Causes and Consequences: Persona Construction
This article had the working title of “The Penumbra of Personality Traits”, but when it came to actually write it, I decided that readers might find the meaning a little opaque (and yes, that’s a pun, as some will immediately recognize).
A penumbra is also a solid metaphor (another pun) for the personality construction technique that I am going to share with readers today, building on last week’s post about character relationships.
Another relevant metaphor as the article unfolds that I would ask readers to keep in mind is that of a spiderweb.
Foundations
This construction technique is built around the Zenith-3 variation on the standard Hero System rules, but that’s just a starting point. While those rules (both base and variant) determine character construction points, those are not relevant to this technique.
In fact, that’s the only reason this can be encapsulated in a single article; if it included the actual rules, it would not only be far too lengthy to be practical as a single article, it would fall foul of the copyright restrictions that Hero Games have mandated for home-brew rules. The latter consideration would require it to be split up into 15 or 16 smaller posts, and I suspect that there isn’t enough interest to sustain such a series – not in a general GMing blog, anyway.
Instead, this post describes the technique that I use to assign such disadvantages, limitations, and definitions to a character, completely ignoring the specific game system interpretations of those into game mechanics.
That makes this a universal system, or fairly close to it, something of as much value to sci-fi and fantasy GMs as it is to Superheroic Genre and Pulp GMs. In fact, it should also be of some use to those creating characters for fiction, as well.
Construction Elements
Before I can tell you how I select the personality construction elements that I use in constructing characters, I really need to define them. There are no less than thirty categories (not all of them recognized in game mechanics) of them.
As usual, it might be best to first present these in list format to serve as something of a table of contents for the rest of this section.
- Motivations
- Desires
- Ambitions
- Dislikes
- Hobbies
- Interests
- Fascinations
- Obsessions
- Mysteries
- Curiosities
- Mistakes
- Inhibitions
- Habits
- Targets
- Enemies
- Recurring Cast
- Beliefs & Superstitions
- Memberships
- Identities – Public, Secret
- Needs & Dependencies
- Susceptibilities
- Vulnerabilities
- Fortune
- Enraged
- Berserk
- Distinctive Features
- Physical Limitations
- Social Limitations
- Other Traits
- Curios & Treasured Possessions
My, but that’s a long list!
Some of these will be recognized to anyone familiar with the Hero System, some of them are grouped in the relevant game mechanics into entries in a broader category, but the more explicit listing is of greater value in personality construction, so…
Also in the relevant game mechanics is an overall rule – if a limitation doesn’t limit a character, it’s not to be listed – that this process explicitly ignores.
- Bad Luck: ‘Comedy of errors when dating’. Or ‘Accident-prone when camping outdoors’. Or ‘Stammers when talking to Claire [character’s girlfriend] about his feelings’;
- Good Luck: ‘Lucky at Poker’, ‘Always wins a minor prize in lotteries (but never the big prize)’, ‘Good luck at sports when Charlie [character’s friend] is on the opposing team’;
- Mixed: ‘Karmic Balance when Christmas shopping’, ‘Karmic balance when looking for parking spots’, ‘Karmic balance with traffic’.
- ‘Good Luck (always in the right place) in sports except when playing a Boston team’, plus
- ‘Makes clumsy mistakes when winning against a Boston team or player’.
- Some people who are enraged can become indiscriminate when someone attempts to deflect them or intercede on behalf of the target of their anger, even attacking friends and allies.
- Some people have a chip on their shoulder that causes them to explode when triggered.
1. Motivations
Why does the character do whatever it is that they do? What is the motivation that drives them? What motivations drove them in the past?
2. Desires
What does the character desire? These need not be material objects; they can be an abstract category of object, or something more general again, or even something metaphysical – “World Peace” is a valid desire. However, to qualify for this category, it has to be something that the character does not expect to personally achieve or attain.
3. Ambitions
That’s because those are explicitly served by their own category, as you can see. Ambitions don’t have to be something that the character expects to achieve, but they are something the character is deliberately going to do something about trying to achieve. So if your character is a regular ecology protester, ‘ecological awareness’ or ‘ecological issues’ would be a perfectly valid choice.
4. Dislikes
This category is seemingly obvious, but this is the converse of Ambitions – these are things that the character dislikes enough to actually do something about. ‘Dislikes Pollution’ and ‘Dislikes Corporate Greed’ would both be valid choices for our Eco-warrior, for example.
5. Hobbies
Similarly, a hobby is something that the character is interested in that requires them to actually do something. It could be a craft like woodcarving, or it could be an activity like mountain climbing or hiking or wilderness camping or deep-sea fishing.
6. Interests
Things that the character is interested in learning about, but not participating in, go into this category. But some things that might be expected to fall into this group should more accurately be placed in the next.
7. Fascinations
There may be some subjects or types of event that absolutely transfix the character that he cannot turn aside from until complete save by an act of will. These are fascinations. I think most people have one or two, though many never discover what they are (or fail to recognize them when they do experience them).
8. Obsessions
One step more extreme again are obsessions. These are experiences that the character feels compelled to join into or take part in, or ambitions that the character will make drastic sacrifices to achieve.
9. Mysteries
There are three types of mysteries – but any mysteries that the character is merely curious about, without making any attempt to solve on their own, are merely an interest. That leaves the remaining two types – those that the character has an intellectual interest in solving, and those that hold some personal significance. The difference lies in the lengths that the character is typically willing to go to in search of a solution. In order to distinguish between these, the first are listed as ‘curiosities’ and the more definitive term is reserved for those puzzles that hold deep personal significance.
For some characters, this can include religious experiences, or para-physical ones. Near-death experiences and brain tumors can also be transformative. So this category can be a little broader than it might at first appear.
Because characters in RPGs are prone to the dramatic, it’s fair to say that they have more than their fair share of Mysteries; most ordinary people will have one or two at most, and often none at all. I frequently use this as a distinguishing point between ‘feature characters’ and ‘wallpaper characters’. The latter are also sometimes referred to as ‘stock characters’, ‘background characters’, or ‘extras’; they generally do not have significant speaking roles in an adventure or work of fiction.
In some cases, they are a compilation that is representative of many diverse individuals, grouped into a melange for convenience and focus while minimizing the attention that needs to be given them in character development.
10. Curiosities
The term used to refer to those mysteries that the character has a purely intellectual interest in seeing resolved, but which they do not feel compelled to solve because of personal impact. Sometimes, these subjects of which the character is curious can wax or wane; in ages past, I have been curious about the true identity of Jack The Ripper, for example, but that itch seems to have left me, at least for now. Usually, it takes only one tantalizing hint or revelation to reawaken the interest, however.
11. Mistakes
There are three types of mistake – those that the character doesn’t acknowledge as a mistake, those that the character accepts having made and has moved on from, and those that the character still deeply regrets. The latter are arguably the most significant now, because the memory will continue to drive future behavior, but the others deal with the road that the character has taken to get to this point, and that is usually also significant within the character’s history.
A potential fourth category would be choices that the character thinks were mistakes, but which actually were not – but that’s getting a little subtle, and most characters will have nothing of the sort in their makeup.
12. Inhibitions
There are two subtypes of inhibition – things the character doesn’t want to do (including phobias and paranoias) and lines that the character will only crossed if forced. Sometimes I consider separating the two, but every time I do so, I realize that anything from the first category can easily erupt into the second; it’s merely a matter of sensitivity.
13. Habits
Most people have habits, and they can be the very devil to break. More often than not, they need to be sublimated into some other form that is less corrosive to the spirit or the health of the individual. That’s the big secret to AA, in my opinion – confession and probity replacing the consumption of alcohol, and enabling the individual to withstand their desires for such consumption.
But the fact is that those who have a habit of sufficient intensity as to potentially pose problems for them (of whatever variety) do not think the same way as people who do not.
This is something that I’ve been aware of for a very long time; there are those who live for the sense of release of inhibitions that comes from alcohol, who feel ten feet tall and made of iron when they drink. They can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to feel that way. (I heard a very similar statement in the dialogue of Leo McGarry on The West Wing when he was attempting to explain his addiction to someone who didn’t share it).
Others drink, not to forget, but to become numb to some source of personal pain. This never really works very well, but eventually you become so inebriated that you don’t care any more; I guess that’s a form of pseudo-numbness.
But, in my case (aside from a couple of particular binges at one specific point in time), I could never stand the loss of self-control that comes with even mild inebriation. While I could (and did) drink socially, I almost always drew the line just short of that limit. And, on the few occasions when I did cross that line, I hated the way I would tell my body to do something and it would do something else.
Did that make me immune to addiction? Absolutely not; just to that particular addiction. But this isn’t about me; they are offered here in support and explanation of the statement offered, that addicts think differently.
14. Targets
There are often people and organizations that the character wants to take down or rehabilitate (by force if necessary). Sometimes the identity of the target is not known to the character, only what they have done; this implies an ongoing investigation aimed at obtaining that identification, but sometimes it can also produce actions aimed at a wider front that will include the target even without knowing explicitly who they are.
15. Enemies
Not necessarily the same groups or individuals, these are people/agencies who are actively seeking to do harm of some sort to the character. That harm could be a restraint of liberty, the capture/collection of some object in the character’s possession, or a public embarrassment of some kind. Again, not at all enemies will know who their target is, as an individual; they may oppose all members of a particular group or who participate in specific activities that they oppose.
16. Recurring Cast
Who does the character know and see regularly? Whose troubles is the character regularly drawn into? Who is likely to get drawn into the character’s troubles?
This can frequently be a far wider collection of individuals than it first seems. For me, the first step is always to identify a social circle or general category of supporting cast, then to identify discrete individuals from within each group; I retain the general group as well, representing everyone who has not been singled out.
For example: I went to school (schoolmates, teachers). I grew up in a particular small town (family, locals). I spent one memorable year in a boarding school (different group of schoolmates, a couple of teachers). I went to university (classmates), joined the Science Fiction Society (friends), joined the ‘wargaming’ group (actually playing TTRPGs) (friends). I lived at a particular place overlooking Bondi Beach (neighbors, landlord, local shopkeepers). I worked at a number of different jobs (fellow employees, bosses, associates), and so on. That’s 15 social circles (some overlapping) – and that’s with just one employer and one residential location in the picture; I’ve had many over the last 42 years. In fact, this only carries me through 1982!
In total, there have been 9 employers of note, and 12 – no, 13 – residences, over the years (not counting the ones already listed). With three social circles for each of those, that’s another 66 social circles, bringing my total to 81!
I’m fully prepared to accept that my experiences are more diverse than most people my age; and hence this is a more extreme example than is normal. That’s not especially relevant. From each of those groups, there will be a few standouts who I still remember (no idea if they would remember me!) – anywhere from 1 or 2 to a dozen or so, weighted toward the lower end. Median would probably be around 4. So those 81 social circles are represented by 324 individuals – which are not the totality of those in the social circles, but are just the individuals that I could name and of whom I have strong memories. But one (family) has to be separated out from that – mine is unusually large and relatively closely-knit, with more than 100 specific individuals with whom I have some sort of personal relationship because they are family. So that’s more than 400 memorable individuals.
Any of those could be the vector for an adventure to reach me, were I a character in an RPG. Or a social complication, or social event.
Now, this is not going to be true of most characters (it’s too much work!). They might have four or five social circles, with 2-3 individuals drawn from each, and a catch-all (“other people [character x] has known”) for everyone else. Most of those individuals will be nothing more than a name until they rise to prominence in a particular plotline, though there may be a few exceptions to that. And that’s for a feature character; less significant characters will have even less definition.
17. Beliefs & Superstitions
Beliefs and superstitions can be minor influences on character behavior or can be defining behavioral factors. Like curiosities, they can wax and wane, and come and go. Some people seem to shed their superstitions as they age, others seem to collect additional ones.
18. Memberships
What organizations is the character a past member of? What organizations is he or she a current member of?
19. Identities – Public, Secret
By what names is the character known (public identities)? What names has he or she used to conceal her true identity?
20. Needs & Dependencies
These are comparatively unusual, since addictions have already been dealt with. These are something that the character actually needs to maintain health, either physical, social, or mental. For example, I make no secret of the fact that I am diabetic; in fact, I have no less than 12 medications that I have to consume regularly (blood sugar, cholesterol, fast heartbeat, arthritis, and some vitamin deficiencies). if I were to stop taking these, not only would medical complications arise relatively quickly, but these would eventually prove crippling or even fatal.
These are something whose absence causes damage of some sort, either short-term or persistent and cumulative.
21. Susceptibilities
A susceptibility is something that has greater effect on the character than is normal. These are relatively uncommon, but all the more noteworthy for that. Special note should be made of any that the character doesn’t know he or she is susceptible to.
For example, as a writer, I am susceptible to accusations of plagiarism. Even the unfounded accusation is corrosive to my credibility and hence to my ability to earn money from my writing. While most people would suffer some social or professional harm from such an accusation, I would experience disproportionate harm from one. Some occupations are susceptible to allegations of child abuse, others to corruption.
22. Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities are more extreme again, but also more common. These are things that are generally harmless or even beneficial but that cause harm to the character. Such harm can be anything from discomfort to death. Kryptonite is a vulnerability for Superman. Penicillin is a vulnerability to me, I’m allergic to it. Some people are allergic to peanuts, or seafood, or pollen. Such harm can require ingestion, or contact, or even its mere presence may be enough.
23. Fortune
At first glance, a character can either have good luck or bad luck, and this is thus an entirely singular category – you either have one, or you don’t. That overlooks the real power of this liability, in terms of characterization.
First, you can specify that the character has bad luck or good luck in a specific situation – ‘bad luck while dating,’ ‘good luck when selling door-to-door’, ‘bad luck with men’ [or women, depending on character gender and orientation], ‘good luck when climbing’, ‘bad luck when engaging in outdoors activities’, ‘bad luck around [a particular person]’ – the list is endless. There is also a third option that is often overlooked, “karmic balance”.
Second, you can specify the form that this bad luck takes when it manifests – clumsiness, stammering, klutz, accident-prone, attacked by nature, tongue-tied, experiences reverses, or whatever.
Third, you can confine the manifestation of the luck, if that’s appropriate.
Put all those together, and you can end up with:
Even so, for most characters, you won’t want too many of these, or they lose their impact, unless they specifically designed to integrate into a greater whole. For example:
This describes a character who is a naturally-gifted sportsman, but for some reason (probably psychological), he becomes a klutz when his team is winning but only when playing teams from a particular location. It doesn’t matter what the sport is – it could be baseball, basketball, football, whatever.
One of my favorite combinations is “Good luck when losing, bad luck when winning”.
24. Enraged
Some things tick us off enough that we have to make willpower rolls not to attack them or otherwise act when we encounter them. You can think about these as more intense but more intermittent forms of obsession. For me, it’s nagging that sets me off (I don’t know why), and sometimes — when I’m GMing, not being listened to or being interrupted. With the latter events, there is usually a singular explosion of temper and then I regain equilibrium; with the latter, it’s more persistent, and more prone to be re-triggered after an event. If pushed, it can even make me turn violent, something I’m not particularly proud of (bring up something once, and there’s no problem; bring it up again and again and you’re in for it).
I have known people who became outraged at perceived miscarriages of justice – some of them regained equilibrium after venting for a while, some needed to write a letter (or email) to the newspaper, and some immediately began organizing marches and protests.
A Narcissist will ‘do something dramatic for attention when he feels ignored or sidelined, even if that is not in his best interest.’
25. Berserk
Most of us don’t have these, thank goodness. They are triggers that cause us to lash out, indiscriminately.
But there are a couple of more common variations.
As with Fortunes, you can also specify the form in which this manifests; most people tend to think of it as ‘physically attack’, but it could be ‘Screams uncontrollably”, or ‘Emotionally embittered by’, or even ‘Becomes cruel and heartless’.
So there’s a lot more scope in this category than first meets the eye.
26. Distinctive Features
This includes scars and tattoos, and inhuman beauty, and even perfect symmetry of features. It includes missing limbs and missing digits. It can include extras of something, too – “Six fingers” for example, or “prehensile tail” (if that’s unusual). I’ve even known a couple of people whose eyes seemed to change color under certain circumstances – I’m not sure how that worked, physiologically, but I’ve seen it first-hand at close range.
Scars are especially significant, because they always stem from a particular incident and that in turn connects them with some other part of their personal makeup. For example, since the mid-80s, I’ve had extensive scarring on my right wrist and chin – I got mugged on a train, and physically thrown off it as it was pulling into a station, sliding 60m along the platform and narrowly missing steel girders acting as support columns. The scars elsewhere from this incident (which took off almost 1/4 of my skin) have faded, but those seem to persist. This caused me to have a ‘berserk when being mugged’ that, on a later occasion, caused me to break a solid oak walking stick on the hand of a would-be mugger (and breaking several bones in his hand, causing him to drop the knife that he was wielding in the process).
But the responses / reactions / connections don’t have to be so dramatic. I have a scar over one eye from an outdoors rock festival in the later 80s – I got up during one act’s set to use the facilities because I wasn’t a particular fan of the band, and one of their fans took a drunken swing at me, driving my eyeglasses back into the eye socket. That connects to my love of music, which is what led me to be in attendance (and hence in a position to be attacked), but there has been no other psychological impact from the event that I can detect. Okay. maybe this reinforced slightly my already-strong resistance to drunkenness – but even that I’m not sure of.
27. Physical Limitations
Missing eyes, missing limbs, missing digits, deafness in one ear – there are a number of possibilities here, but most of them won’t apply to most characters. Some of them will also be distinctive features, some of them may not – an eye-patch is obvious, a glass eye far less so.
But there are some less obvious ones that should be pointed out – things like “vertigo at heights or without solid footing”. Some allergies also belong in this category, even though they may be listed elsewhere in addition – “Hay Fever” is an obvious one. There was a time when I had to be especially wary of infected cuts and the like, because I’m allergic to Penicillin, and that was the treatment of first resort to such (thankfully, Penicillin-resistant diseases caused the adoption of other medications with which I have no problems, so this problem has become progressively less significant over the years – but I still have to bear in mind the fact that sensitivity to one medication can imply sensitivity to other, related, compounds).
28. Social Limitations
As a child, i was very introverted, which conferred a number of social limitations, for example a fear of public speaking – even though I was fairly good at it when forced into it. It was, in fact, RPGs that ‘brought me out of my shell’ – during the ‘Moral Panic’ of the 1980s, I was even able to appear on a radio program to defend the hobby, and I had a letter of protest over the one-sided report on the subject by 60 minutes quoted on-air. I once spent a month as a door-to-door salesman selling vacuum cleaners, and was described by my boss in the job as ‘a master of the soft sell’. Unfortunately, this was a job that principally paid by commission, and reached the point where I could not afford to continue, just as that boss thought I had grown skilled enough to achieve success in the role, so I had to give it away. But the gap from introvert with a fear of public speaking to door-to-door salesman shows just how far I had come!
29. Other Traits
I think that I’ve covered just about everything, but there’s always room for something I haven’t contemplated. So this category exists as an ‘anything else you can think of’ catch-all.
30. Curios & Treasured Possessions
But there’s one final category. Objects listed in this category can be specific (Babe-Ruth signed baseball bat) or general (collection of basketball memorabilia), or even metaphysical (memories of Paris). They can serve two noteworthy functions – first, the fact that the character values them tells you something about the character; and second, they can be used as a physical manifestation of some personality attribute that is otherwise obscure or inobvious, making them a key to ‘unlocking’ the personality by an observer.
For example, if the PCs are to have a meeting with the representative of a company – it could be anything from an insurance company to a manufacturer of some sort – and he has a bookshelf full of books about Conservative politics, including biographies of US Presidents from the Republican Party, that immediately ‘unlocks’ a part of the personality of the individual, creating context and implications and expectations. That one character trait becomes the focal point of so many others that half the work of detailing the personality can be assumed, saving the GM generating the character (or the writer describing the character) masses of time and effort, especially if none of these factors actually plays any active role in the ensuing meeting.
This can be so useful that I will invest a disproportionate amount of time contemplating the individual’s impact on their surroundings.
You can also convey an entirely different personality at a stroke – if I were to add to the description of the bookshelf, “but there is no evidence of any of the books ever having been opened,” you get an entirely different interpretation than if I had described them as “dog-eared and clearly frequently studied”.
Even then, there are still multiple opposing possibilities – the books might be well-read because the character is an active supporter of that side of politics, or because their job requires them to be persuasive to people who are aligned in that direction, politically. One phrase from the NPCs lips when they notice the PC noticing the bookshelf is enough to convey that shift – for example,
“Know your enemy,” she says with a smile.
This also implies that the NPC is adept enough at reading people to have discerned that the PC or PCs are antagonistic toward that branch of politics.
Don’t neglect the value that Curios and Treasured Possessions can have in communicating and defining a personality!
Okay, now that we have the construction elements defined, I can get to the real meat of this article – how to use them. Note that in order to use this technique, you have to have a clear understanding of what these categories contain, without the need to look them up. Until you have that, it’s a good idea to skim through them each time you sit down for an NPC generation session. Eventually, if you do this often enough, you will reach the point where you can use the initial list as sufficient mnemonic to bring them to mind, and can skip over the entire indented section of this article.
Step One: Root Cause
Always start with the one item from anywhere on the list that you consider the most definitive of the character. This is the “Root Cause” (you’ll see why in a moment).
Example
When this article was conceived, it came with the concept of an example that was actually instrumental in structuring it. That example is an NPC with the Root Cause, “Vigilante”.
Step Two: Consequences
A lot of players and GMs using the Hero System stop to calculate the points value of each Disadvantage as it is determined. I want to take this opportunity to actively advocate against this practice, as it results in a stop-start process that restricts the imagination.
The methodology that I am recommending in this article is to accelerate the process of coming up with relevant entries as much as possible, then cleaning up with the game mechanics later. This results in a more free-flowing process in which the imagination of the character’s creator is given free reign.
This step of the process consists of working your way through the list of categories and listing as many ideas in each that are conceptual consequences of the “root cause” (hence the term). “Consequences” lists every type of impact on the character of the root cause that the creator can identify.
Because the “root” in question is conceptual in nature, these “Consequences” can actually be the causes of, or justifications for, the Root Cause.
- Motivation: Lover of Justice
- Motivation: Righter Of Wrongs
- Desire: End injustice
- Desire: End inequality
- Desire: Expose Corruption
- Ambition: Identify and Expose the Jambala Killer
- Ambition: Expose Judge Prentice Shaw as corrupt
- Ambition: Investigate possible corruption in the Dallas District Attorney’s department
- Ambition: Investigate possible corruption in the Dallas Police Department
- Dislikes: Injustice
- Dislikes: Corruption
- Dislikes: Wrongful Convictions
- Dislikes: Mysteries
- Hobbies: none (yet)
- Interest: Legal Processes
- Interest: Legal Ethics
- Interest: Legal Theory and Practical Application
- Interest: Political History
- Interest: Daughter’s Welfare (restricted by court order from a more active role)
- Fascination: Stories of Karmic Revenge
- Fascination: Stories of Sherlock Holmes
- Fascination: Stories of American Pulp Heroes
- Fascination: Unsolved Crimes
- Fascination: Forensic Medicine
- Obsession: Exoneration
- Obsession: Ex-wife
- Obsession: Serial Killers
- Mystery: The Jambala Killer
- Curiosity: Jack the Ripper
- Mistake: Chose ineffectual counsel (Jambala Killer Trial)
- Mistake: Chose ineffectual counsel (Divorce)
- Mistake: Stalking Daughter (refer Interest, above)
- Inhibition; Illegal activities
- Inhibition; Daughter’s personal life
- Habit: Gambling (mild)
- Habit: Alcohol (mild)
- Target: The Jambala Killer
- Target: Judge Prentice Shaw
- Target: The Millford Manufacturing Company
- Enemy: Ex-Wife
- Enemy: Detective Zachery Benson
- Enemy: District Attorney Miles Galruth
- Enemy: Wilson Dent (convicted murderer)
- Recurring Cast: Mrs Shalhoub (landlady)
- Recurring Cast: Jake Prescott (friend / mechanic)
- Beliefs & Superstitions: Instruments of Karma
- Membership: Ex-cop
- Membership: Mystery Writers of America
- Public Identity: Nathan Johns, ex-cop
- Public Identity: Nathan Johns, ex-con
- Secret Identity: Karmon Tracy, mystery author
- Secret Identity: The Pivot (masked vigilante)
- Needs & Dependencies: none
- Susceptibilities: none
- Vulnerabilities: none
- Fortune: Bad luck (distractions arise) when investigating the Jambala Killer
- Fortune: Good luck (discover vital leads) when investigating other crimes
- Fortune: Bad luck (always loses) when gambling on horses and football
- Fortune: Good luck (wins more than he loses) when gambling on baseball
- Fortune: Bad luck (serious life complications) when intoxicated
- Enraged: Blatant injustice
- Enraged: Overt Corruption
- Berserk: If/When Daughter Threatened
- Distinctive Features: One blue eye, one gray
- Distinctive Features: Scar above left eye (barely noticeable)
- Distinctive Features: Tattoo (broken chain) on left wrist
- Physical Limitations: none
- Social Limitations: ex-convict
- Social Limitations: ex-cop
- Social Limitations: restraining order (ex-wife and daughter)
- Other Traits: none
- Curios & Treasured Possessions: Service Revolver
- The character (Nathan Johns) writes his fiction under a pseudonym, a legacy of the fact that his first novel was written while he was incarcerated.
- He clearly blames the Judge, Prentice Shaw, for his conviction, aided and abetted by the incompetence of his chosen attorney, but he is unsure of who else may have been involved.
- He served an unknown number of years of his sentence before proving his innocence, but the lead detective, Zachery Benson, is unconvinced.
- The District Attorney is opposed to Vigilantes on general principle and not to “The Pivot” specifically.
- Instruments of Karma: a blending of the concept of Karma and the principle of ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves’, he believes that certain individuals are motivated and empowered to bring Karmic Balance to the world around them. This also relates to his chosen vigilante non-du-plum, “The Pivot” – he sees himself as the linchpin around which the scales of justice pivot. This concept also led to the “bad luck when intoxicated” entry – an expression of his personal Karma biting him on the ass when he neglects his “mission”.
- I’ve deliberately made this a slightly-flawed human being, one who means well but who has been hardened by his experiences. Although it is not listed as a mistake, it’s entirely possible that his chosen approach (vigilante) is the wrong road to take. Or maybe it’s the perfect response to his situation.
Example
Okay, so let’s work through the list of construction elements:
There were a number of decisions made on the fly in the above listing. I had a general outline of the character concept – a cop wrongfully imprisoned as a murderer, leading to his wife divorcing him and cutting his daughter out of his life – but that was all. My original thought was that he would be a private eye, but the mystery writer angle came to me as I was making out the list.
A couple of notes:
I trust you can now see the relevance of the spiderweb metaphor mentioned earlier. Each of these personality traits were derived from the basic concept of a vigilante good-guy, an almost-antihero who walks the fine line between justice and retribution for his own wrongful imprisonment.
Step Three: Penumbras
For each of the above items, do a really fast skim through the list looking for tertiary connections, and anything that leaps out as having been overlooked. This works on the principle that Step two has greatly refined the character as you proceeded, and so the character was better defined at the end of it than when you started. That opens the door for things to have been overlooked.
In particular (and this is where Penumbras come into the picture), this is where consequences of consequences and other questions around the fringes come into play. For example, he might have a superstition about the number 3 being unlucky – so he never bets on horses with that number, or on the third race.
Rather than continuing the example process at this point (time is becoming a factor), though, I’ll leave it at this point.
Step Four: Ripple Effects
Once you have filled in any blanks and any afterthoughts, it’s time to look at a more directed range of consequences. First, put together a narrative summary of the character background, similar to the one provided in the example after Step Two. Use that to put together a simple timeline of his personal history.
Now go through it, looking for anywhere that you can insert a plot hook or define a consequence that hasn’t already been enumerated.
The example character was in prison. And an ex-cop. That will have earned him enemies, and will have mandated his being present when some typical events went down. His reactions and actions in response may well have earned him still more enemies. And if there’s some sort of question about the honesty or brutality of the guards – there are likely to be some of both – that also needs to be spelled out.
The other thing to look for are consequences that impact events ‘down-time’ from the event. How does being an ex-cop impact his mystery writing? How does his being and ex-convict? Does his ex-wife share the view that he’s guilty, or does she have some other reason for her attitude toward the character, getting a restraining order to separate him from his Daughter’s life?
In general, this is looking through everything created thus far looking for the remaining gaps in the character concept, and filling them in.
Step Five: Prior Causes
Prior Causes looks further back than the earliest event listed, and asks where each of the items already listed came from. This character became a cop? Why? Who was his Instructor? Who were his partners? Where and in what part of his life did he meet his wife? When were they married?
Each such question does at least one of two things: Adds another influence over the events and traits already listed that now needs to be taken into account, and adds a further prior cause that should have its own set of consequences and ripple effects.
Consider the diagram to the right::
Each step back in time creates the conditions that lead to the decisions that produce the root cause, either directly or indirectly, and also have their own consequences.
With each step back, these generally become more insignificant. You might characterize them as adulthood, education, and childhood/family, respectively, for example.
Clearly, adulthood creates the conditions that lead to the root cause, the point at which the character’s life took an unexpected turn. In the case of our example, we’ve already backtracked to the point of our character being a cop, and married – so the next step back needs to explain how those two things came about, and the consequences and flow-on effects of events back then. Perhaps we could maintain our theme with a corrupt partner?
So that gets us back to the point where the character joins the police force. The layer behind that deals with his education and other career options, the teachers and home-town individuals that led to this particular choice being considered. Was it his first choice, his second, or somewhere a long way down the list? Did he, for example, always want to be a writer – but was dissuaded because they don’t earn much money?
Before that, we have family and childhood friends. These generally violate the “gets weaker’ rule, or can do so – unless there’s some estrangement.
If the character had a more complex history – perhaps there was a period of military service in between his becoming a cop and his leaving school – then you may end up with more than four layers, or you may decide that one is rendered so insignificant by this that it can be merged with another.
How the back-steps are broken up is up to you; just make sure there’s an obvious logic to it, and all will work out..
Inversions & Convolutions
There are two conceptual patterns that always lead to richer characters, and that I want to single out; you won’t always want to use them, but that’s always better as an educated and deliberate choice.
Inversions are represented by the example that I’ve been using – a cop who became a con, and who has now become the closest thing that he can to a cop once again. Religious characters who have gone through a crisis of faith, or who experienced some sort of religious revelation that transformed them, would be another example. In general, Characters who go from being one thing to being the opposite – wealthy to poor (or poor to wealthy) or whatever.
Some inversions are more difficult to arrange than others – going from educated to ignorant, for example (though there have been recent examples that suggest that it’s possible).
Convolutions are the other one. This is where a character’s life seems always to have been leading them to whatever they are, right now – but they have discovered along the way that their original vision of their position or role in society was oversimplified, even naive. As their world-view has become more complex, so has their perception of their role – not necessarily in ways that are too their liking. Frequently, they find that people they worshiped have feet of clay.
So common is disappointment as a them in Convolution Stories that I sometimes think that a character who experiences the opposite, discovering idealism, might be fun – but I’ve never come up with a credible character concept for achieving that. Not yet, anyway.
So, that’s the process. I think the example probably does more to sell it than any accolades I can offer about it at this point, so I’ll leave things as they stand, and wish readers success in adding to their repertoires!
That brings this article to a close, but before I go, I have some other news to impart.
Seven years ago or thereabouts, I was inspired by the Kickstarter campaign for an RPG rules system named Fortune’s Wheel to write an article on Prophecy in RPGs: The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies. Unfortunately, that Kickstarter didn’t reach its target, and the author, Peter Hollinghurst, had to drop out of developing it for a while with personal problems.
With those problems now resolved (in part by migrating from England to Canada), he’s back with a new offering, the Edinburgh Horrors, an adventure which uses the Fortunes Wheel system (tarot-card based instead of dice-based) as its foundation.
The adventure is set up so that players can control / influence some of the NPCs their characters encounter to achieve different outcomes, and a methodology for the players to create their own side stories using the card system if they want to enrich the gaming experience provided by the adventure
Interestingly, the plan is to use DriveThroughRPG’s print-on-demand service to deal with those who might want to purchase hard copies.
I don’t have time to get into a full review, so instead I’ll just share the link to the Kickstarter and let you do your own investigations: The Edinburgh Horrors – Long Dead Ink.
As I write, it’s closing in on meeting its goals, so – with 22 days remaining in the fundraising campaign as I write this – I have every expectation that it will achieve its quite modest targets, and even move on to stretch goals.
It certainly sounds interesting enough:
…and the game mechanics might make it useful for GMs of other genres, (as might the ‘Haunted Edinburgh’ game supplement), so do yourself a favor and check it out!
Comments Off on Causes and Consequences: Persona Construction