Has anybody here ever tried to roleplay a legit mute character? How did/would you go about it?
I tried grunts, gestures and writing crookedly on paper for all of a half-hour, and then reverted to bullshit like 'through his awesome pantomime skills, Franz communicates this ridiculously complicated idea in minute detail', only using less cheaty methods for flavor.
E: Sir Bearington doesn't count. He's a distinguished gentleman who can speak, as we all know.
A guy I played with a couple of times played a deep dwarf that refused to speak to outsiders. I think he passed notes of anything he wanted to say to the guy playing his brother (symbolising muttering in another language), who would then read them out. If there's someone who knows sign language in the party, you could do that. If there isn't, well.
Read this as "refused to speak to angels and demons". And elementals I think?
I played a mute character briefly. It didn't work particularly well since there were only three player characters, and my previous character had sorta kinda been the leader. In that I kept track of the quests, and reminded the others about what we were originally there to do.
I say sorta kinda because my character (blaster cleric) was just as reckless as the wizard, and responsible for almost half the burnt taverns (literally. We kept a COUNT on our wiki). So it was often the barbearian (sic) who would reign in our magic experiments, and then my character would recall the actual mission from his copious notes.
So, my mute character... Was going for something different. A mute melee dervish with issues, kinda like a River Tam situation. This did not work well, since the others kinda did rely on me to track the quests. So the PCs kept stalling in important NPC conversations as we dropped into OOC for reminders.
Oh dang, I almost forgot that she wasn't supposed to be a PC at all, just a cohort for my new bard character who was designed to know *even more about everything* and be a perfect vessel for my OOC knowledge. But the RNG fucked him *hard*. First he got sent to the shadow plane within minutes of being introduced thanks to our traditional game of "drink the unidentified potions". I swear I am not making this up. He managed to come back from that, just in time to get killed in his sleep by a lich rage mage (first combat encounter he ever saw). Chain lightning, he wasn't even targeted specifically.
And when we went to reincarnate him, using our special !!FUN!! table, the RNG rolled a tarrasque. Odds about 1/500 IIRC. So yeah that didn't work out... I later came up with an in-rules way to undo the reincarnation (true resurrection I think?) but the DM didn't think it would work.
So instead of a walking library with support spells, I had to play as a mute feral elf cannibal melee character. Who later became a drow, then reincarnated as a very specific type of demon, because apparently the Laughing God rolled our dice.
Months later I realized that my first character had freedom of movement and couldn't have ended the way he did (paralyzed by a lich for days, while under a nosleep curse, went insane because he couldn't cast restoration). It's cool though, he made a decent recurring boss.