We're All Human on the Inside

A couple days ago, Dice Monkey tossed out a few possible explanations as to why some players groove on playing nonhuman characters. I wrote this comment:

Here’s my take. In most RPGs, despite what we tell ourselves, we are essentially playing ourselves on some fundamental, id-versus-ego level. As such, we offer up our most frank, honest roleplaying moments when we’re playing a character that’s fairly near to our own selves.

I mean think about it: when the DM takes a moment and describes something stunning and/or magnificent in the game, you don’t automatically say “By Alrindel’s fair eyes!” if you’re playing an elf, or “Stroke my beard if that isn’t a wondrous sight” if you’re a dwarf. You say “Sweet! That’s awesome!” — and then you scramble to “get into character” and react the way you think your character would act.

That’s why humans are so appealing. They allow us to experience the game through familiar eyes. This in turn preserves the wonder and majesty of the game.

Definitely worth repeating here. I always play humans, and I tend to have a more satisfying time as GM when I’m running a group of human characters. The best moments, most sublime flashes of in-character inspiration, come when we’re confronting things that affect us on a human level. No amount of character immersion can replace the unfiltered utterances that slip out in the heat of the moment.

This, I think, is why OD&D had such a mythical quality attached to it. You were basically playing yourself. You had a spear and maybe some leather armor, or a couple minor spells — but mostly, you were playing a scrub adventurer trying to stay alive in an environment that wanted to kill you. To play a human in such a setting is to enter into a social contract with the game itself. The price of admission is participation.

Bringing the party together: the odd-man-out approach

As GMs, we’ve all spent countless hours trying to devise clever ways to bring the party together at the start of the game. Characters are individuals by nature, and even if you foist some story framework onto them — they’re all from the same village, for example, or they’re the children of a well-known noble — there’s still a good chance the first session will revolve around the characters sizing each other up, forging alliances and generally exchanging basic game information. Sometimes this is a great avenue for storytelling, but other times you just want to the get the story moving!

I had an idea recently that I’ll call the “Odd Man Out” model. In this scenario, all the characters are connected in a simple, convenient way — except for one PC, an outsider who sticks out like a sore thumb. With this setup, it’s possible to co-opt players’ suspicious tendencies by casting one particular character as an obvious interloper.

For that one outsider character (who should be [a] a volunteer and [b] one of the more experienced roleplayers in the group) the first session will be spent explaining himself, integrating himself into the group and leaking important game information (via the GM) to the players. For the other players, they’ll instantly be able to bond over this outsider. They are on one side of the story; he is on the other. Oh sure, they’ll probably be suspicious — but not of each other. What’s more, as they introduce themselves to the new character, they’ll inevitably divulge important details about their own characters — info the players themselves almost certainly don’t know, but must needs share to kick-start the game’s common narrative.

Granted, there’s no guarantee that the game will go down this way, but it’s certainly an interesting thought experiment for GMs to mull over.

Let's hear it for low-level PCs

For our Wild Talents game, our group consciously decided to reach for the stars and play ultra-high-level characters: trade envoys, planetary ambassadors, billionaire playboys and super-scientists. Good stuff, yes, but it's got me thinking about the other end of the spectrum, the low-level characters who have to scramble for every gold piece and make hard decisions about whether or not to leave the two-handed broadsword back at camp because it might put them over their carry capacity.

Part of the fun of low-level roleplaying is that little successes are amplified a hundredfold in the scope of the game -- and what's more, players tend to shoehorn these minor victories into the campaign itself, with admirable results. Bob over at The Dice Bag puts it nicely.

That was until the 3rd or 4th session we played. We’d picked up a mission in The Yawning Portal to help out some local merchants who were being pushed out of the market after refusing to pay protection money to a local gang. After a few hours of gaming we came across a building that used to be a brewery that just happened to be where the gang had set up shop. After a rather successful battle I came up with a bright idea to use the equipment to make up some homebrew. It certainly wasn’t easy to set up but within a few levels I had a rather successful business venture going on.

Dude started brewing up his own dwarven grog with little more than a throwaway skill and a generous DM. It doesn't get much sweeter than that.

This is a gaming philosophy

OK, so I promise this blog isn’t going to become a link-farm for noisms over at Monsters & Manuals, but I find myself returning again and again to his post from a couple weeks ago about creating your own gaming philosophy. That’s something I’ve never really dabbled in, mainly because I never really had a stable group to inspire me.

Now, though, I’m starting to give it some more thought. I’ve been gaming with the same core group of dudes for more than a year (with a much larger cast of additional players rotating in and out), and I’m starting to formulate my own gaming philosophy. Here’s a rough draft of the thesis sentence:

Be on the same page.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically. My best games (both as player and GM) have come about when everyone around the table knows what they’re getting themselves into. This can be as simple as a broad genre (steampunk) or a specific sub-setting (the Five Fingers port city in the Iron Kingdoms setting). The campaign itself should adhere to this rule, too: it’s troublesome and ultimately not so fun if a minority group of players has wildly different expectations about the gameplay and/or ruleset being used.

For my own part, I’ve been a fairly conformist player: I’m happy to reshape my characters within the first few adventures to fit the direction the story seems to be going. In my Mutants & Masterminds campaign for example, my Swamp Thing-inspired tree-dude morphed from an aimless beatstick into a more focused support character (with requisite healing and protection powers) shortly after his introduction. This transition didn’t offend me as a player, and I’ve derived even more satisfaction from the game as a result.

Now, none of this is meant to suggest that originality and character-driven stories have no part in today’s RPGs. Rather, it’s intended to point out that there are a series of small, mostly painless discussions that players and GMs ought to have before embarking on a new game because they can head off potentially larger problems down the road.

Heroes: Who needs 'em?

I've been on the receiving end of a little (friendly) guff lately from my local game group. See, they caught on to the fact that I like playing heroic characters and generally follow a do-good path through most RPGs I play. In general, this interest in all things "hero" is made manifest across all the game genres I enjoy: fantasy, superhero, dark sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, steampunk and more.

But my guys aren't cutting me any slack for our upcoming Wild Talents game; they're urging me to get away from my roots and play a good, old-fashioned "morally gray" PC. As it stands now, I'm going to go along with it and play a warrior-statesman modeled on none other Grand Admiral Thrawn. (Ours is a sci-fi setting in the far future, so it works.)

I'm going to stop this post before it becomes a "Here is my character/Let me show him to you" entry. But count on more thoughts and reactions from me as I take my first baby steps into the wide world of morally gray play.

Giving them their cookies

About five years ago, I played in a fun little steampunk game with a handful of gaming buddies. The setting was something the GM had cooked up himself: lots of airships and piracy, along with a dash of intrigue thrown in for good measure. What I remember most, though, was a phrase he had scrawled on a piece of paper and paper-clipped to his GM screen: “Give them their cookies.”

What followed was a bullet-point list of the specific in-game attributes that would please each character. Cookies, if you will. I was playing a technophile (it’s steampunk – how can you not?!), so my character was obsessed with collecting and cataloguing the various fiddly bits we came across during our adventures. My cookie, then, involved stumbling across people and items relating to engineering and mechanics. I’d get this nod from the GM at least once a session, and it never got old. Sometimes it even launched the campaign in an entirely new direction.

Some cookies, though, proved troublesome. My friend Brett tends to play anime-inspired samurai characters in every single game, regardless of the genre – and that befuddled our GM, seeing as how we were campaigning in a high-adventure faux-nautical setting. But he found a way to distill this samurai character down to his essential parts – honor, duty, loyalty – which then provided opportunities for a veritable double batch of gamer cookies.

In practice, cookies should be tangible things: a bag of gold, a rusty hauberk, a trophy lightsaber. Sometimes they can be people, organizations and contacts. A good rule of thumb is this: A well-designed cookie should always prompt the character to note something on their character sheet, be it a new piece of equipment or an important campaign note.