I’ve found this trope works best when all players know the secret, but the characters don’t. If it’s a cool, interesting secret, everyone can play into it and enjoy the dramatic irony.

It makes sense that people would be drawn to the fish-out-of-water archetype. It is the archetypal protagonist for the “hero’s journey” monomyth. The whole idea of the character who is just learning about the world works great for that sort of hero-centric story. But RPGs aren’t meant to center around one character, they center on a party. And the stories tend to work better when the characters feel like they are part of the world.

I think people see Bilbo from the Hobbit and want to channel that “party boy out of his element” energy but it usually won’t work. Or fry from Futurama. You’re playing a game not writing a book. Don’t take extra spotlight. Don’t be incompetent.

This is done in movies and books to give the reader/watcher a chance to learn the setting without getting hamfisted about it, stuff is naturally explained to the character because they don’t know it either. That’s not necessary in TTRPGs, since the player can always ask out of character.

Also, it’s a way to get some character into the story the reader/watcher can identify with. This also is not necessary in TTRPGs, since there the players naturally identify with their character (at least in most games, some do that differently).

People like to subvert tropes but don’t always understand those tropes and why the purpose they serve, so their subversions don’t necessarily serve a counterpurpose.

I dunno. Depends on the group. I played a babylon 5 where I was a doctor with unregistered psychic abilities and was trying my damnedest to be under the radar, low profile, and stay away from anything that might get the spotlight on me. Ended up being beaten and basically running off the station. The dms will find the ways.

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If you wanna see the newbie done well, watch LA By Night season 1. Erika Ishii’s character is brand newly embraced, while the other main characters are a fair bit more established.

Re: #3 - He doesn’t know about the three shells!?

I feel like the Malkavians need mechanical solutions for these problems.

On derangements: something like ‘you go mad when it’s a full moon’ is vague. I feel like it’d be easier with a just any system, for example ‘renew all Willpower during a full moon, but lose one each scene thereafter’, which encourages the player to try just about anything during that night.

Twisting the mechanics also means the player doesn’t lose agency by thinking ‘oh well, time to act crazy I guess’.

On the combat problem: I feel like this is a symptom of a larger problem with the system. Combat has a system - it has levers everywhere which do things. Nothing else does, and you can’t push buttons which aren’t there.

I’ve solved the second problem by replacing Combat rules with general ‘Contest’ rules – a single system for Extended and Resisted actions, which works for Investigations, competing companies, or snide remarks at Elysium…and sword fights, if you must.

I got myself in character for playing a Malkavian by running the “Malkavian Bible” youtube series a good three or four times between sessions just to keep that strange-spooky-uncanny vibe to my character in the lunatic asylum for angels. The trick was to not deliberately shoot for menacing, frightening, or dangerous-- but to project a constant aura of Twin Peaks-flavor oddness. About as disturbing as a liminal space.

The longer you can keep this energy going, without breaking character, the more effective it gets until all you have to do is lob a smilingly-spoken non-sequitur out into the field to get everyone to stop and look around spooked; and a good Storyteller will work with you to facilitate these moments.

There is always that problem with the ranged character who is optimum at the edge of their range. But most maps don’t go that far and if they do you end up nowhere near the fun. The character also never gets hit or targeted so they are wasted hitpoints sitting in the back and bored. The tiny dungeon rooms from dungeon crawls mitigate this problem somewhat but its more fun to be right up in the action

Crazy characters in general. It turns out mental illness makes it really hard to work collaboratively on stuff, who knew :/

From the player’s perspective this is a rough one as well. There’s nothing more disappointing than to roll up a crafty character only to discover that the campaign has break-neck pacing to prevent rest spam, but also incidentally preventing any downtime for crafts.

It’s especially bad in D&D5e, where the artificer can create any common magical item, but it has to be selected at level up and can’t be changed, and since the game is so focused on High Fantasy, all of the common magic items are completely worthless, since the interesting stuff happens at higher rarety. In the end the system makes the Artificer a reskinned magic user where everything is worse than a plain sourcerer.

Or if they have robust invention rules the player playing the inventor knows exactly everything about them and how to exploit them.

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Yeah, I don’t know what they were thinking. This is completely unplayable.

It works for NPCs that don’t stick around for too long, but should never be a player character.

I think the DnD 5e School of Divination wizard did some good things to make a diviner fun without ruining the vibe. I love the Portent’s ability to “see the future” with its messing of the d20 roll as well as the Expert Divination (you gain 1 lower spell slot when casting divination spells) allows you to cast divination spells without “wasting” slots if you didn’t get anything good. It is really a hard concept to use often because at some point as you get more powerful you transform into a NPC just giving advice instead of going on adventures.

Another thing that makes Oracle / Seer / Diviner characters difficult to GM for is that you need to know things in advance, where the adventure leads to etc. As one whose GMing style leans heavily into Play To Find Out that sort of characters is kind of counter to it.

That said it is highly dependent of what the player want out of such an archetype. If it is a flavour for how the character solves problems I’m all for that. Touching an item to get a vision/impression for something (adventure) related to it go ahead. That is not too different to other ways of investigating. But the player who wants those powers to get “quest markers” or to completely negate obstacles (“hurr durr I have foresight so I’ve seen the ambush”) gets hard noes from me.

Also agreeing with @dumples@kbin.social, D&D 5e Divination wizards are very well made and the divination spells work well in those kind of worlds.

I’d be interested to see The Sprawl or Blades In The Dark’s “planning” mechanics applied to an oracle.

The Soldier playbook in the Sprawl gets to roll at the at start of each job to determine how many bullshit points they can spend during the job to get where they need to or have something they need.

Alternately if you like vague prophecies I’m picturing a system where at the start of the adventuring day you roll on a table of prophecy fragments, each with a mechanical effect, and the more powerful you get the better effects you can have and the more fragments you can roll for. That way you can have vague prophetic words that have a mechanical effect for you to play the hand of destiny.

I’ve only seen diviners as a type handled properly in one game which, if my faulty memory is correct, was C&S (2nd edition, probably also 1st, but not 3rd onward), but I may be huffing paint thinner.

First, diviners had a group of useful spells like detecting traps, hidden things, etc. This meant you didn’t get that whole weirdo vision quest thing with “information” that was only recognizable as such long after the fact, rendering the divination kind of useless, as the only thing a diviner could do.

But even for the visions there was a decent system in place. The diviner would cast the spell and based on the results of that roll, paired with a roll (or decision) made in secret by the GM, get a degree of success that translated into percentile points. The GM’s roll/decision decided between good or bad omens.

If the GM rolled/decided on good omens, they’d come up with one of those vague, flavourful visions so beloved byirritating to players. But… at any point for the duration of the cast augury, if something that could kinda/sorta be interpreted to belong to that vision showed up in play (GMs being encouraged to err on the side of the player), the player could use some of that percentile pool to modify die rolls in their favour (or, equivalently against the opposition’s favour) to do things like turn failures into successes, or successes into critical successes or the like, thus retroactively making the vision “come true” mechanically.

If the rolled/decided omens were bad omens, the percentile pool (smaller if the player rolled well, larger if the player rolled poorly) was instead given to the GM to use to stymie and confound the players in ways related to the vision.

The end result was that the flavourful vision was there, but its application to the situation was determined in play and had mechanical relevance, which was satisfying to the players.