How To Be Korra (In 4e D&D)

How To Be is a series I’ve been writing for a few years now and an important part of that has been making sure there’s no strong bias towards making lots of boring dudes who hit things as their main way of interacting with the world.

Here’s a girl whose main way of interacting with the world is hitting them, and maybe hitting on them.

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How To Be: Blue Mary (in 4e D&D)

How To Be is a blog series I created to address the claim that Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (the Best Edition) stifles creativity and limits the kinds of characters you can make. While that’s true, in that you can largely only make Dungeons & Dragons characters (who are good at doing things for Dungeons and for Dragons), there’s still a lot of room to create in that genre. The series is therefore about picking characters to make them in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (the Best Edition), and I select them through a careful process of throwing a bunch of ideas into a spreadsheet and seeing which ones randomise up. There are characters who are challenging to construct, where I have to find some way to represent the aesthetics of one type of violence-doer in a system that doesn’t have them, and those are really interesting challenges that can involve creative problems that are really hard to solve.

And then there are characters I pick because I think they’re dope and they’re really easy.

That’s what we’re doing this time.

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How To Be: Rimuru Tempest (in 4e D&D)

Isekai is an overcrowded genre of media in which a few works stand tall. Some of them are just enduring classics of the form, things like Escaflowne and El Hazard, works that served to crystallise a genre. Some have been successful beyond all reasonable ken, like Sword Art Online. Resultant from that has been a whole diversifying ecosystem of isekai stories that expand on the narrative wishes of their increasingly specific wants. As an example, the want to not go to work, and suddenly being hot enough to be voiced by Miho Okasaki.

That’s right, it’s…

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How to Be: Frieren (in 4e D&D)

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an anime about what happens after an adventure is over and the player character with all of their level 20 powers wanders the world keeping their brains from being pickled by the feelings of losing all your friends. It’s a well-regarded, critically acclaimed series, and it’s clearly resonating with a lot of people. It’s a story about grieving and loss and finding your own purpose, as well as a story about connecting to your own emotions, and recognising the way your own life can pass by you.

It is also a story about a petite smug elf who turns into animated gifs really well.

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How To Be: Princess Zelda (in 4e D&D)

Hey, haven’t I done this before?

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How To be: Sherlock Holmes (In 4e D&D)

In this project, there’s always a challenge presented by every character. Even when the character straight up ports from a piece of media based on Dungeons & Dragons there’s always going to be something that comes in the translation that has challenges going back. Usually, the problem is one of specificity, where the character is represented in a particular form that can be very clear, with fine detail — a high resolution image, as it were. If a character can leap twice their height and do a diving bomb attack with their weapon, and they do that all the time, any build is going to have to represent that meaningfully or it won’t feel like the character.

The other, rarer problem, perhaps only encountered once before with Robin Hood, is when I’m talking about a character with such vast cultural presence that there’s almost anything they could do.

The game is afoot.

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Decemberween: The 2025 How To Be Covers

Every month throughout the year, I make an article about taking Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and using a system that is somewhat renowned for being confining and unexpressive, and using it to represent a character who is meant to belong to a different kind of property. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and every year, I try to present an article where you can just look at the covers, nice and high resolution, clear and visible and not in the middle of a field or at an odd angle. It’s also a chance to reflect on the How to Be Category.

Here’s 2025!

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How To Be: Captain America (in 4e D&D)

Doing this kind of exercise about real long-running characters can be an interesting challenge because so many of them, with enough time, try enough things in different ways that it’s challenging to really identify what makes the character the character to everyone.

And sometimes it’s really easy because Disney makes a billion dollars selling pictures of his butt.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-captain-america-in-4e-dd/

#dnd4e #howToBe

How To Be: Gideon Nav (in 4e D&D)

What a bozo!

First things first, before we go past the fold (as we normally do), I need to lay out a quick spoiler warning. I’m going to mention things about Gideon Nav, the protagonist of Gideon the Ninth and a factor in the subsequent stories Harrow the Ninth and Nona The Ninth.

What I’m going to discuss is what I consider establishing details; that is, it’s hardly really meaningful for me to tell you that Gideon Nav is a tall woman with red hair and a sword, even if, strictly speaking, those are things revealed in the later chapters of the book. I don’t intend to spoil anything meaningfully deep about why things are the way they are for Gideon, so you can read this if you want.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-gideon-nav-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe

How To Be: Nobara Kugisaki from Jujutsu Kaisen (In 4e D&D)

I like Jujutsu Kaisen but I don’t like how it went. Not because the story is bad, per se, but because the things that it wanted to focus on weren’t as cool to me as the things they were doing before that focus happened. Nonetheless, it’s a banger of a show and it has some great character designs, such as today’s subject:

As a necessity this is going to include some spoilers. After all, Nobara is not in the first episode of the anime or the first issue of the manga, which means even her existence is a spoiler (geeze, look at that anime ending, spoilering such important things like ‘she exists’). Necessarily, though, I am going to mention some things about how this character’s story goes, and includes spoiling things from both an old season of anime and a manga story that’s four years old.

Point is, you’ve had your time to catch up if you care a lot, but even then, I’m giving you a spoiler warning here if you want it.

Also, Content Warning: Jujutsu Kaisen is a horror action manga and I’m going to mention themes that could invoke self-harm.

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https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-nobara-kugisaki-from-jujutsu-kaisen-in-4e-dd/

#DnD4e #HowToBe