crewmates is how we are going to flavor adding them in so to introduce them into the story we had someone who only wanted to play for one session play an NPC which Safra was robbing best to try and start her career and so on. the NPC turning out to be a wereshark ranger. I won't go into details about what happened next but let's just say is that even with his character's backstory and how he described his character behaving listen to actively try and antagonize the player who was playing the npc. To give you an example ( he was a guy in real life by the way and so was being NPC player). she not only took his belongings but stole all of the clothes off of him and ran around the island trying to hide them. They were supposed to try and be recruited into our ship screw in order to avoid her fate or at least that's how the DM tried to re-rail what he had been doing with his character. Instead he had Safra sneak aboard our ship while we were recruiting at the Docks, stuffed his boots into one of our cannons and fired it. thus shredding and destroying the boots. keep in mind she was after monetary gain so she was only trying to what can you declare beforehand kill some valuables and make some money however after reading what I just said and and guess who is being a little bit more than malicious and out of character even by his own character standards. so instead what happened is that the NPC play liked his character so much we decided to turn them into an actual character and he joined our crew which was fun. He became on our crew another deckhand that we needed since we have a larger ship. Safra on the other hand wound up getting arrested and put in a very high security prison. This means that that guy's character would essentially be out of the story in the same session they were introduced. In character none of the crew myself included didn't have the best impression of Safra and was fully content to let her sit in jail however I knew I took the time to make that character so I didn't want them to feel cheated in Session 1. So I decided to break character slightly and I told the captain that even though they had it rubbed us the wrong way, I felt that her skills would be much more useful if applied under our flag. after this amount of persuasion revealing to her that I was a bronze dragon in private and swore on my dragon's honor that if she did not prove useful within 2 weeks then I would personally dispose of her. So the crew banded together and broke her out of prison. The first two days she seemed to be fine and a boone to the crew. But on the third day the dungeon master decided to throw a curveball our way and the ship was taken over by giant rats. After this fight I would show him some of the errors because we were level1 and as a pretend human, I had to act like the rats were a threat. And while the rats were CR ¼, they outnumbered us 4 to 1 and he had also decided to make them all dire rats. He couldn't find any stats officially for dire rats so he decided to just double the HP and AC. So while we were fighting the dire rats, We noticed that Safra was still in the Crow's Nest and realized that she had not come down because was doing her job and didn't know the rats had begun the attack. so I called up to her and asked if she could help out with the rats. At first she refused because they said, “ I still need to do my job. What if the ship runs into trouble? I need toWatch in case something happens”. so after five rounds of combat and most of the rats while not down we're still badly beaten. But so were we and they began two down us one by one. And so when my fake HP ran out I pretended to go down as well. I know I could have easily beaten them. But I wanted to remain a mystery of what I really was for as long as possible because out of character no one knew I was a dragon aside from myself and the dungeon master. Finally after seeing the rest of the crew down she finally decided to help. So she went down from the rigging but stayed just high enough that the rats couldn't get her and began to pick them off one by one with her crossbow. After recovering they both in and out of Character began to mock the whole crew for losing to a bunch of rats. I commented back by saying if you had help out and we worked as a team beforehand we wouldn't have gone down in the first place. I had hoped that this would be the only case of that guyness, but unfortunately I would be proven wrong. during the next couple days leading up to her secret deadline of two weeks. they had openly talked about how the captain was inferior and that perhaps The crew should mutiny and make Safra the captain. Even though the rest of the crew generally liked Calypso as the captain. She mentioned this several times by the way. Also over the two weeks some of the crew had character-driven reasons and Generally fun roleplay had figured out that I was a dragon. Mystery around my true nature and the fun quirkiness of role-playing a dragon trying to masquerade as a human was the whole reason why I made the character in the first place. However, that guy didn't like the fact that my character had any secrets at all even though he was very mysterious and had plenty hidden about their backstory. Out of character he was able to surmise that I was something else but he didn't know what and the fact that it seems that everybody else was figuring out what I was but him since I only revealed the fact that as a dragon in and out of character and private to keep the mystery alive apparently pissed them off. So he couldn't confirm it and had no idea the others knew. He still suspected it nonetheless. So he knew I was something that wasn't human but didn't know what. so he started doing a lot of digging online trying to figure out exactly what the heck I was out of character. And in character he was trying to gather Clues by having Safra follow me around like a hawk. Again even with his character motivations and whatnot Safra had no reason to follow Jack around like she was a hawk stalking prey. Finally on the night of the last day the captain and I had a meeting and she had come to the conclusion that no Safra was not a good member of the crew and that I should uphold my end of the bargain. so I left a note inside Saphris quarters so when she went to bed that night you would see the note which said that I would reveal my secret to her at midnight if she I'm the top deck. Since he was both in and out of character couldn't stand the fact that he didn't know what I truly was, he naturally jumped at this opportunity. so they immediately without any of their gear anything else ran to the top deck of a ship. At first they thought my character had pranked them because they saw no one. Then out from the water on the side of the ship, arose in all his glory. The mighty 37.f.t. tall bronze Dragon Povsrabi. Out of character that guy yelled “ I effing knew it. you were never human and I solved your mystery you bastard.” He proceeded to gloat because he thought he was the first to figure out my secret. I've been in character spoke in my deep draconic voice. “ The crew and the captain were content to let you rot in that prison. but I saw some potential and good in you. you have had two weeks to prove your worth to this crew. I even revealed my secret to the captain and swore on my dragon's honor that you would be a good addition to the crew and you have done not but prove me a fool. It is for this and for your many accounts of selfishness, actively harming the other members of the crew, open Talk of mutiny and various other offenses is why I must uphold my end of the bargain. in this life you have disappointed me perhaps in the next they might judge you more lenient to that I have.” I then use my breath weapon on her. She fails her saving throw, lightning comes fourth and Safra becomes nothing but a mark of Ash on the deck of the ship. out of character that guy is absolutely Furious and raging. First he accuses the DM for letting me play a quote an overpowered and broken character. Cool DM reiterates that he said you could be any creature in the monster manual or any sort of race as long as they had sentence level or above intelligence and were not a god. He then starts trying to use in character reasons for why Safra should not have died. saying things such as oh well you never told her she had two weeks to prove herself you should have told her that. I explained to him that the agreement was to see what your characters' True Colors were and to see if they are a real part of the crew and not just an act to try and get into a position to acquire more things for yourself. He then said If you had told her about the agreement she would have acted differently. I responded by saying that's kind of the whole point about the agreement with the captain and I and kind of what I just explained to you. he then went on to have a tantrum and generally be pissed off that his character was so easily killed. keep in mind the guy is 20 something and going to college. so he's acting very immature for his age. He then spent the next 30 minutes angrily trying to blame everyone but himself for his actions both in and out of character. Like saying that if the other characters knew I was a dragon then he should have been told, even though it would go against my characters wishes and their characters personality. After that the game basically ended because it was such a sour event, no one really wanted to pick up the campaign. which was sad because the rest of us really liked our characters and loved the way we were coming together as a party. While we all remain friends after the fact that guy left the group and has not been back since. But I have been talking with cool dm recently and the rest of the group. We all want to restart the game and keep our old characters. So we might see Povsrabi and gang sail under the black flag once more! Minus that guy of course.
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