The Inner Lives of Player Characters

Trollsmyth has a really excellent piece up today about personality inventories, or "stress-testing the character concept." This is something that I've seen a lot of in his games; the solo game in particular almost entirely revolves around exploring these kinds of changes and personal re-evaluations now, and they're becoming ever more important in the group sessions. I haven't seen so much of it outside of those campaigns, though. I had one player in high school who really got into this kind of thing, but for the most part our campaigns were too short for it to ever come up.

Thus, this kind of character change is intimately connected with another thing that sets Trollsmyth's campaigns apart from the ones I've played in before: I spend a lot of time outside the game thinking about my character. The exact amount varies from week to week and month to month, depending on what's going on in the game and what else is going on in my life, but it's a lot more than any game I've played in before. I'm used to having my mind a lot on the game I'm running, but as a player, that kind of outside-the-session involvement is a new experience.

It can take a lot of time to work through the problems that these kinds of transformations and pressures present to my characters. Particularly since I'm building the cultures that they come from at the same time, and often in response to what's going on in-game, so that her actions and experiences create interesting conflicts with her backstories. And while a lot of times these personality conflicts come up naturally in-game, often in ways that (delightfully!) I don't expect in my between-session musings, I also try -- sometimes without success -- to come up with ways to express the ideas while I've had away from the table (or the keyboard, as the case may be) while I'm at it.

I'm being vague here because this process of character examination and consideration is one of the big reasons I haven't been writing much here lately. When I'm thinking about a game as a DM, I'm thinking a lot about technique. Not only is a lot of it much easier to abstract away from the particulars of the game into the realm of process, it's -- well, it's a lot less personal. I get deeply involved with some of my NPCs on occasion, but even when I do, there's always more going on to a game than just the inner lives of the characters. And I can write about that.

When most of my mental game-time goes into one or two individuals over a long period of time, there's a lot less I can talk about. And a lot less that I want to talk about, particularly on the internet. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it, in fact, is actively secret--the character in the group game in particular is a bit of a schemer, and the rest of the group still doesn't know what she's up to, relationship and otherwise. I don't want to tip her hand to the other players early, before I've had the opportunity to set up the reveals. This isn't as big of an issue in the solo game, but there are at least a few things about that character that I don't plan to discuss with Trollsmyth outside of game until they come up within it.

Still. Blog posts or no, the way my characters have changed and the time that I spend considering and shaping that change is one of my favorite things about these games, and one major reason why I'm even more interested now than when the first one started a year and a half ago. Situations that encourage character change, and allow the opportunity to explore it, is now the bar for what I expect from a campaign. And it's one of the major things I'm going to have my eye on the next time I run my own game.

7th Sea: The Last Report

So the 7th Sea game ended a couple of weeks ago. Though it wasn't without its frustrations, overall I'm pretty happy to have been involved with it. A couple of observations:

• Play-by-post isn't quite my speed. While I love text play, chat is really what fits my style. I like regular weekly sessions; with PBP, the required time commitment is kind of hard to gauge, since the amount I can and should post varies a lot based on what's going on in-game. And it's hard to get really immersed in the scenario, which is a big deal for me. I suspect I could really get into a PBP solo game, since it would always be absolutely clear whose turn it was, but that might be kind of dangerous.
• I have a really weird play-style, and it's all Trollsmyth's fault.
• I need to play more male characters. They're fun, and educational. "Oh. That's what it feels like when a girl laughs at you."
• Low wisdom characters are fantastic. But I knew that already.
• I need to remember to encourage players to build connections between their characters to begin with, because the results are so great for my style of play. This is something that happens pretty naturally in a tabletop game, at least the way I run them: I'll put aside a session for character creation, and the players will talk story and background while one or two people fiddle with the book. But it does need a little extra push online, where everything seems so formal, and people don't necessarily all know each other.
• I'm going to miss Alasdair. Which is new and exciting sensation: I've never played a campaign long enough, or had a character interesting enough, to really be sad when I stopped being able to play him anymore. But Alasdair still had so much excellent drama to angst about and be stupid over.
• God, Alasdair was dumb.

Snowflake the Techno-Plant (This is Boytoy's Valentine's Day Present)

Snowflake the Techno-Plant

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 11

Constitution: 13

Intelligence: 18

Willpower: 14

Charisma: 16

HP: 58

Dermal Poison Slime (7d6 damage, save half)

Epidermal Susceptibility (Fire)

Albinism

Negative Empathy

Quick Mind

Tripping Tendrils

Abnormal Size (1/20th normal)

The upshot: it's about 4" tall, is about as good as it's possible to be at figuring out new technology, and a significant minority of the people it meets immediately try to kill it for no reason.

Poor Snowflake.

In other news, I adore random character generation.

Better Character Backgrounds

Yikes. The posting's been light lately, I know, but that's mainly because I've been busy -- and busy gaming. Two nights a week of Labyrinth Lord plus a new 7th Sea game just starting up has made this a very good semester.

I think I'm getting better at building characters and writing backstories, too. Time was, I'd just have my character's whole family killed off by some mysterious, unnamed menace and call it "giving her motivation." I resisted that temptation for my first character for Trollsmyth and have so far been very happy with the results; her brother has popped up in game directly (working, quite naturally, for a group that is not as bad as some of the other "bad guys" in the campaign, but still pretty bad on their own) and, more importantly, her relationship with her family has shaped the way she's reacted to most of the various exciting disasters that have befallen the party.

So in making the two characters I've built since then, I put a fair amount of thought into their families, and their relationship with their families. If nothing else, it gives me a reliable foundation for figuring out what makes that character tick. "Family" hasn't been as big of a deal for the cleric I made for the second Labyrinth Lord game, but it promises to be a major part of the 7th Sea game, seeing as how Trollsmyth is playing my character's half-sister.

But my old style of building characters did have one thing going for it--uninteresting as they were in themselves, those backgrounds did make it fairly easy for the GM to tie my character into their own schemes. In actual practice, what tends to happen with a really wide-open background like that is that it gets ignored in favor of the characters with a few interesting details filled in. You know, the ones that give the GM less work to do.

Taken to less extremes, however, throwing a few mysterious open-spaces into my backgrounds has turned out to be a handy technique. That brother I mentioned, I'd originally described as having disappeared a few years back, my cleric has a few mysterious NPCs of mysterious motive in her past, and my pirate has what I think is my best twist on this idea so far: a fight that he apparently started, but doesn't have any memory of, that went on to get him into a lot of trouble and eventually was what got him involved in the starting events the campaign. There's a couple people who he thinks might have been responsible for said trouble, including the guy who he got into the fight with (who now has an important family MacGuffin, so my character is going to go after him either way), but he's really not sure what happened.

This may or may not turn out to be a big deal in-game; likewise, the cleric's background hasn't come up yet in a significant way, but that's okay. There's already more than enough excitement going on in the game the cleric is in, and the point isn't so much to get the game to revolve around my character as to give the GM a few more options and ideas. Although it's certainly nice when a background does get used in a major way, it's not essential.

While it's too early to tell exactly how well this latest character will function in-game, he's the main reason I say I'm "getting better" at this character building business: I had more fun making this character than any I've made before, and put a lot more detail into it. Partly this is because I interlocked his background with Trollsmyth's character, and Trollsmyth writes ridiculously detailed character backgrounds, but mostly, I'm just getting better at the whole business of coming up with and picking out appropriate details, and, I think, connecting "things that have happened to my character" with "how my character acts," without tying myself down to boring or obnoxious behavior. Like most else in the hobby, it's a skill, and one I'm glad to finally be getting so much practice at.

The Excellence of Random Character Generation

Traveller character generation is a lot of fun. Maybe the best session of character generation I've had. Feng Shui was kind of a trip, too, and character generation for Is This Fair? went well, but this was a unique experience.

I went into it thinking that I was going to run a default Traveller game. A little trading, a little exploration, a little running for their lives; I didn't have any specific ideas about what I wanted the campaign to be like, and I figured that sounded fun. If the players really took to one adventure or another, I'd move the campaign in that direction, but to start with I was going to keep things standard.

Then one player rolled a twelve. I pointed at that he could automatically qualify for the nobility if he put it into Social Standing, which he promptly did. Five terms later, we had a character with a Social Standing of 15 and a bunch of Yacht share. Add that to the pirate who has slept with half the party, the drifter who wandered onto the ship in a drunken stupor, and the physician with a crush on another guy the pirate once slept with, and we had the makings of a pretty distinctive campaign.

They've all gotten very excited about the idea of running a "space cruise ship." They're planning on doing the usual missions and trade and so on, but they're also hiring several stewards and taking full advantage of their noble's Duke social standing. They've taken very well to the "jump and try to make as much money as possible before jumping again" standard Traveller game play and given me a great excuse to have all kinds of weird NPCs show up to bother them. I couldn't be happier.

And this, without any planning on anyone's part. We rolled some dice and came up with an entertaining explanation for the numbers. A most promising sign.

Literary Pretensions: Iron Man

Iron Man is about technology. In the movie, he's also very specifically about the corporatization of technology, and the responsibility creators have over their creations. But he also represents a general conversation about the role and effects of technology.

In Iron Man, technology has a dark side. In the movie, Tony Stark creates the suit, but he also creates the villains he uses it to battle. And in the comics, Iron Man's suit has, on occasion, become a villain in its own right.

But Iron Man is a superhero. He's technology personified, and, for the most part, he's a force for good. The wrongs he has done, even inadvertently, he works to right. Technology is a powerful tool in that fight, and he has a unique control over it.

Which is at the heart of the Iron Man concept. How do we control technology? In what ways does it affect us? Tony Stark has a remarkable talent, but he simultaneously depends on technology to survive. His injury was inflicted by a man-made weapon, but another device keeps it from killing him. He uses technology to do good, but the evil he fights is often similarly empowered.

And, of course, it's not just shrapnel in his leg or his liver or something. It's his heart that has shrapnel and a magnet in it, magnifying its importance in both physical and metaphorical terms.

"Technology" isn't the only thing that Iron Man is about. And being "about" things isn't the most important thing about Iron Man--the most important thing is smashing bad guys with fancy gadgets.

But what he's about is important. Superheroes, and other culturally important stories, give us a window into our culture's collective unconscious.

Technology is very much on our minds.

What's My Inner D&D Character?

After analyzing your answers with state-of-the-art medieval fantastic psychology profiling tools, Dungeon Mastering is confident that your inner D&D character is a Lawful Good Gnome Ranger!

That's . . . weirdly perfect.

What These Players Wanted

Here's an example of the technique I (sort of) described yesterday.

I wrote down these notes a few days after the first session. Roughly two-thirds of this material stayed valid through the last session.

Soern (the name is misspelled in the original document) would basically go wherever he heard their were magical items of interest to him, or interesting kinds of arcane power. Later on, he started collecting one of the magic item sets in the Magic Item Compendium, making him incredibly easy to motivate.

Sigrid (again, misspelled) dropped the justice motivator, partially because it was causing problems with the other characters, but mostly because it was more interesting to her player to be internally conflicted over her own motivations than to have the kind of clarity that the justice thing was best suited for. She later developed an attachment to one of the main NPCs in the campaign. That's something I didn't really mention before, but it turns out that a character who really cares about a particular NPC is incredibly easy (and fun) to motivate.

Rellik, on the other hand, is sort of a case study in wasted potential. I never really could figure out what was interesting to him, mostly because I was too busy with Sigrid and Blank to focus on him. Which I deeply regret.

Xerxed only showed up in the first session. He was retconned/replaced with Blank, because I thought he was too similar to Rellik and potentially destructive to the campaign, and because the person who played both of them thought being a pirate sounded fun. Thus was born Captain Blank, one of the best things to happen to that campaign.

Blank had a lot more handles than Xerxed, being interested in pirating and interaction as well as being cool, and he lacked the potential for psychopathic behavior. He later developed a personal vendetta against a nemesis, a subplot that was both very fun and somewhat underutilized.

Wizards Podcasts

Spent the afternoon listening to some of the Wizards podcasts. They're really good, and interesting, in a "why does D&D work in the way that it does?" kind of way.

Even if you're not into that, at the very least you should check out the 18th minute of the Drow podcast. Because Chris Thomasson tells us about his character, a 19-year old Goliath cleric/homebrewed prestige classes with a neat name that I can't spell.

He has several amusing stories about this character, but the best one is his horrible, horrible death. (He got better.) Seriously. We are talking classic GM evil.

Chris Perkins is his GM. I am in awe. I am also in awe because apparently, for this campaign, he tweaked every player class and implemented a 20-level spell system. This is the kind of stuff that I wish I had the time and attention span to implement.

I am not nearly as good at GM evil as I'd like to be.

Not That I Need A Reason

Transformers is awesome.

I've seen it twice already. I may go see it again in theaters, and I'll definitely watch it twelve times when it comes out on DVD.

I spent a long time trying to figure out why. I have two posts, 500 words, trying to explain why. Like I had to justify myself. Pointing out all the reasons why it's good, all the aspects of it that are good.

Except that's not why I like this movie. I could go on and on about the acting, the writing, the music, the cinematography, whatever. It's good, it's not good, ultimately, it doesn't matter. Because that's none of that is why I like the movie. It may be what allows me to like the movie, but it's not why.

I like this movie because I can honestly imagine hanging out with the Autobots. Doing this, just chilling, whatever. I can imagine enjoying being around them.

It hit me, as I was trying to explain why I like this movie, that this is what defines the stories that I truly love. Hulk, Hellboy, Animorphs. There are others. X-Men satisfies this criteria, to a somewhat more limited extend, and Oblivion probably falls in this category. Maybe Reboot. But those are the main ones--and now Transformers falls solidly in that category.

These are stories that I desperately want to be real. I feel like that in a general way about a number of things: robots, AI generally, (friendly) aliens, space travel. (This is why I read science fiction. I want it to be true.) But these are specific stories that I want to be true. These are characters that I want to be real. These are people I want to meet.

That's why Transformers is awesome.

Archery II

It occurred to me that I should look at Arcana Evolved and Iron Heroes for archery possibilities.

AE recommends either the hawk totem warrior or the ritual warrior as archers. Both are satisfactory feat-wise (bonus progression, roughly every four levels) but I'd probably go with a ritual warrior, because the special abilities are better. Or rather, more interesting to me. More of their abilities are directly focused on archer-ing -- combat rites, giving you short duration bonuses on various things -- and they get ability score bonuses. The hawk totem warrior eventually gets the ability to fly, and to do various archer-type things while flying, but I'm not really all that interested in that, and the ritual warrior would definitely be more interesting in the early game.

Race-wise, quickling faens have both the advantages and disadvantages of halflings -- bonus to dexterity, smaller weapons -- but they also have the possibility of evolved levels, which give bonuses to dexterity and ground speed. They've also got the option of metamorphosing into a spryte, which would give further bonuses to dexterity and the ability to fly in exchange for becoming tiny size. Which could actually be worth it, because it'd make the character very hard to hit.

Then there's litorians, who also get a bonus to dexterity. A couple of those racial levels could also be worth it, because they give bonuses to dexterity and strength, as well as increased speed and a couple of odd items, like scent.

All told, I'd probably end up going human. There are enough awesome combat feats in AE that it'd be worth it.

Iron Heroes provides one very obvious option: an actual "archer" class. They get a lot of ranged goodies: a +1.25 base attack progression when using ranged weapons, an aim pool, and the best access to projectile feat masteries. Out of all the classes I've looked at, they're the most focused on straight up archery. Every other class has some other thing that they do. Archers are exclusively about chucking things at people.

Racial options would be a little different. IH doesn't have race, as it is normally understood. Everyone's human, but instead of getting an extra feat and skill point you get two traits. For an archer character, I'd spend one trait on Dextrous, giving +2 Dex and -2 Con, and I'd consider using both traits for it, which would eliminate the Con penalty. Otherwise, trait selection would depend on the other aspects of the character -- background, any other skills I wanted to have, and so on.

Comparing these two options, the archer looks much more attractive than the ritual warrior. Mostly because, with the archer, I wouldn't have to manage combat rituals. Partially because Iron Heroes generally looks like a lot of fun to play. Partially because the racial options are better. (I like the AE races. I really do. I just don't like those two races.)

Compared to the options I considered the other day, archer still comes out ahead. The only trouble with it is that I'd have to be able to convince everyone to play Iron Heroes. It'd be much easier to play a ritual warrior in an otherwise "normal" campaign.

Archery Musings

Now I've got this inexplicable desire to play an archer. I'm considering making my next D&D character a ranger. Or, alternatively, a fighter with appropriate feats. But the favored enemy option intrigues me, as does having some kind of scouting creature.

A bard might also make an interesting archer. Though I've played a bard twice already. Neither time was particularly satisfactory, although the first time it was certainly entertaining, and the second time the fun flow problems were caused by the game, not the character. And the GM. Who was horrible. But that's a rant that doesn't need to be repeated.

Anyway. The first time I played, it was fun, but mostly because I was having a lot of fun with limericks. I did an entire character journal in limerick. The game only lasted two sessions, but those two sessions were pretty awesome. Being the first KordCon campaign probably had something to do with it.

The problem I had with the bard is that I had a hard time feeling useful. This may have been because of the level. Using bardic music felt like a meaningful contribution, but I could only use that once per day. At higher levels, with the ability to provide those bonuses in every encounter, the bard thing might be better. Because then I'd be something other than "not as sneaky as the rogue, not as magic-y as the wizard, and not as fight-y as the fighter."

But, anyway. Archer. Elf or human would work--I was thinking halfling, because there you'd have both a racial ability modifier and a size modifier increasing your attack bonus. Except then I remember about reduced damage dice, on account of being sized small. Now, a halfling wizard specializing in rays, that would be awesome.

I'd probably end up deciding race based on setting. In Eberron, I'd totally go with an elf. Elves are awesome in Eberron. Basically anywhere else I know about, I'd probably play a human.

Why Martin Is Awesome

I threatened, a while ago, to describe why I think Martin is a cool character. And now it's late, and I'm tired, and I need to write something. So I've compiled a list. Well, the rest of the list.

He's not annoying in combat. I mostly credit his use of ranged magic attacks for this. (If only all NPCs were so skilled.) He doesn't hit me, he doesn't get in my way, and most of all . . .

He doesn't die. Except for a couple of plot critical points, he can't. Now, sure, this makes the game easier, but it also makes it a lot less annoying, because you don't have to worry about him wandering off and getting himself into trouble. Which is good, because he wanders off to fight bandits more or less constantly.

As an added bonus, his immunity to death means that, if for some reason he ends up very angry with you, you can just knock him out. When he comes to, he'll have no memory of whatever it is you did that ticked him off. There is endless entertainment value in this phenomena.

In general, though: He does things. Granted, sometimes he does annoying things. (Dammit, Martin, I just need one point of blade to level up!) But for the most of the game, he's actually kind of useful. He tells you a lot of interesting things. He's as involved in the whole "saving the world" gig as you are. But what he does, he does without upstaging you. In a major way . . .

He helps you be cool. He's constantly coming up with crazy plans that, basically, only you can pull off. Because no one else is awesome enough. And he never doubts that you can do it. Every conversation you have with the guy reaffirms your awesomeness.

And, of course: He's kind of geeky. I'm serious. There's no other way to describe someone who's constantly coming up with bizarre schemes, covers a table with books, gets another table so he can cover it with books, and responds to you showing up with an incredibly evil artifact by saying, "You should give it to me, because it's, uh, dangerous. Yeah."

Why does this make Martin cool? Because the only people who care whether he's cool are geeks. RPG geeks. The kind of people who actually watch video game cut scenes. The kind of people who combine English major style literary analysis to video games. Even if video games are going mainstream, RPGs are still played by some pretty geeky people.

I'll probably come up with some more reasons, eventually, but those are the basic reasons why I think Martin is cool. Besides the scowling, anyway.

Biffy Dunwhite

Best character I ever ran: Biffy Dunwhite.

Biffy was a lot of things. Mad wizard. Follower of Kord. Total yahoo.

Mostly, she was a lot of fun to play. I want to play her again, especially now that I have the Spell Compendium. With all those crazy spells available (I'm thinking scatterspray would be about her style), she'd be awesome on ice.

Not that she wasn't awesome just with the standard PHB array. See, the thing about my characters is that they all end up crazy. They always end up freaking out about mole people, or pitchforks and torches, or trees. I have a tendency to go off on crazy, paranoid rants when I'm roleplaying. Probably has to do with decreased inhibitions, and this is how I see the world all the time, I just can't tell people about it in my normal persona.

That being the case, the beautiful thing about Biffy was that she started out crazy. I made her for a campaign called "KordCon," where we start publish adventures and never finish them. We go on these adventures because we're all followers of Kord and we've gotten together for a "religious" convention.

The first time we did it, I wanted to play a wizard. (Our usual spellcaster was playing a fighter. A dwarven fighter. Named either "Aleboot" or "Axebeard," the other name belonging to the party's (dwarven) cleric. It was just that kind of campaign.)

Now, when we started making our characters, we didn't know that it was going to involve KordCon. We just knew that the adventure was going to be "really stupid," because the GM had gotten it from some contest.

So, following that line of thought, the guy playing the cleric decides to worship Kord. Kord, in this instance, being the "god of hitting things, and drinking." And it kind of snowballed from there.

So I made Biffy. And Biffy was fun-crazy. She hung out with a couple of dwarves, got into fights, liked wacky spells, and mostly managed to avoid the kind of ranting that had plagued my other characters.

I liked her enough that when we ran the second KordCon adventure, I played her again. A couple of other people played different characters--we had a different, human cleric that time. Which is the only one I remember.

Why do I bring all this up? Because I want to play Biffy again. Next time someone runs a D&D campaign, I plan on playing a wizard, and I plan on playing Biffy.

(And because I've missed a couple of days, and I have to write about something.