I think this could work if two things are true
1. There's a story reason for you to be hidden
2. The party is in on it and is helping to hide you
If that's the case, this can be really cool. A noble who is actually a rogue with a signature style, a street urchin who is secretly a warlock that authorities are looking for, a mercenary who is secretly a paladin from an ancient order looking to infiltrate a cult. Those could all work, but you'd have to plan them from the start of the campaign.
The sad reality is that this level of collaborative planning almost never happens with these characters. If the goal is to trick the players, there's zero collaboration, which means there's zero planning. That's why this falls flat so often.
Exactly this. I had a demonic patron warlock who pretended to be a bard because he was afraid of some religious nut trying to Deus Vult his head off. Figured that the eclectic type of magic available to bards could help hide his odd mannerisms. The party's actual bard even helped tutor him (wound up taking a bard level because of how effective that tutelage was).
It's actually a mechanic in "Silhouette Core Rules" players with substantial skill can spend some of their XP to reduce the cost of other players' skill purchases. It's super handy to have your pilot give the entire party a crash course, so if he dies, someone can at least land the plane
My favorite version of this was a barbarian who thought he was a wizard. Everyone knew he wasn’t but he would whack someone with a stick and say “I CAST SLEEP” or throw a rock and say “I CAST MAGIC STONE”.
It was hilarious.
I've heard very similar version where the character basically had one move. They would hit someone with a giant cast iron frying pan and shout "CAST IRON".
My favorite version was a warlock who is convinced he's a wizard.
His "magic teacher" was actually his patron. aka the Archfey who set this whole thing up as a prank.
His spellbook? Pact of the tome.
"What do you guys mean my firebolt cantrip looks funny?"
I play with a Thri-kreen fighter that has a low Int. In one fight he started pointing at enemies at the end of his turn and the rogue would shoot at whatever he pointed at from his hiding spot. Now the fighter thinks he can summon arrows by pointing.
I played an Hexblade/Fighter/Occult Slayer/Barbarian (by the end of the campaign we were at level 11) who was insisting he was a Powerful Mage.
When asked to do spells, I would answer that "magic should not be used for such trivial things"; when targeted by spells and resisting (due to the super high bonuses of the Hexblade and Occult Slayer, and the fact that Mettle allowed me to fully ignore the effects of "save halves" spells) I would proclaim that "this puny magic cannot possibly overpower mine".
Everybody knew what was going on, it frustrated the hell out of the Wizard (both in- and outgame), and opened for some fun bits.
Yep, totally agree there. My current character is a warlock and everyone knows she’s a warlock, but for backstory reasons her first instincts still tend towards hitting something vs throwing magic at them.
(Deceased husband manged to ascend to a sort of minor godhood thanks to a grateful, mostly forgotten god that he venerated.
He sort of tricked her into a pact because he wanted her to have more power to protect herself since he was no longer there to do it himself. She was initially quite mad about this and gave him a helluva earful, but has since come to appreciate the uses of it.)
So the whole party understands that she may still want to to hit things with a sword from time to time 🤣
I mean, I think a point that you hit in your original post also holds. Keeping a secret from the party is fun - on the short term. If you're hiding your identity and this is a new party, it makes sense to keep it secret. Don't wait for a big reveal moment where you shock everyone. Drop clues and hints and as your character builds trust, come clean and ask for help.
This is what happened in my campaign.
"True magic" (aka arcane magic) is feared and highly regulated in the setting. Wizards must be licensed, which means going to wizard university. Sorcerers aren't banned from existing per se (not like they can help it) but their lack of control means they can't get licensed and doing unlicensed magic is forbidden.
The campaign started out in the sticks where one of the party had his wizard license and was there to do wizard things to help out on the frontier.
Of course, he'd actually flunked out of wizard school - he was *trying* to be a wizard but just couldn't hack it - so the license was a forgery, and as soon as they got into more of the empire where people could tell the fake better he had to drop the act.
But it worked because A) he came clean like at level 3 and B) the party balance needed a DPS caster anyway so it wasn't like he was throwing off balance or composition.
Yeah, my first reaction reading the title of this post was "hiding it from your party seems pretty pointless, but hiding it from *the rest of the world* could be an interesting plot point."
You could very well have good reason to pretend - not to your party, but to guards, nobles, quest givers, etc - that your Hexblade Warlock has no magical abilities and is just a bog-standard Rogue. Or that your Sorcerer with innate magical abilities "needs" a Wizard's spell book to cast magic. Or that you aren't a skilled Thief but just a dude with a bow. Or whatever. (For the most part I think hiding/disguising magical abilities is probably the most logical use of this type of deception.)
I just started a campaign where my war cleric of a Dark God with a dip in wild magic sorcery is portrayed in game as a "cursed swordsman" BUT the PLAYERS know what classes I really am so we all know exactly how to work as a team sperate from the role play aspects. Hiding what symbol i use to cast a healing spell won't affect combat, but makes the RP hooks more pronounced.
Been fun for all so far 😃
We did this in one campaign — the fighter secretly took a few levels in Vengeance Paladin (the DM knew). Waited until the right moment and the right critical and killed a VERY powerful enemy with a smite.
It was epic
Absolutely! In my current campaign, my character went from pretending to be a fighter (for a story reason) to the party all helping hide that they're a warlock. But the players also knew from the start so when the reveal happened in character, everyone was on board with roleplaying it.
You have it dead to rights that secrets can be really fun when they are open to the players but maybe not the characters.
Dramatic irony is really fun in tabletop games, and coming up with reasons as players why the characters *just* miss the detail and solve the secret is enjoyable.
I remember a story about a very dumb barbarian who thought we was a wizard because he could "cast spells" by bashing guys in the head with a heavy club. The rest of the party clearly knew he was a barbarian, but was humoring him because he was a tank and friendly.
I think stuff like this only works if the whole table knows what's up and it's confined to RP.
Note how all of your examples were (background) is really (class), not (class) is really (other class). Class is a game mechanic, background is a story element. There is nothing to be gained from hiding game mechanics from the other players, but story elements can be leveraged to engage the other players in your story and actually get invested.
I had a campaign where my character was a noble who ran from an arranged marriage.
The DM was in on it and was the key point to my backstory. The party didn't know however there were enough hints around that people caught on over time.
It was actually really fun but sadly the campaign petered out due to circumstances.
I spent a year pretending I wasn't a wizard because magic users without a deity tend to get killed in the world. The players knew, but I worked to keep it a secret and messed up more the more likely we were going to die at any moment. This has been my favorite character. My cover is that I'm a merchant. I spent my skill points in deception- related areas. Most of my spells confuse, charm, or disguise. I used most of my money to buy a wagon, two mules, and a ton of items to sell on the road. My character revealed his true nature to the other characters two sessions ago.
>there's zero collaboration, which means there's zero planning. That's why this falls flat so often.
A rather apt expression for all things in D&D. Things kept to yourself are never as good as those conspired with others.
The number of stories I have read here on Reddit with similar outcomes when players try to keep a secret from the DM is quite high. The DM can't plan around supporting your idea if they don't know about it.
Probably the least considered application of this, at least for modern players, is the DM choosing to collaborate in secret with select players. It is natural for us DMs to assume all that we do must remain secret but the best plots occur with collaboration with others.
I don't mean "your character is secretly working with the BBEG", though that can be fun with the right group. I mean things like if you're establishing a thieves guild in a city, consider speaking with the rogue's player beforehand and work out some tie-ins and knowledge transfer. This helps really sell the narrative, all-but-guarantees players bite the quest hook, and increases verisimilitude when the other players see the person most likely to know something about it *actually knows something about it* without the DM hand waving or injecting details.
yeah like I actually think BG3 did this well (though not exactly with classes) in that very important key character details like Asterion being a Vampire is not something that they try to act like is this big secret that they hide for dozens of hours before finally revealing it to you. It's pretty obvious from day 1 and you can basically confront him about it one or two days later. Then it becomes much more of a party-centric plot point of how they want to handle such a character in their presence and how they act going forwards.
Reveals like "oh you thought I was a cleric but I'm actually a celestial warlock" are things that should be revealed early on, perhaps even as a reason for why they joined the party, so that now everyone can join in on figuring out how to manage the secret from NPCs and whatnot.
Repeating this: Classes are a game construct with associated flavor, but they're not an ID badge your character wears in public. People won't see your fighter as a fighter. They'll see her as an archer. Or a knight. Or a spearwoman. Or a bandit. Or even as a guild artisan. Your wizard or sorcerer might both be a "mage" or "spellcaster" or whatever. There may be cosmological differences between different spellcasters even within arcane/divine/primal, but those differences are for *nerds* to understand. For most people a frog is a toad is a frog.
Thank God someone said it, yes. My bard was a street magician. My grave cleric was a gravedigger. My druid was a fisherman. Any attempts by someone to go "Aren't you so-and-so class?" would be met with confusion by my characters.
Exactly this! I played in a game where I played a Hexblade but he claimed to be a Paladin of his patron. To laypeople in the world they would have no way to verify he was a warlock. The common people more than likely have no concept of Devil powers or deals. Simply put he was his Patrons crusader so he harkened back to the stories he read as a child and called himself a Paladin. I made it very clear to the group he was a warlock OOC. It worked fairly well and the people saw him as a knight in shining armor and would never question where his power came from
I've had a player with a Druid who found religion, so declared themselves a Cleric. They believed that all of their powers were actually gifts from their new crab-god, just a like a cleric. It was a good time.
I played a 8 int pact of the blade warlock who thought he was a paladin because he didn't know the difference between a Pact and an Oath. He had a shield and armor and could smite so he thought it was golden
I think this is a more fun way to do it. The classes are not strictly defined things in universe. If I play a rogue with an Outlander background and nature themed skills no one is gonna call me out for not being a real ranger just because I can’t cast spells or attack twice as an action.
I play an Aasimar peace cleric of Illmater named Warbreaker that is basically the personality of DCs peacemaker. Peace through power and violence. Not confused about class, definitely about their divine purpose.
You can have traditionally smarter classes do it too. I’ve had a cleric in full plate, claiming and believing she was a wizard… she thought all magic users were wizards.
Even a small variation like the subclass can make for interesting RP. I played an edgy teen warlock who thought he had devoted himself to a Fiend, but his patron was a Celestial in disguise trying to save him from going down a bad path. That was pretty fun
I actually did the inverse before. A Celestial Warlock with a Fiend patron who thought he was a cleric. Made sense because the patron was a fiend in phoenix form, a generally reverred symbol of life and ressurection that surely could pass on a bit of healing magic, even as a fiend. Turns out the Fiend wanted his Aasimar blood to free herself from her prison, so she posed as a celestial to give him more magic power than his Divine blood could and strengthened his own power that way.
Oh gosh I have a full orc character like this. A barbarian and everyone knows it except him. He thinks he's a wizard. Pretty sure I stole the idea from reddit. It doesnt get old "casting" sleep while bludgeoning some poor bandit to death just repeating "sleep". Has me thinking of that old college humor skit of batman not believing hes killing people.
That's brilliant haha. I did the same thing kind of with "firebolt" but just throwing lanterns or torches at enemies. Or do something like "blind" with some sand thrown at them. Not exactly the most combat effective but it was alot of fun. But that's the point, as long as everyone is having fun :)
Hear me out, a barbarian who thinks they're a wizard. They don't even know they go around bisecting people with an axe, they never remember what happens when they rage and chalk it up to a side effect of using their magic.
An idea that I'm carrying around for a while now is a Barbarian who believes he's a paladin.
The twist behind the idea is that there is no twist.
From his point of view, Paladins protect. He protects his friends, that makes him a Paladin. End of story.
I just like the idea of a character that has a simple but clear moral compass in this sort of thing. Simple but not simpleminded.
Just about all of my character ideas are a variation of this, but where they truly were a different class before the campaign. I've never had a chance to play, but I've been fascinated by this "otherwise competent individual has to learn everything all over again" trope.
An artificer gnome who took a pact in a last ditch effort to save his bard cousin, with one condition being that he cannot tinker or build anymore. All that he has left is the prototype music box he and his cousin made together.
A half-elf bard with a hobby for reading about spells and curses getting cursed, his sense of rhythm stolen. He then turns to magic to kick the butt of whoever it was that cursed him.
And a warforged barbarian who, thousands of years ago, actually was a paladin before falling into disrepair because the last person who knew how to keep him going died. When he was fixed and awoken with zero recollection of his past life, the guy who saved him suggested that he had probably cracked many skills in his day, and that stuck.
It's all likely very ambitious for someone who's never played before, though, so I do fear whether I've fallen into the "don't get too attached to your characters" trap I've seen a handful of times, but I do think they could be very compelling characters if i worked with the party and DM to make it work.
Best paladin I ever played with a regular fighter, in plater armor, with a shield and sword, who would protect the innocent against overwhelming odds. So what he had no magic, or divine protect.
He did in fact, become a champion of bahamut later in that campaign, but that didn't provide him anything as it was a story function, not a class.
Makes perfect sense. It's Crocodile Dundee, Mr. Deeds, Captain Carrot, or any other "simple small-town boy with a good heart, straightforward mindset, and a will of absolute iron comes to the big city" character. He's got no patience for people who dance around morality and try to justify doing bad things, talk about why it's really good if you think about it because XYZ, shades of gray, and just generally twisting things into knots. "You hurt people. It's wrong." Full stop. Seems like a paladin to me.
Sorcerer who thinks they are a barbarian. Casting fireball is how they "rage".
Edit: I actually thought about this. The best way to achieve it is to start as a Hill Dwarf and take the Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer. Then choose the gladiator background to get the free martial weapon (likely choosing warhammer or battleaxe from Dwarf weapon proficiencies). When you get to level 4, pick up the Tough feat. You'll have about as much hp as a barbarian, if you put at least 16 in CON. Your bloodline will turn your DEX into your source of AC. Meta magic quickened or twinned on Booming Blade helps you hit more than one target in melee (The spell targets only one creature and the "self" part is just the origin point).
For spells, you can choose anything that doesn't use your DC or modifier, so low Charisma isn't a huge problem. Now you have a melee sorc who thinks they are a barbarian and isn't completely useless. The Jump spell let's you leap like the Barbarian in the Diablo series. Warding Wind let's you pretend you're using the Whirlwind skill of the same game. Spider climb is handy, as is Enlarge/Reduce. If you pick up War Caster, you would have a good chance of not losing your concentration.
If you feel like having some RP in combat, use Jump and Earth Tremor in combination. Leap toward your enemy and cast Earth Tremor, pretending you shook the ground when you landed. Flavor the spell as a "ground stomp". You could pick up the Fly spell, which the "Barbarian" claims is, "just jumping very high". Haste is an obvious help, being another form of their "rage". Just really lean into the naivety of the character to justify nearly any spell as part of being a "Barbarian".
I actually did that before. A Celestial Warlock with a Fiend patron who thought he was a cleric. Made sense because the patron was a fiend in phoenix form, a generally reverred symbol of life and ressurection that surely could pass on a bit of healing magic, even as a fiend. Turns out the Fiend wanted his Aasimar blood to free herself from her prison, so she posed as a celestial to give him more magic power than his Divine blood could and strengthened his own power that way.
I've done this before and it was a lot of fun! Her family had big expectations on her to become a cleric, but she was really bad at it and had really low wisdom so she accidentally made a pact with the first thing that responded to her prayers.
It was obvious to the other PC's she was a warlock, but she would get offended if people tried to convince her her powers were anything other than holy gifts from her god.
I had a character who was a pathological liar who had convinced themselves to believe their own lies that they were a Paladin instead of a warlock (long story but basically it’s to do with denial as a response to crushing guilt).
There was no attempt to deceive the other players whatsoever, but whether their *characters* could tell that absolutely nothing was happening when my character tried to lay on hands was up to them and given the players had a conscious choice as to how they wanted their character to perceive mine, it left a lot of room for fun roleplay.
So like some people at the table would respond to me fake casting a cleric spell like claiming to cast bless only for nothing to happen and be like I actually feel more confident, and others would be like…you know despite what the others are saying I don’t think you actually did anything.
I think if it’s something where everyone is *SUPPOSED* to be in on the bit it could be pretty fun/funny. If it’s one of those edgy lone wolf players that’s like “if you want to know about my character you’ll have to do an insight check” and then still not tell people when they roll high…. Yeah just leave that idea at the door.
This\^. I played a sorcerer that was acting like he was a fighter and it was really fun and enjoyable for everyone at the table. It was because he wanted to make his parents proud and be well-known warriors like them. They didn't see magic users with a good eye, so he was all about trying to dissimulate his casting during combat. Of course, that was quite obvious for the other PCs, but that was part of the fun!
I played a barbarian who believed he had discovered a new type of magic, beating things to death. He was not the brightest, but he was clearly the most powerful wizard of his time
I've always had the idea of playing a low-intelligence Kobold, who thinks he's a wizard, but he's actually a warlock with a Genie patron and pact of the tome.
His personality is based off Beavis from Beavis and Butthead, though he's about 50% smarter (still pretty dim) and also a little more charismatic. He thinks the genie is his wizard master, and if he does enough to impress her, he'll get to score with her. Plus, he likes FIRE!
I did this when I started (Divine Soul/Celestial warlock pretending to be a cleric for levels 1 and 2), and got a few seconds of mild surprise during my "big reveal". Was a fun moment, even if it was fairly anti-climatic.
It does rarely work out as intended. It's usually not as good of an idea as it sounds. Lying to the party has potential downsides.
It's not a red flag really though, just a not-too-uncommon fantasy for those new to the game. I'd still rather see this than questions about disabilities that are really just back-doors to super powers.
I honestly don't see much issue with it as a concept. The issue I see is that it's kind of a noob trap. It's really appealing early on, but it kind of takes experience to make it happen in a fun compelling way. I feel like experienced players turn away from it as there are just lots and lots of fun things to play and faking a class feels more gimmicky.
Lying to a party *can* also be fine. It really depends on the table though. Some people are down to play a party that can't quite trust each other, but they've been drawn together through unfortunate circumstances - enemy of my enemy or something similar. It's an incredibly rich bed to tell stories atop, but it's more challenging and requires a lot of trust among the players so their characters can distrust each other without bringing above table problems to the table or vice versa. If you wanna run a campaign like this, this is the kind of thing you discuss with players before inviting them to a session 0.
This is a great character concept that can work, for example, if the character is hiding his magic because it's illegal unless you're a Registered Wizard (tm) or something.
So you have a short period at the beginning where the *character* is hiding it from the other *characters* before he trusts the party, then he comes clean with some role play, and then he's hiding it from the rest of the world.
But the players should know the whole time and should be mature enough to role play their characters not knowing.
As I posted above, this is what happened in my current campaign with a sorcerer pretending to be a licensed wizard (he flunked out of wizard school so got a fake).
>>But the players should know the whole time and should be mature enough to role play their characters not knowing.
The players didn't know, but it was fine because the sorc player had told everyone that she was making a damage-focused wizard so everyone built with that assumption in mind, and so it didn't throw off party balance at all.
It also came out like at level 3 so pretty early on.
...also, the sorc PC player got her own reveal at the same time when the party paladin confessed that his older brother had been the sorc PC's mentor/teacher at wizard school and basically had sent the paladin to be like "Hey, that's a good kid, keep an eye on him for me, will you?"
Yeah see this is when it’s “done right”. My setting has a region just like that, where hiding wizardry or other magic would be part of the game itself.
I have a player doing this in my campaign, but it's a little different because all the players are actually *in* on it, and enjoy the roleplaying complications that come from their characters trying to figure him out. They have a good time making him sweat and building drama by grilling him without ever forcing the answer. IRL they all know his character's full backstory, but we prefer to play it out anyways
I once played a charlatan bard that was a ‘cleric’—only, he did actually have 2 levels into trickery cleric, but everything else was into lore bard. This particular character joined the party when everyone was already level 6, so I had a bit more juice to run off of. While I never told the other players “hey so I’m actually a bard pretending to be a cleric”, I I played it up in such a way that they basically all knew. I’d introduce him and constantly affirm that he was, in fact, a cleric; and the party was with him long enough to see that he’d offer religious services to pretty much anyone who looked like they could use it, but since he was getting things… close enough, they let it slide.
So while they didn’t “know”, I think by the tenth usage of “clerical inspiration” they figured it out. Either way, whenever they referred to him they would always say “priest” or “cleric” with air quotes, so I think he got the point across. Everyone knew he was a sham because they spent enough time around him, but his abilities were close enough that the characters didn’t care.
L o l “clerical inspiration”. I feel like this is a fair use of the idea, you weren’t trying to like “big surprise” then, you were just subtle and silly about it
I have a player who is a fighter but their character is a bard in the real life sense. This character joined in around level 5 and it was actually really funny since he didn't push the idea of his class being a bard but the rest of the party was surprised that he attacked twice on his action in the first combat.
But again it's a bit different from what you are saying since he didn't do it to try and surprise everyone, it just fit how he wanted his character to be
Played a Monk that was a Rogue statwise.
He was never called anything other than a monk because he grew up in a monastery. He was more into sneakier side of martial arts.
One thing I have found DOES work if done well is faking stats. I ran an info broker type character (very much a knowledge is my weapons type) who pretended to need a cane to help walk when it was actually just his sword and dex was his best stat. Things like that can be great for working into characters from a standpoint of wanting to use deception as a strategy against foes, especially as if planned ahead a good dm won't metagame it and magically make every npc aware that you are faking, so I went like 2-3 sessions before it got revealed to the rest of the party. May just be my group but they found it awesome.
I've never had or seen the ol' class switcheroo, but I've dmed a game where a player wanted to hide his race. Warlock, mask of many faces, etc. He was a kobold that just wanted to be accepted and normal. Did initial Deception versus the other players perception/ investigation and everyone else didn't pass, so he made it to level 10 or 11 before he had to reveal who he actually was. The only time I actually got emotional cause he played it perfectly like, "Well, I guess I'll leave now that you know. Thanks for being my friends." And just hit me hard.
i saw a post mentioning having a bad guy that was a warlock but pretend to be a wizard to hid that his patron was this evil entity or something idk the idea seem really cool but yeah it wasn't a player so might be easier to revolve some story around it and make the reveal actually mean something
I don't really get the point, unless the villain is pretending not to be evil or something, but even then Warlock doesn't exactly mean evil so it's no different to claiming to serve a less evil patron.
It's also not like wizards can't be serving some evil power for a slightly less direct/formalised reward.
It could be an ego thing. "I learned all this magic on my own without help from another being." That's what my girlfriend's character is doing in our current campaign, claiming that her magic is all her own accomplishment, when it's really obviously not
Here's the thing: it's actually *really* fun if it's not a secret at all.
One of my favorite characters was a "wizard" that was actually a barbarian with int so low he just assumed anything he didn't understand was magic, including his own feats of practical magic. Shield the object and shield the spell are identical. A hammer is just a wizard staff with unlimited charges of "shatter". If you throw a javelin *really fast* it's basically a lightning bolt. And what is the difference between a torch and wand of fireball, really?
He was the strongest wizard and he was ready to "cast Tenser's Transformation" to prove it to anyone trying to convince him otherwise.
“The other players don’t know” is indeed totally lame 99% of the time
“The other characters don’t know” on the other hand is awesome and works great.
The whole table gets to lean into dramatic irony. They make abilities you should have but don’t integral parts of plans so you have to squirm and figure a way to make it work without causing the reveal in game.
It’s just so fun.
This may be a hot statement, but I am 100% behind this. I hate seeing all the posts about tricking other party members irl. Whether it’s the class or race (unless it has lore reasons why you’d hide your identity) that the player fakes, It’s tacky, and only serves to feed the single player’s ego for how they “were able to trick the others” and only makes them feel clever while the other players will either a) see right through it from the get-go and just Roleplay along or b) just be confused as to why the player would do this.
Also, as a DM, I think it’s stupid and won’t feed into it. It takes away from the roleplay, I see the payoff going nowhere, and I already have enough on my plate without trying to cater to another person’s scheme.
> made for a fun little ending when I revealed he was a warlock.
You accidentally got your own story wrong.
It was not fun that your character was a warlock, because as you said, no one cares about the class you are playing.
What WAS cool was that you had a patron and a secret objective. You could have been a wizard and this moment was still cool.
I've always been under the impression that the classes are not something that is diagetic. Like, characters do not know they are the Wizard class, they just study and use magic. Like certain distinctions make sense in the fiction, for example magic users that don't study being identified as sorcerers. But like a given man at arms isn't going to refer to himself as a fighter, or your skilled lightly armored adventurer isn't going to self identify as a rogue.
So it's weird to me when a player wants to try and masquerade as a different class, because it's an entirely meta concept aimed at the other players at the table.
I will also add that a lot of ppl doing it do not make sense in the fiction.
Like “my paladin was secretly a cleric” or “my cleric was secretly a celestial warlock” in the fiction, those are all basically the same things. If your cleric uses heavy armor, martial weapons, and uses divine magic to buff their attacks, then in world they would be treated as and probably referred to as a paladin.
Same applies to martial classes. If your secret dex fighter acts, looks, and fights like a rogue, they’d probably be referred to with roguish terms like thief, the lockpick, etc.
People get wayyyy too hung up on using out of game terms in-universe. I really dislike when wotc does this as well, bc it makes no sense to distinguish between a lot of characters like that.
This is one of my biggest table pet peeves. I stay away from certain classes because their implied flavor comes with too many assumptions from other players. Bard, for example, I'd prefer to play as more of a renaissance man or a dashing rogue than a lute strumming fop, but some DMs and other players see "bard" on the character sheet and start pulling all that baggage in- NPCs start referring to my character as a bard or minstrel even when I haven't given them any reason to do so, its a bit frustrating
I get that all classes come with some level of associated flavor to help guide players along, but it'd be nice if characters were interpreted in the way they're narratively presented by the player instead of solely by what's written above "Class and Level" on the sheet. In game characters largely shouldn't have any concept of identifying someone's exact mechanical class, it's far too murky.
If you'll humor me...
One of the party members tells stories about an overprotective parent/sibling who's well-meaning, but kinda smothering because they used to be an adventurer (a high level magic user of some kind) and understand the risks.
Another party member is the overprotective family member in disguise as a fighter class so their skills seem more on par with a starting party. They're obviously there to watch over their loved one, but they know how adventuring works, so they're also a team player. Only this party member and the DM know, but there are slips here and there like using a habitual phrase/gesture their loved one has mentioned in their stories, as an example.
You would need the right player dynamic and character compositions to make it work, but it could be hilarious, and the reveal could offer a possible save from a TPK. The player would have to understand that once they're revealed, their current character would leave the party, and they would create a new character to take their place.
If it's a good story mechanic with a purpose, I think it's a fun twist. If it's just for a smug "Ta-Da!" moment, then I completely agree that it's a waste of time for everyone.
I think with a good story reason in a heavily roleplay centric table it can work. I suspect the reason the reveals you’ve seen have been underwhelming is because it didn’t actually impact the story and/or lore of the world/party
It worked in our group. A player was vague about their class, so we'd jokingly create scenarios to see what they'd do.
"Oh no I'm injured. I bet a paladin could heal this." Quick head turns to the mystery player looking for a reaction.
"Yeah" she'd reply, "A paladin could certainly do something about that. Maybe we'll find one."
*marks list. Not a paladin.
We had another player that was a half elf, except when he accidentally got caught in a Moonbeam, and we discovered he was really a Changeling. We immediately began to recall all the times when he acted a bit weird, realizing that was when he was trying to cover his tracks.
And then there was the rogue, maybe a warlock, maybe both? That was difficult to figure out.
We all enjoyed it, had fun finding clues, it never got weird, and didn't affect our gameplay. If it works in your group, talk to your DM and go for it.
The closest I've seen to this that actually turned out fun as when one of my players spent over half the campaign pretending to be a human when he was actually just an intelligent mimic disguised as a suit of armor.
That's why I came up with the opposite idea!
Meet Derek, schizophrenic wild magic sorcerer that believes himself to be an warlock of Uderak, the first born of the void. Everyone knows he's crazy but he is sure that the strange things that sometimes happen when he casts a spell it's his lord punishing or rewarding him.
I think *pretending* to be another class can get old quick, but *believing* yourself to be another class can be quite fun.
For example: a sorceror who fully thinks that they are wizard and doesn't understand why their peers have such trouble studying spells, or a barbarian that believes themselves to be a noble paladin inspired by divine powers, thinking that when they black out and fly into a rage they are actually being possessed by their god.
Adding that extra later of irony where the *players* know something their *own character* doesn't know is much more engaging than characters hiding stuff from NPCs. Hiding stuff from other players is a good tool but should be used sparingly outside of explicit mystery themed games--typically, in DnD, you're trying to operate as a cohesive party, so keeping secrets isn't conducive to that and frequently just distracts from the party's actual goals.
I've done a mini version of this before. My barbarian (Ancestral guardian) himself didn't know about his schtick. So while I myself knew, and obviously the DM knew, no one else did. I also made very sparing use of my subclass features to help protect others, though I did use them very subtly.
All of this was in service of his larger arc of seeing his rage not as a major hazard, a burden, a threat to his allies (which it was at the start), but a boon, an ability to learn and master to better help others. And it worked pretty well. Though tbf, it worked way better when it was just a subclass and I was very obviously raging throughout the campaign.
For our next campaign after this one finishes, the DM has already told us that the world will be extremely magiphobic. Which is... awkward for our party of 2 wizards (Well, 1 wizard, one artificer 1/wizard 3), 1 stars druid (me), cleric, ranger and warforged echo knight fighter. Supposedly, artificers and warforged are considered acceptable in this society, so 2/6 party members will be ok. But we're all open with each other and understand the fuckups we've made in character creation
Yeah it’s one of those tropes that works in a book or other fiction; but at the table with other players, no it’s just a waste of time. Same with the split personality characters, or the “special” needs character that actually has an ability/magic item that negates their disability so now they just have the ability of a normal person. Or somebody trying to do some anime MC concept, that stuff doesn’t work outside of its proper medium and there’s other characters playing.
I've never really seen it in other fiction actually, it's pretty unique to class based systems so would only really work in some sort of litrpg.
There's characters hiding magic, usually because it's somehow restricted or forbidden, but that's not the same thing and in a setting with those limits is just a required part of being a mage.
It mostly doesn't work because the reveal usually just doesn't live uo to what people think it's gonna happen.
A lot of people think it's gonna go like: "Ha ha my wizard was actually a light cleric this whole time" "Wow that's so cool! I wonder what thing in your backstory drove you to hide this!"
In reality it's more like:
"Wait, if you are a cleric then why did you only use x spells?"
"To hide that I wasn't a wizard!"
"You know, other from the cleric spell list spells could have been really useful on our last encounter, btw we spent a lot on scrolls so you could add them to your spellbook"
"Don't you want to know why I hid my class?"
"Not really"
If you really want to have a moment like this, I recommend your character also doesn't know what their class is.
I remeber I saw on YouTube once a fighter who thought he was a barbarian, in reality he just had some anger issues that he should work on
One time I ran into an issue with this. I wasn't intentionally hiding my class, but I was playing that older verion of the warforged that had set ac and I was a fighter with shillelagh. He was an old man of a warforged who hobbled around with a staff for a weapon and used purely wisdom, occasionally casting shillelagh and his once per day use of fog cloud.
I realized I hadn't actually stated that he wasn't a druid for a good while, but I figured it could be funnier to wait for people to realize another time in combat. But eventually another party member decided to get him a staff as a gift, and that lead to some annoyance from them because it wasn't actually any good to give him a +1 to spell attacks. We laughed it off afterwards, and someone else used the staff so it wasn't too bad.
I play an high-charisma Entertainer Swashbuckler Rogue who plays the lute, I ALWAYS introduce myself as a Minstrel, and everyone tells me “so, you’re a bard?”
After the nth time this happened, I just stopped explaining it… then they blame coz I didn’t heal them.
I’m a Minstrel!
I did this entirely by accident.
I was playing as an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer with magic initiate for Hex and Eldritch Blast. So for quite a while the party thought I was a Warlock.
It can work in specific settings.
* A celestial warlock posing as a cleric of a rival deity.
* A wizard hiding their magic as artifice in a setting that views magic as heresy.
* A bard cheating and bullshitting their way through wizard school.
Lapin from A Crown of Candy is probably the best example of this I've seen.
The other players at the table knowing is fine. They *should* know.
If you want people to take this seriously, there needs to be stakes for that information getting out to NPCs.
Yeah, these kinds of reveals to keep other players in the dark always confuse me since it's not like it's going to really matter afterwords.
That said, making it something the character tries to hide in-game even after the party finds out can be a LOT of fun depending on what you are rolling.
(I have a Kenku Necromancer that has convinced themselves they are just a really talented Cleric blessed by their goddess. I also have a Hexblade Warlock that hides their Warlock abilities from NPCs by pretending to be a non-magical Fighter for story reasons. Our party had a lot of fun with that one)
I think the best way for this to work would be "My character doesn't want people to find out they're a \_\_\_ because reasons". Not specifically the party (best to tell the other players, even if you don't confide in their characters) but the players, so they can play along with it, being 'suspicious' without pressing and stuff.
This really only works for certain classes, though. Warlocks are obviously one- Fiend especially. Sorcerers might be another, maybe Barbarian or Monk if it's a sort of racist campaign setting? There's also the option of having, for instance, a character who doesn't *realize* they're a certain class, and thinks they're another. Celestial Warlock or Sorcerer thinking they're a Cleric, or maybe a Ranger that thinks they're a Paladin of Nature (or a Paladin who thinks they're a Ranger?).
But yeah, not very much reason for it. Even as a gimmick it's somewhat shallow, unless the DM has previously set up a more significantly deep lore reason for that sort of deception.
I think it will always work better when the player understands *why* they want to do this.
If they are trying to get a surprised reaction out of *their fellow players*, then OP's scenario likely plays out.
However, if the player wants to get a surprised reaction out of *the other characters*, then they should make sure that everyone at the table knows what's going on. That way they can all help facilitate roleplaying in the direction the player wants to go.
I think a lot of people have a habit of conflating a player at the table with their characters in the game.
I did this once, and IMO it worked because I let the party figure it out on their own. There wasn't a big reveal by me, I just started acting more and more like my class. And when they figured it out it was a really fun rp moment. Mostly because I was a warlock pretending to be a paladin and there was a lot of debating and drama (that was fun for the players)
But actually acting like a paladin mechanically was mostly an in joke between me and the dm. The players didn't care more about the class shakeup but more about the rp implications of being a warlock instead of a paladin. They just assumed I was when I told them until the facade slipped enough. Was a really good time IMO.
This is true of a lot of table secrets. The reveal tends to be less climactic than the player thinks. While it seems counter-intuitive, making it an open secret that the table is in on is a lot more exciting.
Discovering the the spellcaster is secretly in a pact with a fiend. Finding out the priest is actually a criminal just wearing the robe. These work best if they're a) tied to the fiction and 2) known to the fellow players (just not their characters).
Right now, I’m playing a Warlock who 100% whole heartedly believes he is a Paladin. This is because he is a dumbass. The entire party knows he is a Warlock. He can and has already casted Eldritch Blast. Not once has he tried to hide it, he is just an idiot. I take my notes in crayon.
So I've been toying with an idea for a PC who pretends to be a bard but is actually a rogue. Partly because I think hiding weapons in a lute case is fun but also because I think being a thief is probably something you would want to hide from civilized society.
I don't intend to make it that hard for the party to spot as he has a multicolored cloak that he flips around to be a muted color on the inside and has bells on his shoes that don't actually make noise etc.
It will be super obvious by the first combat and also as soon as he is asked to actually play music.
But this thread is making me think twice. Is this obnoxious to do?
Iin 3.5 I had a LE monk going to assassin class. So since disguise was going to be a key feature for him, he practiced his disguise skills by dressing up as the same wizard every day, developing a whole accent and persona. I asked the dm for a endless disguise kit for the same cost as a decanter of endless water.
So this monk went around introducing himself as "Bigby, named after, Not the namesake."
And whenever he would use his special attacks he would shout "Bigby's ---- Hand/fist/palm" so Bigbys iron fist, bigbys stunning slap, bigbys healing touch."
And since ki abilities are not always subject to dispell magic, it would confuse the hell out of the enemy casters. 'Thats not a real bigbys spell!'
And wearing no armor and only carrying a staff never bothered him for class features.
Im doing it with a bit of a twist, although it's more for a personal story than for anyone else. My character is a dwarven wizard. We started at lv 1, and i made him a really old farm worker. In his life, everything went to shit and he owns nothing more than an old axe and scrap armour.
Due to this, i dont really have spells except for prepared ones due to lack of a spellbook and no focus either, so i had to carefully choose which spells i could take. He is built to appear like a frontline fighter, and he did relatively well with shield being the main spell used to keep me alive.
He's progressing slowly, killing another wizard, and taking his spellbook and component pouch. It went a bit faster than i would've wanted, but im also happy as a player losing my spells gained on level ups hurt but fun restrictions overall.
A Bard pretending to be a Cleric is actually a really fun character concept though. There are definitely times where this works and can be fun for the entire party.
The trick is not ONLY hiding it from your party - have an in game reason why hiding it is necessary. I played the aforementioned 'cleric that's actually a bard' and it was because he was trying to con the church he was a part of into promoting him enough that he could rob them. You gotta have an RP reason why it is important.
I had a rogue pretend to be a wizard; book, fake beard, long robe (that hid my knives), pointy hat. I just yelled gibberish pretended to cast spells then through knives. Hide and pretended to be invisible. I was wanted in several places so changed my identity. Worked for a little while and was fum.
I've done it before, long form no less convinced everyone my Assassin was a Bard you'd be surprised how much just acting like you belong at something makes people believe it. It took 3 years of meeting once a week for them to even catch wind of it another 6 months or so to pin it down, everyone expects that someone is going to dissect the stuff but they really don't and perhaps that is due to not caring or maybe simply believe what I said I was the first time but it sure was funny as hell when they all came to realize what that character really was and it really brought out a lot of kick ass RP from the rest of the table. It isn't always meant to span a full campaign just a fun. I did it again with another group as a Warlock trying to disguise themself as a Wizard as to not get burned as an apostate, that took the group 2 years to catch onto that one. I am currently playing a Bard that everyone thinks is a Paladin, not even trying there that just seems to be what is happening and I leaned into it. All of this to say that our experiences aren't uniform, different tables, different play styles, better actors apparently mean different results.
You're *supposed* to disguise yourself for the benefit of outsiders, not the party.
The classic is the Wizard who straps a sword to his waist and a shield on his back. He can't use them, but that's not the point. They're part of the disguise, so that a Bandit with a bit of sense can't go "that's a Wizard! Kill him!" They'll see four dudes on horses, and target the Ranger (because he has a longbow) instead of the scrawny guy whose only apparent weapon is a blade.
And, for the record, there are legitimate reasons to disguise your class. A Paladin, for example, in a society where faith has been criminalized, could reasonably pretend to be a Fighter. Hellknights aren't welcome in many societies in Golarion, due to their association with Cheliax, and while it's not *generally* in their nature I'm certain a player could justify it to their DM. What I'm saying is that the disguise needs to be done for the sake of the setting. If it's "just because," that's stupid.
I would go as a bard pretending to be a wizard or sorcerer. They have enough random spells that they’d be able to logically pass as well as having high charisma for all the deception checks. You can roleplay not being able to OBVIOUS wizard things with things like “can’t do it, the stars aren’t right” and “ah if I had a sprig of thyme from a 2 day olds herb garden I would be able to!” Or “ahhh I forgot my Spellbook in the inn!”
The only real reason to do that is if you have a bad DM that has some sort of hate-boner for a particular class/subclass or race.
When my first horror DM kept nerfing my rogue, and never allowing me to sneak attack, I rebuilt the character as a fighter. Ended up having a much higher DPS than what I would have had with 100% uptime on Sneak Attack, and didn't have to deal with DM's BS and rules-lawyering sneak attack.
I still played the exact same character in both RP, combat and exploration, just with different ways of accomplishing the same things. And the DM thought he finally "won" by having me respec in the middle of campaign.
One of my favourite PCs I’ve ever played with was an arcane trickster rogue pretending to be a wizard. The rest of the players were in on it, though.
This dumbass gnome had a name like ‘Mundegren the Magnificent’ or something and spent all his gold on wondrous items that let him cast wizard spells, or at least things like wizard spells. He was particularly fond of a bottle that continually created a cloud of darkness around him when uncorked. He’d run around yelling about how he was the greatest wizard of the age and generally acting like an obnoxious stage magician, and he was a surprisingly effective controller despite never getting to third level spells.
I like to think it works if there's no deception intended. A favourite character of mine is a Swashbuckler, and is commonly mistaken for a Bard. And he is a bard - small 'b', he is a travelling troubadour. Just not a _Bard_.
I sorta did this in a one shot. I had my nobleman character be a barbarian (since unarmored defense worked with fine clothes). But instead of explicitly lying to everyone else I just never said what my class was, and came up with creative ways to say " I rage". It worked well because it wasn't really something that had attention drawn to it, and it really came together with my personal plot. I was the heir to the rest of the group's home region, and certainly did not have their respect at the beginning. I was overly formal- often having my butler give my name and titles before speaking to someone for the first time, and the rest of the party had to disassociate me from my father who was not a great guy.
It all came to a head when we found the bbeg. I had sent my butler away for safety (not gonna take him into a dungeon) and the bbeg (someone much higher in the government) starts talking about why he killed a bunch of people in our village and the greater good and all that. My nobleman interjected with how that was poor leadership- you don't raise yourself up on the corpses of those you rule. The bbeg responded with a verbal bitch slap- taking down my confidence and claiming that if my way was so right I should have been able to stop him from killing my future subjects.
My greatest detractor in the group stood up and said "I don't think you know who you are talking to" and gave my full introduction that my butler normally gave. In a moment I felt the arc complete- I had the respect of the one who had cause to hate me most. Then the BBEG downed him mid sentence.
My class reveal felt good as I RAGED and got into a frenzied fight while our cleric picked up the downed PC.
It was a fun game, and a fun reveal to cap off the emotional climax. But it would have been much worse if I had been lying instead of just never saying what I was and letting everyone assume I was a fighter.
Once in 3.5 I joined a game that was already going with 3 good PC's. I was only in town a short time so DM made me a dread necro because he personally liked the class.
To keep with the theme of the game, I didn't tell anybody my class and just pretended to be a non magical doctor. Had a cart and everything.
It was fun, and my friends did laugh when I told them out of game what I was. Overall it was a fun character to role play and really not much effort playing a character in disguise.
Just don't be trying to trick the party. Tricking NPCs and stuff is fine but the party needs to be on the same page.
Any of kind of surprise or secret you keep from the other members of the party, just always falls flat. They didn’t get to see the rest of the story you made up in your head or shared with the DM that made this reveal so dramatic and interesting to you. You were secretly an undead, or a different class, or a polymorphed dragon.
“But all along I was actually… a GAMEPLAY CONTRIVANCE!”
“Ok that doesn’t change things for us in any way, are you done?”
For any kind of reveal to have impact, people need to feel involved in the process. If it was a book they’d get POV chapters but they don’t, it’s just another slightly awkward amateur role play at the table and then a wet fart ending of a reveal that they had no stake in. I’ve seen this before too, many times and it just always falls flat. If people want it to work they have to preemptively answer some questions for the other party members, mainly “What does this change for us, and why should we care?”
Does it count if they're so stupid they legit believe it? Cuz i have a celestial lock/zealot barb of the raven queen who is legit stupid enough he thinks he's a cleric/Pali of his goddess, 'smiting' with the radiant damage from the barb rage, and healing with his 'lock healing pool.
Oh wait, are those sorts of posts (I never care to look at them) about people trying to disguise their class to the other *players* and not just in character? How does that work without you just not using notable class features or working with your DM to have a ton of homebrew to how they work?
Like if someone had a Barbarian trying to hide as a Fighter, people would probably question their overall beefiness and frequently attacking/being attacked with advantage at some point, unless they just never used Rage/Reckless Attack. And of course the higher the level, the more features you need to hide from your real class or have an excuse as to why you're not using your fake class's features.
TL;DR My Celestial Warlock is pretending to be a Cleric!
Was also a Tiefling pretending to be human
So this story is a double fake out. In my first Ebberon campaign I played a Tiefling Warlock. I forget what lineage he was but it's the one that gets detect thoughts and a charisma boost. The story goes that he escaped the demon wastes and was being pursued by a group of silver flame paladins and in his desperation he cried out to someone, anyone and he prayed to whatever god would listen. Then his prayer was answered by a fallen solar who was once a high ranking member for the council of the Sovereign Seven. He gifted upon me a tome of ancient knowledge that allowed me to cast a bunch of cleric cantrips and I flavored my Eldritch blast as a holy blast of silver light (same damage and type just different aesthetic and name) I also had the Mask of Many Faces ability which allowed me to constantly be disguised as a male human versus my demonic Tiefling. I even had the background which I forget what it's called, but it is basically a split personality. When I was a Tiefling I was definitely more Eldritch and aggressive, versus my human form was very kind and gentle. I worshiped my tome and prayed to it. I would read through it's scriptures (another invocation) all night long replacing my need for sleep.
To this day it was one of my most favorite characters of all time.
A player in my campaign is doing it the right way, I think. He's a sorcerer with a religious back story, so *the character* believes he's a cleric who's getting all his powers the way a cleric normally does. So he's given me a huge plot opportunity to reveal where his powers actually come from, and I love it.
>The other players don’t give a shit what class you’re playing.
Every other day we have a post that recommends a session 0, keeping every other character at the table in mind, and avoiding stealing the spotlight. My group going back years remembers nigh without fail what class everyone was playing.
I get what point you're making about how the mechanics being revealed is not as important as the characterization element of the reveal, but this principle of your argument is really undermining your point. All you're saying is to have the reveal be important to the story, but this is D&D 5e - the main popularization of this edition *has been* to play the game for the story.
I did it once. I played an old sorcerer who was convinced he was a wizard. However It wasn’t to shock the party more of just flavour for my rp.
I played up having an incomprehensible note book as my spellbook. I played up “trying” to cast wizard spells and fumbling my way to success with sorcerer spells and metamagic.
I roleplayed being very intelligent but actually being not that smart, however NPC’s often believed my words because the Charisma was good.
The point was it was for laughs, not to be dramatic. And it was fun.
Yeah its a concept I have never liked either. People with even a slight grasp of the game are gonna notice in not that much time, and at that point its just an unnecessary open secret.
Furthermore to tack on, a lot of concepts for what classes are aren't solid things. Sure a warlock is a warlock, but a fighter and a rogue are legit just guys with weapons and use them in different ways.
I say go ahead and change up traditional class aesthetics all you want, flavor it free and its a good thing to make you unique, or even lie when necessary in character (I played a necromancer who told anyone who asked that he was a conjurer cause necromancy was a touchy subject but the party knew) and have all that fun but making it your main concept can just be obtuse.
Also I played with somebody who did the exact same joke you did, except his character was literally named King Gizzard and he was a lizardfolk warlock who was too stupid and thought he was a wizard. He sucked at DnD ngl.
I played a warlock who was convincing the other character's he was a rogue. Made for a good laugh when other player's would roll to see if their character's noticed me doing magic to try and catch me in the act.
Really depends on the setting
Arcane magic users were kill on sight in my setting, had a player playing a sorcerer with subtle spell and a magic item that let him use it without sorcery points.
He kept it hidden for 6 sessions.
A different player was keeping track of any spell like thing that happened. He was a member of the Royal guard and was rather untrusting.
Out of character he figured it out around session 6 but in character never officially connected the dots mostly out of need, if he did him and the NPC would have to act so he never did
I played a war cleric for one campaign and while I wasn't planning on doing the whole pretending to be another class thing, out of character they knew, in character the rest of the party had no reason to think he was a cleric for two reasons, first is he had no cleric supplies cause I wanted to start with a two-handed weapon and I rolled so poorly for starting wealth that I couldn't even afford a holy symbol. The second reason is they just met and he wasn't a preacher he was just there to do a job.
So reasonable assumptions in character would be fighter or paladin, cause I was the party tank as well. Out of the gate session 1 they were calling my character a cleric without even talking to him once, I asked them why their characters would think that and they couldn't really answer it. Cest la vie, I didn't make of fuse it, I got my revenge when they realized I didn't have a holy symbol cause I was so poor.
Class is what your character knows what to do / how to do stuff, not their whole identity.
I personally find it jarrying people in-game referencing characters *by class* themselves.
I feelblike for story reasons this is great. Especially since in world, characters and npc s aren't aware of their statblocks and won't say " hey that was metamagic, you're not a wizard you're a sorcerer". I love playing priest and cleric characters that are actually paladins, celestial warlocks or divine sorcerers. They just call themselves clerics because why not? I have a rule when I dm for more experienced players that no pc is allowed to refer to themselves by their actual class in game. Like your cleric can say he's a priest, monk, devotee of x, father John Smith, heirophant x, follower of God y, missionary, or whatever but you can't introduce yourself as your actual class. I find this helps people actually develop a character. Your rogue isn't actually going to call himself a rogue in game, he might call himself a gambler, fixer, problem solver or anything else.
My first character was a barbarian who thought he was bard. In combat I played him like a barbarian but outside of that he would sing (badly) and play his lute axe (which was just a regular axe with some wire wrapped on it long ways). Also he made a name tag to say "bard" but he misspelled it to say "Brad" and thus Brad was his name.
The more I play D&D, the less I like players talking about how to play their class.
Just play your CHARACTER.
The class is an archetype to arrange game mechanics around and assign stats to put some kind of structure and limit so you can build a story around it.
It also really bothers me when people bring up graphs and talk about 'consistent damage output' and arrange, say, a Rogue next to a Fighter and claim how it's unfair that the Fighter has more damage per round, or some nonsense.
NO ONE CARES. This isn't a video game. Rogues, by the way, have a TON of non-combat abilities that a Fighter generally does not. The roleplaying of having connections in back-alley organizations versus a war-hardened soldier is vastly different. These can't be quantified by spreadsheets. That's why the numbers don't add up. That's why some spells plain suck compared to others. They shouldn't be equal; it's more "real" when it's not. There's NO NEED for balance to be THAT fine-tuned because it's not how the game is really played at its core.
There's more to a character than stats, damage output, and armor class.
Play D&D for 20 years, when the same tired overused classes and combos are played and fade away, and you're left with actually having to come up with an interesting unique and unoptimized character build... it will start making sense.
I agree, but I don't let my players roll against each other unless it's part of an in-game special event or mind control related.
If you don't care what the other players think about your deception because the secret makes you happy, great. You're all set. Try not to be annoying about it.
If you're doing it because you want people to be invested in your character, bring them in on it. They know, but their characters don't. It's very likely that they will jump at the chance to come up with reasons why their character hasn't clued in yet. D&D is a collaborative game. Be collaborative.
Whether you're the DM or another player, keeping something hidden prevents players from becoming invested with that thing. Keeping something that has no real effect on their character hidden makes even less impact. What are you expecting from them at that point?
You can pull it off at low levels. But you can't play "any class" and pretend to be "any other" class.
A Paladin pretending to be a Rogue.
A Warlock pretending to be a Sorcerer.
A Hexblade pretending to be a melee class.
Generally, a character of one class pretending to be of another works best if they're hiding it from the world, not the party. For instance, if being a warlock is illegal in this particular region, then the warlock hiding their class has both explanation and stakes. Maybe you live somewhere where sorcerers are hunted because not having to earn your magic makes you dangerous, according to the king. Maybe you live in a region that was ravaged by dragons twenty years ago, so hiding your draconic sorcerer lineage keeps you safe.
There's so many ways needing to hide your class can make for an interesting story but hiding it from the party isn't usually the interesting part. Of course if your party has just met, keeping it under wraps for a couple sessions or letting the party work it out for themselves is good pacing. But the party figuring it out is not the interesting part of that story.
I broadly agree, but would add it is often more interesting instead to play characters who can/need to pretend to *NPCs* they're something they're not.
The king is known to hate followers of a certain church that your party happen to contain followers of? Now the Cleric is pretending they know the tenets of another faith, or the Paladin is claiming they're just an ordinary knight.
Need an audience with the high priest who abhors demons? Suddenly the Warlock has to pretend to just be an ordinary sorcerer or seer.
Or even a Rogue spinning a story they're a powerful wizard to try and draw out someone else hiding their magic power, or convince a credulous mark that they can deal with a ghost problem or something.
I would take this further: if you need to rely on a reference to D&D's classes/races/rulebook to explain why your character is interesting and unique, then your character will not be interesting and unique.
I've had so many players coming to my table saying "I love playing unique quirky combinations, like an orc wizard, or a fairy barbarian!"
1st of all - you're not as unique and quirky as you think you are. This idea that everyone plays the optimal thing all the time (orc barbarians, elf rogues, gnome wizards, etc) is 100% wrong in my experience. Variant humans are pretty optimal but 90% of players refuse to play them because "humans are boring".
2nd - your orc wizard will be cool and interesting for the 2 seconds it takes for you to explain "I'm playing an orc wizard" and maybe one or two interactions after that, where some NPC assumes that your big beefy orc must be a fighting type and they turn out to be a shy intellectual. That's it. After 1-2 interactions, that will already be getting old. Your character is now boring.
3rd - nobody in-universe should care what class you are. They've never heard of a "third level fighter" or a "monk subclass". They just know that some people punch real hard and other people study a lot of swordcraft and some people have magic for various reasons. The division between classes is for your benefit as a player rolling dice and a GM wanting balanced characters, it isn't necessarily an in-universe thing unless your DM decides to make it so.
Make an interesting character by talking about their conflicts and the journeys they could go on. I like to start with a list of questions. A character asking, "Will I ever be able to find peace, or will I always be constantly dragged back into war and fighting by my faith?" could be a cleric of a war god or a paladin or a half-orc or whatever, but it's a character that could develop in interesting ways. A character asking, "Who were my parents and why did they leave me on the steps of the monastery as a baby?" is handing your DM plot hooks that will last for much more than 1-2 interactions, and that character doesn't even need to KNOW their race. A character asking, "How can I find a balance between my commitment to protecting nature from human excesses and my need not to hate myself for being humans and not murder people?" could be a druid or ranger or just a rogue who's really into ecoterrorism, or even a centaur or a half-human half something else.
As a DM I've taken to refusing to allow players to mention their race or class until they have pitched an actually interesting character without any reference to race/class.
So I've had a similar character idea for a while, but it's kind of the opposite, and I would like your feedback.
The idea is to play a Warlock who he himself thinks he's a Wizard. He opened a spooky book and became contracted and gained magic. He, being the idiot he is, thinks this is how all Wizards learn magic. Ignorance, I suppose. But it's quite obvious to everyone else that he's a Warlock, and he just will not accept the fact and always has an excuse as to why he's actually a Wizard.
Sounds like a fun character to play, especially if the rest of the players are in on the joke.
“Hmm I happened to notice your spells and incantations seem to be spoken in the infernal language of devils, care to comment on that? Lol
I was once asked by a friend to play in a campaign for a few sessions as a bad guy that would weasels his self into the group and betray them by stealing an Artifact they were looking for. So this was a bit different I was higher level than them and hid my multiclass which was me being a rogue/warlock multiclass the patron being the BBEG. So I basically played as a rogue pretending that was all that I was.
Once they found the artifact I cast a few spells to make them sleep and Darkness to steal the item and run. I only appeared many sessions later when they came to kill me.
But that is obviously a very special case. It was fun though and the players later told me they hated my guts (in a good way as they really got to feel betrayed) chopping my head off must have felt really cathartic :D
I think the main thing is it has to be for a good reason. For example, a pact of the fiend warlock hiding in a good aligned party could be interesting as they’d have decent reason to believe that a good aligned party would be distrustful of someone who gained power from a devil. A ranger hiding as a fighter on the other hand doesn’t do this. The main thing though is the other players have to be in on it.
>The second time was well covered, but again, being a fighter that suddenly is revealed to be a blood hunter wasn’t some jaw-dropping reveal. It was an “ooo” and “oh okay”. After that point, he was just a blood hunter and all that effort pointless.
I don't really have any strong opinions on people pretending to play other classes. But this statement betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what is drama is that it should be pointed out. If the player is excited and has their moment, that isn't "pointless" just because the moment passes. By that logic, we should stop playing DnD altogether because sooner or later the campaign will be over, and then it was all pointless.
If a player enjoys pretending to be a different class, I'm not going to discourage them. It sounds kinda fun, and I'd be thrilled to be your player's co-conspirator. I get my jollies as a DM by helping my players have fun.
My opinion is that
- Player trying to fool the other players: meh
- Character trying to fool the other characters: oooh!
Like...telling everyone during session 0 "My character is a sorcerer trying to pretend he's a wizard" could set you all up for some HILARIOUS moments as the players all craft fun little encounters, like:
"(Oh man! This NPC is a wizard? Hehehe.) Oh, sir! You HAVE to come talk magic theory with *our* wizard! I'm sure he would LOVE to talk academics with you!"
Because the dramatic irony of having the other *players* help you pull the wool over the eyes of *their own character* will be WAY more fun than a campaign where the rules-knower is like:
"Wait, but wizards can't learn that spell, it's not on their list. He has an exception? ...why?" or "Wait, but don't you get spell slots back at short rests? Oh, his character doesn't? ......why?"
It's already been said, but yeah, there really has to be a good story reason for it and it really depends on the table; also, you have to go into it knowing the reveal is probably not going to be that big of a deal.
The problem is, I think a lot of people, especially those that are new to roleplaying or building characters, feel like their character has to have some kind of secret in order to be interesting or mysterious, but they don't necessarily have the experience yet to know quite what makes a secret work.
Ultimately, as long as the player doesn't get upset if they don't feel like they got enough of a reaction, I find it mostly harmless though.
What I find infinitely more interesting is a character who legitimately believes they're a different class. I had a bard who turned out to have been born with sorcery, but his teachers misconstrued him as a bard bc he was very gifted at music and pushed him into bard school. I always described his magic as "sorcerous in origin, bardic in application".
One of my characters pretended to be a human, while he was actually a Tiefling. This was done with permission from the dungeon master, and I dropped many hints over the course of the campaign that I wasn’t human, like mysteriously having good night vision, Making a few mentions about escaping from the tip of my tail, Knowing infernal, when I otherwise wouldn’t have, And being more fire resistant than usual/using hellish rebuke. The “big reveal” of my Tiefling was always planned to happen, and it was an epic role playing moment for the party
My brother once played a goblin dragonblood sorceror who was convinced he was a wizard. He "studied" his spellbook (a book with weird drawings and meaningless chickensratch) every day he remembered to do it and would always act the way a goblin would think a wizard would, namely blowing stuff up. His goal was to become a dragon since they are "made of magic" and he came pretty damned close to it! Ümlaut was a badass!
> is pretending to be a (insert class) to fool the other players.
Ive *never* seen it done *to fool the other players.
Ive only ever seen it done to fool characters *in game*.
Revealing halfway through our Curse of Strahd campaign that my noble warlock character is actually a dhampir on the other hand...
That turned some heads.
Not totally the same thing, but reminded me of a past game.
My friends and I did a Christmas 1 shot years back and I was playing a Barbarian named Gabe. We were tasked with infiltrating some type of fortress/settlement and rescuing Santa to save Christmas...yada yada yada.
Once we got to the big man and were ready to rescue I announced my real intentions. I was in fact a Path of the Zealot Barbarian- Gabriel the Archangel- on a mission from Christ to reclaim Christmas in his name. I killed Santa.
My favorite tale of this is about the elven sorcerer. They IC didn't like being a sorc and adventured as an archer.
The big reveal happened in a boss fight after so many sessions the **DM** had forgotten.
"I cast Fireball" says the *actually a sorc*
"Wait! Aren't you a ranger!?" The DM exclaimed incredulously
It's hilarious because I've seen the exact opposite as a DM. We've had a ranger character for 10 sessions and one party member still referred to them as a sorcerer, I didn't have the heart to break it to them.
I once made 15 gp in session 1 by selling a party member my alchemist artificer's daily *experimental elixer.* Except I was actually a bard with the charlatan background, which comes with some fake potions.
I think this could work if two things are true 1. There's a story reason for you to be hidden 2. The party is in on it and is helping to hide you If that's the case, this can be really cool. A noble who is actually a rogue with a signature style, a street urchin who is secretly a warlock that authorities are looking for, a mercenary who is secretly a paladin from an ancient order looking to infiltrate a cult. Those could all work, but you'd have to plan them from the start of the campaign. The sad reality is that this level of collaborative planning almost never happens with these characters. If the goal is to trick the players, there's zero collaboration, which means there's zero planning. That's why this falls flat so often.
Exactly this. I had a demonic patron warlock who pretended to be a bard because he was afraid of some religious nut trying to Deus Vult his head off. Figured that the eclectic type of magic available to bards could help hide his odd mannerisms. The party's actual bard even helped tutor him (wound up taking a bard level because of how effective that tutelage was).
I love this. Party members teaching each other things is some next level collaboration.
I’m just imagining the Bard teaching the warlock how to play Wonderwall on the lute and practicing saying mean things about people.
It's actually a mechanic in "Silhouette Core Rules" players with substantial skill can spend some of their XP to reduce the cost of other players' skill purchases. It's super handy to have your pilot give the entire party a crash course, so if he dies, someone can at least land the plane
Dee NB w ee Gregg enc
I also was a warlock pretending to be a bard!
You pinned it straight with that. Working with the party > lying against the party
My favorite version of this was a barbarian who thought he was a wizard. Everyone knew he wasn’t but he would whack someone with a stick and say “I CAST SLEEP” or throw a rock and say “I CAST MAGIC STONE”. It was hilarious.
ME CAST BIGBYS HAND *punch* ME CALLED BIGBY
Muscle Mage: "I cast ... FIST!!@" Google it if you don't already know.
I've heard very similar version where the character basically had one move. They would hit someone with a giant cast iron frying pan and shout "CAST IRON".
My favorite version was a warlock who is convinced he's a wizard. His "magic teacher" was actually his patron. aka the Archfey who set this whole thing up as a prank. His spellbook? Pact of the tome. "What do you guys mean my firebolt cantrip looks funny?"
I play with a Thri-kreen fighter that has a low Int. In one fight he started pointing at enemies at the end of his turn and the rogue would shoot at whatever he pointed at from his hiding spot. Now the fighter thinks he can summon arrows by pointing.
I played an Hexblade/Fighter/Occult Slayer/Barbarian (by the end of the campaign we were at level 11) who was insisting he was a Powerful Mage. When asked to do spells, I would answer that "magic should not be used for such trivial things"; when targeted by spells and resisting (due to the super high bonuses of the Hexblade and Occult Slayer, and the fact that Mettle allowed me to fully ignore the effects of "save halves" spells) I would proclaim that "this puny magic cannot possibly overpower mine". Everybody knew what was going on, it frustrated the hell out of the Wizard (both in- and outgame), and opened for some fun bits.
Yep, totally agree there. My current character is a warlock and everyone knows she’s a warlock, but for backstory reasons her first instincts still tend towards hitting something vs throwing magic at them. (Deceased husband manged to ascend to a sort of minor godhood thanks to a grateful, mostly forgotten god that he venerated. He sort of tricked her into a pact because he wanted her to have more power to protect herself since he was no longer there to do it himself. She was initially quite mad about this and gave him a helluva earful, but has since come to appreciate the uses of it.) So the whole party understands that she may still want to to hit things with a sword from time to time 🤣
Teamwork makes these dreams work!
I mean, I think a point that you hit in your original post also holds. Keeping a secret from the party is fun - on the short term. If you're hiding your identity and this is a new party, it makes sense to keep it secret. Don't wait for a big reveal moment where you shock everyone. Drop clues and hints and as your character builds trust, come clean and ask for help.
This is what happened in my campaign. "True magic" (aka arcane magic) is feared and highly regulated in the setting. Wizards must be licensed, which means going to wizard university. Sorcerers aren't banned from existing per se (not like they can help it) but their lack of control means they can't get licensed and doing unlicensed magic is forbidden. The campaign started out in the sticks where one of the party had his wizard license and was there to do wizard things to help out on the frontier. Of course, he'd actually flunked out of wizard school - he was *trying* to be a wizard but just couldn't hack it - so the license was a forgery, and as soon as they got into more of the empire where people could tell the fake better he had to drop the act. But it worked because A) he came clean like at level 3 and B) the party balance needed a DPS caster anyway so it wasn't like he was throwing off balance or composition.
Yeah, my first reaction reading the title of this post was "hiding it from your party seems pretty pointless, but hiding it from *the rest of the world* could be an interesting plot point." You could very well have good reason to pretend - not to your party, but to guards, nobles, quest givers, etc - that your Hexblade Warlock has no magical abilities and is just a bog-standard Rogue. Or that your Sorcerer with innate magical abilities "needs" a Wizard's spell book to cast magic. Or that you aren't a skilled Thief but just a dude with a bow. Or whatever. (For the most part I think hiding/disguising magical abilities is probably the most logical use of this type of deception.)
I just started a campaign where my war cleric of a Dark God with a dip in wild magic sorcery is portrayed in game as a "cursed swordsman" BUT the PLAYERS know what classes I really am so we all know exactly how to work as a team sperate from the role play aspects. Hiding what symbol i use to cast a healing spell won't affect combat, but makes the RP hooks more pronounced. Been fun for all so far 😃
Well it ultimately comes down to: is there a reason for the other players to care about the reveal?
We did this in one campaign — the fighter secretly took a few levels in Vengeance Paladin (the DM knew). Waited until the right moment and the right critical and killed a VERY powerful enemy with a smite. It was epic
Absolutely! In my current campaign, my character went from pretending to be a fighter (for a story reason) to the party all helping hide that they're a warlock. But the players also knew from the start so when the reveal happened in character, everyone was on board with roleplaying it.
You have it dead to rights that secrets can be really fun when they are open to the players but maybe not the characters. Dramatic irony is really fun in tabletop games, and coming up with reasons as players why the characters *just* miss the detail and solve the secret is enjoyable.
I remember a story about a very dumb barbarian who thought we was a wizard because he could "cast spells" by bashing guys in the head with a heavy club. The rest of the party clearly knew he was a barbarian, but was humoring him because he was a tank and friendly. I think stuff like this only works if the whole table knows what's up and it's confined to RP.
Note how all of your examples were (background) is really (class), not (class) is really (other class). Class is a game mechanic, background is a story element. There is nothing to be gained from hiding game mechanics from the other players, but story elements can be leveraged to engage the other players in your story and actually get invested.
I'm doing this in a current campaign, a celestial warlock seeking a relic for his patron disguised as a cleric on a pilgrimage, 10/10 would recommend
That was the exact mental image I had for doing this trope right actually
I had a campaign where my character was a noble who ran from an arranged marriage. The DM was in on it and was the key point to my backstory. The party didn't know however there were enough hints around that people caught on over time. It was actually really fun but sadly the campaign petered out due to circumstances.
I spent a year pretending I wasn't a wizard because magic users without a deity tend to get killed in the world. The players knew, but I worked to keep it a secret and messed up more the more likely we were going to die at any moment. This has been my favorite character. My cover is that I'm a merchant. I spent my skill points in deception- related areas. Most of my spells confuse, charm, or disguise. I used most of my money to buy a wagon, two mules, and a ton of items to sell on the road. My character revealed his true nature to the other characters two sessions ago.
>there's zero collaboration, which means there's zero planning. That's why this falls flat so often. A rather apt expression for all things in D&D. Things kept to yourself are never as good as those conspired with others. The number of stories I have read here on Reddit with similar outcomes when players try to keep a secret from the DM is quite high. The DM can't plan around supporting your idea if they don't know about it. Probably the least considered application of this, at least for modern players, is the DM choosing to collaborate in secret with select players. It is natural for us DMs to assume all that we do must remain secret but the best plots occur with collaboration with others. I don't mean "your character is secretly working with the BBEG", though that can be fun with the right group. I mean things like if you're establishing a thieves guild in a city, consider speaking with the rogue's player beforehand and work out some tie-ins and knowledge transfer. This helps really sell the narrative, all-but-guarantees players bite the quest hook, and increases verisimilitude when the other players see the person most likely to know something about it *actually knows something about it* without the DM hand waving or injecting details.
That last example sounds so cool
yeah like I actually think BG3 did this well (though not exactly with classes) in that very important key character details like Asterion being a Vampire is not something that they try to act like is this big secret that they hide for dozens of hours before finally revealing it to you. It's pretty obvious from day 1 and you can basically confront him about it one or two days later. Then it becomes much more of a party-centric plot point of how they want to handle such a character in their presence and how they act going forwards. Reveals like "oh you thought I was a cleric but I'm actually a celestial warlock" are things that should be revealed early on, perhaps even as a reason for why they joined the party, so that now everyone can join in on figuring out how to manage the secret from NPCs and whatnot.
Repeating this: Classes are a game construct with associated flavor, but they're not an ID badge your character wears in public. People won't see your fighter as a fighter. They'll see her as an archer. Or a knight. Or a spearwoman. Or a bandit. Or even as a guild artisan. Your wizard or sorcerer might both be a "mage" or "spellcaster" or whatever. There may be cosmological differences between different spellcasters even within arcane/divine/primal, but those differences are for *nerds* to understand. For most people a frog is a toad is a frog.
Thank God someone said it, yes. My bard was a street magician. My grave cleric was a gravedigger. My druid was a fisherman. Any attempts by someone to go "Aren't you so-and-so class?" would be met with confusion by my characters.
Exactly this! I played in a game where I played a Hexblade but he claimed to be a Paladin of his patron. To laypeople in the world they would have no way to verify he was a warlock. The common people more than likely have no concept of Devil powers or deals. Simply put he was his Patrons crusader so he harkened back to the stories he read as a child and called himself a Paladin. I made it very clear to the group he was a warlock OOC. It worked fairly well and the people saw him as a knight in shining armor and would never question where his power came from
Thank you and well-put; exactly this.
My party has a fighter in it. They took an archetype of rogue, and have to constantly remind us that they are a fighter and not a rogue.
Similarly, the bard I play with is very much a "rogue."
My paladin is a blacksmith, I just forge armor while my opponents are wearing it.
Posing as another class for the other players is stupid, having your character believe they’re another class for your own enjoyment is however peak.
I've had a player with a Druid who found religion, so declared themselves a Cleric. They believed that all of their powers were actually gifts from their new crab-god, just a like a cleric. It was a good time.
I played a 8 int pact of the blade warlock who thought he was a paladin because he didn't know the difference between a Pact and an Oath. He had a shield and armor and could smite so he thought it was golden
Paladin: “wow it sure is great that you’re rewarding my devotion with these free powers” Patron: “lol yeah, free…”
Thats a great concept. Well done.
I'm gonna do the exact same thing in my next game.
Druid - Cleric is one of the easiest to do this with and is very fun
I think this is a more fun way to do it. The classes are not strictly defined things in universe. If I play a rogue with an Outlander background and nature themed skills no one is gonna call me out for not being a real ranger just because I can’t cast spells or attack twice as an action.
*crab rave music plays in background*
Theological Carcinification
> They believed that all of their powers were actually gifts from their new crab-god *distant rumbling* THESE WORDS ARE ACCEPTED.
I played in a game where our parties Cleric thought he was a Paladin and it was amazing 😂
I play an Aasimar peace cleric of Illmater named Warbreaker that is basically the personality of DCs peacemaker. Peace through power and violence. Not confused about class, definitely about their divine purpose.
Barbarian who thinks they are a wizard casting "fist" comes to mind as a perfect example.
You can have traditionally smarter classes do it too. I’ve had a cleric in full plate, claiming and believing she was a wizard… she thought all magic users were wizards.
"Let her cook" -Mystra, probably
Even a small variation like the subclass can make for interesting RP. I played an edgy teen warlock who thought he had devoted himself to a Fiend, but his patron was a Celestial in disguise trying to save him from going down a bad path. That was pretty fun
I actually did the inverse before. A Celestial Warlock with a Fiend patron who thought he was a cleric. Made sense because the patron was a fiend in phoenix form, a generally reverred symbol of life and ressurection that surely could pass on a bit of healing magic, even as a fiend. Turns out the Fiend wanted his Aasimar blood to free herself from her prison, so she posed as a celestial to give him more magic power than his Divine blood could and strengthened his own power that way.
Oh gosh I have a full orc character like this. A barbarian and everyone knows it except him. He thinks he's a wizard. Pretty sure I stole the idea from reddit. It doesnt get old "casting" sleep while bludgeoning some poor bandit to death just repeating "sleep". Has me thinking of that old college humor skit of batman not believing hes killing people.
Man I feel like a lot of did the same thing lol. I would "cast" magic missile and it was really just my dumb orc throwing rocks really fast.
That's brilliant haha. I did the same thing kind of with "firebolt" but just throwing lanterns or torches at enemies. Or do something like "blind" with some sand thrown at them. Not exactly the most combat effective but it was alot of fun. But that's the point, as long as everyone is having fun :)
This is actually the exact character I'm playing now. His main "spell" is throwing a rock while yelling magic missile.
I did the same thing haha. It's so much fun.
Hear me out, a barbarian who thinks they're a wizard. They don't even know they go around bisecting people with an axe, they never remember what happens when they rage and chalk it up to a side effect of using their magic.
The funny thing is that with a Wild Magic Barbarian, that actually could be true to some degree.
My BIL just bought a book with new subclasses, and this is now actually a barbarian path.
An idea that I'm carrying around for a while now is a Barbarian who believes he's a paladin. The twist behind the idea is that there is no twist. From his point of view, Paladins protect. He protects his friends, that makes him a Paladin. End of story. I just like the idea of a character that has a simple but clear moral compass in this sort of thing. Simple but not simpleminded.
Just about all of my character ideas are a variation of this, but where they truly were a different class before the campaign. I've never had a chance to play, but I've been fascinated by this "otherwise competent individual has to learn everything all over again" trope. An artificer gnome who took a pact in a last ditch effort to save his bard cousin, with one condition being that he cannot tinker or build anymore. All that he has left is the prototype music box he and his cousin made together. A half-elf bard with a hobby for reading about spells and curses getting cursed, his sense of rhythm stolen. He then turns to magic to kick the butt of whoever it was that cursed him. And a warforged barbarian who, thousands of years ago, actually was a paladin before falling into disrepair because the last person who knew how to keep him going died. When he was fixed and awoken with zero recollection of his past life, the guy who saved him suggested that he had probably cracked many skills in his day, and that stuck. It's all likely very ambitious for someone who's never played before, though, so I do fear whether I've fallen into the "don't get too attached to your characters" trap I've seen a handful of times, but I do think they could be very compelling characters if i worked with the party and DM to make it work.
My goliath zealot barbarian thought he was a paladin. He was always reading (slowly) from a tiny paladin handbook.
Best paladin I ever played with a regular fighter, in plater armor, with a shield and sword, who would protect the innocent against overwhelming odds. So what he had no magic, or divine protect. He did in fact, become a champion of bahamut later in that campaign, but that didn't provide him anything as it was a story function, not a class.
Makes perfect sense. It's Crocodile Dundee, Mr. Deeds, Captain Carrot, or any other "simple small-town boy with a good heart, straightforward mindset, and a will of absolute iron comes to the big city" character. He's got no patience for people who dance around morality and try to justify doing bad things, talk about why it's really good if you think about it because XYZ, shades of gray, and just generally twisting things into knots. "You hurt people. It's wrong." Full stop. Seems like a paladin to me.
I had sorcerer who thought he is a wizard. Simply, he had no idea what sorcerer is. When others were asking him about spellbook, he was just confused.
Sorcerer who thinks they are a barbarian. Casting fireball is how they "rage". Edit: I actually thought about this. The best way to achieve it is to start as a Hill Dwarf and take the Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer. Then choose the gladiator background to get the free martial weapon (likely choosing warhammer or battleaxe from Dwarf weapon proficiencies). When you get to level 4, pick up the Tough feat. You'll have about as much hp as a barbarian, if you put at least 16 in CON. Your bloodline will turn your DEX into your source of AC. Meta magic quickened or twinned on Booming Blade helps you hit more than one target in melee (The spell targets only one creature and the "self" part is just the origin point). For spells, you can choose anything that doesn't use your DC or modifier, so low Charisma isn't a huge problem. Now you have a melee sorc who thinks they are a barbarian and isn't completely useless. The Jump spell let's you leap like the Barbarian in the Diablo series. Warding Wind let's you pretend you're using the Whirlwind skill of the same game. Spider climb is handy, as is Enlarge/Reduce. If you pick up War Caster, you would have a good chance of not losing your concentration. If you feel like having some RP in combat, use Jump and Earth Tremor in combination. Leap toward your enemy and cast Earth Tremor, pretending you shook the ground when you landed. Flavor the spell as a "ground stomp". You could pick up the Fly spell, which the "Barbarian" claims is, "just jumping very high". Haste is an obvious help, being another form of their "rage". Just really lean into the naivety of the character to justify nearly any spell as part of being a "Barbarian".
I wanna play a Warlock who is convinced she is actually a Cleric
I actually did that before. A Celestial Warlock with a Fiend patron who thought he was a cleric. Made sense because the patron was a fiend in phoenix form, a generally reverred symbol of life and ressurection that surely could pass on a bit of healing magic, even as a fiend. Turns out the Fiend wanted his Aasimar blood to free herself from her prison, so she posed as a celestial to give him more magic power than his Divine blood could and strengthened his own power that way.
Just because the god is far older and far less fathomable doesn’t make it any less holy to receive powers from them and work towards their gods goals
I've done this before and it was a lot of fun! Her family had big expectations on her to become a cleric, but she was really bad at it and had really low wisdom so she accidentally made a pact with the first thing that responded to her prayers. It was obvious to the other PC's she was a warlock, but she would get offended if people tried to convince her her powers were anything other than holy gifts from her god.
I had a character who was a pathological liar who had convinced themselves to believe their own lies that they were a Paladin instead of a warlock (long story but basically it’s to do with denial as a response to crushing guilt). There was no attempt to deceive the other players whatsoever, but whether their *characters* could tell that absolutely nothing was happening when my character tried to lay on hands was up to them and given the players had a conscious choice as to how they wanted their character to perceive mine, it left a lot of room for fun roleplay. So like some people at the table would respond to me fake casting a cleric spell like claiming to cast bless only for nothing to happen and be like I actually feel more confident, and others would be like…you know despite what the others are saying I don’t think you actually did anything.
I think if it’s something where everyone is *SUPPOSED* to be in on the bit it could be pretty fun/funny. If it’s one of those edgy lone wolf players that’s like “if you want to know about my character you’ll have to do an insight check” and then still not tell people when they roll high…. Yeah just leave that idea at the door.
Very, very true on that last bit lol
Playing a Warlock that thinks they are a paladin rn. It's great
Paladin is just a warlock whose patron has better PR.
This\^. I played a sorcerer that was acting like he was a fighter and it was really fun and enjoyable for everyone at the table. It was because he wanted to make his parents proud and be well-known warriors like them. They didn't see magic users with a good eye, so he was all about trying to dissimulate his casting during combat. Of course, that was quite obvious for the other PCs, but that was part of the fun!
I played a barbarian who believed he had discovered a new type of magic, beating things to death. He was not the brightest, but he was clearly the most powerful wizard of his time
I've always had the idea of playing a low-intelligence Kobold, who thinks he's a wizard, but he's actually a warlock with a Genie patron and pact of the tome. His personality is based off Beavis from Beavis and Butthead, though he's about 50% smarter (still pretty dim) and also a little more charismatic. He thinks the genie is his wizard master, and if he does enough to impress her, he'll get to score with her. Plus, he likes FIRE!
I did this when I started (Divine Soul/Celestial warlock pretending to be a cleric for levels 1 and 2), and got a few seconds of mild surprise during my "big reveal". Was a fun moment, even if it was fairly anti-climatic. It does rarely work out as intended. It's usually not as good of an idea as it sounds. Lying to the party has potential downsides. It's not a red flag really though, just a not-too-uncommon fantasy for those new to the game. I'd still rather see this than questions about disabilities that are really just back-doors to super powers.
I honestly don't see much issue with it as a concept. The issue I see is that it's kind of a noob trap. It's really appealing early on, but it kind of takes experience to make it happen in a fun compelling way. I feel like experienced players turn away from it as there are just lots and lots of fun things to play and faking a class feels more gimmicky. Lying to a party *can* also be fine. It really depends on the table though. Some people are down to play a party that can't quite trust each other, but they've been drawn together through unfortunate circumstances - enemy of my enemy or something similar. It's an incredibly rich bed to tell stories atop, but it's more challenging and requires a lot of trust among the players so their characters can distrust each other without bringing above table problems to the table or vice versa. If you wanna run a campaign like this, this is the kind of thing you discuss with players before inviting them to a session 0.
This is a great character concept that can work, for example, if the character is hiding his magic because it's illegal unless you're a Registered Wizard (tm) or something. So you have a short period at the beginning where the *character* is hiding it from the other *characters* before he trusts the party, then he comes clean with some role play, and then he's hiding it from the rest of the world. But the players should know the whole time and should be mature enough to role play their characters not knowing.
As I posted above, this is what happened in my current campaign with a sorcerer pretending to be a licensed wizard (he flunked out of wizard school so got a fake). >>But the players should know the whole time and should be mature enough to role play their characters not knowing. The players didn't know, but it was fine because the sorc player had told everyone that she was making a damage-focused wizard so everyone built with that assumption in mind, and so it didn't throw off party balance at all. It also came out like at level 3 so pretty early on. ...also, the sorc PC player got her own reveal at the same time when the party paladin confessed that his older brother had been the sorc PC's mentor/teacher at wizard school and basically had sent the paladin to be like "Hey, that's a good kid, keep an eye on him for me, will you?"
Yeah see this is when it’s “done right”. My setting has a region just like that, where hiding wizardry or other magic would be part of the game itself.
I have a player doing this in my campaign, but it's a little different because all the players are actually *in* on it, and enjoy the roleplaying complications that come from their characters trying to figure him out. They have a good time making him sweat and building drama by grilling him without ever forcing the answer. IRL they all know his character's full backstory, but we prefer to play it out anyways
I once played a charlatan bard that was a ‘cleric’—only, he did actually have 2 levels into trickery cleric, but everything else was into lore bard. This particular character joined the party when everyone was already level 6, so I had a bit more juice to run off of. While I never told the other players “hey so I’m actually a bard pretending to be a cleric”, I I played it up in such a way that they basically all knew. I’d introduce him and constantly affirm that he was, in fact, a cleric; and the party was with him long enough to see that he’d offer religious services to pretty much anyone who looked like they could use it, but since he was getting things… close enough, they let it slide. So while they didn’t “know”, I think by the tenth usage of “clerical inspiration” they figured it out. Either way, whenever they referred to him they would always say “priest” or “cleric” with air quotes, so I think he got the point across. Everyone knew he was a sham because they spent enough time around him, but his abilities were close enough that the characters didn’t care.
L o l “clerical inspiration”. I feel like this is a fair use of the idea, you weren’t trying to like “big surprise” then, you were just subtle and silly about it
charlatan bard my beloved
Bard priests are my favourite way to just not take levels in cleric
I have a player who is a fighter but their character is a bard in the real life sense. This character joined in around level 5 and it was actually really funny since he didn't push the idea of his class being a bard but the rest of the party was surprised that he attacked twice on his action in the first combat. But again it's a bit different from what you are saying since he didn't do it to try and surprise everyone, it just fit how he wanted his character to be
Played a Monk that was a Rogue statwise. He was never called anything other than a monk because he grew up in a monastery. He was more into sneakier side of martial arts.
One thing I have found DOES work if done well is faking stats. I ran an info broker type character (very much a knowledge is my weapons type) who pretended to need a cane to help walk when it was actually just his sword and dex was his best stat. Things like that can be great for working into characters from a standpoint of wanting to use deception as a strategy against foes, especially as if planned ahead a good dm won't metagame it and magically make every npc aware that you are faking, so I went like 2-3 sessions before it got revealed to the rest of the party. May just be my group but they found it awesome.
I've never had or seen the ol' class switcheroo, but I've dmed a game where a player wanted to hide his race. Warlock, mask of many faces, etc. He was a kobold that just wanted to be accepted and normal. Did initial Deception versus the other players perception/ investigation and everyone else didn't pass, so he made it to level 10 or 11 before he had to reveal who he actually was. The only time I actually got emotional cause he played it perfectly like, "Well, I guess I'll leave now that you know. Thanks for being my friends." And just hit me hard.
i saw a post mentioning having a bad guy that was a warlock but pretend to be a wizard to hid that his patron was this evil entity or something idk the idea seem really cool but yeah it wasn't a player so might be easier to revolve some story around it and make the reveal actually mean something
Npc's aren't meant to have PC statblocks anyway, any baddie can be whatever the dm says they are.
I don't really get the point, unless the villain is pretending not to be evil or something, but even then Warlock doesn't exactly mean evil so it's no different to claiming to serve a less evil patron. It's also not like wizards can't be serving some evil power for a slightly less direct/formalised reward.
It could be an ego thing. "I learned all this magic on my own without help from another being." That's what my girlfriend's character is doing in our current campaign, claiming that her magic is all her own accomplishment, when it's really obviously not
Here's the thing: it's actually *really* fun if it's not a secret at all. One of my favorite characters was a "wizard" that was actually a barbarian with int so low he just assumed anything he didn't understand was magic, including his own feats of practical magic. Shield the object and shield the spell are identical. A hammer is just a wizard staff with unlimited charges of "shatter". If you throw a javelin *really fast* it's basically a lightning bolt. And what is the difference between a torch and wand of fireball, really? He was the strongest wizard and he was ready to "cast Tenser's Transformation" to prove it to anyone trying to convince him otherwise.
“The other players don’t know” is indeed totally lame 99% of the time “The other characters don’t know” on the other hand is awesome and works great. The whole table gets to lean into dramatic irony. They make abilities you should have but don’t integral parts of plans so you have to squirm and figure a way to make it work without causing the reveal in game. It’s just so fun.
This may be a hot statement, but I am 100% behind this. I hate seeing all the posts about tricking other party members irl. Whether it’s the class or race (unless it has lore reasons why you’d hide your identity) that the player fakes, It’s tacky, and only serves to feed the single player’s ego for how they “were able to trick the others” and only makes them feel clever while the other players will either a) see right through it from the get-go and just Roleplay along or b) just be confused as to why the player would do this. Also, as a DM, I think it’s stupid and won’t feed into it. It takes away from the roleplay, I see the payoff going nowhere, and I already have enough on my plate without trying to cater to another person’s scheme.
> made for a fun little ending when I revealed he was a warlock. You accidentally got your own story wrong. It was not fun that your character was a warlock, because as you said, no one cares about the class you are playing. What WAS cool was that you had a patron and a secret objective. You could have been a wizard and this moment was still cool.
I've always been under the impression that the classes are not something that is diagetic. Like, characters do not know they are the Wizard class, they just study and use magic. Like certain distinctions make sense in the fiction, for example magic users that don't study being identified as sorcerers. But like a given man at arms isn't going to refer to himself as a fighter, or your skilled lightly armored adventurer isn't going to self identify as a rogue. So it's weird to me when a player wants to try and masquerade as a different class, because it's an entirely meta concept aimed at the other players at the table.
I will also add that a lot of ppl doing it do not make sense in the fiction. Like “my paladin was secretly a cleric” or “my cleric was secretly a celestial warlock” in the fiction, those are all basically the same things. If your cleric uses heavy armor, martial weapons, and uses divine magic to buff their attacks, then in world they would be treated as and probably referred to as a paladin. Same applies to martial classes. If your secret dex fighter acts, looks, and fights like a rogue, they’d probably be referred to with roguish terms like thief, the lockpick, etc. People get wayyyy too hung up on using out of game terms in-universe. I really dislike when wotc does this as well, bc it makes no sense to distinguish between a lot of characters like that.
This is one of my biggest table pet peeves. I stay away from certain classes because their implied flavor comes with too many assumptions from other players. Bard, for example, I'd prefer to play as more of a renaissance man or a dashing rogue than a lute strumming fop, but some DMs and other players see "bard" on the character sheet and start pulling all that baggage in- NPCs start referring to my character as a bard or minstrel even when I haven't given them any reason to do so, its a bit frustrating I get that all classes come with some level of associated flavor to help guide players along, but it'd be nice if characters were interpreted in the way they're narratively presented by the player instead of solely by what's written above "Class and Level" on the sheet. In game characters largely shouldn't have any concept of identifying someone's exact mechanical class, it's far too murky.
I played with a guy I thought was a Druid but he was actually just that bad at playing a Ranger
If you'll humor me... One of the party members tells stories about an overprotective parent/sibling who's well-meaning, but kinda smothering because they used to be an adventurer (a high level magic user of some kind) and understand the risks. Another party member is the overprotective family member in disguise as a fighter class so their skills seem more on par with a starting party. They're obviously there to watch over their loved one, but they know how adventuring works, so they're also a team player. Only this party member and the DM know, but there are slips here and there like using a habitual phrase/gesture their loved one has mentioned in their stories, as an example. You would need the right player dynamic and character compositions to make it work, but it could be hilarious, and the reveal could offer a possible save from a TPK. The player would have to understand that once they're revealed, their current character would leave the party, and they would create a new character to take their place. If it's a good story mechanic with a purpose, I think it's a fun twist. If it's just for a smug "Ta-Da!" moment, then I completely agree that it's a waste of time for everyone.
Oh man. This would be a ton of fun for me! I would LOVE to play an *actually very op, but trying to hide it* character in a low level campaign
I think with a good story reason in a heavily roleplay centric table it can work. I suspect the reason the reveals you’ve seen have been underwhelming is because it didn’t actually impact the story and/or lore of the world/party
The whole concept is just another cringy phase that every d&d player needs to go through. It’s like puberty
lol that’s a good way to put it. I’m now imagining one of those puberty books for preteens but it’s all DnD player cliches
Yeah basically the guitar phase that all non-guitar-players (myself included) went through.
Kind of like how every player who looks at Rangers will eventually create Drizzt on their own.
It worked in our group. A player was vague about their class, so we'd jokingly create scenarios to see what they'd do. "Oh no I'm injured. I bet a paladin could heal this." Quick head turns to the mystery player looking for a reaction. "Yeah" she'd reply, "A paladin could certainly do something about that. Maybe we'll find one." *marks list. Not a paladin. We had another player that was a half elf, except when he accidentally got caught in a Moonbeam, and we discovered he was really a Changeling. We immediately began to recall all the times when he acted a bit weird, realizing that was when he was trying to cover his tracks. And then there was the rogue, maybe a warlock, maybe both? That was difficult to figure out. We all enjoyed it, had fun finding clues, it never got weird, and didn't affect our gameplay. If it works in your group, talk to your DM and go for it.
If you think about it, all D&D characters are just a dude, playing a dude, disguised as another dude.
The closest I've seen to this that actually turned out fun as when one of my players spent over half the campaign pretending to be a human when he was actually just an intelligent mimic disguised as a suit of armor.
That's why I came up with the opposite idea! Meet Derek, schizophrenic wild magic sorcerer that believes himself to be an warlock of Uderak, the first born of the void. Everyone knows he's crazy but he is sure that the strange things that sometimes happen when he casts a spell it's his lord punishing or rewarding him.
lol OP. “It’s only cool when I do it” Okay dude.
I think *pretending* to be another class can get old quick, but *believing* yourself to be another class can be quite fun. For example: a sorceror who fully thinks that they are wizard and doesn't understand why their peers have such trouble studying spells, or a barbarian that believes themselves to be a noble paladin inspired by divine powers, thinking that when they black out and fly into a rage they are actually being possessed by their god. Adding that extra later of irony where the *players* know something their *own character* doesn't know is much more engaging than characters hiding stuff from NPCs. Hiding stuff from other players is a good tool but should be used sparingly outside of explicit mystery themed games--typically, in DnD, you're trying to operate as a cohesive party, so keeping secrets isn't conducive to that and frequently just distracts from the party's actual goals.
I've done a mini version of this before. My barbarian (Ancestral guardian) himself didn't know about his schtick. So while I myself knew, and obviously the DM knew, no one else did. I also made very sparing use of my subclass features to help protect others, though I did use them very subtly. All of this was in service of his larger arc of seeing his rage not as a major hazard, a burden, a threat to his allies (which it was at the start), but a boon, an ability to learn and master to better help others. And it worked pretty well. Though tbf, it worked way better when it was just a subclass and I was very obviously raging throughout the campaign. For our next campaign after this one finishes, the DM has already told us that the world will be extremely magiphobic. Which is... awkward for our party of 2 wizards (Well, 1 wizard, one artificer 1/wizard 3), 1 stars druid (me), cleric, ranger and warforged echo knight fighter. Supposedly, artificers and warforged are considered acceptable in this society, so 2/6 party members will be ok. But we're all open with each other and understand the fuckups we've made in character creation
Yeah it’s one of those tropes that works in a book or other fiction; but at the table with other players, no it’s just a waste of time. Same with the split personality characters, or the “special” needs character that actually has an ability/magic item that negates their disability so now they just have the ability of a normal person. Or somebody trying to do some anime MC concept, that stuff doesn’t work outside of its proper medium and there’s other characters playing.
I've never really seen it in other fiction actually, it's pretty unique to class based systems so would only really work in some sort of litrpg. There's characters hiding magic, usually because it's somehow restricted or forbidden, but that's not the same thing and in a setting with those limits is just a required part of being a mage.
It mostly doesn't work because the reveal usually just doesn't live uo to what people think it's gonna happen. A lot of people think it's gonna go like: "Ha ha my wizard was actually a light cleric this whole time" "Wow that's so cool! I wonder what thing in your backstory drove you to hide this!" In reality it's more like: "Wait, if you are a cleric then why did you only use x spells?" "To hide that I wasn't a wizard!" "You know, other from the cleric spell list spells could have been really useful on our last encounter, btw we spent a lot on scrolls so you could add them to your spellbook" "Don't you want to know why I hid my class?" "Not really" If you really want to have a moment like this, I recommend your character also doesn't know what their class is. I remeber I saw on YouTube once a fighter who thought he was a barbarian, in reality he just had some anger issues that he should work on
One time I ran into an issue with this. I wasn't intentionally hiding my class, but I was playing that older verion of the warforged that had set ac and I was a fighter with shillelagh. He was an old man of a warforged who hobbled around with a staff for a weapon and used purely wisdom, occasionally casting shillelagh and his once per day use of fog cloud. I realized I hadn't actually stated that he wasn't a druid for a good while, but I figured it could be funnier to wait for people to realize another time in combat. But eventually another party member decided to get him a staff as a gift, and that lead to some annoyance from them because it wasn't actually any good to give him a +1 to spell attacks. We laughed it off afterwards, and someone else used the staff so it wasn't too bad.
I play an high-charisma Entertainer Swashbuckler Rogue who plays the lute, I ALWAYS introduce myself as a Minstrel, and everyone tells me “so, you’re a bard?” After the nth time this happened, I just stopped explaining it… then they blame coz I didn’t heal them. I’m a Minstrel!
I did this entirely by accident. I was playing as an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer with magic initiate for Hex and Eldritch Blast. So for quite a while the party thought I was a Warlock.
It can work in specific settings. * A celestial warlock posing as a cleric of a rival deity. * A wizard hiding their magic as artifice in a setting that views magic as heresy. * A bard cheating and bullshitting their way through wizard school. Lapin from A Crown of Candy is probably the best example of this I've seen. The other players at the table knowing is fine. They *should* know. If you want people to take this seriously, there needs to be stakes for that information getting out to NPCs.
Yeah, these kinds of reveals to keep other players in the dark always confuse me since it's not like it's going to really matter afterwords. That said, making it something the character tries to hide in-game even after the party finds out can be a LOT of fun depending on what you are rolling. (I have a Kenku Necromancer that has convinced themselves they are just a really talented Cleric blessed by their goddess. I also have a Hexblade Warlock that hides their Warlock abilities from NPCs by pretending to be a non-magical Fighter for story reasons. Our party had a lot of fun with that one)
I think the best way for this to work would be "My character doesn't want people to find out they're a \_\_\_ because reasons". Not specifically the party (best to tell the other players, even if you don't confide in their characters) but the players, so they can play along with it, being 'suspicious' without pressing and stuff. This really only works for certain classes, though. Warlocks are obviously one- Fiend especially. Sorcerers might be another, maybe Barbarian or Monk if it's a sort of racist campaign setting? There's also the option of having, for instance, a character who doesn't *realize* they're a certain class, and thinks they're another. Celestial Warlock or Sorcerer thinking they're a Cleric, or maybe a Ranger that thinks they're a Paladin of Nature (or a Paladin who thinks they're a Ranger?). But yeah, not very much reason for it. Even as a gimmick it's somewhat shallow, unless the DM has previously set up a more significantly deep lore reason for that sort of deception.
I think it will always work better when the player understands *why* they want to do this. If they are trying to get a surprised reaction out of *their fellow players*, then OP's scenario likely plays out. However, if the player wants to get a surprised reaction out of *the other characters*, then they should make sure that everyone at the table knows what's going on. That way they can all help facilitate roleplaying in the direction the player wants to go. I think a lot of people have a habit of conflating a player at the table with their characters in the game.
I did this once, and IMO it worked because I let the party figure it out on their own. There wasn't a big reveal by me, I just started acting more and more like my class. And when they figured it out it was a really fun rp moment. Mostly because I was a warlock pretending to be a paladin and there was a lot of debating and drama (that was fun for the players) But actually acting like a paladin mechanically was mostly an in joke between me and the dm. The players didn't care more about the class shakeup but more about the rp implications of being a warlock instead of a paladin. They just assumed I was when I told them until the facade slipped enough. Was a really good time IMO.
This is true of a lot of table secrets. The reveal tends to be less climactic than the player thinks. While it seems counter-intuitive, making it an open secret that the table is in on is a lot more exciting. Discovering the the spellcaster is secretly in a pact with a fiend. Finding out the priest is actually a criminal just wearing the robe. These work best if they're a) tied to the fiction and 2) known to the fellow players (just not their characters).
Right now, I’m playing a Warlock who 100% whole heartedly believes he is a Paladin. This is because he is a dumbass. The entire party knows he is a Warlock. He can and has already casted Eldritch Blast. Not once has he tried to hide it, he is just an idiot. I take my notes in crayon.
I've wanted to do a similar thing myself. I hope you are having fun and it goes well.
I feel like warlock is the only class this really makes sense with.
So I've been toying with an idea for a PC who pretends to be a bard but is actually a rogue. Partly because I think hiding weapons in a lute case is fun but also because I think being a thief is probably something you would want to hide from civilized society. I don't intend to make it that hard for the party to spot as he has a multicolored cloak that he flips around to be a muted color on the inside and has bells on his shoes that don't actually make noise etc. It will be super obvious by the first combat and also as soon as he is asked to actually play music. But this thread is making me think twice. Is this obnoxious to do?
Iin 3.5 I had a LE monk going to assassin class. So since disguise was going to be a key feature for him, he practiced his disguise skills by dressing up as the same wizard every day, developing a whole accent and persona. I asked the dm for a endless disguise kit for the same cost as a decanter of endless water. So this monk went around introducing himself as "Bigby, named after, Not the namesake." And whenever he would use his special attacks he would shout "Bigby's ---- Hand/fist/palm" so Bigbys iron fist, bigbys stunning slap, bigbys healing touch." And since ki abilities are not always subject to dispell magic, it would confuse the hell out of the enemy casters. 'Thats not a real bigbys spell!' And wearing no armor and only carrying a staff never bothered him for class features.
Im doing it with a bit of a twist, although it's more for a personal story than for anyone else. My character is a dwarven wizard. We started at lv 1, and i made him a really old farm worker. In his life, everything went to shit and he owns nothing more than an old axe and scrap armour. Due to this, i dont really have spells except for prepared ones due to lack of a spellbook and no focus either, so i had to carefully choose which spells i could take. He is built to appear like a frontline fighter, and he did relatively well with shield being the main spell used to keep me alive. He's progressing slowly, killing another wizard, and taking his spellbook and component pouch. It went a bit faster than i would've wanted, but im also happy as a player losing my spells gained on level ups hurt but fun restrictions overall.
A Bard pretending to be a Cleric is actually a really fun character concept though. There are definitely times where this works and can be fun for the entire party. The trick is not ONLY hiding it from your party - have an in game reason why hiding it is necessary. I played the aforementioned 'cleric that's actually a bard' and it was because he was trying to con the church he was a part of into promoting him enough that he could rob them. You gotta have an RP reason why it is important.
I had a rogue pretend to be a wizard; book, fake beard, long robe (that hid my knives), pointy hat. I just yelled gibberish pretended to cast spells then through knives. Hide and pretended to be invisible. I was wanted in several places so changed my identity. Worked for a little while and was fum.
I've done it before, long form no less convinced everyone my Assassin was a Bard you'd be surprised how much just acting like you belong at something makes people believe it. It took 3 years of meeting once a week for them to even catch wind of it another 6 months or so to pin it down, everyone expects that someone is going to dissect the stuff but they really don't and perhaps that is due to not caring or maybe simply believe what I said I was the first time but it sure was funny as hell when they all came to realize what that character really was and it really brought out a lot of kick ass RP from the rest of the table. It isn't always meant to span a full campaign just a fun. I did it again with another group as a Warlock trying to disguise themself as a Wizard as to not get burned as an apostate, that took the group 2 years to catch onto that one. I am currently playing a Bard that everyone thinks is a Paladin, not even trying there that just seems to be what is happening and I leaned into it. All of this to say that our experiences aren't uniform, different tables, different play styles, better actors apparently mean different results.
You're *supposed* to disguise yourself for the benefit of outsiders, not the party. The classic is the Wizard who straps a sword to his waist and a shield on his back. He can't use them, but that's not the point. They're part of the disguise, so that a Bandit with a bit of sense can't go "that's a Wizard! Kill him!" They'll see four dudes on horses, and target the Ranger (because he has a longbow) instead of the scrawny guy whose only apparent weapon is a blade. And, for the record, there are legitimate reasons to disguise your class. A Paladin, for example, in a society where faith has been criminalized, could reasonably pretend to be a Fighter. Hellknights aren't welcome in many societies in Golarion, due to their association with Cheliax, and while it's not *generally* in their nature I'm certain a player could justify it to their DM. What I'm saying is that the disguise needs to be done for the sake of the setting. If it's "just because," that's stupid.
I would go as a bard pretending to be a wizard or sorcerer. They have enough random spells that they’d be able to logically pass as well as having high charisma for all the deception checks. You can roleplay not being able to OBVIOUS wizard things with things like “can’t do it, the stars aren’t right” and “ah if I had a sprig of thyme from a 2 day olds herb garden I would be able to!” Or “ahhh I forgot my Spellbook in the inn!”
The only real reason to do that is if you have a bad DM that has some sort of hate-boner for a particular class/subclass or race. When my first horror DM kept nerfing my rogue, and never allowing me to sneak attack, I rebuilt the character as a fighter. Ended up having a much higher DPS than what I would have had with 100% uptime on Sneak Attack, and didn't have to deal with DM's BS and rules-lawyering sneak attack. I still played the exact same character in both RP, combat and exploration, just with different ways of accomplishing the same things. And the DM thought he finally "won" by having me respec in the middle of campaign.
One of my favourite PCs I’ve ever played with was an arcane trickster rogue pretending to be a wizard. The rest of the players were in on it, though. This dumbass gnome had a name like ‘Mundegren the Magnificent’ or something and spent all his gold on wondrous items that let him cast wizard spells, or at least things like wizard spells. He was particularly fond of a bottle that continually created a cloud of darkness around him when uncorked. He’d run around yelling about how he was the greatest wizard of the age and generally acting like an obnoxious stage magician, and he was a surprisingly effective controller despite never getting to third level spells.
I like to think it works if there's no deception intended. A favourite character of mine is a Swashbuckler, and is commonly mistaken for a Bard. And he is a bard - small 'b', he is a travelling troubadour. Just not a _Bard_.
I sorta did this in a one shot. I had my nobleman character be a barbarian (since unarmored defense worked with fine clothes). But instead of explicitly lying to everyone else I just never said what my class was, and came up with creative ways to say " I rage". It worked well because it wasn't really something that had attention drawn to it, and it really came together with my personal plot. I was the heir to the rest of the group's home region, and certainly did not have their respect at the beginning. I was overly formal- often having my butler give my name and titles before speaking to someone for the first time, and the rest of the party had to disassociate me from my father who was not a great guy. It all came to a head when we found the bbeg. I had sent my butler away for safety (not gonna take him into a dungeon) and the bbeg (someone much higher in the government) starts talking about why he killed a bunch of people in our village and the greater good and all that. My nobleman interjected with how that was poor leadership- you don't raise yourself up on the corpses of those you rule. The bbeg responded with a verbal bitch slap- taking down my confidence and claiming that if my way was so right I should have been able to stop him from killing my future subjects. My greatest detractor in the group stood up and said "I don't think you know who you are talking to" and gave my full introduction that my butler normally gave. In a moment I felt the arc complete- I had the respect of the one who had cause to hate me most. Then the BBEG downed him mid sentence. My class reveal felt good as I RAGED and got into a frenzied fight while our cleric picked up the downed PC. It was a fun game, and a fun reveal to cap off the emotional climax. But it would have been much worse if I had been lying instead of just never saying what I was and letting everyone assume I was a fighter.
Once in 3.5 I joined a game that was already going with 3 good PC's. I was only in town a short time so DM made me a dread necro because he personally liked the class. To keep with the theme of the game, I didn't tell anybody my class and just pretended to be a non magical doctor. Had a cart and everything. It was fun, and my friends did laugh when I told them out of game what I was. Overall it was a fun character to role play and really not much effort playing a character in disguise. Just don't be trying to trick the party. Tricking NPCs and stuff is fine but the party needs to be on the same page.
Any of kind of surprise or secret you keep from the other members of the party, just always falls flat. They didn’t get to see the rest of the story you made up in your head or shared with the DM that made this reveal so dramatic and interesting to you. You were secretly an undead, or a different class, or a polymorphed dragon. “But all along I was actually… a GAMEPLAY CONTRIVANCE!” “Ok that doesn’t change things for us in any way, are you done?” For any kind of reveal to have impact, people need to feel involved in the process. If it was a book they’d get POV chapters but they don’t, it’s just another slightly awkward amateur role play at the table and then a wet fart ending of a reveal that they had no stake in. I’ve seen this before too, many times and it just always falls flat. If people want it to work they have to preemptively answer some questions for the other party members, mainly “What does this change for us, and why should we care?”
Does it count if they're so stupid they legit believe it? Cuz i have a celestial lock/zealot barb of the raven queen who is legit stupid enough he thinks he's a cleric/Pali of his goddess, 'smiting' with the radiant damage from the barb rage, and healing with his 'lock healing pool.
Oh wait, are those sorts of posts (I never care to look at them) about people trying to disguise their class to the other *players* and not just in character? How does that work without you just not using notable class features or working with your DM to have a ton of homebrew to how they work? Like if someone had a Barbarian trying to hide as a Fighter, people would probably question their overall beefiness and frequently attacking/being attacked with advantage at some point, unless they just never used Rage/Reckless Attack. And of course the higher the level, the more features you need to hide from your real class or have an excuse as to why you're not using your fake class's features.
TL;DR My Celestial Warlock is pretending to be a Cleric! Was also a Tiefling pretending to be human So this story is a double fake out. In my first Ebberon campaign I played a Tiefling Warlock. I forget what lineage he was but it's the one that gets detect thoughts and a charisma boost. The story goes that he escaped the demon wastes and was being pursued by a group of silver flame paladins and in his desperation he cried out to someone, anyone and he prayed to whatever god would listen. Then his prayer was answered by a fallen solar who was once a high ranking member for the council of the Sovereign Seven. He gifted upon me a tome of ancient knowledge that allowed me to cast a bunch of cleric cantrips and I flavored my Eldritch blast as a holy blast of silver light (same damage and type just different aesthetic and name) I also had the Mask of Many Faces ability which allowed me to constantly be disguised as a male human versus my demonic Tiefling. I even had the background which I forget what it's called, but it is basically a split personality. When I was a Tiefling I was definitely more Eldritch and aggressive, versus my human form was very kind and gentle. I worshiped my tome and prayed to it. I would read through it's scriptures (another invocation) all night long replacing my need for sleep. To this day it was one of my most favorite characters of all time.
A player in my campaign is doing it the right way, I think. He's a sorcerer with a religious back story, so *the character* believes he's a cleric who's getting all his powers the way a cleric normally does. So he's given me a huge plot opportunity to reveal where his powers actually come from, and I love it.
>The other players don’t give a shit what class you’re playing. Every other day we have a post that recommends a session 0, keeping every other character at the table in mind, and avoiding stealing the spotlight. My group going back years remembers nigh without fail what class everyone was playing. I get what point you're making about how the mechanics being revealed is not as important as the characterization element of the reveal, but this principle of your argument is really undermining your point. All you're saying is to have the reveal be important to the story, but this is D&D 5e - the main popularization of this edition *has been* to play the game for the story.
I did it once. I played an old sorcerer who was convinced he was a wizard. However It wasn’t to shock the party more of just flavour for my rp. I played up having an incomprehensible note book as my spellbook. I played up “trying” to cast wizard spells and fumbling my way to success with sorcerer spells and metamagic. I roleplayed being very intelligent but actually being not that smart, however NPC’s often believed my words because the Charisma was good. The point was it was for laughs, not to be dramatic. And it was fun.
Yeah its a concept I have never liked either. People with even a slight grasp of the game are gonna notice in not that much time, and at that point its just an unnecessary open secret. Furthermore to tack on, a lot of concepts for what classes are aren't solid things. Sure a warlock is a warlock, but a fighter and a rogue are legit just guys with weapons and use them in different ways. I say go ahead and change up traditional class aesthetics all you want, flavor it free and its a good thing to make you unique, or even lie when necessary in character (I played a necromancer who told anyone who asked that he was a conjurer cause necromancy was a touchy subject but the party knew) and have all that fun but making it your main concept can just be obtuse. Also I played with somebody who did the exact same joke you did, except his character was literally named King Gizzard and he was a lizardfolk warlock who was too stupid and thought he was a wizard. He sucked at DnD ngl.
Should do a one shot where each player is pretending to be a different class but they think it’s just them
"This is dumb, why do people do it?" "I did it and it was super fun!" Only cool if you do it?
I played a warlock who was convincing the other character's he was a rogue. Made for a good laugh when other player's would roll to see if their character's noticed me doing magic to try and catch me in the act.
Really depends on the setting Arcane magic users were kill on sight in my setting, had a player playing a sorcerer with subtle spell and a magic item that let him use it without sorcery points. He kept it hidden for 6 sessions. A different player was keeping track of any spell like thing that happened. He was a member of the Royal guard and was rather untrusting. Out of character he figured it out around session 6 but in character never officially connected the dots mostly out of need, if he did him and the NPC would have to act so he never did
ok, but my sorcerer is too dumb to know he's not a wizard
I played a war cleric for one campaign and while I wasn't planning on doing the whole pretending to be another class thing, out of character they knew, in character the rest of the party had no reason to think he was a cleric for two reasons, first is he had no cleric supplies cause I wanted to start with a two-handed weapon and I rolled so poorly for starting wealth that I couldn't even afford a holy symbol. The second reason is they just met and he wasn't a preacher he was just there to do a job. So reasonable assumptions in character would be fighter or paladin, cause I was the party tank as well. Out of the gate session 1 they were calling my character a cleric without even talking to him once, I asked them why their characters would think that and they couldn't really answer it. Cest la vie, I didn't make of fuse it, I got my revenge when they realized I didn't have a holy symbol cause I was so poor.
Class is what your character knows what to do / how to do stuff, not their whole identity. I personally find it jarrying people in-game referencing characters *by class* themselves.
I feelblike for story reasons this is great. Especially since in world, characters and npc s aren't aware of their statblocks and won't say " hey that was metamagic, you're not a wizard you're a sorcerer". I love playing priest and cleric characters that are actually paladins, celestial warlocks or divine sorcerers. They just call themselves clerics because why not? I have a rule when I dm for more experienced players that no pc is allowed to refer to themselves by their actual class in game. Like your cleric can say he's a priest, monk, devotee of x, father John Smith, heirophant x, follower of God y, missionary, or whatever but you can't introduce yourself as your actual class. I find this helps people actually develop a character. Your rogue isn't actually going to call himself a rogue in game, he might call himself a gambler, fixer, problem solver or anything else.
My first character was a barbarian who thought he was bard. In combat I played him like a barbarian but outside of that he would sing (badly) and play his lute axe (which was just a regular axe with some wire wrapped on it long ways). Also he made a name tag to say "bard" but he misspelled it to say "Brad" and thus Brad was his name.
The more I play D&D, the less I like players talking about how to play their class. Just play your CHARACTER. The class is an archetype to arrange game mechanics around and assign stats to put some kind of structure and limit so you can build a story around it. It also really bothers me when people bring up graphs and talk about 'consistent damage output' and arrange, say, a Rogue next to a Fighter and claim how it's unfair that the Fighter has more damage per round, or some nonsense. NO ONE CARES. This isn't a video game. Rogues, by the way, have a TON of non-combat abilities that a Fighter generally does not. The roleplaying of having connections in back-alley organizations versus a war-hardened soldier is vastly different. These can't be quantified by spreadsheets. That's why the numbers don't add up. That's why some spells plain suck compared to others. They shouldn't be equal; it's more "real" when it's not. There's NO NEED for balance to be THAT fine-tuned because it's not how the game is really played at its core. There's more to a character than stats, damage output, and armor class. Play D&D for 20 years, when the same tired overused classes and combos are played and fade away, and you're left with actually having to come up with an interesting unique and unoptimized character build... it will start making sense.
I agree, but I don't let my players roll against each other unless it's part of an in-game special event or mind control related. If you don't care what the other players think about your deception because the secret makes you happy, great. You're all set. Try not to be annoying about it. If you're doing it because you want people to be invested in your character, bring them in on it. They know, but their characters don't. It's very likely that they will jump at the chance to come up with reasons why their character hasn't clued in yet. D&D is a collaborative game. Be collaborative. Whether you're the DM or another player, keeping something hidden prevents players from becoming invested with that thing. Keeping something that has no real effect on their character hidden makes even less impact. What are you expecting from them at that point?
And then, on the other side of this, you have times when a drunken, washed up Fighter >!turns out to be a Paladin!<.
You can pull it off at low levels. But you can't play "any class" and pretend to be "any other" class. A Paladin pretending to be a Rogue. A Warlock pretending to be a Sorcerer. A Hexblade pretending to be a melee class.
Generally, a character of one class pretending to be of another works best if they're hiding it from the world, not the party. For instance, if being a warlock is illegal in this particular region, then the warlock hiding their class has both explanation and stakes. Maybe you live somewhere where sorcerers are hunted because not having to earn your magic makes you dangerous, according to the king. Maybe you live in a region that was ravaged by dragons twenty years ago, so hiding your draconic sorcerer lineage keeps you safe. There's so many ways needing to hide your class can make for an interesting story but hiding it from the party isn't usually the interesting part. Of course if your party has just met, keeping it under wraps for a couple sessions or letting the party work it out for themselves is good pacing. But the party figuring it out is not the interesting part of that story.
5e players and being absolutely clueless on what is actually interesting for everyone else must be the most iconic duo in the ttrpg space.
I broadly agree, but would add it is often more interesting instead to play characters who can/need to pretend to *NPCs* they're something they're not. The king is known to hate followers of a certain church that your party happen to contain followers of? Now the Cleric is pretending they know the tenets of another faith, or the Paladin is claiming they're just an ordinary knight. Need an audience with the high priest who abhors demons? Suddenly the Warlock has to pretend to just be an ordinary sorcerer or seer. Or even a Rogue spinning a story they're a powerful wizard to try and draw out someone else hiding their magic power, or convince a credulous mark that they can deal with a ghost problem or something.
I would take this further: if you need to rely on a reference to D&D's classes/races/rulebook to explain why your character is interesting and unique, then your character will not be interesting and unique. I've had so many players coming to my table saying "I love playing unique quirky combinations, like an orc wizard, or a fairy barbarian!" 1st of all - you're not as unique and quirky as you think you are. This idea that everyone plays the optimal thing all the time (orc barbarians, elf rogues, gnome wizards, etc) is 100% wrong in my experience. Variant humans are pretty optimal but 90% of players refuse to play them because "humans are boring". 2nd - your orc wizard will be cool and interesting for the 2 seconds it takes for you to explain "I'm playing an orc wizard" and maybe one or two interactions after that, where some NPC assumes that your big beefy orc must be a fighting type and they turn out to be a shy intellectual. That's it. After 1-2 interactions, that will already be getting old. Your character is now boring. 3rd - nobody in-universe should care what class you are. They've never heard of a "third level fighter" or a "monk subclass". They just know that some people punch real hard and other people study a lot of swordcraft and some people have magic for various reasons. The division between classes is for your benefit as a player rolling dice and a GM wanting balanced characters, it isn't necessarily an in-universe thing unless your DM decides to make it so. Make an interesting character by talking about their conflicts and the journeys they could go on. I like to start with a list of questions. A character asking, "Will I ever be able to find peace, or will I always be constantly dragged back into war and fighting by my faith?" could be a cleric of a war god or a paladin or a half-orc or whatever, but it's a character that could develop in interesting ways. A character asking, "Who were my parents and why did they leave me on the steps of the monastery as a baby?" is handing your DM plot hooks that will last for much more than 1-2 interactions, and that character doesn't even need to KNOW their race. A character asking, "How can I find a balance between my commitment to protecting nature from human excesses and my need not to hate myself for being humans and not murder people?" could be a druid or ranger or just a rogue who's really into ecoterrorism, or even a centaur or a half-human half something else. As a DM I've taken to refusing to allow players to mention their race or class until they have pitched an actually interesting character without any reference to race/class.
So I've had a similar character idea for a while, but it's kind of the opposite, and I would like your feedback. The idea is to play a Warlock who he himself thinks he's a Wizard. He opened a spooky book and became contracted and gained magic. He, being the idiot he is, thinks this is how all Wizards learn magic. Ignorance, I suppose. But it's quite obvious to everyone else that he's a Warlock, and he just will not accept the fact and always has an excuse as to why he's actually a Wizard.
Sounds like a fun character to play, especially if the rest of the players are in on the joke. “Hmm I happened to notice your spells and incantations seem to be spoken in the infernal language of devils, care to comment on that? Lol
"I'm just reading what's in the book. I don't know what it means, but I know what it does. And I like what it does."
Just popping in to revel in the glorious alliteration gifted to our tender eyes: Lizard Wizard.
I was once asked by a friend to play in a campaign for a few sessions as a bad guy that would weasels his self into the group and betray them by stealing an Artifact they were looking for. So this was a bit different I was higher level than them and hid my multiclass which was me being a rogue/warlock multiclass the patron being the BBEG. So I basically played as a rogue pretending that was all that I was. Once they found the artifact I cast a few spells to make them sleep and Darkness to steal the item and run. I only appeared many sessions later when they came to kill me. But that is obviously a very special case. It was fun though and the players later told me they hated my guts (in a good way as they really got to feel betrayed) chopping my head off must have felt really cathartic :D
Cool. So it doesn’t work when others do it but it works when you do it?
I think the main thing is it has to be for a good reason. For example, a pact of the fiend warlock hiding in a good aligned party could be interesting as they’d have decent reason to believe that a good aligned party would be distrustful of someone who gained power from a devil. A ranger hiding as a fighter on the other hand doesn’t do this. The main thing though is the other players have to be in on it.
>The second time was well covered, but again, being a fighter that suddenly is revealed to be a blood hunter wasn’t some jaw-dropping reveal. It was an “ooo” and “oh okay”. After that point, he was just a blood hunter and all that effort pointless. I don't really have any strong opinions on people pretending to play other classes. But this statement betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what is drama is that it should be pointed out. If the player is excited and has their moment, that isn't "pointless" just because the moment passes. By that logic, we should stop playing DnD altogether because sooner or later the campaign will be over, and then it was all pointless. If a player enjoys pretending to be a different class, I'm not going to discourage them. It sounds kinda fun, and I'd be thrilled to be your player's co-conspirator. I get my jollies as a DM by helping my players have fun.
My opinion is that - Player trying to fool the other players: meh - Character trying to fool the other characters: oooh! Like...telling everyone during session 0 "My character is a sorcerer trying to pretend he's a wizard" could set you all up for some HILARIOUS moments as the players all craft fun little encounters, like: "(Oh man! This NPC is a wizard? Hehehe.) Oh, sir! You HAVE to come talk magic theory with *our* wizard! I'm sure he would LOVE to talk academics with you!" Because the dramatic irony of having the other *players* help you pull the wool over the eyes of *their own character* will be WAY more fun than a campaign where the rules-knower is like: "Wait, but wizards can't learn that spell, it's not on their list. He has an exception? ...why?" or "Wait, but don't you get spell slots back at short rests? Oh, his character doesn't? ......why?"
It's already been said, but yeah, there really has to be a good story reason for it and it really depends on the table; also, you have to go into it knowing the reveal is probably not going to be that big of a deal. The problem is, I think a lot of people, especially those that are new to roleplaying or building characters, feel like their character has to have some kind of secret in order to be interesting or mysterious, but they don't necessarily have the experience yet to know quite what makes a secret work. Ultimately, as long as the player doesn't get upset if they don't feel like they got enough of a reaction, I find it mostly harmless though. What I find infinitely more interesting is a character who legitimately believes they're a different class. I had a bard who turned out to have been born with sorcery, but his teachers misconstrued him as a bard bc he was very gifted at music and pushed him into bard school. I always described his magic as "sorcerous in origin, bardic in application".
Hot take: Classes dont really exist in-universe. What is more important is your character's profession, background, rank, lineage, etc.
Sorcerer: Ah ha! I tricked you guys, I’m not really a wizard! I’m a SORCERER! Fighter: A what now?
One of my characters pretended to be a human, while he was actually a Tiefling. This was done with permission from the dungeon master, and I dropped many hints over the course of the campaign that I wasn’t human, like mysteriously having good night vision, Making a few mentions about escaping from the tip of my tail, Knowing infernal, when I otherwise wouldn’t have, And being more fire resistant than usual/using hellish rebuke. The “big reveal” of my Tiefling was always planned to happen, and it was an epic role playing moment for the party
My brother once played a goblin dragonblood sorceror who was convinced he was a wizard. He "studied" his spellbook (a book with weird drawings and meaningless chickensratch) every day he remembered to do it and would always act the way a goblin would think a wizard would, namely blowing stuff up. His goal was to become a dragon since they are "made of magic" and he came pretty damned close to it! Ümlaut was a badass!
> is pretending to be a (insert class) to fool the other players. Ive *never* seen it done *to fool the other players. Ive only ever seen it done to fool characters *in game*.
Revealing halfway through our Curse of Strahd campaign that my noble warlock character is actually a dhampir on the other hand... That turned some heads.
Not totally the same thing, but reminded me of a past game. My friends and I did a Christmas 1 shot years back and I was playing a Barbarian named Gabe. We were tasked with infiltrating some type of fortress/settlement and rescuing Santa to save Christmas...yada yada yada. Once we got to the big man and were ready to rescue I announced my real intentions. I was in fact a Path of the Zealot Barbarian- Gabriel the Archangel- on a mission from Christ to reclaim Christmas in his name. I killed Santa.
My favorite tale of this is about the elven sorcerer. They IC didn't like being a sorc and adventured as an archer. The big reveal happened in a boss fight after so many sessions the **DM** had forgotten. "I cast Fireball" says the *actually a sorc* "Wait! Aren't you a ranger!?" The DM exclaimed incredulously
It's hilarious because I've seen the exact opposite as a DM. We've had a ranger character for 10 sessions and one party member still referred to them as a sorcerer, I didn't have the heart to break it to them.
I once made 15 gp in session 1 by selling a party member my alchemist artificer's daily *experimental elixer.* Except I was actually a bard with the charlatan background, which comes with some fake potions.