When do you care about your character?

This post has been kicking around in my mind for a while now, because it represents an element of game design that I am very interested in. In some ways it's a continuation of the Storytelling in Games post.

I've had many discussions over the years that illustrate a spectrum of "character development before a campaign begins" - on one end, the desire to make a fully fledged backstory for a character complete with a 1-10 page biography and a timeline of their life. On the other end, "This is Bob Characterguy III, son of Bob Characterguy II who died in the last session. He's also human".

Each of those ends is a wild extreme, and I gravitate more closely to the center of that spectrum these days. But we're not here today to talk about individual preference, we're here to talk about how game design interacts with individual preference.

Framing the Discussion

I want to center this topic specifically around two phases of "character development":

• Character Creation and Backstory, including the back-and-forth between the player, GM, and the table.
• Character Development during play, both mechanical and narrative.

Then, discuss how different game styles encourage or reward certain character development strategies.

For ease of example, we're going to have two example characters (exaggerated for comedic effect):

• Kara Iglsdottr, daughter of the Thane of Illrun, heir apparent to the crystal throne; and
• Bob Characterguy III

Kara has an elaborate backstory which involves political intrigue, murderous cousins, a talking raven, and a series of mad dashes across the country - barely escaping with her life. Kara's player has left several gaps in the story for the GM to fill in and tug on as part of the ongoing campaign.

Bob III was rolled at the table to replace Bob II who fell into a pit trap and died, so that Bob's player could get back into the action quickly and be engaged in the session. Bob has no backstory other than he was Bob II's son, and was near enough to the dungeon to avenge his father's death. He may come to have a stronger backstory, but we don't know what it is yet.

The Plot thickens (or, seeding the world) in narrative games

Okay, with that out of the way, let's look at Kara in the context of building out an interesting world. Kara's player has told me a few things about what she would like to see in the game via her character's backstory:

• She'd like to see some political intrigue come up from her relatives.
• The Crystal Throne is an important piece of the game world, though neither of us knows why yet.
• At least one raven in the game world can talk (either this one is special or we determine it's a familiar or something)
  • In a crunchier game, like Pathfinder, we might discuss character builds at this point (is she a Witch? Summoner?). In a narrative game like Fate, it's just an aspect: "Talking Raven Companion" or similar.

Contrast that with Bob - since there's nothing in the character to distinguish what Bob wants to see, I'd likely have a quick chat with Bob's player to ask what they're expecting from the game world.

If we're playing a character-focused narrative game, where a lot of the action revolves around what the characters are doing and their motivations are - a character like Bob sticks out as "too blank". There's nothing really to engage with about Bob in the narrative until Bob's player fleshes out some things about Bob. We know his father was recently killed by a pit trap, but for some reason Bob III has taken up the mantle of "adventurer".

The design of narrative games requires the characters to be more filled out in order to give them a satisfying and congruent experience in the story, because they're influencing the story as it develops through their motivations and actions. The players are tugging on the characters strings much like you would a novel.

The "world as the character" games

Let's spin this around to games with a different play style in mind. Particularly, I'm thinking about OSR games, especially those with campaigns designed around hex crawls. In these games, it's expected (and dare I say, desired by a good portion of the audience), that the characters will start fairly "thin" in terms of their desires and motivations. Because they are not the focus of the action.

Especially in games with similar design to Shadowdark RPG (though less lethal than other OSR games), the characters aren't "important" in the same way that they might be in 5e or a narrative game. They may leave a chink in a stone, or have a very important grave somewhere, but ultimately the world influences the characters, and the world is the proper focus of the "story".

Another important element in this style of game design is keeping the players engaged and at the table. In Bob's example, he fell to an unfortunate pit trap, but because Shadowdark has very streamlined character creation guidelines, you can suspend disbelief and get a new Bob right into the action. Because the focus is on "how do the players deal with this situation", it doesn't really matter too much that Bob's doesn't have a lot to go on. You can more easily discover Bob's "story" through play and interesting things that happen to Bob in the dungeon. It's not as much of Bob influencing the world as the world influencing Bob.

When Bob gains a level, he gets a random talent. What does that talent say about Bob's personality? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything! Who knows? Either way, you're not getting attached to Bob until you've had some time with him and your level of engagement in Bob's story is entirely on the player. If Bob's player never wants to engage with Bob's place in the fiction any deeper than "I don't know, Bob finds adventuring fun", you can do that with little consequence.

Again, the focus here is on the player being the one prodding the world, rather than the character. Nothing about the game design of Shadowdark requires you to care any more about Bob than you might a "Featureless Protagonist" in other media. But you can. It's up to you.

So how does game design influence character development?

I like to talk about "core gameplay loops" a lot (and do at length over in this article about XP design) and how they influence play.

For narrative games, like Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark, the core loop ultimately is designed such that everyone at the table is contributing to a character-focused narrative. They do this in a bunch of different ways, but I'll take a couple of examples from Blades in the Dark:

• Each Playbook selects NPCs who are tied to their characters and how they feel about those NPCs.
• You select a Vice and a Virtue which have both mechanical and story elements
• You select a Background and a Heritage - which only have narrative impact (not mechanical).
• Every scene is a conversation between the players and the GM and no single person is in charge of the ongoing narrative.

Even with a very "small" amount of backstory (keeping to the bare minimum of the mechanics), you're still selecting a fair amount of "truths" about your character during the character creation process. Other PbtA games also have "ties" between characters where you are given some prompts to help you know why your group is together.

For "OSResque" games, the mechanics encourage you to not be invested in the character from the beginning, frequently via:

• Random statistic rolls - you'll take the stats you get (and you don't have to worry about the numbers when roleplaying if you choose not to).
• Moderate to high lethality, especially at lower levels.
• Play that rewards player action over character action
  • e.g. "not relying on the dice" to resolve a situation. It's expected that you'll come up with a clever idea, not say "I roll persuade to convince the stingbat".
• Ambiguous motivation: It's up to the players to decide why they're doing this rather than living a comfortable life.

That leads to getting to the gameplay faster and encourages the players to treat the game "as a game" rather than as a shared narrative experience. You absolutely can get a shared narrative out of a game with that design, but that isn't the point of the game design.

What I'm actually doing when I run a game

So I mentioned these extremes as a spectrum above, and that I sit in the middle when starting a new campaign. If I'm running a campaign, I am liable to ask for a couple of sentences describing the character's background and then use that in an (asynchronous) Session 0 to establish some facts about the game world.

I usually run character focused games if I'm running a longer campaign, so the characters need to have some internal motivations and triggers to move a narrative along and for their players to tug on for a satisfying narrative. The context of the Setting doesn't matter as much as what the characters are, their flaws, their motivations, their feelings.

This requires group buy in. One of the interesting pitfalls you can run into with disparate backstories is the classic "why are you all together" scenario, to which the traditional answer is "you all meet at the tavern". In narrative games, you typically use the backstories as a starting point to discuss group cohesion and the reason you are all in this shared narrative. Likewise, as I mentioned above, the narrative games often have mechanics to facilitate that conversation.

It also has some assumptions about how the world is going to be built. The GM might have some ideas for the setting (or if you're playing Blades in the Dark, there's a lot of setting there for you to build on), but the characters are going to drive what's important to the setting.

Contrast this with a game with less up-front character development; you can just skip a lot of that design. We're together, in this dungeon, because we're in this dungeon looking for treasure - we can figure out a plausible reason we're together later if it matters to the group. It's a lot less work on the collective.

With hex crawls, it's up to the GM to seed interesting locations, and where the players choose to explore drives the setting forward. The things that happen during play in those dungeons will frequently inform who the characters are, rather than the characters influencing the ongoing narrative.

So, when I'm running a game that's more like Shadowdark (which... has been Shadowdark the two times it's happened), I am more inclined to run it akin to a board game: you're here, in a dungeon, looking for treasure. Who cares why? If we're having fun, we can expand the surrounding area. If not, that place need not continue and we can seek adventure elsewhere.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this rambling excuse for a post has given some perspective on how I think about character backstory development and how it relates to game design.

As a GM (or a designer), you can encourage certain levels of backstory development ahead of time if you understand how the game you're playing (or making) was designed. Learning to lean into, or lean around, what the game wants can help make a richer game experience for everyone at the table, players and GM included.