Flavor is Free: Tasteful D&D Reflavoring

Author: Lilith

Timmie has just finished their first game with a pre-generated character, and Timmie is now trying their hand at building their own character for their second ever game. They wish to make a “witch doctor,” practicing voodoo and communicating with spirits, but there doesn’t seem to be any official content strongly supporting the idea, and the DM did not approve any homebrew.

Their second idea is a “detective” character, Eimmit, solving crime and fighting criminals. Skimming through the class and subclass options, Timmie spotted the Inquisitive Roguish Archetype and thought it was a pretty close fit for their idea, based on all the flavor baked into the archetype’s description.

However, throughout the campaign, Timmie felt underwhelmed. The subclass was not adding much of what they wanted, just some skill checks for an occasional lore dump from the DM and a Sneak Attack enabler that they didn’t need. And then the long-awaited 9th level subclass feature turns out to be… making a Perception check as a bonus action?

Many of us may have had an experience similar to Timmie’s story above: we saw the name of a class or subclass, imagined a flavorful concept in our heads, but when we played the character at a table, the class fantasy felt incomplete. It might have been because the mechanics didn’t actually satisfy our perceived flavor, or because the mechanics were so subpar that it hindered our enjoyment of the game. Optimizing our build might solve one half of this equation, but is it possible for us to solve the other half?

When it comes to approaching optimization in D&D (or other tabletop RPGs), there is a common perception that mechanics and narrative are inherently conflicting forces: that in order to satisfy one, you must sacrifice the other. However, here at Tabletop Builds, we disagree that such a conflict necessarily exists and hold as one of our Core Tenets that “flavor is free.” In this article, we further expand on what this tenet means, and how you can get the mechanics of D&D to work for you and your game, rather than against you.

Why Do We Need Flavor?

When looking at certain flavor text, or even just ability names, many of us form an intuitive impression of what those are supposed to mean in terms of gameplay. Some even rely heavily on the base flavor to spark inspiration and inform decisions. At some point, there is bound to be a mismatch in that expectation between players and developers who wrote the mechanic text, or players and the type of game they play in, that ultimately leads to dissonance and disappointment that makes the game feel limited. 

An Assassin Rogue might not play out as a deadly striker without the whole party sneaking around to achieve surprise, and a School of Divination Wizard using Portent to guarantee a levitate on an enemy might not feel like a fortune-seeing seer. The Ranger can do amazing DPR and has the best spell list for a “half-caster,” but it is not delivering the fantasy of a “survival expert” which many expect of it simply because survival mechanics are practically nonexistent in most 5E adventures. This leads to the class’s undeserving reputation of being “mechanically terrible.” Some may even get upset that the grappled condition works more like tugging on someone’s shirt instead of a wrestle/choke-hold, or that the Fiend Warlock’s Hurl Through Hell is just making someone disappear for a turn with some damage instead of having anything to do with hell.

Even if the base flavor works out perfectly for you, your option would still be confined to only what’s presented without reflavoring. Is the only way to play a Samurai to pick the Fighter subclass that grants advantage on attacks in a turn three times per long rest? Is the only place to play a Battle Smith Artificer in a sci-fi campaign? (Because oh my god that is literally a steel robot with fully functional Artificial Intelligence!)

What is Flavor?

Flavor refers to the non-mechanical, narrative aspect of the game. It can be an active element such as the specific movement a character uses to make an attack, or a fact of the world like the source of someone’s magic. 

In D&D 5e, there are supposedly “no hidden rules” and spells “do what they say they do.” It is written more like hard magic with codified parameters and constraints, which differs from systems like Mutants and Mastermind or the RWBY RPG which favor more narrative-based, improvised actions with broad rules to resolve them. Whether or not your group reads into the Rules as Written or follows it, 5E pays great attention to the distinction between “melee attack,” “melee weapon attack,” and “attack with a melee weapon.” 5E cares whether a feature requires line of sight and/or line of effect, if it targets creatures, objects, or points, or whether an ability can be used once per turn or once per your turn. 

This does not necessarily limit creativity, but rather, encourages it on a different level. After all, magic when used as a problem solving tool is only as interesting as its limitations.

D&D serves a diverse array of genres and fantasies, and can be applied to wildly different flavors of worldbuilding. This is partly thanks to the flexibility in terms of flavor you can have to build on top of the base mechanic.

You needn’t look far into the rules to find official support for reflavoring either. the very first sentence of the chapter on Multiclassing:

In a more recent book, reflavoring is further emphasized in “Personalizing Spells” section in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, where they encourage you to go wild. Farmer sorcerer! Magic missile chickens!

However, while most would welcome describing eldritch blast as a spectral arrow, some are more reluctant to accept a character with Crossbow Expert attacking exclusively in melee reflavored as dual wielding cool swords. Flavor is free, yes, but how free? And how do you reflavor?

Fundamental Mechanics

Flavoring, or reflavoring, involves applying a new narrative to a fundamental mechanic without changing it. The new narrative can simply be an alternative spin on the base concept, or something new altogether, but the fundamental mechanic remains the same at its core. 

Take for example, the Rogue’s Sneak Attack:

Sneak attack, strike subtly, exploit a foe’s distraction—those are the flavors, images that help you conceptualize what this ability means.

The fundamental mechanic can be described like this:

Once per turn, deal an extra 1d6 damage on an attack, if both of these conditions are satisfied: 

1. The attack uses a finesse or ranged weapon
2. If you have advantage on the roll 
   OR 
   If an enemy of the target (not incapacitated) is within 5ft of it AND you don’t have disadvantage on the roll

Although the ability suggests an accurate, subtle, weakness-exploiting attack, there would be no mechanical difference if it is described as doing anything else that is in line with the fundamental mechanics of “doing extra damage,” such as an especially powerful strike or a magically-guided crossbow shot. 

Fundamentally, classes and subclasses and spells can be broken down to simple packages of abilities, with pre-written flavors acting as suggestions and primers that give newcomers an intuitive understanding of it. Ranger is a class that has proficiency in light and medium armor, shields, and all weapons, as well as Extra Attack, Spellcasting, and potentially some minor bonuses to traveling and exploration. Paladin is a class that has all armor and weapon proficiencies, can heal and cure poison through touch, has Spellcasting, and can turn spell slots into damage on a weapon hit. The spell web creates an area of difficult terrain that forces Dexterity saving throws to avoid being restrained, requires a Strength check to break out, can be set on fire, and will collapse in one round if it has no supporting surface. 

An important limitation to remember is that reflavoring keeps the fundamental mechanics intact, and thus requires you to understand what the mechanics are and how it interacts with other aspects of the game. You can’t set grease on fire for more damage, can’t occupy an enemy’s arm just by grappling, nor can you extinguish a wall of fire spell with a casting of tidal wave. If you describe fireball as lobbing an alchemy flask, it will neither require nor consume any actual flask, and if you describe the Manifest Echo from Echo Knight as your dimensional sibling, they would still function solely as an anchor to deliver your attacks and features granted by the subclass in combat.

Fundamental Concepts

At the end of the day, this is a fantasy game of make-believe, designed to be fairly open and high magic. Flavoring can help a concept come to life, not just in terms of image, but also in terms of gameplay. 

A concept can also be broken down to its essential components, which informs you of how your character plays. What does it mean for you to be an “assassin,” “detective,” “ice mage,” or “time traveler?” What kind of gameplay loop are you looking for? When you say you want to play a “monk,” do you want the feel of a martial art combatant with stereotypical eastern monastery tropes, or do you specifically want to mess around with the specific mechanics from a class named Monk?

Not every concept is represented within the available character options, and the character option of the same name might not match your vision of that concept either. If what the game presents to you is not a perfect fit, reconsider your criteria, apply some levels of abstraction to the original concept, and adapt your definition.

Take for example, an “ice mage.” Usually the instinct would be to pick all the spells that deal cold damage and everything with cold/frost/freeze/ice/storm in it, but you’d likely end up with a rather ineffective blaster, or sacrifice significant capability to match that criterion.

If the parameter of “does ice damage” is not working out, perhaps it is too specific and one dimensional and needs some extra layers of abstractions. What do you associate with ice and ice magic? What are you willing to accept as ice magic? 

Is it defensive and resilient, warding you from danger? The shield spell, Abjuration Wizard’s Arcane Ward, or just about any feature that generates temporary hit points can represent that idea.

Is it expansive and debilitating, crippling your foes’ advances? Any area control spell can fulfill that idea, even sickening radiance can be seen as an intense frostbite, burning out all the enemies’ life energy to survive your pocket winter.

Or perhaps you want to get physical. That ice can be simply imposing and overwhelming. The Rune Knight’s transformation can make you become like a frost giant, smashing enemies with weapons encrusted in ice crystals. 

After getting the right feel in terms of gameplay, without sacrificing effectiveness, all the backstory, particle effects and fancy descriptors are completely free, as long as they’re not directly in conflict with the world you play in.

Level of Abstraction

Of course, not all reflavoring will be able to maintain the exact mechanic text. Some parts of an ability’s interaction, regardless of how insignificant or obscure, might change with a new flavor, and some flavor text elements might have relevant narrative consequences.

Take for example the web spell, which states it creates webbing. While a minor interaction, it might be considered to qualify for the “Web Sense” and “Web Walker” features of spiders at your table. A Druid can flavor their half-plate armor as chitin or ceramic, but that might make it immune to being targeted by heat metal. Or it could just be the setting you play in is insistent on certain base flavors, such as one where every single entity who can spend spell slots to add a couple d8s in radiant damage to their attacks with a melee weapon are called Paladins and have Paladin levels. Perhaps resources are immensely scarce in your game and you have to keep track of every single item down to the last grain of salt, and lobbing flasks of fireball out of nowhere might raise practical questions. Maybe it’s on you, you really like the fireball spell with all its mechanics intact, but it’s too hard to somehow spin it as an ice spell. 

There are several approaches to address this issue. 

The first is the magic of Handwavium, where the group abstracts away the nitpicky minor interaction and rules it as normal (the half-plate the Druid wears heat up anyways, the spider just spots you because it is a cool spider). 

Secondly, you can come up with an alternative narrative for the outlier scenario. Perhaps your entire campaign is not full of spiders in tight corners that have to rely on magical web to spot enemies and in this one scene, the spider noticed you through other means. 

Thirdly, if the interaction is narratively relevant but mechanically insignificant, you can ask for an alteration of its rule. For example, spending a couple copper pieces to stock up on flasks for your “alchemical” spells, or even changing damage from fireball to cold.

Jeremy Crawford even said that damage types have no real effect on game balance , but if that is not enough for you as a DM you can look at damage types that are similarly resisted.

Lastly, if it really can’t work out, perhaps consider another flavor instead.

Putting It All Together

What if you want to describe a sleet storm as a fire tornado?

Sleet storm mechanically creates a massive field of difficult terrain, heavy obscurement, and constantly knocks people prone. A minor effect is extinguishing exposed flame. 

If your concept of fire tornado involves:

• Big and scary
• Does fire damage
• Make things burn

You should not choose that reflavor, as dealing damage directly clashes with the mechanics of sleet storm. Similarly, if your group places great mechanical significance on the fact that the text says the spell covers the ground in slick ice, we’re out of luck.

It could work, however, if your group considers the “slick ice” part flavor, and your idea of fire tornado is imagined as:

• Big and scary
• Heat generates strong current that slows, knocks down, and sucks away air for ignition
• Fire generates ash for obscurement

Conclusion

Optimized characters, regardless of race, class, subclass, feats or multiclass selections, tend to function as a package piece with abilities that work well together. There’s no good reason that character’s story can’t be just as coherent and thematic. Let the base flavor text remain as your inspiration, rather than your limitation, and work the narrative into your abilities to enhance any concept you enjoy and works well for your table.

Bonus Content

Your friend wants to learn about flavor but can’t read or will only listen to a kobold?

You think eldritch blast is boring? Here’s a list of ideas for reflavoring.