It’s time to bring this frantic Catch Up Week — which has also become Character Arc-pocalypse Week — to a close by talking about the thing I actually wanted to talk about. This is also the thing I know lots of you actually expected to hear about. It’s the thing that @Sanderson and @Athetos — or whoever — were so clueless about, as I explained in the Long, Rambling Introduction™ of my Personal Character Quests Feature. But don’t click that link. That Feature sucks.

In fact, I’m gonna make up for that overly long, overly ranty Long, Rambling Introduction™ by getting right to the point today. And the point is… Character Arcs. What they are, why they don’t work in tabletop roleplaying games, and how you might make them work, maybe, if you wanted to do the work. Which I don’t.

Now, I’m calling this a Bullshit Feature. That’s because this Feature lacks a nice, firm, actionable answer. It’s more about discussing the problem. It’d be a nice starting point, though, for anyone who did want to solve the problem. It’s just that I’m not sure I have a solution I like and also that I don’t really think this problem needs solving. At least not in the kinds of games and systems I like.

So… let’s get to it.

Character Arcs… For Reals

I’m going to pretend that my supporters aren’t all completely mouthbreathing asshats. Which is something I pretend pretty much every day. The pretense keeps me from asking myself what the hell I’m actually doing with my life and drinking myself into oblivion. Actually, I do that most days anyway. Pretense or no.

My point is, today, I’m going to pretend Supporters @Sanderson and @Athetos — I don’t give a shit what their actual names are — actually wanted me to talk about Character Arcs and didn’t mean to send me into a week of frantic, furious content generation and total isolation from the world.

So… how does one design and execute Character Arcs in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons?

One doesn’t. One can’t. And even if one could, one shouldn’t. End of story.

Come back next week for a True Campaign Managery lesson about not wasting your time with a Session Zero. See you then.

Character Arcs… For Reals… Again

Okay, fine, I’ll give this question it’s due. After all, I said I wanted to write this Feature. And not just to have an excuse to check out at the 500-word mark and still get paid. I do want to talk about this Character Arc thing and how awesome it’d be to get them into the right game system and why Dungeons & Dragons — and adventure roleplaying games in general — aren’t the right game system and what you’d have to do to get them into the right system.

Because, the truth is, this ain’t a Game Mastering issue. It ain’t even a Scenario Design thing. If you want Character Arcs, you need to do some serious System-Level Design to get them. Nothing less will do it.

But, I don’t want to go too fast. Because there’s apparently some disagreement over just what even is a Character Arc. There is a correct definition. This ain’t one of those, “When I say Character Arc, I mean…” kind of things. Character Arcs are defined literary, narrative elements that feature in many stories.

So let me explain how they’re defined.

Character Arcs Correctly Defined

A Character Arc is an inner transformation a character undergoes throughout a narrative. Often as a result of the events of that narrative. And the inner part of that definition is especially important. It’s the thing all you dumbasses were missing when you were talking about Personal Character Quests.

Character Arcs are changes on the inside. They’re changes in belief, personality, mindset, perspective, morality, or some other in-the-head kind of trait.

Keeping it Simple: Three Arcs Make a Circle

Broadly and generally speaking — which is good enough for my purposes — there are three major kinds of Character Arcs. I know there’s some debate about that number and where to draw the lines between them, but rather than get bogged down in that fight, I’d prefer it if you’d just finish frothing the milk for my latte and then grabbing me a chocolate croissant to go, thank you.

Yes, if you look this shit up, you’re going to find some obnoxious debate about the different kinds of Character Arcs and which characters are examples of which arcs and how best to define Flat Character Arcs, but what you won’t find is disagreement about what a Character Arc actually is. If you weren’t talking about an inner, transformational journey, you were just wrong. And you really fucked me up. Thanks.

Anyway…

As far as I care, you’ll find three different kinds of Character Arcs throughout fiction — books, movies, comics, streaming shows, and cetera — Positive Arcs, Negative Arcs, and Flat Arcs.

Positive Character Arcs describe the transformation of a character into a better person by the end of a story. Sometimes that’s as simple as overcoming a flaw, weakness, or defect, as with Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: The Original Theatrical Cut. Sometimes, it involves a complete transformation, as with Scrooge McDuck in the Ducktales prequel Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

By the way… if you haven’t seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, you should probably go watch it now. I’m coming back to it. Also, you’re a terrible human being if you haven’t seen it.

Negative Character Arcs, on the other hand, involve characters turning into shittier people by the end of the story. Anakin Skywalker’s arc in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy is totally a Negative Character Arc. He starts off optimistic and hopeful and believing the best of people and ends up as a mass-murdering space wizard who strangled his own pregnant wife because he couldn’t deal with his lack of control over the universe he lives in.

Flat Character Arcs are tricky and there’s a lot of debate about them, so I’m not going to waste much time on them. Some say Flat Character Arcs aren’t Character Acts at all. Basically, they describe Static Characters like Sherlock Holmes who end every story pretty much the same as they started. Me? I prefer the view that they are dynamic journeys and describe the inner lives of characters whose beliefs and personalities are challenged and even temporarily broken or abandoned before being reaffirmed at the end of the story.

It ain’t really worth fighting over this though. See, I was into Flat Character Arcs before they were cool. And also before they got ruined. These days, they’re the purview of Mary Sues and Marty Stus and they’re mostly a feature of shit that’s more message than story. So, basically, propaganda. You know, stories where the protagonist — despite being a complete shit — is proven totally right and that everyone should have been listening to her from the beginning?

But that’s a rant for another time. I’m mostly including this shit for interest. When it comes to tabletop roleplaying games and the Game Masters who want such things, we’re usually talking exclusively about Positive Character Arcs. Game Masters want their player characters to undergo inner transformations and become better people as a result of their adventures. And that just makes sense given that Positive Character Arcs are central to the Quest Narrative that basically forms the DNA of modern adventure roleplaying games.

And because Character Arcs are just awesome in general.

Better Arcs Make Better Characters

Character Arcs are great. At least, they make every story better. All else being equal, audiences invest more emotion in characters that undergo transformative Character Arcs. Why? Because Character Arcs make characters more Relatable.

Relatability is basically the ease with which our brains can trick themselves into thinking imaginary story characters are actually real people. Which is something brains love doing. We personify everything. And we look to stories to teach us about ourselves and about the world. And the most important thing in the world is the people we share it with. The human world is, first and foremost, a social world.

Which is why it’s better to be liked than to be right. No matter what the Internet tells you.

Character Arcs make characters seem more human because humans are affected by the shit that happens to them. At least, they should be. Character Arcs are how characters change. Positive Character Arcs show people learning and growing as a result of their hardships. They’re good lessons. Negative Character Arcs are cautionary tales about people who let their hardships break or corrupt or ruin them.

The Quest for the Best Narrative

Character Arcs — especially Positive Character Arcs — lie at the heart of a particular kind of story called the Quest Narrative. The Quest Narrative is one of the most common story frameworks in the entire world. Every culture’s got versions of it and most have existed since the beginning of time. That’s the narrative Joseph Campbell famously named the Hero’s Journey in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And the Quest Narrative forms the template for basically every adventure game you might play.

Now, whenever I bring up Campbell, there are always a few postmodernist hipster asshats ready to remind me that Campbell’s claim that every story is a Hero’s Journey has been totally debunked and he cherry-picked his examples and blah blah blah. And to them, I always say the same thing: “Could you just finish making my damned latte?”

The point here isn’t that every story is a Quest Narrative — which even Campbell never claimed — but just that it’s a good roadmap of the basic structure of some of the most popular and oldest adventure stories. And, central to such stories, is how the quest changes the hero. In fact, the external quest is usually less important, thematically, than the hero’s inner transformation. Luke Skywalker is a hero because he blew up the Death Star. But more importantly, he learned to accept his destiny and to have faith in the Force. His victory is less important than the fact that he made himself a Jedi. And, by the end of the Star Wars Original Trilogy, that transformation is what empowered him to redeem Darth Vader, defeat the Emperor, and transform the galaxy for real.

But, however much I love it, you ain’t here for a bunch of literary analysis bullshit. You want to know how to bring these awesome Character Arc things into your own tabletop roleplaying Quest Narratives. So it’s a real shame that I’ve got such a Negative Arc to take you through.

You Can’t Have Your Arcs and Play Roleplaying Games Too

Thematically, Character Arcs — especially Positive Character Arcs — are a great fit for tabletop roleplaying games. Especially adventure roleplaying games. Especially fantasy adventure roleplaying games. So it really sucks that, realistically, practically, they’re almost impossible to cram in.

Now, obvious reason is obvious. Character Arcs are inner journeys. They’re inner transformations. And tabletop roleplaying games don’t let you see inside the characters’ heads. But if that were the only problem, it’d be easy enough to overcome. After all, movies and shows and plays also don’t let you hear a character’s inner thoughts and they still manage to convey Character Arcs.

Take Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s a great example of an inner transformation implied by action. At the start of the film, Detective Eddie Valiant is a drunk. He’s mourning the loss of his brother and drinking himself to death. Before the climactic scene in which he rescues Roger and Jessica Rabbit and prevents all of Toontown from being erased from existence by the evil Judge Doom, Eddie Valiant takes out a bottle of whiskey, goes for a snort, then looks at the bottle in disgust, pours it out, tosses it into the air, and puts a cartoon bullet through it.

But Valiant’s Character Arc isn’t that he stopped drinking. See, he and his brother Teddy used to live, laugh, and love. They loved the ‘Toons, they loved their jobs, they loved their girlfriends, they were happy. After Teddy got killed, Eddie died too. He stopped living, he stopped laughing, he stopped loving. His spirit was dead even if his body was alive and the alcohol would take care of that.

Now, the movie does a good job of showing us all that crap, but what it can’t show us is Eddie’s Moment of Revelation. The moment when he realizes there are things worth living for, laughing at, and loving on. Loving to? Whatever. So his alcoholism becomes a visual, behavioral representation of his spiritual death and his choosing not to drink thus shows us, the audience, that he has decided to live again. And then, after he realizes that there is a life without his brother, he is able to avenge his brother, rescue the lovebirds Roger and Jessica Rabbit, and keep literally all laughter from being erased from the world.

It’s just the same way with Luke Skywalker shutting off his targeting computer and, “Using the Force.” That action represents an inner transformation. He accepts his destiny and lets it do with him what it will.

Of course, all that’s possible in tabletop roleplaying games. Theoretically. The audience can’t see the character’s inner journey, but they can see the character’s actions. And, hypothetically, players could just tell the rest of the table what their character is thinking. Seriously, you could have everyone at the table just deliver inner character monologue. But it still wouldn’t work.

Tabletop Roleplaying Games Aren’t Movies or Books

I’m betting lots of you had an instinctive revulsion to the idea of players sharing their characters’ inner monologues, didn’t you? I sure as hell did. Do you know why? Because tabletop roleplaying games have no audience.

I know, I know…

You can argue the Game Master is both director and audience and that the players are jointly protagonists and audience members too — I’ve even said so myself — but the relationship just ain’t the same. Players and Game Masters aren’t an audience the same way a movie’s watchers or a book’s readers are. They’re just not. As a Game Master, I don’t care what my player’s characters are all thinking the same way I care what Jon Snow or Harry Potter are thinking.

Of course, you could claim that each player is their own character’s audience. Which is also something I’ve said. But if that’s really true, then each player can have their own character’s inner journey and so there’s no reason to do the shit with targeting computers and bottles of booze. If the transformation does change the character’s behavior, it’ll show up organically at the table, but it’ll be subtle.

So, either Character Arcs are meaningless because there’s no audience to care or they’re invisible because the audience can read the thoughts of the only characters whose Character Arcs they care about. Their own.

But even if all this high-minded, conceptual crap weren’t a problem, there’d still be the glaring issue of actually pulling this shit off. Which relies heavily on the players. And players… suck.

Hoping the Players Get it Right

As a Game Master, all you control is what happens in the game. You can’t control the players’ characters and their inner lives. This means you’re stuck counting on the players to do this Character Arc shit if you want Arcs in your game.

And there are some problems there.

First, most tabletop roleplaying games tell players — both explicitly and implicitly — that their job is to come up with a character and then portray that character across their many adventures. That the player’s job is — partly — to stay true to the character no matter what all happens to them. The characters will grow — sure — by leveling up, but that’s not transformation so much as it’s refinement or progression. At best, that setup allows for a Flat Character Arc like I described above. At best, roleplaying game players are challenged to create characters that remain true to their inner selves in the face of adversity.

But even if you fought that and tried to get your players on board with Positive Character Arcs, you’d hit the second problem. And that is that, whereas you control the game’s events and not the characters, the players control only their characters and have no say in the game’s events.

I didn’t just choose Roger Rabbit for my example out of genuine love and respect — though I absolutely do love and respect it; it’s fucking art — I also chose it because, frankly, that movie didn’t need such a perfectly executed Positive Character Arc. It was a bonkers movie based on a terrible book that Robert Zemeckis only wanted to make to prove his technical mettle using practical effects to seamlessly combine live-action and cartoon antics. And, being a Disney-distributed crossover featuring every animated character ever, the movie basically sold itself. And yet, the character of Eddie Valiant is so well done. It’s literally about a character who saves laughter itself by overcoming the death of his brother and regaining his own ability to laugh.

Now, imagine if it were a tabletop roleplaying game. Could you — and the player who rolled up the hard-boiled drunk detective — pull off anything remotely close to that shit? Maybe. But there are only three ways it would happen: accidentally, through overplanning, or through brilliant opportunism.

Maybe shit can work just right such that a Positive Character Arc just emerges through play. The game’s events and a player’s desire to execute an Arc and the right arc for the right game and the dice cooperating… that’s an Accident. You can’t count on an Accident once, let alone once for each player.

So, maybe you sit down with the player and plot a bunch of this shit out in advance. The player gives you an idea about the transformation they want to undergo. You, with an idea of the overall plot of your game and the length of the campaign, plan the right events at the right times and cue the player to respond the right ways… that’s Overplanning. And at that point, it’s not a roleplaying game anymore, is it? It’s more like improvising a story based on a preplanned roadmap like World Wrestling Entertainment or Critical Role. And just who the hell are you putting that show on for?

So what’s left? Well, maybe the player’s so committed to undergoing a Positive Character Arc that, as events unfold, they seize on whatever opportunities arise to build an inner journey. One that works for their character and one that suits the in-game events and, for bonus points, they use their prodigious acting skills to show the table their journey through their in-game actions. And then everyone claps. And then you scoop the player up and plop them on the back of the horse you’ll never have either and ride off into the sunset.

That’s Opportunism. Basically, you’re counting on the player to recognize that a Positive Character Arc is a good thing — that they’re the point of the game — and to use the game’s events to build a Positive Character Arc into their play experience. And that is literally the only way you’ll get a proper Character Arc to happen at your table.

Hope in One Hand, Shit in the Other…

You can’t count on Accidents and Overplanning a Character Arc runs against the spirit of tabletop roleplaying games. Especially action-driven adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons. The best you can do is set your game up so the characters can undergo transformative journeys if the players want to and if the players can recognize the opportunities and seize on them.

Good frigging luck.

Except…

There is, hypothetically, a way to make the Opportunism approach more likely to work. It’s just not something a Game Master can do. Because, first, you need the players to understand that Positive Character Arcs are part of the gameplay experience, and thus characters should be made to grow, not just progress, through play. And, second, you need to get the player to watch the game’s events the way a rabid fox watches a vole hole for each and every opportunity to grow they can spot.

You Need a Mechanic…

The best way to get players to do something — like stay vigilant for transformative growth opportunities and pounce on them — is to build a game mechanic for it. And that ain’t as crazy as it sounds. For example, the old Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game by Margaret Weiss Studios — back before Maggie Weiss got so fed up with the online gaming community’s bullshit that she quit and man do I envy her for that move — the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game based on the Cortex Plus game engine had a pretty good example of one form such a mechanic might take.

And, by the way, Cortex in general, and MHRPG in specific demonstrate the sort of system that actually would benefit from this Character Arc crap. Cortex Plus is way more character-driven than skill-driven or action-driven and Marvel was, back when it was good, also very character-driven.

Every character in MHRPG had two Milestone Paths. These were how characters gained Experience Points. Each was a list of in-game events for the player to spot and capitalize on and they did sort of spell out rudimentary transformative Character Arcs. Hell, most allowed both Positive and Negative Arcs.

For example, Spider-Man — proper spelling — had this Milestone Path:

Deadly Foes of Spider Man
1 XP when you declare a villain as an old foe.
3 XP when you take trauma from your chosen foe.
10 XP when you forgive your chosen foe or they beg for your forgiveness and you let them go.

And Captain America had this Milestone Path:

Avengers Assemble!
1 XP when you first lead a team.
3 XP when you defeat a foe without any team member becoming stressed out.
10 XP when you either convince a hero to join a new Avengers team or disband your existing team.

I ain’t saying this approach is the only way to do Character Arcs or even that it’s the right way. And I ain’t saying that Experience Points are the right reward. I’m just offering an example of a game mechanic that might entice the players to look for opportunities to do Character Arcs without you micromanaging them. And if you wanted to design such a mechanic, its form would depend heavily on the game you were building. If I was doing something like Dungeons & Dragons, for example, which is heavily based on character abilities, I might have super secret special Class Abilities that the players can unlock by completing steps on their transformative journey. Something like that.

Not that D&D’s a good fit for Character Arcs. I can’t stress that enough.

… or Maybe Two Mechanics

If you do want to build a mechanical incentive for your players to spot and seize opportunities for Positive Character Arcs, it’s important to remember that good mechanics come in pairs. You probably also need a mechanic to stop them from having Positive Character Arcs every week. Or just having a major transformation in session one so they’ve got their Disc Four Superpower available through the whole campaign. You need something to hold them back or something that demands a certain amount of work before the players can call their Arc done or just something to make them not want to finish their Arc.

So, maybe you want a robust Character Flaw mechanic and then a mechanic for Overcoming the Flaw. The Flaw would obviously cause problems, but it’d also give some benefit. Alcoholism has its downsides, but — and I am speaking only of pretend elf games here for obvious reasons — it might offer an upside. Maybe it’s an easy way to reduce Stress Points or gain Willpower bonuses against pain or fear or despair or some shit like that. Thus, when the character Overcomes the Flaw, they become Fully Powered Up, but they lose the Flaw’s helpful upsides. And, because you’d make them incomparables, it’d be impossible to optimize when to Overcome the Flaw or whether it’s better to keep the Flaw forever.

You could also build a mechanic whereby, any time, a player can tell the Game Master, “I’m ready to Fight my Flaw,” and then, the Game Master will run a special adventure that puts the character and their Flaw front and center. If they win the adventure, the Flaw is gone and the character Fully Powers Up. But if they fail, the character retires forever. Or, if that’s punitive, maybe once you’re Fully Powered Up, you can’t gain levels ever again.

And if the last adventure of the campaign is coming up, the Game Master can also do any remaining character’s Fight My Flaw adventure before the climax.

Or maybe, Flaws are these things that take a Willpower Roll to resist when they’re triggered. The barbarian always risks going into Rage when a fight breaks out or when he’s insulted or when the store is out of his brand of cereal or whenever else the Game Master says he’s triggered. If the barbarian wants to not Rage or end his Rage before he beats his friends to death, he’s got to make a Willpower Roll. And maybe, throughout the campaign, the barbarian’s Willpower Stat or Rage Resistance changes in response to in-game events. And maybe if the barbarian ever beats their Willpower Roll to resist their Rage by a really high margin, they gain Complete Control. Like, they can get the combat bonuses from Rage whenever they want without actually flying into Rage ever again.

Look, I’m just spitballing. I’m just flinging some ideas. Any such mechanic will need refinement and testing and its form will vary based on the game and the designer’s intentions. And it’s way, way, way, way, way easier to invent little mechanics for specific Character Arcs — like overcoming rage or alcohol — than it is to come up with a general system to encompass all possible Positive Character Arcs.

And that’s the big problem here. Positive Character Arcs are such an open-ended thing and they can take so many different forms that designing a mechanical system to handle them is almost impossible without drawing a bunch of bounding boxes around the design.

Character Arcs are Gravy and Gravy is Okay

I’m being a bit defeatist here; I’m harping on why this Character Arc thing is probably an unsolvable problem. And those of you who know me well — who really know me — know that ain’t my usual style. For all my negativity and swearing and insulting, I’m usually the one yelling at my Supporter Discord Community, “Could you guys shut up? I’m trying to finish this solution to the problem you’re all arguing is impossible to fix.”

But I really don’t think this is a problem that needs solving. Roleplaying games aren’t actually missing anything for not empowering and encouraging every player to take their character through an arc. It’s not like they never happen. Many characters at my table have had arcs — good and bad — through their adventures. It’s just one of those things some players will just do. Especially if they’re heavily invested in the world of your game. If you can get your players to really care — emotionally — some of them are gonna undergo inner journeys themselves. And their character will be swept along. And often they won’t even notice it’s happening.

Hence, I don’t think you should sweat this whole Character Arc thing. Just focus on running the most engaging game you can. And remember what I taught you in the True Game Mastery series: you build Investment by doing all the thousand tiny things you do just right. You don’t build it with mechanics or by making demands of your players.

And that is my last word on this Character Arc shit forever.

Unless I come up with more, obviously.