Engagement vs Involvement: The forgotten balance
Every player, and more importantly, every PC, who is participating in an RPG is a member of a team. That team can be constructed to form an idealized “machine” if the players collaborate on their character designs, but more normally, things are looser.
At best, you have the GM constructing a team model in which no one character treads on the toes of another PC – that’s what I did when setting up the Zenith-3 campaign. Importantly, I made sure that there were more archetype “slots” than there were PCs, so that there was room for the dynamic between team members to grow and evolve, as one member left and another joined. The team model was flexible. Within those archetypes, the characters that were created were entirely up to the players, and so was the archetype they were slotting into – the only requirement was that archetype selection was first come, first serve.
In most campaigns, there is not even this level of management. I have once GM’d a game in which everyone turned up with a Cleric – all worshiping different, and oft-times hostile, deities.
And so this disparate and diverse motley crew come together and work as a team to solve the problems that confront them in the course of the campaign. There are times when each takes the spotlight, and there are times when they yield the spotlight to another PC, and there are times when they are a team player and not an individual.
There is clearly a balance in every character of team participant and star, and that’s something that I talked about in Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign? almost 4 years ago.
In retrospect, though, that article doesn’t go far enough. It takes the two hallmark positions – member of an Ensemble or featured player in a Star Vehicle with a rotating spotlight – and assumes that there is nothing in-between. And that’s a problem, because – as I’ve shown above – every character occupies some middle ground between the extremes from the very moment of character conception, through character creation, into all aspects of play – roleplaying, combat, and problem solving – and into GM’s encounter design, adventure design, and even campaign design.
What brought this train of thought on? An exchange between my brother Paul and myself, about the departure of Michael Weatherly from NCIS after 13 years. We were talking about what impact this would have on the show, and I pointed out that Sean Murray’s character of Timothy McGee had grown over the course of the 13 seasons (12 as a regular and 8 guest appearances in Season 1) and was now positioned to take up the lead agent role; in a way, this would bring the show full circle back to where it was in the beginning, or close to it.
I’ve been mulling over McGee’s career within the show and realized that this growth in utility has come at a price – unless they specifically write in a scene to show off his technological expertise, which they do once or twice a season, he has, by and large, shed his former role within the series as a Geek (see the “reception” section of the Wikipedia page linked to above).
I wasn’t entirely sure where the train of thought was going until I reached that point of revelation, and suddenly extrapolated the change of role outwards and propagated it into the realm of RPGs. I mention this just to provide some context to the article.
Every character has to have duel roles (if not more) on the metagame scale within a campaign: the team player and the character in the spotlight. At times, he needs to occupy a midway point – not the character standing within the spotlight of the current scene, but the dominant presence for the adventure as a whole.
And characters have to be designed for that – and they aren’t, generally. No-one really gives that even the slightest bit of thought. The focus is always on the individual spotlight, and when the character will qualify for it, and the team aspect of the design is at best incidental – even though the ‘supporting role” will overwhelmingly dominate in actual play.
Impact On Character Concept
There are three different imperatives in operation here – the capacity of the character to demand an equal share of the spotlight, the capacity of the character to link with the other PCs in a supporting capacity, and the way the character will mesh with those others in full collaboration towards a common end.
A good character (in a group environment – solo play is a slightly different story) will be able to tick all of these boxes. They will have a singular area of expertise in which they can take the lead; they will have areas of lesser expertise (probably thematically related to the first) which will permit them to assist, support, and contribute to the spotlight time of others, and at the same time will contain the capacity to be the focal point of an entire adventure; and they will be capable of meshing with the other PCs as a unified force, especially in combat.
When first thinking about what sort of character a player wants to create, all these aspects of the proposed character bear contemplation. Articulating how the character will function in each of these roles permits other players to build their characters around the interaction and dynamic necessary for success.
It’s my experience that players spend a lot of time thinking about the first (area of expertise), and might spend a bit of time on the last (function within a team), and generally assume that the middle one will develop naturally as a consequence of the others. And, to a certain extent, this is a valid assumption; but occasionally it will misfire. Never trust to chance what can happen by design with minimal investment in thought and effort.
Here’s another way of thinking about these three functions that can be useful, but oversimplifies and neglects a number of alternative solutions: The first can be described as non-combat things the character knows how to do, the second can be things the character knows about but has no practical experience in, and the third on the style of combat and how that can be employed tactically within the group.
Batman, for example, ticks all three boxes: He’s a driven detective with a depth of information in a wide variety of fields. Where the mystery dominates the plotline, so does the character. When the mystery is not the central aspect of the plot, but is a bridge connecting one scene to another, or where another character has an important decision to make that will be a more informed choice with information from Batman, the character takes a supporting role; and in combat, he can either identify an enemy’s weakness, employ surprise and athleticism (and weaponry) to take enemies by surprise, can provide cover where some specialized expertise (magic, super-science, whatever) is needed to win the central confrontation, or simply function as a distraction to buy time for others. In fact, in combat is where the character is weakest, though he is certainly versatile; he could almost be designed to function in a team environment, at least in terms of capabilities. Balancing these strengths are his personality (loner), obsessiveness, and – to some extent – paranoia and secrecy. Triggering these can either force him to fade back into the shadows, yielding the spotlight to someone else, or push him firmly into the spotlight to become the driving force in an adventure. It’s this particular assemblage of strengths and weaknesses that makes the character so flexible, a flexibility that is key to his ubiquity – and the sheer variety of plotlines that this opens up for the character has been a major contributing factor to his popularity over the last 77 years.
Impact On Character Creation
Choosing not only what a character can do, but what they can’t do, is far easier with a character concept to serve as road-map. I view character construction as more than simply assigning game mechanics numbers to various details; it is a defining of a personality, and selection of abilities, such that the personality influences and shapes not only what capabilities the character seeks out but how those capabilities will be employed, all held together and explained by a personal history.
The three functions of the character inform every choice that I make when designing a PC, but especially skill and ability selection.
Skills: behind-the-curtains theory
To understand the role of skill selection and choices about skill improvement requires a slight shift in awareness by the owner/operator of the character and the GM who interprets the game mechanics.
Let’s say that a character has a skill such that they succeed on 12 or less on a d20. The usual way of looking at this is to say that there is a 60% chance of the character being successful at any using the skill. I suggest that this is an abbreviated shorthand for the correct interpretation, which is both more interesting and more complicated: that the character knows 60% of whatever there is to know about that subject and is ignorant of the other 40%. In a perfect simulation of reality, once a subtopic is rolled, the results (success or failure) would be documented and the character would never need to roll for that specific knowledge again; this avoids the illogical anomalies of a character being an expert in some aspect of the knowledge one week and completely ignorant of it the week after. The more broadly the skills system defines its parameters, the more likely it is that such anomalies will arise. “I knew about the gang territories in Los Angeles last week, why don’t I know about it now?”
In reality, this is impractical, and the explanations that are usually offered to permit the ignoring of the occasional anomaly are that either the subject, or contemporary understanding of it, are dynamic and continually changing, or that there are always gaps in knowledge or its application, or that the character has simply forgotten or not absorbed the information when they were studying the subject. Systems that offer “eidetic memory” as a purchasable option stretch credibility by voiding the last and weakening the first (especially if coupled with “Speed reading” or equivalent). Nevertheless, we simply hide behind the euphemism “the character has a 60% chance” and ignore the actual significance of that statement.
This becomes more interesting when we consider two characters of equal ability discussing the subject. If they had exactly the same knowledge, there would logically be no reason for any improvement in their chances of accessing any given fact. In fact, the subject matter can be reduced to a common core that they both posses and a fringe that may have some overlap but is not required to do so.
If there were no central core, then simple probability based on the chance of failure would give the chances of success of the pair collaborating on a problem: 8/20 x 8/20 = 64/400ths = 6400/400% = 64/4% = 16% chance of failure, and therefore a 84% chance of success; the sum of their knowledge is 24% greater than either of them alone. Or, to put it another way, a second character with 12/- has 24% of knowledge that the first lacks, and vice-versa. Which could be expressed as a Venn diagram in which the area outside the overlap is 24% of the combined area and there is, therefore, a 76% overlap.
Things get more complicated when you factor in the concept of a “common core” of knowledge or ability that is central to the skill. Instead of having the entire breadth of the subject in which differences can emerge, there is only the “fringe”. In essence, this increases the likelihood of differences in knowledge within the two fringes – a lot of the “overlap” is consumed by the “common core”. How much, it’s impossible to say without defining this “Central Core”.
Most skill systems go a step further, defining layers or “shells” of knowledge, and decreeing some of them to be “more exotic” than others. This is frequently represented by increased difficulty levels for more obscure information. Although the mechanics are completely different, both my Zenith-3 game system and D&D / Pathfinder employ this construct behind their respective curtains.
Practical Application
These concepts enable the GM to “interpret” a skill level relative to a character’s experience and background; what might be a “fringe knowledge” question for one character can be an “inner layer” question for the one standing next to them; even though, in terms of mechanics, they have the same level of ability within the skill,
The clever player can anticipate or even mandate this differentiation by balancing specialist bonuses against broader ignorances, regardless of whether or not this is an official part of the game mechanics (if not, GM approval will be required). For example, a character with 12/- in “Knowledge: Underworld”, or equivalent, might suggest that due to his background he should have +2 or +3 in “Gangs of Los Angeles” in return for -1 in all other areas covered by the skill. So the character is effectively at 11/- to identify something about a gang in New York City, but is at 16/- to know that the leader of the LA Commancheros (to invent a gang from whole cloth) eats lunch at Willard’s Sandwich Joint every Friday.
This works by defining what is the “fringe” of random assorted factoids for the character and what is not.
If you want to institute such a mechanics subsystem for yourself, you should apply the following principles:
- The more narrow a specialty is, the greater the bonus a character should get in return for a -1 in “everything else”;
- Characters should be permitted only one specialty, or the penalty should be cumulative and possibly even larger for subsequent specialties, because the scope of the “everything else” of the first specialty is being reduced in scope by the second specialty.
A less formal approach is simply for the GM to apply ad-hoc modifiers based on the character’s background and experience; if the player can cite a valid reason for gaining an increased chance of success, grant it. This rewards players who put greater effort into their characters.
Getting back to design and the functional roles
By not taking a specialization within a sphere of knowledge or practical skill that is central to the character, the player is defining this as an area of spotlight expertise proportional to their skill in the subject. In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, because the Club organization is based in New York City, all the characters have spent time there, and consequently have some “Area Knowledge: New York City”. However, as a long-term resident of the city, the Priest character, Father O’Malley, has a far higher skill than the others.
Therefore, any time a knowledge of the city, or establishments and significant locations within the city, becomes important to the plotline, Father O’Malley has a spotlight moment. If he fails, or is not present, the others may resort to their “fringe knowledge” of the subject to see if this is one of the random factoids that they have picked up from their time there.
If one of the others were to look at significantly increasing their “skill” in the subject, we (the GMs) would probably discuss “capping” the increase or requiring them to take a specialty of the type discussed above – so as not to steal Father O’Malley’s “spotlight time”.
Although planning these was not something we had in mind during character creation for the campaign, it is something that we would consider in future. It’s a combination of blind luck and, once again, an application of the conceptual archetype approach, that each of the characters is developing their own niches of knowledge. We’re unlikely to leave such things to chance in future, and in the future development of the existing characters.
Abilities
Abilities benefit from a similar mindset. A diverse application of an ability to different situations for spotlight time while not treading on other character’s toes comes relatively easily if they are all of different character classes, and with greater difficulty if this is not the case or the classes are too similar.
Again, the general observation is that considerable effort is placed on the spotlight abilities, passing consideration may be given to the character meshing into an effective unit in combat situations, and virtually no thought is given to the middle “supporting” role. There are more exceptions to this rule of thumb when it comes to abilities, however.
It is generally left to the GM to think of ways in which one PC can support or contribute to another character who is having a spotlight moment, and the general solution is the temporary yielding of the spotlight mentioned earlier, as a second character steps forward with a key contribution.
If the player were to give this question some thought during character construction, he might be able to choose an ability that is effective in supporting another rather than trying to be second-best in someone else’s area of expertise.
There is a PC in the Zenith-3 campaign who is relatively physically vulnerable. There is also an NPC that I have created whose primary abilities are supportive, protective, and secondary in nature; his ideal tactical role is normally to protect the PC. However, his personality is such that he has to continually resist the temptation to join in the front-lines, even though he is far less effective (most of the time) than the front-line specialist within the team. The PCs are slowly putting together prepared tactics for those occasions when he either goes “off the reservation” or is thrust into the front-lines by virtue of specific circumstances, involving one of the other characters falling back to protect the vulnerable PC.
Impact On Roleplay
Roleplay is often as much about the personality of the player as it is that of the character they are playing. Some people are naturally pushed into the spotlight under certain circumstances simply because they are better in certain situations.
In the Pulp Campaign, Father O’Malley is the most diplomatic and the best at speaking with higher authority, and is usually front-and-center when religion or the supernatural manifest; Captain Ferguson shines at organizing direct action and response; Doctor Hawke is the best at speaking to technical experts, Steffan is good at connecting with ordinary working men and women but is still evolving as a character, as is the last PC in the campaign, Eliza Black, who is most adept at dealing with law enforcement.
Some of these choices derive from character experience and expertise, some from player ability, and – most commonly – as a function of a combination of the two.
Again, a lot of this is the result of a confluence of the deliberate differentiation of archetypes in the concept phase, coupled with trying to get each character to play to the player’s strengths during that phase. These days, we would be even more aware of the significance of these attributes and how they operate within the three functions – individual, ally, and member of collective.
Impact On Problem Solving & Puzzles
Because the parameters of puzzles and problems are defined by the GM, it can seem that the player has no role to play in this area. I would beg to differ. Like roleplay, this should be a combination of player strengths and deliberate selection of capabilities on the part of the character during the design and construction process. The result is that situations that might have to be “forced” by the GM can occur naturally within play.
Consider the different types of puzzles and problems that might confront a character, and then determine which of these (a) the character should be good at, and (b) which of them the player is good at. The first is spotlight time for the character, but if the player is not successful at that particular type of problem/puzzle, it is an uncomfortable spotlight that can only be resolved by resorting to die rolls. This is less than satisfactory to all involved, but it is sometimes unavoidable.
Contriving a justification during character creation for the character to be gifted in those areas where the player is skilled yields a far better gaming experience. Even better is avoiding situations in which the character excels at something the player is, or feels, deficient in.
Word puzzles, Logic puzzles, interpersonal puzzles, solving mysteries, tactical problems, riddles, finger puzzles, social and political puzzles, quizzes and trivia games – the list goes on. In part, this all depends on how the GM is going to simulate the puzzle within the game – if the player can design a process that employs one of their personal strengths to simulate a strength that the character has but he doesn’t, it will go a long way towards replacing die rolls with interaction.
For example, I’m not great at word puzzles, though I can sometimes solve riddles. I’m not brilliant at Crossword puzzles, either, but I’m better at those – so if I were to create a PC who would be brilliant at word puzzles, I would either insert a reason for the character to be less effective at them, or simulate the word-game process by having the DM create a simple crossword puzzle for me to solve. Each success is effectively a riddle; so long as I get more right than I get wrong, I win the riddle contest or word game. By adjusting the difficulty of the crossword puzzle, or biasing the results (I need “X” more than half), the GM could simulate the relative strength of an opponent or difficulty of a problem.
One of the major benefits to these approaches is that any other player’s spotlight expertise can then become a source of supportive contribution to the problem. The Cleric or priest might have an answer to a theological crossword clue; the mage might know the name of a spell that is the solution to another; and so on. In this way, solitary activities can be transformed into group activities even as something that would normally be just a solitary die roll becomes an interactive group experience.
Impact On Combat
When it comes to combat, the normal (flawed) order of priority is reversed to some extent; players spend most of their effort assuming that they will be fighting in the company of others, give passing consideration to the idea of fighting on their own, and virtually none on how they could make others a more effective combatant and whether or not that potential contribution outstrips a more direct form of hostility – unless the specifics of the character class push the character in that direction whether the player likes it or not. And, as a rule of thumb, they don’t; there is a pleasure that derives from the visceral “crunch” for all that it’s soundless, virtual and imaginary.
Because of this, during character design, there is a tendency to neglect the supporting role simple because players find it unsatisfying. This is an incorrect mindset, because it is viewed in the wrong context; you don’t want a purely supportive role when everyone’s in battle, but that doesn’t mean that you should not plan for the times when you aren’t in an all-in fight.
I would point people at the Classic Star Trek episode, “Amok Time“, and the role of Dr McCoy. He was the one who decided the outcome of the fight, even though he was not one of the participants.
While a player cannot control when or under what circumstances his or her character will be reduced to a supporting role in a conflict, he can rest assured that at some point it will happen, simply because it is a way for the GM to make a combat different and challenging. For example, in a D&D campaign, I might create a monster that “eats” clerical magic, evolving new combat capabilities as it does so. It would attempt to engage the PC cleric, but as soon as its nature is appreciated, he would need to disengage from the fight; the character is forced into a supporting role when he successfully does so. Whether he is then helpless, or can participate by indirect means, is down to his design and how much preparatory thought the player has given to a situation resembling this one.
Similar tactics in innumerable variations can reduce any character into a supporting role. A monster that becomes intangible after it strikes can mean that anyone with a naturally high initiative score, like most fighters, become ineffective in terms of direct action. Certainly, the fighter can refocus (in D&D and, presumably, Pathfinder) to lower his initiative – but so can the monster.
As a GM, I try never to put characters into this position without designing something into the encounter that gives the sidelined character something positive to do. But that would be made a lot easier if the player had considered the possibilities during character construction, giving me the ability to make combats more interesting for everyone.
At the same time, while a character’s role in a group combat situation is considered during character construction, it is almost completely forgotten during subsequent character advancement, which almost exclusively focuses on the individual’s capabilities. To some extent, this is the fault of the game designs, in that very rarely are multi-character maneuvers explicitly handled by game systems, but players need to accept some of the responsibility as well.
The GM’s Responsibility
Nor is it fair to put the entirety of the blame on the players. It’s up to the GM to provide opportunities for the players to explore these alternatives, and to ensure that a character can contribute something to the game even when they aren’t in the spotlight, and to exploit the options that players do provide.
For every ability that a PC acquires, the GM should ask themselves “How can I build an encounter, or an adventure, around this? How can I make it matter to the game even when it’s not the ability on center stage?”
To put it bluntly – if the GM doesn’t use it, the players won’t bother creating it.
- Every encounter should be planned so that every player can make a contribution to its resolution, or the advancement of the plot, if not every character.
- Every adventure should give every character the spotlight at least once, even if another character is the central focus of the adventure. And every character should get his fair share of adventures in which he is the central focus.
The Impact On Campaign Planning
To some extent, this is a function of campaign planning. Ideally, each character has his own plotline, his own development arc, all taking place simultaneously or nearly so. This is a lot easier if the player is an active collaborator in the planning. Ideally, all of these plot threads will then come together at the climax of the campaign.
Every campaign plan should therefore be regarded as preliminary, needing customization to the capabilities, skills, and personalities of the characters who are going to participate. The best campaign plans are robust enough that this involves minimal alteration, but I don’t know of any that don’t require some attention in this respect.
The ultimate art form of GMing might be considered the eschewing of campaign planning completely, making the content of each adventure purely derivative of the unplanned but continuing growth of the PCs. Personally, I find that this leaves too much to chance and the wild hope of inspiration taking place at the right time, but not everyone agrees with that position.
Every GM gives some thought to the optimum balance between planning and spontaneity. In a perfect world, the preferences of the participants would be the only determining factor; but – as this article has shown – the way each character is to function within the campaign is a major determining factor in limiting the flexibility that the GM has available to him. It follows that everyone benefits from both sides giving a little more consideration to the functional roles of the characters, and especially the oft-neglected balance between those roles: individual, supporting player, and member of a collective group.
No character can ever strike a perfect balance between the three, and the needs may well evolve as the campaign develops. But a huge amount of improvement is achieved through simple awareness of the issue. The perfect PC strikes some sort of planned balance between all three, and the GM then exploits that balance to ensure that everyone participates equally, producing greater enjoyment for all concerned.
May 24th, 2016 at 6:12 am
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May 27th, 2016 at 7:45 am
Mike, the depth of your scholarship impresses me every time I read one of your posts.
This level of conscious intentionality has never been in my toolbelt, but it’s certainly something I’ve always considered in broader terms. Ensuring everyone has a role to play & a time to shine is an important part of the GM’s job, and there’s some serious meat here on how to consider that when planning.
My favorite bit in this one, though, is considering meshing with the group during the character concept phase. Mostly because it’s something I agree with so much, and try to foster during character creation.
Good stuff.
@Loraedor recently posted..The Lute
May 27th, 2016 at 2:32 pm
@Loraedor: Thanks for the compliments! I always try to set a high standard when it comes to depth and covering a subject as completely as possible, so it’s always great when someone tells me that I’ve hit the mark.
A lot of GMs , I think, implement planning to some degree during character creation, even if it’s only to say “Bob’s already generated a bard, you might want to think of something else.” But it’s rare for chance to yield the best possible result; deliberate intent has a far better track record. The trick is not squeezing the spontaneity out in the process. I think the approach I’ve described in the article strikes the right balance, and will yield a better game for everyone.