Image by raghav bhadoriya from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Attitude and Intensity

We all have NPCs who are more driven than most, more obsessed or more sassy. This is never as easy as it sounds.

We all have to raise our voices a little just to be heard clearly from all parts of the gaming table.

Simply employing the “intense whisper” for the dialogue of such characters works well in movies and on TV, but is liable to be completely inaudible at the gaming table. And describing the speech pattern that way has all the impact of wet spaghetti.

So, how do you convey intensity or attitude at the gaming table?

For June’s blog carnival, I want to know about one of your PCs or NPCs who had or has attitude to burn, what they care so passionately about, and how you play this so that the (other) PCs are aware of it. “WHY” is usually an integral part of the story, too. Did you have to / ask to / want to change the character’s stats to reflect this situation?

The understanding is, of course, that these will then become a pool of characters and techniques that other GMs can call upon in their own games.

Campaign Mastery last hosted a year ago (anchor, roundup, and sequel).

Image by Zdenêk Chalupský from Pixabay

Em’ridge

As my contribution to this discussion, let me tell you about a PC who appeared in the first D&D session that I ever ran.

First, a little context.

I had a whole suite of house rules developed as part of my first campaign. So much so that I decided that a playtest was warranted. On top of that, since this was my first ever campaign, I wanted to test the level of interest that the campaign background could sustain.

I wasn’t intending to measure myself against the standards of a novice GM; I knew that I would be competing for players with GMs who had been running the game for years, who were either part of the first wave of players when the game reached these shores, or those who were treading on their heels shortly thereafter. A number of the players who I hoped to attract were somewhere in between this elite group and those with the same level of experience as I possessed – about a year’s worth, as a player, at the time.

Design and Prep for the campaign had started around July or September of 1981, when I didn’t even have that much experience under my belt. I spent about 3 months on the background, the initial dungeon (which would be considered a mega-dungeon, these days), and on the house rules that needed to both convey and reflect the background.

For the playtest, only the first level of the dungeon was ready. Because of the standards that I wanted to test against, I invited six or seven of the “elite”-level players that I knew through the University Of NSW Science Fiction Society (who had introduced me to RPGs earlier that year).

Em’ridge was one of the characters created for this one-off game session / playtest. From memory, he was a fighter/mage, but I also have vague recollections of there being some Ranger in there somewhere as well. And that’s just about the last time that the character class of this PC will be mentioned in this write-up.

What’s In A Name?

Well, in this case, there’s an apostrophe.

Em’ridge’s player had constructed a simple table, that he shared with no-one. At the start of each game day, or after experiencing any one or more of a long list of ‘triggers’ (some of which would bias the results), the player would roll a d6.

1 or less = prickly, prone to anger
2 = sad, wistful, and reflective
3 = cautious and apprehensive, potential to panic, potential to overcompensate
4 = content, happy-go-lucky, “normal”
5 = joyful, exuberant, hyperactive
6+ = same as he was previously

This table made it easy for the player to run Em’ridge as a manic-depressive in a society that had never heard of the concept, never mind the term. No-one else knew about this table, not even me as a GM; if anyone asked about the die rolls, it was simply a generator of the character’s “mood” or an “air” that he had around him. The player, a 2nd or 3rd year psychology student, had reasoned that such individuals must have existed long before there was a diagnosis for the condition, so he had constructed this neat little simulator.

But he didn’t make a grand announcement of the character’s attitude; he reasoned that the character himself would have been unaware that he was mentally ‘different’ to anyone else.

The only clue that people had, initially, was that apostrophe, because whenever the player would refer to his character in the third person, or would introduce himself, the vowel that bridged the apostrophic gap in the name would correspond to the psychology then in effect:

1. EmARridge
2. EmERridge
3. EmIRridge
4. EmORridge
5. EmUHridge

This not only provided an indicator, a pattern that would have grown recognizable after further exposure, but it kept the mechanics from intruding into the roleplaying. In effect, he created a personality outline that he used to guide his “performance” of the character.

Personal Rituals

To accompany this behavior, the character had a number of personal rituals that the player had worked out. There was a generic one used at the start of each day’s play, and after every meal, that signaled a potential change in mood, a check that all the character’s weapons were where they were supposed to be, and ready for use.

Unless the character was in EmARridge mode, at the start of combat he would use a round to conduct this ritual ‘readiness check’, and that was the first big clue to the others of what was going on. If the character was in EmIRridge mode, he would do it twice, which came as a rude shock to the rest of the party, who were already up to their neck in the battle by the time Em’ridge entered the battle. It was also often misinterpreted by the other side, too.

There were others.

Every coin had to be untouched by corrosion, checked and polished individually each night; if one were flawed, he would pester one of the other PCs to exchange it for one in better condition.

When the character took off his armor, he lined up the pieces from large to small; if there wasn’t room to do so, he would stack them in that order. The character claimed that this structured process made it easier to put the armor on properly if necessary.

The character absolutely would not touch food that had anything white in it – if the soup-pot had a visible bone in the stew, it had better be gray or brown.

When the group went shopping for equipment, Em’ridge would draw up a list of all the items most commonly sought out on such expeditions, then ask a particular PC to be in charge of acquiring enough of that item for the entire party. This was “more efficient”. Since he always chose one of the lists that was likely to be harder to find to do himself, there was no grumbling.

When he counted, he used fingers and toes – and if he didn’t have enough of them, he got one of the other PCs to “provide” him with extras, simply by standing where Em’ridge could see them. The character wasn’t dumb – one extra set of fingers represented tens (ten, twenty, thirty, and so on); a second enabled him to count almost all the way up to four digits, and so on. Since several members of the party were both illiterate and innumerate, this was also accepted and assumed to be a technique that the character had devised for himself before his formal education and training began.

I don’t think the game went on long enough for anyone to decide if there were more; these were just the ones that got noticed.

It’s worth mentioning that marathon gaming sessions were the order of the day in that era, at least in these parts. We convened at 10AM, spent 10 minutes or so making small talk, spent another ten minutes while I briefed them on the most significant things they needed to know about the game background, another 90 minutes on character creation, and after a ten-minute break, were ready to start play. We broke for half-an-hour’s lunch at about 1:30, and for dinner at about 7 PM; and the game session came to an end at 2AM, because twenty minutes later was when the last train left the local station. That’s a 16-hour stint, less interruptions and meal-breaks. So there was a fair amount of opportunity for such personal foibles to show itself.

The true obsession

But all this was just underpinning for the character’s true fascination: an obsession with fire.

Each night, when the PCs were setting up camp, he insisted on being the one who set and lit the campfire. He would gather chunks of wood, branches of various sizes, twigs and other small flammables, would carefully arrange them in a stack, lovingly stroking each piece before emplacing it, would carefully anoint selected pieces of timber with lamp-oil before carefully setting them in their pre-ordained place, all while murmuring his appreciation of the sacrifice they were about to make.

Once the fire was lit, he could sit and stare into it for hours. If someone got his attention – plonking a serving of roast meat in front of him, for example – he would extremely poetically call their attention to some aspect or attribute of the flame. I can’t recall exactly what was said, so many years later, but in general terms he might point at the way the fire rose up like a wave only to die back, tethered as it was to the burning wood.

If someone was foolish enough to mention fire to him during the day’s travels, he could extemporize poetically about the flames he had seen on another occasion, and what made them memorable (to him); he would talk the ears off of anyone in the vicinity. All delivered in a natural voice but with reverent tones.

The Cleric (and the only character who was not multi-classed, because the latter was encouraged under the house rules) suggested that perhaps he worshiped a fire god. Unfortunately for him, Em’ridge happened to overhear the comment (I had him roll) and he came back with the proposal that fire was the one thing that the gods could not fully control, that it was always trying to escape and run rampant, and only extreme care prevented this from taking place – or something like that.

The List Of Proverbs

The player must have been intending to make this his character’s theme all along, because he had prepared a list of proverbs and sayings about, or related to, fire (many of which the player had created himself), and potential meanings for them as metaphors.

I don’t remember many of them, these days, either, but one went something like “Weather is the fire in which all must burn” when it started to rain, and another said “You cannot divide the flame, only the fuel; it is an inevitable consequence with a mind of its own.”

This gave the character many ways to work fire into any conversation, and many more ways to use it as a referent in a discussion of any other topic. But the player was careful not to go too heavy with this; it was just a reminder of the character’s obsessive fascination with fire.

The End Result

There was once acute manifestation of the character’s quirk – staring into the flames, barely blinking, using them to meditate. Other manifestations were small and fleeting, for the most part, and the character’s other unique aspects supplemented what could have been a one-trick pony to give it richness and complexity. Everything was designed by the player to convey the maximum amount of in-game and meta-game information with a minimal share of the spotlight, without being so overwhelming that the character couldn’t have a normal conversation about ordinary events when it was warranted.

Most importantly, the player never simply came out and said “my character is manically-depressive with an obsession for fire”; instead he employed the old writer’s maxim, “Show, don’t tell”. He created a pattern of behavior and let that do the talking for him; the results were more organic, and more natural, and both of those traits made the character’s obsession clear with no need to shout it from the rooftops.

Besides being a perfectly satisfactory playtest, it was a masterclass in applied characterization, something of value to all of us – player and GM alike.

So that’s my contribution. Now, can anyone else add to the conversation? Pingbacks seem wonky and unreliable these days, so make sure to drop a line and a link to your contributions in the comments space below. At the end of the month of June, I’ll aggregate and review the contributions.