Hi. I’m the Angry GM. You probably don’t know who I am. That’s okay. Your GM does. In fact, your GM is probably the person who asked you to read this. Your GM has been reading my stuff for a while now. Months. Maybe years. Maybe longer. For the last ten years, I’ve been helping GMs like yours learn how to run games and how to run them better here on this website. I’ve also put out a lot of homebrewed rules and mods. I’ve done some freelance design work, and I even published a book about playing and running RPGs. And it’s all based on my experiences playing and running games steadily for over thirty years.
Don’t be put off by the ‘Angry’ in my name. It’s just this running gag. I pretend to abuse, insult, and belittle GMs because of how badly they suck and they pretend to develop insecurities and PTSD and, in some disturbing cases, Stockholm Syndrome. I laugh. They laugh as best they can through the tears. It’s all in good fun. If you think your GM does a good job, they’ve probably been working really hard to get good at it for a long time. And putting up with a lot of phony abuse sprinkled through the 5,000 words I’ve been putting out every week for a decade.
You might want to thank them. You might not have realized how much work, skill, and practice it takes to run games. And most modern RPGs don’t make it easy. Which is part of where the ‘Angry’ comes from in my name. But I digress.
Today, I’m taking a break from ranting and swearing at your GM about how to run better, more lifelike NPCs to talk to you – presumably, a player – about how you’ve been making and playing your characters. Because I want to offer you a better way to make and play characters than the one you’ve been using. One that will offer you a more satisfying role-playing experience. More satisfying for you, more satisfying for the players who share your table, and more satisfying for your badly overworked and abused GM.
Thing is, as RPGs have evolved over the years, they’ve encouraged some pretty bad character creation habits. And most RPGs these days tell you to make characters in a way that… well… it’s okay. But it runs against some of the most important aspects of role-playing games. The things that put the RP in RPG. And it doesn’t take into account your brain’s natural skills and wiring.
Some of what I’m about to say is going to seem counterintuitive. That’s part of my thing. When I talk to your GM, I spend a lot of time explaining and justifying my counterintuitive instructions. I refer to everything from narrative and screenwriting structure to neuroscience and psychiatry to evolution and biology to pretty much every other topic under the f$&%ing sun. But I’m going to spare you most of that bulls$&%. I’m just going to give you some advice and some reasons why my advice will help. And then I’m going to trust you to maybe give it a try when it comes time to make your next D&D character.
Oh, the f$&%ing swearing is part of my thing too. And so is what you’re reading right now. I start all of my articles off with this Long, Rambling Introduction™. Some people think they’re funny. Some people just skip them. They’re usually a lot less focused and a lot more tangential than this, but I’m trying to be straightforward here because you don’t know me. And, while I’m normally very wordy, I’m trying my damndest not to be.
Sorry if this is long. Feel free to take a break when you need to and come back.
How to Make a Character
Every role-playing game is different. If you’ve only ever played one D&D,… If you’ve only ever played one RPG, you’ll have to trust me on that. Character creation varies from game to game. Mechanically, anyway. Every game has different rules for what makes a character. Sometimes, you have to pick a race, class, and background and sometimes you have to spend a bunch of points on skills and attributes with no class or race to help you. Sometimes you just have to write down some fluffy story bulls$&% and that’s it. But despite those differences, character creation is actually pretty much the same at its core across most RPGs.
Start with a character concept, an idea of who you want your character to be. Then do all the rules-and-stats bulls$&%. Then, develop a backstory that explains all the stuff you put on the character sheet. Then assign some personality traits and flaws and an alignment or a belief or something and write that down. You might do those things slightly differently from one game to the next, or do them in a different order, but the idea is the same no matter what.
Now, some of you actually don’t like doing all that crap. Some of you don’t want to bother with concepts and personalities and backstories. But some of you love that s$&%. Some of you think that s$&% helps you play your character really well. Some of you think that knowing exactly who your character is and how they’ll behave and what they think will help you make decisions in the game. And, you like having a plan. It’s your character; you should know where they’re coming from and where they’re going. And besides, that s$&%’s fun. It’s fun to make characters and write backstories. More fun, sometimes, than playing the game.
If you DON’T like all the backstory and concept crap, I’ve got good news for you. I’m going to tell you how to make a character without doing any of that s$&%. Well, almost any.
If you LOVE that backstory and concept crap, though, we have a tough discussion ahead of us. Because, while it’s not technically wrong and you can play the game any way you want, it’s actually wrong. It runs against the spirit of the game. It churns out less interesting characters that are harder to role-play in the long run. It makes the game less enjoyable for the other players and the GM. And you won’t believe me when I say all that because you can’t see yourself from the outside. The truth is, all of that hurts your ability to really role-play and to learn what it’s like to be a fantastic character in an imaginary world. It literally gets in the way of the parts of your brain that are actually really good at role-playing.
That said, it’s a really great way to write a novel. Or, at least, a short story.
Play to Find Out What Happens
When you sit down to play an RPG, you’re sharing an experience with a group of other players. A story. A story that plays out in a world created by the GM. You’re not playing the GM’s story. The GM just presents situations and goals and events. You and your friends decide how to respond to those things. And the GM determines how to world reacts to what you do. And then you react to that. And the world reacts to you. And through that back and forth interaction, a story emerges. A story nobody wrote. A story that grows as everyone responds to everyone.
We GMs have an edict. A rule. It was explicitly written down in a game called Apocalypse World, but it’s been around forever. It says, “play to find out what happens.” And it reminds us that we – the GMs – don’t plan out the story or the game. We set the action in motion and then we respond to what you – the players – do. It reminds us that, in the end, the only way to know what’s going to happen in the game is to sit down with a bunch of other people and actually play it out.
But the same rule applies to everyone. The GM responds to what you do, but you do what you do in response to the situations the GM presents. And you also respond to what the other players do. Because you’re not alone in the game. That’s role-playing. It’s a dynamic experience. And it’s interesting and exciting and tense because no knows what’s going to happen. Everyone is just responding to the unexpected.
Dynamic Characters
Role-playing is about adopting the persona of a fictional person – one who could be a real person – and imagining how they’d respond to whatever the world throws at them. In real life, people are constantly adapting, growing, and changing. Over the long term, the way people think, act, and behave and even the way they perceive the world is shaped by all the experiences they’ve had in their lives. In the short term, people constantly adjust their behaviors, perceptions, and thoughts to the different situations they find themselves in. People aren’t fixed. They are very malleable. They – we – just don’t notice it very often. That’s partly because the big changes tend to be gradual evolutions. And it’s partly because we can’t really perceive the changes because our perceptions are part of the changes. You might not realize how different you act in different social situations, but you do. Everyone does. Hell, most people don’t even realize their mood is affecting their behavior until someone else calls them on it.
Point is, we expect people to change. We expect them to change from situation to situation and we expect them to evolve over time. That’s what people do. Authors have a term for characters who change over time. They’re called dynamic characters. They’re the opposite of static characters which authors usually avoid because, at best, they’re boring and, at worst, they seem unrealistic.
Embracing the Uncontrollable
When you’re playing an RPG, you have to be willing to respond to the game’s events and to the other players’ actions. And you have to be malleable and adaptable. You have to evolve. And that means giving up a lot of control over what actually happens to your character. And even who your character becomes. I mean, your character might be the happiest person in the imaginary world and you might like him that way. But if enough terrible s$&% happens in the game – especially because of his own mistakes – he might become hardened, bitter, cynical, or depressed. It’s an extreme example, sure, but it makes the point.
That ain’t for everyone. It’s scary to build a character you love and then have so little control over what happens to them. If they even survive what happens to them. That’s part of the courage it takes to play an RPG. And if you can’t do that, well, then what you want isn’t an RPG. Maybe a solo creative activity is more your speed. Like writing or drawing comics. And that isn’t sarcasm. It isn’t pejorative. It’s not a dig. You may not be the sort of person who wants to share the game with a group of players and a GM. Because they’re going to mess up your plans.
This is part of the RPG social contract. Part of the agreement everyone tacitly accepts when they sit down to play. Even your GM. As a long, LONG-time GM, I can tell you I’ve put a lot of work into a lot of s$&% I’ve loved for my games and worlds and watched some terrible, awful things happen to them that I didn’t plan or want. I’ve had to destroy entire worlds because of what the players did. Or didn’t do. Or failed to do.
Now, there’s more to that social contract. There’s stuff about agreeing to play the same game and respecting people’s personal limitations and a whole bunch of other stuff. But that stuff’s a discussion for another day. Today, I’m pointing out that part of playing an RPG is accepting the risk that things won’t go the way you want them to go for your character and that you’re obligated to not only to accept that s$&%, but to play your character’s responses to them in good faith.
A Team or an Audience
This part might not apply to everyone. I have to mention it though. Some players I’ve worked with have revealed that what they really want out of the other players at the RPG table is an audience for their adventures. They have little interest in the other characters in the story. Or even in sharing the story with other characters. And that’s why they play RPGs instead of writing books. They want to play for a crowd. And I’ve had to tell them that that’s not what an RPG is about. Everyone at the table is part of a team – including the GM – and the game is a team sport.
I’ve also had to tell those players that, because they view the game that way and because their perceptions affect how they play the game, their audience probably isn’t paying attention to them anyway. Their audience, frankly, doesn’t give a s$&% about their character. That’s because the things that make fictional characters interesting include their interactions with others and their dynamic changes over time. If you view the other players as extras in your story and you won’t change your plans based on the games’ events, your character is flat, static, unrealistic, and uninteresting.
I’m going to assume that’s not you, though. I assume you want a genuine role-playing experience in which you get to experience your character’s growth as a result of a shared story. But if it is you, you may want to think hard about what I’ve said before you go any further and make sure the hobby really is for you.
And I’m sorry I even have to say that. But it’s something everyone – player and GM alike – needs to hear.
Role-Playing is Hard Until it’s Not
Click on the tip jar to leave a tip
Last thing about role-playing theory is this: role-playing is a lot harder than you think it is. Especially if you think it’s pretty easy. If you think it comes naturally. The other day, I explained to your GM in painstaking detail precisely why the human brain isn’t actually good at role-playing and why role-playing, acting, and even empathy, are all based on a concept I called ‘you, but…’. Basically, you can’t rewire your brain, and your brain wiring influences how you perceive things and react to them. So when you try to role-play, you’re mostly just putting a few simple filters over your own brain to fake it. Don’t worry about all that s$&% though. You don’t need to care about the technical details.
Just know that the more strongly you define a character – especially a character different from you – the more mental strain you have to put on your brain to role-play it and the less realistic and convincing your portrayal will be. And the more strongly you define a character, the less malleable it will be. The less it will change over time.
Fortunately, your brain is really good at putting on disguises if you let it do so naturally. It’s wired to. So, if you ease yourself into playing a role and you’re gentle on your brain, the role eventually takes on a life of its own. It sort of starts to play itself. And it does so in a very natural and convincing way. It will even evolve organically in response to changes. What’s really amazing, though, is that the character inside your own brain can even surprise you. Kind of like how you sometimes surprise yourself with your own choices and behaviors and end up thinking, “now, why the hell did I do that?”
This emergent role-playing doesn’t just grow and evolve forward, either. It also evolves backward. Into the past. As you role-play – TRULY role-play – backstory details emerge through play. Maybe your fighter just saved everyone’s a$&es with a successful Animal Handling check and one of the other characters asked you how you got so good with horses. You might find your character speaking through your mouth. She might explain that she grew up on a farm and hated it. That’s why she left and joined the army. But the one thing she liked was taking care of the animals. She was a natural. And when she was left to take care of the army’s pack horses, a knight saw how well she treated them and invited her to squire for him. And then when he fell in battle, she took up his sword and avenged his death. And that’s how she became a fighter.
And you might not have known any of that before she started speaking through you. I s$&% you not. I see it happen all the time. Hell, it happens to me a lot. As a GM, I’m really happy my brain can do this kind of trick. It lets me invent all sorts of details about the world and the game on the fly whenever the players ask questions.
When you find yourself truly role-playing like this, it’s genuine and heartfelt and surprising. It engages everyone at the table because it makes your character truly dynamic and interesting in a way that regurgitated facts from a prewritten backstory just can’t. And it also engages and excites YOU. Because you get the fun of learning about this character – this stranger in a strange, fantastic world – from the inside. As the character grows, you grow into her.
And the only way to get there is to use a trick that we GMs have been using since the first time one of us waited until the last minute to build an entire game world for their campaign and had no idea what the hell to do. You “start small and build.” Basically, you start playing a character before you know too much about them.
The Two-Note Player-Character
If you love writing elaborate backstories and playing well-defined characters, hopefully, I’ve convinced you to at least TRY something else for a few weeks so that you can experience a different kind of role-playing. To have your character emerge through play as part of a shared story experience. And that means you’re ready to learn how to get started.
Meanwhile, if you hate that backstory crap and just want to play the game – or you think you can’t really role-play or you suck at role-playing – then I’ve got some bad news for you. This is a role-playing game. You can’t get away from it. But the good news is I’m going to tell you how to create a character so you don’t actually have to worry about backstory and role-playing and s$&% like that. You can just play the game and the role-playing will take care of itself.
The trick is to take advantage of the parts of your brain that already know how to adopt different personas and how to adapt to different situations. Parts that come preinstalled in every human brain as part of the standard social interaction software suite. Those parts will do the heavy lifting for you. You just have to give them the smallest seed to get them started and then get the hell out of their way. After a few sessions of play, you’ll find your character is just sort of magically there. Living in your head and coming out of your mouth.
Obviously, to make a character, you have to do all the crap the game wants you to do. Pick a race and class, blah blah blah. You need to fill out a character sheet. But what you don’t need to do anymore – and this might be scary or it might be liberating depending on who you are – what you don’t need to do anymore is worry about WHY your character might have a specific skill or how they might have picked up a specific trait. Just pick the stuff you want. Go with whatever looks cool or seems fun. Eventually, your character will tell you exactly how and why they have the skills and traits they do.
You can even be really ballsy and do what we used to do back in the day. You can make your character completely randomly. Roll for everything. It’s a hell of role-playing experience when you suddenly discover there’s a randomly generated gnomish avenger paladin living in your head who can tell you the day he learned to play Dragon Poker. Random generation is not for everyone, but it’s a hell of a drug.
Just don’t fill out any of those pesky personality traits. Leave them blank. No traits, quirks, flaws, ideals, nothing. Just do the mechanical parts. Tell your GM I said it was okay.
Once you’ve filled out the character sheet with all the gamey s$&%, you need to come up with two seeds. Two notes you’re going to write down. One seed is a small seed. It’s actually more important to your GM than it is to you. It’s called your motivation. It’s the vague, general reason why your character is doing what they do right now. It’s what they hope to gain from all the dungeon-delving and monster-slaying and treasure-hoarding. Write your motivation somewhere on your character sheet where you can easily find it. But also tell your GM what it is.
Your motivation doesn’t need much detail. There’s a reason I said it was general and vague. In one of my recent games, I gave the players a list of possible motivations they could choose from for their characters. No additional details were needed or wanted. It didn’t matter at the start of the game who they swore their oaths of vengeance against or what dark desires they were tempted by. The seed was enough for the players’ brains. And it was enough for me – the GM – to create adventures that motivated the characters.
- I am bound by honor
- I was chosen by the light
- I have lost all hope
- I know that fortune favors the bold
- I am a glory hound
- I’m a natural leader
- I am pure of heart and have a noble purpose
- I will gain respect and recognition
- I’m a risk-taker at heart
- I am a slave to my duty
- I must know the truth
- I’ve been tempted by dark desires
- I have a thirst for knowledge
- I’ve sworn an oath of vengeance
- I suffer from wanderlust
The other seed – the big seed – is a single, short sentence. A single fact about your character. A single belief your character holds. A single idea. A single memory. A single desire or fear. It doesn’t have to be anything big or fancy or Earth-shattering. In fact, the smaller and simpler it is, the better. It should be short enough to write on the front of an index card in big letters. Or to write across the top of your character sheet. Because that’s what you want to do. You want to write it down big enough that you can read it at a glance.
In one of my recent games, one player – she was playing a tiefling wild magic sorcerer – wrote, “I hate and fear my uncontrollable magic.” That’s it. Short. Simple. To the point.
Once you have your big seed written down, your big note, you want to keep it somewhere where you can see it easily while you’re playing. Though you probably don’t want it to be too visible to the other players. It’s just important to keep it somewhere where you gaze will fall on it periodically as you play. That’s why the top of the character sheet is a good choice. Every time you check your character’s AC or update your hit points or adjust your gear, you’ll see the note. That keeps reminding your brain about it. It’s a psychological trick and it works for a lot of things. But I only give advice about games involving pretend elves, so you’ll have to figure out the other uses for yourself.
Now, as you make your character, you might have some other ideas about them. You might, for example, know why your tiefling hates her magic and what happened to her. At least, you might have a vague idea. And that’s perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re just not allowed to write it down. Not even privately in your own notes just for yourself. Psychologically, if you don’t write that s$&% down, it stays malleable in your head. Your brain can tweak or change it on the fly. If you write it down, you literally remove your brain’s permission to change it without your approval. Yes, your brain can change things without your approval. Even your memories. Try not to think too much about that.
Anyway, that’s it. That’s the whole trick. Just write down a motivation and one single, solitary fact where you can always see it and then start playing the character and see what happens. I know it seems too easy. I know it seems counterintuitive. I know it seems crazy. And I know you’re going to argue why your way is better. And I’m not going to argue back. I won’t pull the whole, “I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I’ve introduced over a hundred players to the game personally and have seen many more come and go from my tables,” argument of authority. I won’t cite my sources or bombard you with academic research. If you don’t like what I’m offering, you can leave it right here.
But I am asking you to give it a try. Take a chance. Give it a fair shake for several sessions. It can take some time to start working. The more often you do it, though, the quicker it works. After that, if you hate it, you can go back to doing things your way and know that you were right and that the Angry a$&hole with his stupid, wordy website and his childish censored swearing was wrong.
It’s your call. Either way, thanks for taking the time to read this. And make sure you let your GM know you’re having fun. You have no idea how much a genuine ‘thank you’ means to a GM. Happy gaming. Have a great day.
There. That ought to hold the little bastards for a while.
Thank you for this. I’ve been asking for something very similar from my players for years. I just added, “Name one person you know.” as a third thing. Mostly that last one is for me though, so I can have some NPC’s that are a bit more tied to the PC’s. It’s good to know I’m not the only one who prefers not to have elaborate backstories for the PC’s.
Great article, this will be my suggestion to my players in my next campaign.
And thank you for the comment about saying “thank you”. A player acknowledging that they enjoyed what you as a GM dished up can really make their day
This is **epic**.
I do the ‘start small with world-building’ thing all the time, but I never thought to do it with characters.
I will suggest this to players in my next session zero.
“your brain can change things without your approval. Even your memories. Try not to think too much about that.”
Thank you for this tidbit Angry. It’s just what I needed for an NPC quote in my next Traveller game.
The players are battling Neo-Sapient psionics who are trying to mess with people’s minds – your text will fit nicely into the Patron briefing.
If you’ve read Ender’s Game, you might understand this is exactly what happens to Valentine; after writing as Demosthenes, she becomes him. Also, isn’t the two-note thing what Fate tries to do? I’m writing a similar game and I wanted this idea to be firmly planted into the game. Thanks for your work, Angry!
The community needs more articles like this, because there are more players than GMs. What’s great is that this gives players extra things to be excited about between sessions! I wish I’d considered this approach years ago, I can’t wait to try it.
Being a player sounds great, I’d love to try it one day..
Eh. It kinda sucks, honestly.
Ditto. Would 10k x rather DM 😀 Great article, Angry. You always pinpoint, and present solutions to, those things that nag at me about DND. Permission to print for dissemination to my future players?
Is it the gming that ruins it for you or the system itself?
Or just the ability to see through most of the tricks they pull to make the world seem alive etc..?
I suspect Angry misses the power.
For me, it’s being able to see the tropes and narrative structure because I’ve been breathing the skeletons of stories for year, plots become predictable, if I know my GM or the source author well enough I know whether a scene while hold to trope or subvert and the answers to the plot are generally easy to guess. One of my longest friends and GMs enjoys world of darkness and reuses the same world-plot and weaves it into every single game they run because they love the narrative of the story so much and his original cast had so much fun playing it. After the third rehash popped up in the last game we played I quit playing games with them, they asked why, and they didn’t appreciate when I explained. Once I can see your hand behind the curtain without the curtain being drawn, there’s no disbelief to suspend, I’m walking through your script making commentary on your prose while kicking around the props and costuming department. And, as a player, I come into games to explore a character and the landscape, not play the friendly art critic and read your newest draft of the same tired old work. As a GM, I can get my fix of exploring the landscape by developing it in and out of games and enjoy others developing their characters vicariously.
The choice as to what is likely to give me a fun time is clear, I can’t trust other GMs to cook a decent dinner when they insist on using leftovers they and I enjoyed ate last year with RediMac sprinkled on top. You can feed me a story you’ve had on the shelf for century and I won’t bat an eye, but God help you if you reuse a plot on me and then tell me I’m playing wrong when I mention it tastes stale.
…yeah, that’s not a pent up personal issue at all…
For me, it’s not even that I miss the power. It’s just that I get caught up thinking “That’s not the ruling I’d make” and then have a hard time not correcting the GM on this or that detail.
It’s better for me to just stay behind the screen where I can only criticize myself.
Feeling your pain Rijst. My last experience as a player was so long ago that I can’t even be sure of the genre.
If the impossible happens and one of your players ever steps up to GM then there are pitfalls to avoid.
I highly recommend watching Seth Skorkowsky’s recent video on ‘When a Player GMs for Their Game Master’. It’s fun and very relevant.
Seth Skorkowsky’s video on ‘Character Backstory’ is also on point for points raised elsewhere in these comments: e.g. how to get players to do their bit to integrate backstory into the game.
The answer being – basically – ‘bring up your backstory in the form of questions and hints to the GM’.
So for instance if my PC is being hunted for a murder he didn’t commit, I shouldn’t get frustrated just because my GM doesn’t spontaneously weave the plot of ‘The Fugitive’ into every interaction.
Instead I should ‘signal’ to the GM – reminding him what my preoccupations are.
I should say things like: “I enter the tavern, my collar high to hide my face. For of course I am a wanted man. I slide into a corner and look about. Are there any bounty hunters in here?”
The GM then knows to respond.
For instance he might say: “You sit down in a dark corner and furtively scan the crowd. After a bit you calm down. The clientele seem to be simple tradesmen who come here every day. There are no heavily armed men with mud-stained boots.”
“But when you go to the bar you get a shock. There is a poster on the wall marked ‘Wanted – the KingKiller!’. The poster displays an excellent picture of you.”
That’s a good idea and a pretty cool example too.
Thanks Rijst, appreciate it.
One of my players is a gm actually but he seems to enjoy that I whip up. Maybe I can convince him to run something one day..
The part about audience or team players made me understand why it seems that so many seem to lament ” a lack of” customization options in DnD5e. A lot of people want their cool idea to be mechanically supported so they can show of their cool idea.
I’ve also always said that character background only ever needed a reason why the character is an adventurer. Although it seems there is some weird addiction to writing a life story for a background even with me asking that I only need that reason.
I think one of the thing also overlooked for consequences is that you character can be done adventuring. For example your target of revenge is now dead, you’ve regained the lost honor of your family, or whatever tangible goal you set. It’s fine to retire a character even if your character could continue adventuring. Death or end of campaign doesn’t need to be the only ends of your character.
I think it has to do with the fact that when you look at your star wars and your lord of the rings, you see either the illusion or the reality of this long shadow of backstory in the non POV characters: Han Solo, Aragorn, Obi Wan, Gandalf, are all introduced to us with this huge back log of crap that they did before they met our hero.
So you think that you too need to make a bounty hunter on the run from a slug after dumping drugs you were running in the fastest ship in the galaxy because you got pulled over by the cops, after doing the kessel run in 15 inches.
And if even one person at the table cares (which is your hope) they’re going to act very not-movie character and go “whoa whoa hold the f&#k on. Slug drug dealer!? You work for a slug who deals drugs? Fucking why?”
And since improvisation is just planning in the middle of doing, you figure you should answer some of those questions ahead of time. But questions just raise more questions and soon you have a backstory.
This article reminds me of the best one-line character definitions that I was ever presented with.
The player summed up his new PC in just one sentence:
“Imagine Galadriel – but as a serial-killer”.
Every edition of the game changes the culture of the game itself, in good and bad ways. The worst thing 3rd brought in — and mind you, that’s my fave which is why I play Pathfinder nowadays — was “the opposite of all the advice Angry gave us here”. I hate games where you have six characters that were all obviously conceived as the lone protagonist of a novel, the first half of which is given to the DM as “my backstory” and the other half is in the player’s head as “what better happen or I’ll be pissy”. I think it may have started because the detail involved in creating a character made them less disposable, encouraging the idea that the character was indispensable to the story, so it must be THEIR story.
I feel like the example would have been more plausible if Angry hadn’t said “tiefling”. Unless the player rolled race randomly, I have never in my life heard of a tiefling character that didn’t also have at least half a Twilight book of backstory written up.
The example is a real-life example. Like, from an actual person. In a game I ran.
Angry, you literally wrote “If fictional characters behave like normal humans, we call them unrealistic or poorly written.” a while ago.
If anything your point has been proven.
If I knew how to meme, I would insert that stick figure guy who’s about to say something with his finger raised and then deflates because he realizes he’s been beaten and his finger sags.
I felt that this article is a bit too long to give to players. I read it with the idea in mind that I might give this to somebody about to play in one of my campaigns and that changed my impression of how it reads. If it’s just me, I dig the style. I like the suggested method, though, independently of how it is presented, and would still encourage players to read through this.
I can see how this article is definitely needed, though. In my first campaign people wrote long sob stories as their background which they ended up forgetting about before I could even bring them up in play. They couldn’t portray those characters, and the campaign ultimately had no benefit from those multi-page tracts.
If your player can write an entire book about their character’s backstory they can read a few thousand words of advice for their next character. If not, it’s a great precursor for how you can explain to them what they should be focused on during character creation
A surprising amount of player-directed advise is either GM’s and their wishlists, or players who lack the self-awareness skills to realize their fun is IN SPITE of their ideas.
That said I’m def using this. All of my ideas to be are set up just for a more loose and lubricated character experience.
Was anyone else slightly unsettled by the tone of this article? With everything going on in the world right now, a soft Angry may be the final, penultimate sign of the apocalypse.
Then he brought it all back to reality with his final sentence. Whew! Thanks for not changing, Angry! Great article… now to somehow get my group to read it… 🙁
Nah, I’m inured to it. I watched Iron Chef Jr a few years back and got to see Gordon Ramsay acting *nice*.
Angry, just a thought, but would you ever contemplate a second revised edition of your book? Do you think your way of looking at RPGs and DMing generally has changed enough that it warrants a revised version of the book?
This article seems to say that a developed backstory for a player character is wrong somehow. I don’t see a difference due to the possibility of a minimal backstory growing into a developed backstory later on, which is encouraged. What is the difference in having a developed backstory at the two different points in time?
This article also seems to change the definition of roleplaying as has been defined previously, or our focus on playing it out in the game.
“Roleplaying” as defined previously has been usurped by this new definition, which seems to be have been stated as a form of acting as acting has been defined previously. “Playing with a mask.” “Thoughtless and reactive.” Which seems to go against the idea of projection.
As an example, what about the section in the “Defining your game” article where it says combat is not really roleplaying? Do we accept that is technically correct, but that we should nonetheless “play our masks” in combat due to the differences in definition? It seems to me that combat would be a valid form of “playing masks” due to the lack of emphasis on thoughts of the player, which was the defining reason for why combat or other things was not roleplaying. That it was mostly logical thoughts. Like a puzzle, or sudoku. Which to me seems it should be “played with masks” now.
So why is “playing with masks” the more valid way of roleplaying as I believe it is argued in this article? Should combat and puzzles be “played with masks” now?
There is a simple difference between a backstory that was written before you even started playing the game and one you develop at the table during the game. It is that it’s more fun to make up your backstory on the fly, at the table during the game.
It isn’t inconsequential, and it is not just that it is more fun. Angry’s argument is that we are cursed (and blessed) with being ourselves. Writing down 100 things about someone who isn’t me, then trying to live all 100 is a doomed endeavor. Writing down two things, then being me plus those two things is possible. Once I’m practiced with those two differences, adding more tweaks is possible, as they become relevant.
If at level 5 we face our first dragon, and I realize/decide my character has a fascination (or terror) for dragons, because of something involving my kid brother, I can then have an actual memory from the game to reinforce the made-up memory of my character (for me and the rest of the table), and it will be something I can continue to role play, rather than forgetting I even had a brother, whom I gave a whole village worth of children to, none of whom would ever mater to the story played at the table at all. Not only do I get the joy of knowing something about my pretend elf, but I get to get that at the table, with my friends, who share in it with me.
RPGs are played at the table. They are played best with the least mental load reasonable. Backstory doesn’t bring much to the game, and if it does, it comes with a hefty mental load too. And it hinders adding new bits, because there are already “facts” in the way, even if only I am aware of them, and only vaguely.
Finally Angry’s argument settles into, you may not like it, but try it first to see, because He says you will like it, and so will your table-mates, and he notes that he is not presenting any evidence (despite having it) to prove this. Because the best evidence is your experience at the table. It will be “fun,” whatever that means.
This is a very apt summary. Well done.
There is a direct parallel with a GM doing all the world building for his game before the 1st game even starts, compared with a GM doing ‘just enough’ world-building to sustain his game.
‘Just enough’ world-building allows the GM time to rethink half-baked ideas, it allows him to focus world-building in the direction the players are going, and it removes the enormous barrier-to-entry of having to create the whole world before the PCs start on their 1st adventure.
In the same way: ‘Just enough’ character-building enables the PC to engage with the GM’s narrative without any dead-wood; he can allow his PC to ‘suprise him’ by reacting to the situations in the game, rather than necessarily adhering to his pre-conceived idea of the character, and of course he saves time by not creating a backstory.
Now some GMs like or allow their players to subcreate part of the game, specifically using their backstory as a condensation nucleus for world-building:
e.g. If a player tells their GM that their paladin is a member of a secret order that hunts shapeshifters through the corridors of power, then a GM could work with that to shift the focus of the game.
This is the PC doing part of the worldbuilding through their character backstory. In this case the PC should still abide by the ‘just enough’ rule for worldbuilding, but his backstory might be more fleshed out than usual.
It’s one thing to write a sentence about their paladin hunting shapeshifters through the corridors of power, it’s another to specify names of shapeshifters, what they did to deserve being hunted and to whom, names of people and places where said corridors of power reside, etc.
The things the player writes likely differ from the setting the GM had in mind and now the GM has to deal with these discrepancies. Not such a biggie if it’s just a few names of NPCs etc but if the GM wants to set his game during a zombie apocalypse and the was raised in the colourful mushroom-palace of the gnome king who rides an animated balloon animal there’s a potential problem. The GM can reject the backstory, overhaul the entire setting or use a “this was on another continent so it doesn’t matter here” cop-out but it’s unsatisfactory.
We could call it “player trying to railroad the gm”, which is an outrageous phrase that should never be used. Keeping these details to a minimum allows for everything to fit together elegantly regardless of what happens.
Absolutely – a GM who did this would *have* to vet his player contributions.
If the PC is given this right of subcreation AND he specifies loads of stuff (names of victims etc) which aren’t strictly required then he’s slightly breaking the rules on world-building. The GM should take care to prune his input.
If the PC specifies inane stuff like animated balloon animal steeds then he’s building wild contradictions which will torpedo the GM’s world-building. The GM should veto this without mercy.
And of course – even specifying a secret war against shapeshifters – without any other details – would be a huge ‘bid’ by a player. Most GMs would refuse that idea, simply because they want their game to be about something else.
——-
All this said – some of the best narrative threads in my current game came about from a ~14 page story (ouch) written by one of my players.
That story was … pretty bad. Almost no element of it survived into the ‘real world’. But my terse rewrite of it (to make it fit my game) forced me to crystallise major story elements.
Critically – if I hadn’t been able to absorb his input to my complete satisfaction, I would have refused it completely.
14 pages! That’s insane, I know of at least one gm who wouldn’t even read that.
One of my players, when asked if his noble character came from this particular kingdom, just answered “no but I have family here”, combined with his impoverished state due to gambling debts this gave me all I needed to link the next adventure to his character. I sent him a rough “family history” based on this and the plot I’m creating and he loved it. Done and done. We can fill in the details as we go along, less really is more here..
I’d make a player feed it to a shredder. If a player wants to write novels, he can do that on his own. An RPG is about developing a character through play.
“A player trying to railroad the gm” – that can happen, and that’s a pretty good way of describing it.
*All GMs remember*: you are the final authority for what is in your game. You can veto literally every ‘bid’ from the players if you wish.
Your decisions may be right or wrong, but they are emphatically yours to make.
Players who cannot bear to live with your choices can simply become GMs. They can spin up an instance of Roll20 and create a better game.
You are not standing in their way. In fact: you wish good luck to your new fellow GM!
Yep, 14 pages, no pictures.
I had a sinking feeling when I recieved it out of the blue (for of course I didn’t ask him to write it).
But then I thought – ‘this is a player who is wildly enthusiastic about my game. I don’t want to shoot him down’.
So – I made the effort, and I’m glad I did.
“We can fill in the details as we go along, less really is more here”
Sage advice. This is exactly right.
Angry should write an article about that.
Oh wait..
Sorry Angry – I misled you.
This wasn’t a 14 page backstory (shudder) but a 14 page narrative written at the height of the campaign to set up a dramatic death scene for a beloved character – so that the player could play someone else.
Affably chatting with Rijst, I veered off-topic into worldbuilding and how PCs can contribute to that – sorry for the confusion.
Wow. For the first five paragraphs there, I got anxious and wondered what “they” had done with the *real* Angry. Thankfully, by paragraph six I knew we were still in familiar territory.
No worries. 😀
I want to try to contest the claim that dynamic characters are inherently better than static characters.
Let’s start with some definitions. From the beginning to the end of a story, a character either changes, or not. We call the former type of character a “dynamic” character, and the latter type a “static” character.
Change, however, can either be good or bad. Consider, for instance, a character who has to rise to the occasion and become a hero, or a character misuses their power and sinks into evil. These aren’t made up examples: in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy fits the first role, whereas Anakin Skywalker in the prequels fits the second role.
But notice, however, that resistance to either of these forces would be bad or good, respectively. If a character rejects the role of hero, then we end up with a moral fall, but if a character rejects the temptation to misuse their power, we end up with a moral triumph. In Star Wars, this might be the equivalent of Luke rejecting his role as a hero, or Anakin rejecting the dark side.
When it comes down to it, this gives us four major kinds of character arcs. If the character is given an opportunity to:
1) become a better person, and takes it
2) become a better person, and rejects it
3) become a worse person, and takes it
4) become a worse person, and rejects it
Any one of these types of character arcs can result in a delicious story, even though types 1 and 3 are dynamic characters, and types 2 and 4 are static characters.
Now, obviously, writers (and GM’s alike) can choose to make more complex character arcs by subverting these tropes. In some cases, character arcs can also be simpler. It’s also common that characters aren’t given enough space or screen time to show any meaningful change, or lack thereof.
If you’re interested, or still not convinced, here are two articles that explain static and dynamic characterization better than I can:
https://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english287/cc-static_vs_dynamic_characterization.htm
https://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english287/cc-plot_char.htm
(these are from https://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english287/cc.htm)
You can have those arcs without an elaborate pre-written backstory though. Then you’re left with the question of which character is easier to play and I think the one with less baggage comes out ahead.
Actually, all 4 examples could be static characters, it just depends on what their core personality is. If the character suffers no conflict from making the choice, they’re static, not dynamic. Even a character who “was going to make the choice obvious for them” can be dynamic if taking the choice alters them somehow. If the choice is easy, obvious, and/or doesn’t place any weight on the story’s pace or direction, it’s a static choice; dynamism is what makes any of the ‘four choices’ delicious when done well in stories. A static character can make a world-shattering choice, yet their morale conflict feels more like picking between cheesecake and strawberry shortcake.
As a GM who has had way too many games crumble to dust under the weight of scheduling issues that inevitably derail a game, I tend towards the solitary world-building type nowadays, but I have always, and will always, love rolling completely random characters and then RPing them into various settings. It’s probably the one single activity that brings me the most enjoyment in the entire hobby
For extra fun roll race and class before stats, then you get fun stuff about how your Half-orc Barbarian has very low strength and constitution but a wizard-like intelligence – and no they don’t just become a wizard as they progress, in fact they’re even more determined to be the best damn battle-frenzy on the field
I’ll even roll random motivation and belief. My favorite characters of all time have all been random, and most of them are much more memorable than any of my premades
Honestly I very rarely premake any character anymore, PC or NPC, they are are random. Put a jealous, nervous type into your Paladin faction. Put a brash, impetuous type into your Wizard conclave. Put calm, collected people into your goblin horde. That is where the story really emerges
Two (probably stupid) questions that I have:
1. Any advice for applying this advice/approach to characters that have already been created?
2. What is the best way to approach choosing a background in 5e for the mechanical bits (proficiencies, equipment, and feature) while avoiding defining too much about your character in advance?
Thank you in advance for any advice.
Just choose the background. Same as you choose the class. Whatever it says, it says. But don’t bother with any of the traits or ideals – no one uses inspiration anyway – or anything that adds non-mechanical details. You know, like your criminal specialty or the secret of your life of seclusion or whatever. Anything you can avoid defining, just don’t define it.
As for applying this to an already created character, I’m not really sure there’s a good way to un-define s$&%. It doesn’t really work. It’s like telling people to strike something from the record or pretend something never happened. They really can’t. You can’t remove thoughts from your head. It’s like trying to remove pee from a swimming pool.
I remember many a flame war back in the early days of the dial-up internet (when the 3-fold model was first being hammered out) between the DASers (Develop At Start) and DIPpers (Develop In Play)
I’ve never found detailed backstories particularly useful. They are either forgotten or over-written by events in the game. They also tend to be written in isolation so they often don’t help tie the character into the group or the plot.
My personal rule is that nothing is real until it happens at the table. If an event occurs in that shared game space that builds on someone’s back story, then that bit is real. Until then, it’s like schrödinger’s backstory. It might be real, it might not. Only play can tell.