Constructing a D&D cartoon.

[DSMatticus]

Lago hates vampires. Got it.

Mary Suepires like in Twilight or being a vampire is meaningless like in Touhou.

This is a bad argument. Is Dracula a Marty Stupire? You seriously just made the case, "pop culture evolved, get over it," and then your response to further pop culture evolution was, "stop that, I hate it."

In your defense, Twilight sucks, and the sparkly vampire is totally laughable. If that's the direction we're going with vampires, fuck that. But Twilight sucks for reasons completely beyond its "oh noez, sunlight, im gonna sparkul," so it's an unfair example. It sucks because it doesn't make a single god damn bit of sense and is a bad fanfic.

But most of your vehement hate of it isn't very well justified. Most druids I've played with had a few hand-picked forms they liked - a few for mobility, one or maybe two for combat. It's not at all unreasonable to have a druid who never ends up turning into a bat or wolf, because he prefers bears and eagles. And the rogue assassin (edit: oops) has chosen a trap/debilitating ranged attacker set-up, he just doesn't favor charms and illusions. It doesn't strain believability or thematics at all for them to 'leave' niches for the vampire girl.

I'm not saying, "you should have a vampire girl," but your arguments against it aren't very sound and it seems more like a matter of just personal preference (you like old school vamps more, I'm on the same page).

[Lago PARANOIA]

The reason why I was so hard on the 'original' vampire example because it's a lame attempt to dodge the fact that the vampire myth has evolved a lot; it apparently has more weight because the trendsetter is the original instead of a Livejournal FF creation, but so fucking what? If you ask most people vampire weaknesses nowadays you'll get the sunlight thing as probably the biggest one. The reason why you made the character a vampire in the first place was to draw upon the memetic power of whupass vampires like Blade, Castlevania Dracula, Dmitri, Lestat, etc.. I'd forgive just one vampire dodge, but Frank's example character did a LOT of vampire dodges.

Yeah, vampires are not identical to each other and have some deviation from the 'standard' model but it's fucking lame to compile all of the deviations at once because not doing so would make the story too inconvenient. You changed the mythos around so much that the character hardly resembles any pop culture vampires at all. You're just using 'vampire' in a haphazard attempt to leech some of the cool when would work better to create some brand-new original creature.

And you know what? You're not even treading any new ground or anything. The idea of people making their characters vampires or half-vampires while giving them none of the weaknesses has been noticed and mocked to death. Even South Park and My Immortals have gotten in on the fun.

Most druids I've played with had a few hand-picked forms they liked - a few for mobility, one or maybe two for combat. It's not at all unreasonable to have a druid who never ends up turning into a bat or wolf, because he prefers bears and eagles.

Uh, yeah, that's because players are either overspecialized or lazy.

Animal shapeshifters in fiction don't stick to one or two forms, because single-author fiction is a lot more flexible than TTRPGs. Multiform shapeshifters/channelers like Beast Boy or B'wanna Beast that don't have a generically superior form don't just stick to a small list of them.

Aside from that, having two multiform shapeshifters in the party is lame. Frank already (rightfully) shot that idea down earlier in the page and the only reason why I suggested shifter was just so that the character can Hulk Out, not channel Animal Form kungfu where they change into a tiger or whatever.

And the rogue assassin (edit: oops) has chosen a trap/debilitating ranged attacker set-up, he just doesn't favor charms and illusions. It doesn't strain believability or thematics at all for them to 'leave' niches for the vampire girl.

1) Trap/Debilitating ranged attacker set-up? Seriously? That's not enough to differentiate the character in combat, otherwise they're just a vanilla action hero.

2) The assassin is already the designated Magnificent Bastard character, meaning that they're the go-to person when the plot requires some social engineering. It's very lame to have the social engineering guy NOT be the mind control guy, otherwise you have situations like 'wow, great job getting us into the base with your clever story, but we could've also just crushed their minds'.

[Prak]

There's no detachment from humanity, no inconvenient weaknesses, no metaphor of it being aristocracy or an underground society, no nothing. You just have a sexy gal with fangs who gets vast powers for no reason.

Wow, almost as if it were a modern pop culture vampire from anything other than Buffy.

In your defense, Twilight sucks, and the sparkly vampire is totally laughable. If that's the direction we're going with vampires, fuck that. But Twilight sucks for reasons completely beyond its "oh noez, sunlight, im gonna sparkul," so it's an unfair example. It sucks because it doesn't make a single god damn bit of sense and is a bad fanfic.

actually, the worst part of that specific part of Twilight is that of any of the number of ways she could have made the sparkling, marble skinned blood drinkers make sense, she chose none of them.

The reason why you made the character a vampire in the first place was to draw upon the memetic power of whupass vampires like Blade, Castlevania Dracula, Dmitri, Lestat, etc.. I'd forgive just one vampire dodge, but Frank's example character did a LOT of vampire dodges.

Well, it'd still have some of the weaknesses. She would still be turnable, she could be given a difficulty crossing water, she could have to sleep in a coffin and grave dirt, etc. Hell, given that it's a cartoon, any attempt to get it actually started would see executives trying to shove a garlic revulsion into the character.

[Soda]

If the/a main character of the show is a vampire/werewolf, it immediately stops being a D&D cartoon and starts being a vampire/werewolf cartoon.

While I'm posting, I'll spit out my ideas briefly.

Male Human Magnificent Bastard would be able to talk himself into the plot points and always escape with his magnificent bastardry.

Female Human Paladin would be the force of good, make the friendship speeches and bring out the good in the lead.

Female Elf/HalfElf Wizard because you need a wizard in D&D, then going into dark magician girl like V or Willow.

Male/Female HalfElf/Ef Druid to be the level-headed one, solving inter-party conflict. Alternatively a monk, possibly warforged, though I'm against robots (not in D&D, but in the main party of this cartoon).

Then a fifth character added later. A Male Dwarf/HalfOrc Barbarian/Fighter to be super tough and add Jayne-style comic relief, or a Male/Female Drow Assassin type to rival the lead's roguery.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Do you think doing the whole 'you do not have superpowers, therefore you suck' thing would be too meanspirited to use? I mean, on the face of it it is, but I think that it's even a worse lesson to imply that everyone can be as good as anyone if they just try hard enough. Especially if this point is reinforced by plot fuckery/wanking and author-induced villain stupidity. That kind of stuff seems to actually be worse in the long run since it encourages Ayn Rand style 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' stupidityness.

[Username17]

In an episodic format, you can produce every moral you could imagine. Even contradictory ones. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Whatever.

Believing in the heart of the cards or whatever the fuck can be the moral for one episode, and you can have another episode where the bounty hunter bemoans the fact that he lacks the magical talents of the other characters. Primarily though you shouldn't make any of the five-person team the "Ma Ti" of the team. All of them should participate.

You got:

• Half Orc Paladin (girl)
  Human Wizard (girl)
  Human Druid (boy)
  Drow Bounty Hunter (boy)
  Templated Innocent (girl)

Frankly I don't much care what your templated character's template is. She's there because in getting power "for no reason" and "all at once" she ca be the POV character for all the shit that everyone in the adventuring business is supposed to know but the audience doesn't. Probably I guess you should pick some D&D specific template like Wight, Yellow Musk Zombie, or Half-Golem.

But the bottom line is that all of them can contribute even when the opposition is like flying around or some shit. And even the Mary Sue character isn't played for worthless like many fifth wheel characters you could name.

-Username17

[Orion]

Dude, Lago, I listen to you bitch about the vampire girl character, and I get the impression that you're forgetting that the cartoon is going to have a plot, and that most of the vampire tropes you're invoking are plot tropes. Let's grab a few of the vampire tropes you've mentioned:

--Angst
--Detachment from Humanity
--Inconvenient Weaknesses
--Aristocracy
--Secret Society
And one that you didn't mention:
--Plague/Consumption

Now let's put them to work.

A Girl's village is attacked by the Big Bad, who is a Vampire. For some reason he decides to vamp her, but is interrupted by the Paladin before he can finish the process. Afterwards, the Paladin insist that she is now a threat to her friends and family, and needs to come with her to a rehab center to learn to control herself.(Detachment) She denies that anything is wrong and refuses to go. However, shortly thereafter she has a weird nightmare and finds that she has sleepwalked into her younger brother's room and wakes up standing over his bed. She flees in tears into the nearby woods.(Angst) She is immediately attacked by agents of the Big Bad, giving her her first chance to discover her new super strength. However, they use holy symbols to subdue her and carry her off in a cage.(Inconvenient Weakness) She is rescued by the Drow; shortly thereafter she meets the Paladin again by coincidence, and vouches for the Drow's good conduct. She now accepts that she cannot stay in her old home, and reluctantly sets off on her grand adventure.(Angst) Along the way, she learns that the Big Bad is spreading a plague which destroys fertile land, and that she is able to restore the land by shedding blood.(Plague) She reaches the monastery halfway through the season, and learns that the Big Bad is the first vampire, the recently-revived cursed king of a long-forgotten empire.(Aristocracy) Near the end of the system, she is once again captured with holy relics(Weakness)and spends several episodes in a cage in the Big Bad's palace, soaking up exposition while he tries to turn her to the dark side. Eventually the team storms the palace and breaks her out, at which point they kill the Big Bad. END OF SEASON ONE

Teaser for Season Two: During her captivity, she learned that the Big Bad was the first vamp but certainly not the last. Various bits of bad luck during the first season were in fact arranged by a wide-ranging network of undercover vampires plotting the return of the Old Kingdom, and the death of the Big Bad only allowed a takeover by a charismatic young vamp with radical ideas.(Secret Societies, Club Scene)

Subplot, Insert anywhere: She has a crush on the Druid, but assumes that he would never want to be with someone "unnatural" and dangerous. She tries dating the Drow for a while, since they're both "dark", but they really have nothing in common. Eventually, during some high-tension plot point, the Druid makes a dramatic gesture which proves that he likes her back. (Detachment, Angst)

This might be way too much for an ensemble show--I've basically made the whole season arc revolve around her, but I think if we did do a vampire girl we would want to focus more metaplot on her than on others. If you tell me which tropes are expendable I can trim her screen time a little.

[Vnonymous]

All this ampire arguing is pointless. A werewolf or half-dragon would fit much better. Really, flight/resilience/strength/breath weapon/a bit of magic is a perfectly acceptable thing to bring to a party(obviously not going to be using the default 3.5 half dragon because that thing is fucking ass but w/e),

[RadiantPhoenix]

Were-Slaad! You know it is the best only choice!

In all seriousness, though, having one of the main characters in the alternate medium being a monster-character is good because it encourages the development of actually good rules for playing such characters.

[Username17]

Half-Dragon would be pretty hard to make work, because the "purpose" of a templated character is to have someone who is suddenly thrust into being powerful enough to compete with the other adventurers without having gone through years of relevant training. So the template, whatever it is, has to be an acquired one rather than a hereditary one. Other than that, it doesn't much matter.

It could be a classic template like Vampire or Lyncanthrope. It could be an obscure template like Revenant or Yellow Musk Zombie. It could even be a bullshit template you made up for the show: like maybe the character gets dumped into a Spawning Pool and ends up part demon in her first episode. It's not super important, save that for the character to "work", she has to have been an ordinary person before having the power dropped on her.

The point is that you want a Kagome character, because that way you can fit in any amount of exposition you think the audience needs, whether or not a Paladin of Torm or whatever would need or even notice such exposition.

-Username17

[Prak]

Half-Dragon would be pretty hard to make work, because the "purpose" of a templated character is to have someone who is suddenly thrust into being powerful enough to compete with the other adventurers without having gone through years of relevant training. So the template, whatever it is, has to be an acquired one rather than a hereditary one. Other than that, it doesn't much matter.

It could be a classic template like Vampire or Lyncanthrope. It could be an obscure template like Revenant or Yellow Musk Zombie. It could even be a bullshit template you made up for the show: like maybe the character gets dumped into a Spawning Pool and ends up part demon in her first episode. It's not super important, save that for the character to "work", she has to have been an ordinary person before having the power dropped on her.

The point is that you want a Kagome character, because that way you can fit in any amount of exposition you think the audience needs, whether or not a Paladin of Torm or whatever would need or even notice such exposition.

-Username17

What if inherited templates were treated like the X Factor gene? Ie, coming online around puberty, or after significant trauma, that way Kagomi-expy can be a half dragon, demon, celestial, illithid, whatever, but have the powers suddenly emerge, rather than always be there. It could also allow her to gain new stuff periodically (mechanically explained by taking heritage feats).

Revenant, on the other hand, would be kind of cool, even if the template is ass. Curst is a cool one though. Both have cool flavour, but cursts' mechanics are better.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Make that 'sometimes'; some people are going to want to have characters that were always that way.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. Let's change focus a bit, I don't think we're moving anywhere fast discussing party makeup. We're at that point where people are in the same ballpark and we're fighting over details.

So. General plotlines. I personally prefer how they did it in Teen Titans: a third of the series was devoted to developing the seasonal story arc while the rest of the episodes was generally an 'out of order' deal where you could just pick up the show at random and watch. The only real thing I would change with that approach is to make it more like the A:TLA approach. That is, while 2/3rds of the show would more or less be episodic, the flavor of individual episodes would be influenced as to where they were in the metaplot. So for the second half of season two, half of the episodes would take place in the frozen wastelands but a few of them would be out-of-order stuff like trying to escort a caravan from one village to another, another episode would involve them being captured by the Frost Lodge barbarians, another episode would involve ending the curse on the Crystal Frost, etc.. while two of the episodes would involve storming the Winter Queen's castle, breaking her Macguffin, and rescuing the prince--which incidentally cripples the enemy's war efforts in the North because it was some kind of undead-raising artifact.

Even so, while it is a good thing to have it so that people can generally watch the show out-of-order, I don't think it's a good thing to have an unchanging status quo. A:TLA had what I think was a pretty good number of shakeups to the hero and villain cast and character development, but it wasn't done IMO in an alienating way. Like you could watch Zuko Alone and The Storm and even though they were like a season apart you could guess what happened in between so it wasn't all that confusing to guess what happened. Unlike, say, DS9. Because of this I am totally not a fan of the 'epiphany' form of character development, especially if it halts further character development. At the same time, I also feel that characters should either shit or get off of the pot. The Doctor and So9 learning how to be human is something you can milk for like one or two seasons; I think Data took it too far, even though he's a good character. It's ALSO (I know) why I'm a fan of giving characters a lot of built-in character hooks, because even though you should write a story with a beginning, middle, and end you never know when you might get approved for an extra season or a spinoff or a movie or whatever.

As far as fighting goes, I think that the rate Teen Titans did it at should be the standard. Two action sequences should pretty much be the standard per 30-minute episode--one extended high octane one is acceptable--though obviously the action sequences needn't necessitate fighting. Also another good thing the show did was to split off characters instead of having the whole team fight at once. Not only does it allow characters to have the limelight but also helps prevent characters from going stale.

That said, you'll also have to consider power upgrades for the characters. And unfortunately, between five people passing out treasure and handing out level-ups gets old fast. It'd probably be better to give all of the characters a stable of generalized schticks rather than specific superpowers. Having explicit upgrades from Scorching Ray --> Produce Flame --> Fireball --> Wall of Fire --> Dragonstrike is probably too distracting, but if you just give the character a generalized schtick of 'fire powers' and just increase the special effects you can still give the impression of the character being stronger without having to pause the plot. Not to say that you don't want to do the 'OMG guys, look at what I can do now', but that should be like a once-a-season thing when spread out among five characters. Treasure should be pretty much handed in the same way. While the characters should change their clothing and gear, it should mostly be a silent thing. Unless it's a plot coupon, something you want to make a plot hook revolve around, or an artifact it shouldn't really be that big of a deal; when it's time for the party to use a Pavilion Tent or Flying Carpet they should just jolly well pull it out at a certain point.

[Orion]

Make it a running joke that the wizard gets new utility powers with no fanfare or training sequence. Preferably one that would have been incredibly useful a couple of episodes ago. Every couple of episodes you get:

"Since when can you do that?!" "Well, you know, I've been studying..."
"Why didn't you say you could do that?!" "Nobody asked."
"[Wizard Name]" "What?"

[Prak]

Make it a running joke that the wizard gets new utility powers with no fanfare or training sequence. Preferably one that would have been incredibly useful a couple of episodes ago. Every couple of episodes you get:

"Since when can you do that?!" "Well, you know, I've been studying..."
"Why didn't you say you could do that?!" "Nobody asked."
"[Wizard Name]" "What?"

This gives me the idea of using a subtle musical cue, not a song, but a specific thing that happens to whatever music is playing, when someone goes up a level, so, basically when the characters are in a battle and they're "about to level up" the music, whatever it is, reaches a crescendo right towards the end, signifying in an oblique way that one or more characters just "pinged"

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is just a theory I have, but I think that there is a limited amount of edginess and establishment-challenging a cartoon can do before you get complaints from Moral Guardians (which is a good thing) or you get worried executives sticking their dicks in the pie (which is really bad). This doesn't just apply to things like having a transgendered character, but also to things like fanservice and violence.

So, assuming you have a limited amount of social credit you have for your D&D cartoon, how would you like to spend it?

[Prak]

Honestly, I think making a D&D cartoon at all spends some of that social credit right off the bat. Maybe not a lot, but it does.

I'd personally like to see some spent on a transgender character (failing that, a character that doesn't believe in gender roles, or who comes from a society with non-typical gender roles) and a good aligned necromancer who sees the body as a shell, a tool cast aside when no longer is use, so they use lots of skeletons, maybe the occasional "ghoul" (read zombie that's not rotting), and other corporeal undead, but not ghosts or other "restless spirits."

[RadiantPhoenix]

(failing that, a character that doesn't believe in gender roles, or who comes from a society with non-typical gender roles)

I presume this would not be something along the lines of a genderless personality warforged, but rather someone like Vaarsuvius from Order of the Stick whose sex is still unknown despite being hundred of pages into the comic, right?

[Prak]

No, because that's a dumb joke that needs to be resolved and buried. A drow would fit nicely, being from a matriarchal society if the writers knew what the hell they were doing.

The closest to V I would think acceptable is if their gender were in question for the first few episodes and they basically saw no reason it was important (but realized that not everyone is that way and so basically gets a "Oh, ha, yeah, I'm (X), I just don't think it matters." line).

Warforged would be interesting, though generally they are given gender identities. In fact, as much as I dislike non-gendered robots (read: functionally male robots), I'd much rather a genderless warforged to a V "what gender are they?" expy.

[Midnight_v]

How about just letting it be a changling.

I put that into the first couple page before some dickhead shouted me down, about something or rather I can't recall and can't be bothered to look back but just let the "gender-bender" be a fucking changling, descended from dopplegangers and hasn't decided a final form final standard form yet.

Half Orc Paladin (girl) Eww. Sigh. Sure though too many arguments in the "pro" column so whatver.
Human Wizard (girl)
Human Druid (boy) - I suggested that shit earlier too. Should be an elementalist under this paradigmn moreso turning into elementals to keep the obvious beast boy theft to a minimun. Get like a human super-skrull instead.
Drow Bounty Hunter (boy)
Templated Innocent (Changling) - So instead of V you get Data, or the girl from small wonder, or morph from the x-men or any other number of strange formless entitites, or hey a new version of the character everyother episode. It not like its a new idea really.
Which this would be your stealth character etc, sometime it works and sometimes He/She(it) gets too much talking and whoever realizes somethings up.

[Username17]

I actually think that if you're going to go with the physically strong girl paladin character that it's a waste of your social credit to have a gender bending character. You can tell most of your "gender roles are stupid" stories with a female halforc without actually doing anything that would get you in trouble. So what does a transgendered character add? You're already telling the patriarchy to stuff it without doing anything that the main stream media would give sympathetic ink to complaints about, why throw a bone to Focus on the Family?

FotF is going to be raging pissed that your strongest front-line leader-warrior is a woman. But they aren't going to be taken seriously by the New York Times or even the Post if they try to raise a stink about it. If you lay down a character with ambiguous gender, then they can raise a stink about that and get taken seriously.

You should not spend social credit confronting issues that you can confront without spending social credit. If you're going to spend social credit, you should do it on issues that you don't have a round about way of addressing: like the insanity of racism or the futility of the death penalty.

The Drow arc can and should push liberal issues, but those issues should be things like having an episode or more dedicated to the fact that Drow torture chambers don't get good intelligence and don't reduce crime.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's also the consideration that you're also working hand-in-hand alongside other media that are confronting these issues. Quite frankly since gay rights (adoption, love, marriage, all that) is a big 'thing' lately you don't really have to spend a lot your social credit confronting that. I'd much rather use it to delve into territory that doesn't get explored in the media. It wouldn't be very hard nowadays to counter a homophobic show, but 24 being pretty much uncontested on its pro-torture views is pretty troubling.

That said you'll probably have to keep 'real' violence (not cartoon violence like in Teen Titans) and sexual fanservice to a minimum. Teen Titans is again about as probably as far as you can go with that, but Birthmark really pushed the limits.

How would I personally like to do it? Well, as far as the five-man band thing goes, I think that non-black minority leaders are rarer than female leaders. Combining them both isn't a bad idea though since those TOGETHER are like nonexistent. Frankly the combination of race/gender would be important. My feeling is that could get away with a Caucasian/East Asian female lead or a Black/Asian or American Indian male lead, but not a black female lead. Not without having to drop another issue.

Here's what I would like to spend my social credit on if I had my druthers. In roughly descending order or importance:

• Pro-Genetic Engineering/Transhumanism, including robots though a Bashir-type would work just fine. It's why I am so insistent on having one of the characters be a robot, either the templated innocent or the leader. I'm willing to sacrifice everything else to get this one through. A show that did this would be way, way ahead of the curve.
• Anti-Arcadia. The fetishism of Luddism, poverty, and social inequality is really troubling, especially since it's wrapped up nicely with fat peasants in the singing fields and an Arcadian bow.
• Anti-Fantasy Objectivism. Large O. I think it'd be nice to show that most fantasy heroes, especially those pushed by D&D, are actually dicks and that it's more desirable to have problems solved by the so-called powerless masses than some people with leet superpowers.
• Anti-Torture. I know that this might be too squicky for an all-ages show to tackle, but I find it really troubling that very few people are stepping out to say 'torture is almost always wrong' rather than 'torture is something the bad guys are shown doing' which have subtly but importantly different implications.
• Anti-Death Penalty (this might have to go since this may turn out to be hypocritical within the context of the show)

Of course you always have the issues in which you can take a stand against without expending any social credit. You're going to have some pushback against anti-torture, but no one except for Metapedia is going to rail back against anti-slavery viewpoints.

I think Frank's list is pretty good personally. I have an alternate one in case that doesn't satisfy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So going back to suggest an edit to the hero to accommodate the plot point:

Minority Male/'Good' Minority, Fantasy Minor (i.e. green skin like in Doug) or Caucasian Female Paladin, posing as a famous disposed prince/princess. The backstory is that their people had a widespread genetic disease that was killing people early and causing Alzheimer's decades ahead of schedule, so they did the literally unthinkable and juiced the genes of the people at large and even tinkered with it to make a better people. They got overthrown by alarmed powers-that-be (making it a church would be going too far even though they're the most obvious perps) and the royal family killed when they refused to abandon the experiment.

To further drive this point home, the character is a clone homunculus of the actual dead prince/ss and was asked to become a paladin and get that technology to the people at large. I'm not a fan of using strawmen hypocrites, but in this case you should do things like showing that the surpressors are using more culturally accepted avenues of transhumanism like magic and have the show call them out on it. You should also bring up the issue of fairness as well, since no one objects to elves being pretty, tough, and immortal; it's just bad to defy biology for some reason. Also you should studiously avoid that 'whoops, hidden weakness! The clones are explosive so this contrived and convenience weakness means that it's bad all along forget we brought it up' crap that media just can't resist doing. Fully human instead of half-orc or half-elf to make the issue more applicable to the audience. This isn't just fantasy-era tomfoolery, this is a real thing that could affect them and their children. I don't think that anything even close to mainstream has gone this far before; even in series like DS9 or Tot Abyss which go 'transhumans are people, too' never go far as to say 'and this is why everyone should become one'. It's always a 'yes, it happened and the victims should be treated with respect, but let's make sure this never happens again', which is bullcrap.

Though really you shouldn't spring this up on the audience at the outset. It should just be a slow reveal process; first the audience knows that the character isn't really the prince/ss, not really the chosen one, the reason why the kingdom was crushed, and then finally the fact that the character was a clone in a haphazard attempt to avert some prophecy. This is the real reason why you should have one of the others characters be a Warforged or fantasy robot character, that way you can slowly soften up the audience for this plot point by getting people to sympathsize with someone even further along the transhuman barrier. Also because, as Raven, Data, and Seven of Nine have shown us angsting about humanity / what is this thing you call love is an awesome plot generator. Of course the height of those arcs should happen about the same time as the final reveal for the homunculus character's origins. Seriously, doing more than two serious arcs about 'so-and-so learns how to become a human' gets old.

[Username17]

Having your templated innocent character being the result of mad wizard grafting experiments is totally workable. I really think that actual robots are too polarizing in D&D-land. The Warforged are the only thing anyone likes in Eberron, but that is because all the other It Breeds True races are shit. Warforged are still derided as out of genre often enough that they don't belong as a fifth ranger.

I would honestly prefer that the fifth character was a Dragonborn. And I hate Dragonborn. Here are some better ways to get your "transhumanism is awesome" fix:

• Character is infected by a Slaad, and some smart character (possibly a Gnome) arrests the process, giving the innocent character a bunch of Giant Frog powers.
• Wizard makes potion of immortality and villains kill him for it. Innocent character ends up drinking it on accident and is now Lady Deathstrike.
• Character turned into vampire/lycanthrope but gets given the serum from Blade so that they don't turn evil.
• Character gets permanent effect result on the potion miscibility table with a potion of super heroism and something else, is now Captain America.
• Character horribly wounded, but saved by kindly wizard implanting golem-bits (wizard is then killed), turning the character into FMA.
• Character is a Gith.
• Attempt to transform into giant dragon and conquer world goes wrong, both main villain and innocent character turn into half-dragons.

And so on. If you want to say that transhumanism is good, you have a character who starts as a muck covered peasant and becomes something awesome with the application of magitech.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think it's very preferable for the 'transhuman is good' angle to be a result of something applicable and replicable to the audience at large. Having someone become an awesome vampire after being a muck-covered peasant isn't really generalizable to the viewers at home, but Fantasy Scientists and their patients getting killed en masse for trying to cure a widespread genetic disease (and throwing in some extras) to a suffering and early-death populace is.