Doppelganger Designs
August 15th, 2011
Hello, and welcome to Doppelganger Week, a week set aside to everyone’s favorite shape-shifting, mind-reading monster (except perhaps the rakshasa, but who’s keeping score, right?). The rest of the week will be full of exciting doppelganger-related content, like ‘ganger-centric plot hooks, encounters with doppelgangers, and new doppelganger-related crunch. Today, though, I have to admit, I’m not sure what to write about.
There’s not that much to say about the design of the doppelganger monster, except perhaps by talking about all of the things that it’s not. In fact, if you were to look up doppelgangers on, say, Wikipedia, you might be puzzled by the result you get. While it’s true that the doppelgangers of folklore, myth, and pseudo-science can look identical to an existing person, and that they are generally considered to be evil, they’re not typically shapechangers: they look exactly like one person, like a sort of evil twin.
Naturally, if you flip to doppelganger in the Pathfinder Bestiary expecting to see a normal person with a bad goatee (you can always tell an evil twin by the goatee—evil twins apparently don’t believe in shaving), you’re probably going to be a bit surprised when you see a big, ugly, grey thing that looks sort of like your stereotypical UFO-riding serial-prober. You’d probably be further surprised to learn that they can change their shape to look like anyone and anything at any time, and can, for some reason, read minds. So, why are things like this?
The answer to that question is “I don’t know,” unfortunately. There are a few things I can tell you, though. Obviously the ability to read minds is there to allow the doppelganger to better pass as whoever they are attempting to impersonate, and this seems like a solid design (because otherwise it would be far too easy to detect a doppelganger). As far as the “natural form” being essentially a Grey, this likely stems from the fact that, if it can change its shape to whatever it wants, this will naturally cause people to ask that largely irrelevant question: so, what do they look like when they aren’t shapechanged?” A grey, hairless body is probably about the most neutral shape you could think of. Cashing in on the associations players (and DMs) have with the form of a Grey is likely just an added bonus.
The real question, of course, is, “Why can it change shape at all, instead of being an evil twin?” I think (though again, I cannot say for sure) that the answer here lies in the fact that Dungeons and Dragons is a game, and a relatively complex one, at that. You see, in order for the doppelganger to be an evil copy of a single, specific character, he would probably need to be mechanically similar to that character. In fact, each doppelganger would be completely different (though, considering that the folklore talks about how doppelgangers tend to be harbingers of death or disease, they might have a few consistent abilities along those lines). If anything, doppelganger would be a template (and not much of one, at that) that you apply to the existing creature. Not the most exciting monster entry.
Besides, you can get a lot more bang out of one doppelganger if he’s able to change his shape into lots of different forms, and, all things considered, I think that the existing D&D doppelganger provides a much, much wider variety of interesting plot hooks, especially for campaigns that are high on intrigue or mysteries, than “shadow” versions of specific individuals.
Ideas for using existing doppelgangers, however, are something I’ll leave for Joshua to do tomorrow. Instead, why don’t we take a little time to consider how a DM who was interested in doing so might go about creating an “anti-party” of more traditional doppelgangers. “Why bother,” you ask, since I just said that I personally find the existing doppelgangers more useful? A couple of reasons: first, there are going to be times where you aren’t interested in those other possibilities, and would rather have a doppelganger that just mimics a PC (especially if you want a more challenging fight at higher levels, and definitely if you want a more interesting fight). Second, well, there is a certain something romantic about PCs fighting “shadow” versions of themselves, especially if, like me, you grew up with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and the infamous fight with shadow Link in the water temple.
So, how would you do it? The simple solution would seem to be to borrow your players’ character sheets, make notes of all of their abilities, and then throw them at themselves (or vice versa). Strictly speaking, there’s nothing wrong with this approach, but I think it’s going to run into a few speed bumps that can be avoided by approaching it from a different angle.
First of all, your doppelgangers are almost certainly doomed to fail, probably badly. Why? Because it’s highly unlikely that you are going to play all four (or five, or six, or whatever your party’s size is) characters as well as the players who made them and have been working with them since level one. If all the stats are the same, it’s really just a matter of luck and tactics, and if the originals have better tactics, your doppelgangers will likely fall a little flat.
Secondly, the fight is likely not going to be all that interesting. I mean, sure, it will be novel to have your own signature attacks thrown back at you, and it might be amusing if someone suddenly gets hoisted on their own petard (or eats some of their own medicine, or whatever saying you prefer. “Is finally on the wrong end of flesh to stone,” perhaps), but likely the PCs will fail to be impressed by what are, essentially, the same tricks that they’ve been using the whole game. They’re hardly new. The PCs likely know how best to defend against them, too. And really, while embodying a character’s internal struggle between good and evil through a mirror swordfight is romantic, and looks good on paper, it doesn’t always translate into a stunning play-by-play in D&D rules, at least.
Finally, you will run into odd alignment problems. Back in the day, at least, if you needed an evil paladin, for example, you needed a blackguard, who had to actually have levels in fighter or rogue first, and the whole thing was kind of a mess. Now you could probably just have an anti-paladin, or one of these various paladin variants [link to justin’s ginormous paladin article], but what about monks or barbarians? If good (or, I guess, neutral) becomes evil, does law become chaos? It could go either way, and if the answer is yes, then you either need to find a new class for those characters, or break some rules, or something. And then of course there are things like clerics. A doppelganger of a cleric of Thor probably doesn’t still worship Thor. Who does he worship? How do his domains change? Does that affect his choice of spells or feats? What about his overall outlook?
So, instead, I would recommend taking a little extra time and making whole new stat-blocks for the ‘gangers. They should still be equivalent to the PCs (ie, don’t change their level, or number of feats, or give them more or less ability score points), but feel free to alter them in ways that make them their own unique individual, the flipside of the same coin. Adjust their feats to let them fight a little dirtier. If they’re the aggressor, maybe give them something to help defend specifically against the original character’s tactics: after all, they know how their “twin” thinks, right? They should be reminiscent, but different: twisted, wrong. You get the idea.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Join me next week when I’ll be discussing magic item creation. In the meantime, keep an eye out for doppelgangers.