I’m dying to play D&D’s biggest idiot, but my parties keep putting me in charge

06.05.2024 - 16:01 / polygon.com

I have a Dungeons & Dragons curse. You won’t find it in the Player’s Handbook or on any list of spells, and yet it’s demonstrably real. Gather round, listeners, and hear my woeful tale. (I have a lute now. I’m plucking it. It’s too late; the tavern door is locked behind you.)

I want to play the dumbest character in my D&D party, but no matter what I do, I wind up as the party’s boss.

There is a sublime joy in playing a complete numbskull, and I wish to experience it. Maybe the best I’ve seen it done is Dimension 20’s Zac Oyama, whose character list is a taster’s menu of different blockheads, including a teenage barbarian who keeps whiffing his Insight checks; a devoted firefighter with more abs than brain cells; and a space parasite still figuring out how human mouths work.

That’s not to say that Oyama never plays a smartie — his Puss in Boots might be my favorite performance in Dimension 20’s Neverafter season. But Oyama’s characters are defined by his comedic strengths and his background as an improviser. He’s never the most loquacious guy on a given show, but any Dropout fan knows Oyama’s silence is only in service of when he breaks it, inevitably to offer the funniest thing to say at the best possible moment. The denseness of his characters belies how smart you have to be to make playing dumb on purpose into entertainment.

I look at Oyama’s characters, and I think: God, I wish that were me.

I want to play a giant lug of a woman. Someone with an impractically large weapon. Someone who says funny things without realizing it, makes bad decisions, and tries to survive the consequences. And this is very important: I want to be dumb as a box of rocks. When my character approaches any situation requiring even a modicum of mental acuity — whether of the Intelligence or Wisdom or Charisma varieties — I want the rest of the players to whisper, “Oh no.” But, like, gleefully.

Let me try another way of getting at what I’m going for: You know that one henchman whose job it is, when Batman bursts through a skylight, to yell, “It’s da Bat!”? To yell this as if it were not Batman’s successful aim, in crashing through a skylight, to alert all to his presence? To yell it as if there could be any other person who just smashed loudly through several panes of glass while dressed as a bat? To yell this in complete surprise, as if, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, this was not something that happens five times every night in Gotham City? Nevertheless, he persisted. He yelled, “It’s da Bat!”

I want to play that, but for the good guys.

Across the entire history of my tabletop life, due to one thing or another, I wind up being the person who simply must be on the ball at all times.

I’m a bit of a unicorn