I've told this before on this subreddit but I'll tell it again. Apologies to those who have read it (reddit? ... I'll see myself out...) before.

Some years ago, a fella from my online group tried his hand at DMing. He loves role playing and storytelling, but he was incredibly focused on his own characters to the detriment of what our characters were doing. As such, his campaign only lasted a few sessions. During that campaign (this was 4e, by the way) I came up with a character concept I really liked: a horribly disfigured Changeling that permanently morphed into a beautiful Elven lady named Lindelea and studied to become a cleric. She had a very reserved and shy personality, due to the fact that she was terrified of anyone finding out the truth and abandoning her due to her hideous appearance or her lies. The softness of her personality meshed well with the cleric class. During the short campaign, she fell in love with the character of another player, an Elven Ranger named Halt. Despite only having a few sessions together, I and the other player developed the relationship between Halt and Lindelea and worked them into our other characters. It was a lot of fun.

When the 5th Edition playtest was in full swing, I wanted to bring back all the characters I loved most to test them out. And for the Encounters season 'Murder in Baldur's Gate', I brought in Lindelea. Now, you probably know that Changelings did not exist in the playtest (hell, it's only recent that they released a beta Changeling race), so I was forced to play as a High Elf with a secret that she didn't tell anyone. Being a Cleric, she was at the forefront of figuring out what was going on; I absolutely nailed my Religion check to figure out what the creature was that attacked in the first session, and I deduced what was going to happen over the next few days; chaos, insanity, the city was going to hell. Which means, my shy, timid Cleric needed to step and get some stuff done.. otherwise thousands of people would suffer or die, and a terrible evil would be reborn. Talk about character development! The whole campaign was hands down enjoyable, one of the best I've ever played and that's saying a lot; Encounters modules are very well-written, in my humble opinion. Anyway, we had our adventures, my Cleric had a crisis of faith, there was a lot of struggle, and all good adventures came to an end. Fortunately at no point did Lindelea fall unconscious, otherwise I would have had to bullshit a reason as to why she transformed into a hideous beast.

There was one point in that adventure that really stood out for me. As the city was descending into chaos, and the townsfolk were taking the law into their own hands, our group came upon an irate nobleman who claimed he had been slighted by a young lantern-boy. The nobleman demanded a payment of flesh, and drew steel to back up his claim; the boy had no weapons and no training, and the crowd was itching for a fight. Enter Lindelea, who had weapons and had training; she offered to take the dishonor of the boy onto her own shoulders, and fight in his name. Which was entirely within the rules for a duel, and much to the nobleman's chagrin, the crowd seemed to agree. The terms were: winner is the first to draw blood, and the loser bears the dishonor upon their shoulders forever. And so we rolled initiative, and I won. The DM asked me what I would do, and I responded, "Nothing." "Nothing?" "Yep. I'm just going to stand there." "Okay..." So the nobleman attacks, and botches his roll; sword dings off of my chainmail. My turn. "So what do you do?" "Nothing. I just stand there." "... alright ..." Nobleman attacks again, strikes, deals damage. As he is the first to draw blood, my cleric says, "You win," heals herself, and walks away.

He wanted a fight. He didn't get one. He wanted to impose dishonor upon another. He ended up looking like a fool. He wanted glory and admiration from the crowd. He had to listen to them cheering for me.