Weird Magical Items and Narrative Reactivity

So, to take a break from podcasts or talking about Assassin’s Creed I recently caught up with an article on io9 called “The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons”. The intention of this article was to poke fun at some of the more apparently ridiculous items to be found in D&D’s extensive back catalogue of quest minutiae. I don’t know quite how this all works, as in, I’m not sure how these ideas come to be included in official D&D stuff.

Are D&D coast wizards constantly scribbling down ideas for these things in notebooks they keep close at hand day and night? Or do they, in fact, create new items in their own campaigns and then submit the best ones for inclusion in whatever volume of stuff they’re currently compiling? I tend to think the latter as the vast majority of insanely detailed plots, locations, NPCs etc. rise out of play sessions, response to, you know, actual players and the like.

So I guess that we can be comfortable in the notion that these things were not just summoned wholesale from the basement of imagination, made, as it were, from whole cloth. While some of the items seem, quite clearly, to be cursed objects intended to provoke a particular howl of simultaneous disbelief, horror and delight from players others, maybe, bore the marks of a thing I’m going to call “Narrative Reactivity”.

What is this new thing that I have created? Well, it’s less of a creation and more of an observation really. It’s about the nature of lazy creation when it comes to problems where your characters won’t behave in a story. Many times when this happens in role play it comes from the feeling the host has that managing the demands of the players is somewhat akin to herding cats. Maybe that feeling demands some more time in another post at another time, but right now we shall move swiftly on.

In writing the same thing can happen, and is possibly more upsetting for featuring characters dreamed up within your very living brain itself as opposed to being centred in the brains of other people who might be forgiven for not psychically understanding what you want to achieve in the story world you have built for them.

If the characters who come from your own mind start misbehaving, though, that can be, well, troubling. It puts forth the notion that you are not quite in control of parts of your mind, that people you dreamed up can have their own agendas. There’s something dark and mystical about your characters engaging in acts of sabotage against your story. In those cases you might find that the solutions the inexperienced or desperate author comes up with to fight against the tide of mutiny are more desperate, leading to the lazy introduction of plot-hole tearing technologies and surprise deus ex machinas and the like. So my hope with considering a few of these D&D items is to reveal something of the wiring under the board with regards to such incidents in the hope of guarding against such lazy story making.

Exhibit One: The Ring of Contrariness This “forces the wearer to disagree with everything anyone says” the author of the linked argument concludes that given the difficulty of forging magical artifacts this represents “a prime example of some wizard wasting his time.”

This is actually quite an easy one to unpick. It smells like a GM consulting on a D&D expansion met a player who was quiet and unassuming, someone who just appeared to tag along behind in every session. So in a GM ambush this player ends up with this ring on their finger and is magically required to stir up trouble, the peacemaker has become the agitator. Was this fun, or torture, for the player targetted? We will never know.

So, yes, the idea of a wizard inside the narrative bothering to make such an apparently useless artifact is troublesome. So much so that the meta-purpose of the item appears for more clearly than an in-story reason for someone to forge such an irritating artifact. However, the existence of such an item would appear to be a great opportunity for a budding story teller. How did this ring come to be? That is a tale to be told.

From a gamer’s perspective, of course, the item is a curiosity, leading to some sort of game outcome of no major import. If the reasons for its inclusion were indeed as stated above it may have arisen out of a misplaced desire to see all players fully participate in the game. GMs feel that if someone seems not to quite be in the game that this is necessarily a problem in need of resolution when, in reality, some people just like to be along for the ride.

The up front way to deal with a player who doesn’t appear to be participating to the fullest would be to just ask them if they’re happy with the way things are going and only try to change things if they are not. Of course, role playing is a particularly delicate form of social contract so your mileage in such circumstances may vary.

Exhibit Two: Bell's Palette of Identity

Bell the Wizard [made] this magic art palette, which, when used to paint a self-portrait, allows all status effects — basically anything you'd make a saving throw for — get transferred to the portrait instead. Users of the Palette must carry their self-portraits around wherever they go; if they don't have the paintings literally on their body, its powers are useless.

The linked article’s author speculates as to why the portrait must be kept in the possession of the character, tied around their left leg with fishing twine or whatever (rolled up around the inside of a knee-high boot?). The conclusion is that the Wizard Bell was just a bit rubbish not to have fully embraced this offshoot of the Picture of Dorian Gray.

There is, however, a simpler explanation for the item’s strange properties. Firstly, D&D characters have no real homes, they live in campsites and sleep in taverns. The party must never be split and must never stop moving. So the idea of an item that only works when placed on a shelf in the character’s home might lead to some awkwardness.

Also, what is the risk of an item that will make someone immune to whole swathes of rules in the game that cannot be accidentally ruined by a sword slash in the wrong place or accidentally landing up to the waist in swamp water? The properties of the magic palette are a quite obvious trade off of utility and plot convenience.

Exhibit Three: Ring of Bureaucratic Wizardry

When a wizard casts any spell while wearing the ring, a sheaf of papers and a quill pen suddenly appear in his hand. The papers are forms that must be filled out in triplicate explaining the effects of the spell, why the wizard wishes to cast it, whether it is for business or pleasure, and so on. The forms must be filled out before the effects of the spell will occur. The higher the level of the spell cast, the more complicated the forms become. Filling out the forms requires one round per level of spell.

This must have seemed like a cracking gag when it was dreamed up. Indeed it is a very good joke, it works on both a narrative and a ludic level. The joke transfers through the intra-digetic up to the meta level and actually means more things the more levels on which you appreciate it. If I understand correctly the advantage of the artifact would appear to be that the spell being cast is not subject to failure, just to bureaucratic delay.

To make a super-powerful spell operate guaranteed if the rest of the party can just hold off the enemy whilst the wizard does the necessary paperwork is a fantastic mental image. This leaves only one question. How did this item come to be? As I noted I imagine the sudden appearance of artifacts like these is likely to be reactive.

Maybe there was a wizard who was pretty pedantic and always cast low-risk spells leading to a situation where they just weren’t pulling their weight in the party (plus annoying pedants are annoying). This item seems like a cracking way to help address the balance in a way that gets people laughing about the situation.

Exhibit Four: Druid's Yoke

If you're in a D&D campaign where you need to do any kind of farming, you have bigger problems than any magical item can fix. But this yoke allows characters to — when they put it on themselves — turn into an ox. Not a magical ox; a regular ox. Then you can till your field yourself! You can't do it any faster, because again, you're just a goddamned ox, but it does allow you to… do the horrible manual labor… instead of the animal you've bred for this exact purpose. So that's… something someone would totally want. The best part? Once you've put it on, you can't take the yoke off; someone else has to do it for you. Because you're a goddamned ox.

Of all the artifacts that seem to have been created in reaction to a particular situation this one would appear to be the most specific. I can picture a campaign where, in order to get access to a particular bad guy, the players had to get access to a cattle market but the entry is restricted to people who had something to trade. They have money, but of course, the only place to buy a cow in time for the market is, unfortunately, the market: catch 22.

So they do find this Druid’s Yoke thingie which leads to an argument as to which team member will be, er, beefing up, for the market. After all anyone who can’t see the clear downsides to this not-so-genius plan must be a bit dense.

Obviously the plan goes sideways, how could it not? Now the rest of the team have to fight to reclaim their en-oxened party member in order to remove the yoke. Meanwhile the ox itself is trying to shake the yoke, or get it removed, by any means necessary. Hilarity is all but guaranteed to ensue.

Anyone who doesn’t see the narrative potential of this item isn’t thinking very hard. All you need to do is manufacture a reason for someone to put it on and let the rest of the plot flow from that circumstance.

Exhibit Five: Puchezma's Powder of Edible Objects

Interestingly, this odd item is one of the few D&D magical items that does have a back-story; apparently the unfortunately named Puchezma was a cheapskate who inadvertently created a powder that allowed him to eat any chewable material while trying to make a spice that would allow him to eat cheaper and cheaper food. With it, people can eat anything from cotton to tree leaves instead of bread and salted beef! Now, I would say if you're carrying around cotton, you might as well be carrying food. I would also say that if you plan on your player-character eating tree leaves to save fictional money you are very much missing the greater point of D&D.

This, along with another item called “fish dust” seem most obviously created in order to solve a pernickity problem. How to expediate the delivery of food to the players in unusual circumstances or, without exhaustive checks for success in a given activity.

Fish dust is a dust you sprinkle on water and it stuns the fish it touches causing them to float to the surface. Essentially it’s a kind of quiet way of dynamiting fish.

I can just see, in either case, that a party were either a) able to fish but the GM did not want to waste time on having them do so instead of getting on with the story or b) wandering through an ancient tomb of stuff with no food and in danger of starving to death. In each case the GM produced an item which mitigated the immediate problem and allowed the story to move on. No big mystery.

Exhibit Six: Mirror of Simple Order

"When a character steps in front of this mirror, he sees a strangely distorted image of himself. … There are eyes, a mouth, and a nose, but all lack character. Although the figure moves as the character does, it is shorter or taller than he is, adjusted in whatever direction approaches the average height of the character's race. Any clothing worn by the character is altered as well. Bright colors will be muted, appearing to be shades of grey. Any ornamental work on armor, weapons, or clothing will be gone. … He retains his level and class, but is not as exceptional as he might have been. He is bland and boring. The character's alignment changes to lawful neutral, and he becomes interested in little else other than setting order to the world." So there's a magical item that turns you into a soulless bureaucrat. I guess that's whose making those damn rings.

This is a fascinating artifact as, like the Ring of Contrariness, I can see it having been created as a “trap” for a particularly flair heavy and flamboyant player character, but the implications of the device reach far beyond this one usage. In fact, coming to think about it I cannot help but wonder if this is a reaction to a group losing a player who turned in a “unique” performance as an extrovert exhibitionist with bags of charisma.

Not wanting to kill the character or pass it along to another player the Mirror accomplishes the job of leaving the character largely as was but removing all of their individuality. Possibly there was a chance that the player would return, making the restoration of the player’s “true” character a subject for a twist in the narrative.

Essentially, in game terms, this artifact would seem like the perfect tool for turning an individual character into a bland back-up NPC for an uncertain duration and for this reason it is an object that only has its true meaning revealed in its meta-purpose. Intra-digetically to the narrative, of course, the effect of this mirror would be a terrible, subtle and deeply unsettling curse.

Working On Your Characters - An Approach (Mine)

I put this as an answer to a question Writer's Stack Exchange

First, crack dialogue.

Why? There's this weird ouroboros effect between characterisation and dialogue. Dialogue establishes character BUT dialogue emerges FROM character. Weirdly, you can exploit this by swimming a little against the tide.

Take two character stubs that you have in mind. They really don't need to be all that developed, could be as little as:

Jake: Fussy, lazy, prim.

Tony: Sharp, fidgety, sarcastic.

Then put them in a room and make them wait for something. This is an exercise I like to call "Rosencrantz and the Dumb Godot in Bruges" after scripts in which a pair of characters famously fill in time whilst waiting for something (note that in three out of the four the characters are spies/hitmen).

Now your brain is marinated in that free association space where you can let the dialogue flow. Two characters is enough to just get the focus right and allow them freedom to express themselves a bit better than in a crowd.

Tony is clearly going to be the one most ill-at-ease with waiting around so we'll give him something to do:

TONY is looking at his shoes. (NOTE: Why is he looking at his shoes? Well, he's fidgety. So I could have decided to have him be prepared and to bring a small rubber ball with him or something, or lucky and have him find a set up for a small gallery of targets at which to pitch rocks. I decided to make him both unprepared and unlucky so he is reduced to examining his shoes for inspiration.)

JAKE is laid out with a newspaper over his face, as if napping. (NOTE: So JAKE is more prepared than TONY. He brought a newspaper. He can probably tell that TONY is uncomfortable with nothing to do but is using his newspaper as an eyeshield. This indicates that JAKE is selfish.)

TONY: I think my shoes need cleaning.

JAKE (Under the newspaper): So get them cleaned.

TONY: I will. Not now, obviously, but I will, as soon as we get back to the city.

JAKE (Under the newspaper): Good idea.

TONY: I'd do it myself. I'd do it now. But, one, I don't think I do as good a job as a professional shoe shiner and two, I don't have any polish. I mean, who'd bring polish along on a job like this.

JAKE (Under the newspaper): Only a lunatic, for sure.

TONY: That's a terrible job... shoe shiner. Of course, there hasn't been the type of war that puts shoe shiners on the streets in a while. It's hard to find someone who'll shine your shoes. I think people regard the job as menial and humiliating. It's a shame. Most shoes just go around scuffed and dirty these days.

JAKE: Shoes are a lot cheaper than they used to be.

TONY: I know, right? I'm not sure that's a good thing. Shoes are important. They cushion you as you walk. Walking is vital to communication. If we couldn't walk then we couldn't have got here.

JAKE: We could have teleconferenced.

TONY: Mister Black didn't want to teleconference, he wanted face to face. He's old school, Mister Black.

And just pootle on like that for as long as you can. There are even dialogue writing exercises that can help you out with that.

Next, mix it up a bit.

Repeat the first process for a number of natural character pairs. The character pair is the basic atom of show-don't-tell character development and revelation.

Your next stage is to mix up the characters you have paired and put them in new situations. You might want to generate or acquire a number of situations where the two characters could be forced to wait. Also change up the pre-existent relationships between them. Make a male and a female character husband and wife (even if you don't intend that they end up that way in your proposed novel), have two characters who know each other well talk as if they have never met. Note that there is, in any two-handed conversation, an actor (the person who proposes the topic and trajectory of the conversation) and a reactor (the person who fills in with their own reactions to the actors actions).

After that you want to start widening the circle. The number of people involved in a scene up to about eight largely dictates what will happen between them due to the rules governing permutations thus:

1. A person alone: with a completely dedicated and individual agenda. By default an unreliable narrator.
2. Actor and Reactor: feeding off each other, pressing one another on, seeking companionship for its own end. A partnership is, by default, accepts a level of intimate intensity. Most prosaically this manifests as romantic love, but could equally well be obsessive hatred, or any other kind of odd thing in between. Each partner in a duo will tend to reveal more of themselves to the other than they intend as neither of them can be distracted by anyone else.
3. The couple and the lodger: Always two people will be united in purpose and the last will be identified as "other", "outsider" or "leader".
4. The double date: People pair off and a love of symmetery makes two couples who police each other's status for some kind of equilibrium obsessively. Unlike a couple left to their own devices any point of conflict will be deflated or defeated by the other unit. Subtext begins to become a thing.
5. The troublemaker: As this is an odd number the "spare" character is free to sow chaos among the other four people's stable set up. The "outsider" can prevent couple A from stabilising couple "B" or vice versa. The fifth party is always likely to be a source of contention.
6. The dinner party: Three couples mean that each person in any de facto couple takes an opportunity to stand on their own, the number of permutations of one-to-one interaction here is large but finite. Although friction in certain actions may lead to much ado about very little this party is ultimately static in its bonds.
7. The King or The Fool: Here the odd person, introduced into the dinner party scenario, has an opportunity to unite everyone (either in ordered placidity or in terrifying hatred of them), or to sew the seeds of ultimate chaos splitting the party into smaller subdivisions.
8. The Gathering: A bigger dinner party. The larger the group from this point the more that each person present has to shout louder and be clearer to "control" or "own" the conversation. Now people will be very careful about things like social norms projecting an image of someone as "the type of person they want to be", idiosyncrasy in character will decrease, the wisdom and madness of groupthink will emerge, interaction becomes increasingly pageant like. There may be a "leader" but instead of emerging naturally through personality and charismatic dominance the leader is more likely to be, in some sense, elected and therefore take on the mantle of governmental power rather than personal charisma.

From that point on the behaviour of crowds and leaders just multiplies. Two leaders and a crowd make a war, three leaders and a crowd suggests a courtroom, four leaders and a crowd suggest some kind of cold war. Always, the more people are added the more difficult it becomes for people to be established as "leaders". The tendency of large mobs is always towards chaos.

Given that overview I would tend to practice with scenes involving up to five characters. After that you're entering the realm of "crowd scenes" which are easier tackled when you have a lot of context.

Finally, to the matter of plot.

Some people, Elmore Leonard famously, have a very woolly idea of what the plot actually is, they like to assemble patchworks of character scenes into a narrative and leave it at that. This could be your thing.

If not, you should work out how your characters, who you should know quite a bit about by now, will achieve the ends of your initial plot. Some "plot problems" may seem intractable but I have never yet found one that can't be thought about until it is tweaked out of existence.

Anyway, the first two parts of this answer will probably get you going in the right direction. After that it's all about sewing up the plot holes.

The Avatar Effect

Crikey, two comments, on topic on one of my posts. It must have been my crack about having no readers!

So in answer to the comments. Yeah, it was very pretty. But I'm one of those people who says "mmmm, pretty, but what does it *do*?" Also, while we're on the topic most reviews that swiftly descend into pontification on nature vs. tech begin by drooling verbally all over the visuals. It's pretty, I get it. But it's like someone blew umpteen million dollars on a script written by a pissy, horny, morbid fifteen year old boy. I'm sorry but that just starts to look like a waste of time from where I'm sitting.

I'm having yet another Mugatu moment as people debate the politics of this movie as if the whole thing weren't utterly ridiculous. What really burns me is that people have the nerve to criticise the story. As many have pointed out the story is an old one. That means that it should work, I think Cameron probably chose to do a rendition of this "Dances With Wolves" type story for precisely that reason.

When you get down to it the execution of the story was so ham-fisted it reached George Lucas levels of error. At one point I was actually wanting to get hold of a copy of the DVD when it comes out just to do a commentary that goes toe to toe with all the ridiculous BS in the script. That way at least you could get an attractive slide show to accompany a deconstruction of why the film suckety suck sucked.

Aside: Went to see Holmes despite reservations both grave and deep (in the end it was RD Jnr's current renaissance that convinced me) and it was awesome. The action sequences were far less obtrusive than I'd feared, the script was actually very... er... Sherlock Holmes-y to such an extent that it's one of the few films for which genuine spoilers exist so I'll shut up now.

Back to Avatar. If truth be told I really enjoyed the movie up to the moment where Colonel McScarryHead approached Mr. Avatar to propose a little military style double dealing.

For a lover of the narrative arts many movies are like slowly expiring disappointments. If the film gets off to a good start it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get all the way to the finish line without breaking its ankle in a plot-hole pothole.

For me, that was the moment. You see, to identify with the protagonist in a movie I tend to listen to what the characters around him are saying and wonder if I'd ever react the same way. I was down with the Avatar right up until McScarryHead made his pitch because nothing I'd seen so far backed up the main character's reaction to the offer. The Colonel had never acted like he might not be a looney, Mr. Avatar had shown a love for legs but had never been given a reason to trust that McScarryHead could, in good faith, arrange an incredibly expensive spinal operation to restore the use of Mr. Avatar's legs.

I mean sure it was possible but I didn't feel it was any more probable than any of the other characters being able to wangle him a new set of knees. If we're going on pure spending power the Acme Corporate Greaseball character seemed to be the best connected for such purposes.

From there onwards I lost sympathy and it became a firework display.

Anyhow. I've been blogging more regularly for a month now. I think I'm hitting my stride. I think two or three a week might be the happy medium I've been striving for. I think staying away from X Factor and committing to the geek-athon might also be appropriate as people are commenting on the latter but seem not to care about the former (even though I get quite geeky about X Factor).

This blog, like all blog's exists to be a dialogue. That's my aim for it in 2010. See you all next year!

The Joker In The Pack

No sooner do I lament the complete lack of anything that makes for a substantial post than KA-BLAM! something amazing socks me in the face; almost literally in this case.

When I was compiling the Core Book I tried to include everything I could think of at the time to make a sourcebook for the budding No Dicer. It is inevitable that things should be missed. Almost everything that's coming in the Random Encounters series is intended to be filled with examples of powerful things that you can do with No Dice principles. So in each adventure we're kind of expanding the toolkit of the prospective Host and also giving a concrete example of potential play.

Last night we play tested the Monster Action Thriller "The Creature of Black Lake" and got off to a rocky start. Basically an incident mentioned in the notes that's supposed to just happen resulted in the death of a player's character before the adventure had even started.

This was notable for several reasons but not least because that's really not supposed to happen. I know that people have been keen to discuss the idea of abitrary character death recently but this basically put someone out of the game in the first forty minutes.

Not only that but I experienced an incident of Host meltdown, a brief autopsy of the situation lead to the conclusion that the wires of communication were badly crossed and for a while there it all looked grim. You see, the whole point of No Dice is that it's supposed to help you sidestep these issues and keep going. If an adventure has a serious hole that relies on a certain series of incidents not happening then it's just not working.

A workable suggestion was put forward by Justin who suggested that when you hit the blind alley you as Host rewind the action to just before everything went pear and then re-explained the situation giving the player an out.

Like I say, this is workable but it's not really all that neat. It means that a player could take a one way trip up diarrhea drive and then like the Prince of Persia just rewind and do it again.

It was Sue who hit on the real answer. Which in a discussion that followed broadened out from a specific instance in that adventure to become a general principle that Core Book is sorely missing. Oh well, for the second edition I suppose.

But for those of you who don't want to wait n years for the 2nd ed here's the idea right now. Treasure this one, it's golden:

Creating NPCs is always a problem. 95% of NPCs are just cyphers of course. They are barkeeps, random wandering citizens and other reasonably easy to scope functionaries.

That other 5% are the important ones. Many of these, probably just over half, are villains and again there isn't really a problem with them. It's that last 2% that can leave the Host scratching their head.

These are the "major friendly NPCs". Don't be fooled, just because they're marked "friendly" doesn't mean they're always happy to see the players, it more or less just means they won't just try to kill the players on sight.

In the Core Book I got as far as advising people to avoid "infoblaster" NPCs who just know everything. And I also advised against making NPCs as powerful or more powerful than the player characters who were supposedly their allies.

Aside from that I just recommended a Host create "real" characters using the Player's Guide notes to make a fully rounded and realised character.

In some cases this might be fine. But in reality players don't really spend all that much time talking to NPCs just for fun. So a lot of the Host's fine character creation work goes by the wall.

Besides, once you've stopped the NPCs being more powerful when they're too friendly you've kind of left yourself in a bit of a bind.

The problem is sometimes you want characters to move the plot on. They are supposed to arrive, do something dramatic and then leave the players to deal with the fall out.

So how does one do this without making them villainous or too powerful? After all a constant parade of utter villainy keeps things busking along but really in a story based RP you want other types of encounter.

This was exactly the problem in Creature. I had an NPC who needed to rather aggressively insert himself into the party and provide useful plot information, in a guarded manner, for the remainder of the adventure (or at least until he died). I had written up notes for this character which were pretty light. I wanted to introduce him and then, in the playtest, develop him in some way into a fully realised character.

So when he came in to the action I kept him neutral. The only problem with this is that he was neutrally holding up the party's boat with AK47s. As I quickly discovered this kind of thing can be misinterpreted as open aggression. Funnily enough, had he gone in with open aggression the accidental adventure ruining bloodbath that resulted from my weak characterisation would have been averted. Then, of course, the players would have had to just follow along on rails.

On rails is not a good place for adventures to be.

So I needed to, rather than render the character neutral and hence weak, render him a little bit charming and crazy and hence allow characters to interact with him even though he was, technically, a bad dude.

This is a really exciting dramatic position, the guy's holding you hostage but he's quite willing to have a conversation with you about begonias (or whatever). As a player you feel you might be able to negotiate or something.

At the same time the Host has someone who can nudge the characters back on task if they look like they're about to commit suicide or whatever.

This guy's a great NPC, not too overpowering but not too floppy either. He's not going to interfere unless you need him too. He's a joy to have involved.

And hence was born the Joker.

You see Creature is not alone in needing a character like this. Every role play session could do with having a Joker to interact with the players, nudging, testing, exploring their characters.

The situation where the Joker is a guy who has technically taken the Players as hostages, but in a polite way, is just one possible scenario. Characters who have vast reserves of information they are unwilling to share, characters who offer money, or professional services desired by the players all of these are ideal Joker characters.

The secret is to always lay on the unthreatening manner on thick. This was my vital mistake last night. Neutrality won't cut it if an NPC has some power over the players. The character has to maintain their power over the character while entertaining the player.

I'm not saying that making them will be easy but there is a way to make it easier. Sue loves poker and she quickly put me on to the old poker trope of trying to find the sucker at the table. Essentially when you come up with an adventure design your job is to try to identify the Joker(s) at the table and then make them around their role in the story.

Some stories, Con of the Dead, Revelation Point, don't really need a Joker character. Then we return to the poker trope: if after ten minutes searching for the Joker in the scenario you still can't find them, it's you.

Yes, in some adventures it is the Host himself who takes this gently tormentative role for the players. Horror splatter scenarios are the most likely to feature these.

So from now on when I'm dealing up a new scenario I will be sure to use a deck comprised of 53 cards. The joker's going to become one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal.

NB: That last sentence was a dramatic article closer. You don't need to actually draw a card to know when to make the Joker NPC, you just kind of look for them after you've finished your notes.

D&D Characters

I know, I know, I'm having a pop at D&D again. I'm going to reiterate that if D&D floats your boat then go for it. It's actually a highly sophisticated dungeon-crawl RPG and I'd prefer to think of people enjoying a D&D campaign than playing hours of WoW. But it's just not role playing. Well, not given any reasonable definition of the words "role" and "playing" when in the context of one another anyway.

This has never been made more apparent to me than in the unfortunate habit I have encountered in some gamers to create what I shall dub the "D&D Character". The D&D Character must satisfy the following brief to be considered thus:

• Must have a fascinating instant impact or be unusual in some way for examples of class, race, occupation, alignment etc. This feature in a proper story would serve as a hook for the character. In a game where one has to start the adventure with a large degree of presumed incompetence could also explain this hilarious incapability away. For example, if you created a normal everyday hulking warrior with a big sword to kill things with his early incompetence is nothing short of embarrasing. However if Jongar the Allyrian is obsessed with cheese one could point to his failure to perform even the simple tasks of his trade as a being a byproduct of his unhealthy pecadillo.
• Could have a detailed but largely tertiary back story; thus explaining the cheese obsession. Also it will probably dangle alluring plot hooks for a GM who hardly, if ever, finds a way to work these into the story which wouldn't involve shoehorning, long periods of not using dice or showboating from the player who invented the character. Of course in a story people mill about they come to the fore, they retreat, they circulate. If you had some support for group storytelling instead of a bunch of dice heavy combat rules... ahem.
• Is designed to always have something to talk about in a one or two-dimensional manner. These are never deep things and are always topics of conversation that can be pulled out for a "character moment" at the drop of a hat e.g. having an imaginary friend, being a bit dodgy and a pointlessly pathological liar, having an obsession with some harmless and often incongruous topic such as toast or flower arranging... yes, yes, or cheese.

The symptom, as is so often the case, points to the disease. Generally speaking I've not met role players who weren't yearning for a part in a game that allowed them to feel like the hero properly. Sure there should be challenge and difficulty otherwise the game is dull but in the end the challenge and difficulty should arise from factors other than the character's blatant incompetence. It's a well worn trope of fiction that a character should be likeable and in heroes capability is likeable.

When you create a character who has to be lame until they've levelled up a few times you necessarily begin to be irritated by them during this process. Making them into a bit of a weirdo accomplishes the twin aims of poking fun at your pathetic character but also gives you a chance to vent your frustrations at a game which promises so much and delivers so little. The D&D character provides a way of letting off steam and having fun in a situation which, despite claims to the contrary, is short on opportunities to do either out of the box.

In fact this tendency also works against the player ever getting that moment in the sun. Even if a GM is adventurous and allows Jongar to encounter the evil master baker who grilled him like so many pieces of medium sliced white when he was naught but a boy the player's already made it quite plain that Jongar's a looney. If you were trying to run a semi-serious campaign Jongar's either got to be less of a looney or the whole encounter is going to end up on a Python-esque route perhaps not entirely inkeeping with the spirit of the game.

I have, on occasion known GMs to bemoan this very thing, when the game turns "silly". It's six of one half a dozen of the other. So Jongar's player is making a mockery of the serious plot, let's face it having to roll 2D6, 1D8 a D20 and a D4 every time Jongar swings his mighty broadsword also makes a mockery of the serious plot, just not in a fun way.

Just as attempting to introduce plot to a board game may be a bit of a morale killer so making merry quips within the "plot" framework is a counter morale boost.

So this dysfunction balances out nicely in that type of game. In a game that has a serious story potential, however, the dysfunction just collapses into broken.

D&D characters are no good in the long haul, five or six episodes and the character's all played out. They don't have subtlety, layers, aspects, they just have furry underpants and an obsession with toast. It all seemed so amusing at the beginning but now? Hmmm.

So next time I'm creating a character concept I will be sure to make sure there is definite dramatic complication in there. Now the story is real I want to be a real character within it. If that's what you've been yearning for in your campaigns, either as a GM or a player maybe it's time you tried to find a solution.