One of the prettiest Twiddlethumbs you’ve ever seen. Or is it? Refer to the text and you’ll understand.
Based on an image provided in WP Clipart (which has nothing to do with WordPress, predating the publishing platform by at least 5 years). Color enhancement and background by Mike.

“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet” – or so wrote Shakespeare. This afternoon, I watched (not for the first time), the Star Trek (original series) episode of (almost) the same name, and spent a few seconds ruminating on the expression. This essay will expand and expound on the passing thoughts that resulted, because there’s a lot of meat for GMs packed away there.

I wrote this with no certainty about when and how I wouldl be able to publish it. My internet was still out at the time. Thankfully, it has now been restored and I’m busy catching up with emails, tweets, and the like!

What was Shakespeare saying?

“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet” is a statement about the qualities, traits, and properties by which we define or classify an object. By extension, the same can also be true of a person, a scent, a place, a symbol, or anything else that can be defined or classified.

The qualities which we associate with the object usually called “a rose” don’t change just because we choose to give such objects a new name.

At the level of subjective reality, then, Shakespeare is saying “names are less important than the defining qualities, traits, and attributes.” A name is just a label, a convenient shorthand for referencing those qualities, traits, and attributes, and assigning them to something, either literally or symbolically.

In literature, including screenplays, this can be a very useful creative technique – you define a character as, say, “a rose” (with all the metaphoric interpretation and baggage that comes with that definition) but never actually put that definition in the written content; it thus serves as an unspoken touchstone, providing stability of characterization while never being a straitjacket, and never raising the definition itself for discussion (eliminating the potential for disagreement).

That’s a great technique for ‘casual NPCs’, I might add, and a useful one for ‘casual locations’, too. But I’ll get back to that.

The Validity Of The Thought

First, let’s look at the concept itself to understand its validity, and the limits to that validity.

So, imagine an object. It has a particular look and scent to it, such that you would call it a ‘rose’ if it existed in real life. Calling it a Twiddlethumb doesn’t change those qualities, and doesn’t change our appreciation of, or reactions to, the object in question.

There is a clear and demonstrable validity to the thought.

The Flaw In The Thought

Again, imagine an object with the same look and scent, such that you would call it a ‘rose’ if it existed in real life.

This time, I’m going to suggest that we name it “a scented candle”. Wow, but that makes a profound difference to your imagined object, doesn’t it?

Why is that so? Because “Twiddlethumb” has no associations as a name, while “scented candle” is a term that describes something that can look and smell like a real rose, but isn’t one.

The term “scented candle” carries baggage with it, and that baggage changes our perception of the item. Clearly, there is a limit to the principal being expressed by Shakespeare.

Have you ever seen a silk rose with a plastic stalk? They can look incredibly realistic. If you use plastic coatings, you can even come close to the texture and ‘feel’ of the real thing, too. Add a spritz of an appropriate perfume, and it can become really hard to differentiate between the artificial flower and the natural. Enough that you would probably drop the qualifier – artificial – and simply call it a rose.

And, in keeping with the literal statement, it would quite definitely (by definition) smell like a rose, invoking the same responses and reactions.

But that doesn’t mean that it is the same thing – not by a long stretch. You use such artificial flowers because they won’t decay, or not on the same timescale – after a century or so, even an artificial flower may have wilted or browned! And I don’t know what the nutritional value of a rose is (I suspect not much), but I seriously doubt if eating an artificial flower would deliver it – even though as much as 90% of the flavor comes through scent, I suspect that it would be very different on the palette.

Conferring the artificial flower with the name of its natural source doesn’t confer any additional qualities to it, doesn’t change its actual qualities at all.

Heck, let’s substitute a different imaginary scent for the smell of roses – lavender, maybe, or lemon, or green apple. Changing the imagined properties of the object radically transforms it – I don’t know what you would call it, but “rose” no longer seems appropriate.

So the statement is demonstrably false under at least some circumstances. There is a limit to the validity.

As a Metaphor

It can be argued that Shakespeare didn’t mean for the statement to be taken literally, but as a metaphor. As soon as you contemplate that interpretation, you are back in the world of validity – because now we aren’t talking about the qualities of the object, but about how we react to it.

The statement, with this interpretation, is saying that “I will still feel the same way about this object/person because of the qualities that I perceive in them, no matter what names or labels others may attach. They are more than the sum of those labels too me.”

The actual qualities of the object can change completely, and so long as the person issuing the statement still reacts to them in the same way, the statement is valid, and poetic, and emotes for the audience, triggering reactions to the sentiment.

It doesn’t even matter if no-one else in existence can perceive the person, place, or object in that way, the statement is still valid for the person who is reacting that way.

That’s a rather profound notion, isn’t it? A deep thought on the subject of superficiality – which (if it had been shorter) might well have used as the title of this essay!

But the expression goes still further as a metaphor, because that can access all sorts of other qualities associated with an object and use them as metaphors, too. In fact, that’s how the “quick NPC” / “quick location” application mentioned earlier works.

It works whether the root quality is “rose” or “banana” or whatever.

Assigning people the metaphoric qualities of an inanimate object is nothing new – poets have been doing so ever since we learned to talk.

But that gives us another powerful, and often-underestimated, tool for our GMing toolkit – the use of a metaphor as a summary of perceived qualities. Tell you what, let’s let that simmer for a while, too.

The interpretation of the Star Trek episode

Aside from the superficialities of infrastructure like plot and character, the Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name” is worthy of study in its own right, as well as being sufficiently interesting as a drama with comedic touches to be watchable and enjoyable as an entertainment.

It tells the tale of a group of alien invaders from another galaxy who adopt human form for convenience, and who discover that in doing so, they have also acquired various attributes associated with the form against which they have no power or defense. They become heir to all the flaws and limitations of humans, in the process losing their near-divine power, superiority, and authority and becoming equal to the humans aboard the vessel, who are able to exploit these weaknesses to propose a solution acceptable to both. “Feet of clay” thus becomes an asset to humanity, and not a liability.

Philosophically deep notions indeed, but rendered with sufficient superficiality that you barely notice them.

This isn’t the only place this concept has been explored; it’s one of those science-fiction standards that seem to have been floating around for as long as the genre has existed.

Related Associations

When you think about it, you can see a related thread of thought submerged deeply in The War Of The Worlds, a science-fiction novel from before the very existence of the term. The Martians are defeated by germs and viruses which humans have learned to coexist with, but against which the invaders had no defenses – you see the parallel? One uses disease as an expression of the philosophic concept, the other uses human emotions and vices, but they are both about taking an otherwise superior force and reducing it to a status of equality or less.

I find myself wondering if all those tales of Greek and Roman deities with their larger-than-life-but-very-human foibles and vices are actually examples of the same concept, expressed quite differently due to the difference in time between us and the respective cultures. Perhaps the intent was not to make the gods seem petty and egocentric, but to humanize them, to reduce them in some aspects to a position of inferiority to the ‘best’ of mankind – because we can control our instincts and desires, and they can do nothing but indulge them.

That offers a profound insight into the way most GMs run Divine Beings in their campaigns, doesn’t it? And the way such beings are depicted in Science Fiction and fantasy, for that matter.

Take 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example. There have always been two undercurrents running through that movie (and the novelization, and the short story on which it is based), that few others seem to appreciate until they get pointed out to them.

The first is that at every stage, the beings being manipulated, having their potential unlocked, had to make an effort proportional to their greatest level of achievement to date. If they didn’t make that effort, they didn’t get the reward. Whether you’re talking about the cave-men, who had to allow curiosity to overcome fear, and to have mastered the use of their environment as tools (bones as clubs), or the astronauts who had to reach the moon and discover the monolith there, or the astronauts who had to journey to Jupiter, there was never a red carpet; everything had to be earned.

The second thought comes from comparing the attitude of the aliens who constructed the Monoliths with Star Trek’s Prime Directive. There was an undercurrent of ruthlessness, almost approaching the level of cruelty, in the way the aliens were willing to experiment with another species. That they forced those subject to their experiments to volunteer doesn’t detract from that quality.

Unless, of course, they had done this dozens or hundreds of times before, and so knew what they were doing. But even then, there had to be occasions when they did so without that expertise, so the assessment still holds.

At the time, humans saw themselves as the pinnacles of creation, and felt that this alone was enough to justify doing anything we wanted to ‘lesser species’ for our own benefit. What the movie does is take that perception and have another species apply it to themselves, with humans cast in the role of the ‘lesser species’ – an observation that many have made in the past about the story.

It doesn’t matter whether the aliens are motivated by curiosity or generosity or ego or empathy – they get something out of the act of advancing other species, implying that they were that advanced already a long time ago, and are hence inherently superior.

You get the same thing in Contact, where the aliens are benign and benevolent, and a slightly different and more nuanced perspective in Stargate: SG1, in which those directly threatened by human advances oppose us, while those who are not ignore us until they deem us worthy of friendship – and the qualities that earn that friendship have little or nothing to do with technological advances. The Tolan, the Nox, the Asgard, the Jafar and the Gou’ald all fit one of these two patterns. The only relationship that is established on purely technological grounds is with the Tok’rah, and that ultimately goes sour as a result of butting heads over those non-technological qualities and ideals.

The Future Of Human Society?

The view of humanity implied, critically, in 2001, is slowly giving way to a new self-perception. This started with the view of humans as being dependent on an ecosystem for survival, but is now becoming a view of us as just a part of an ecosystem. That’s a subtle difference, but the change is driving changes in human behavior and what is considered socially acceptable.

And the principle is also starting to leak into the way we view roles within society, largely driven by the social disruption caused by Covid-19. People are increasing perceiving the economy of which they are a part through the model of an ecosystem, rather than the more mechanical approach that formed the foundations of 20th century economics. This movement is so new that it has not yet had time to drive any significant social change, let alone anything that could be expressed as forcefully as a reform. Some might even dispute that it’s happening, and even if it is, it could easily be derailed by other social perceptions. I see it as a beginning that might become a trend, a consequence of the changed perception of the environment being applied to other facets of modern society, rightly or wrongly.

Application to RPG plots

Clearly, it’s relatively easy for plots to explore this sort of philosophic territory, even without the author (or GM, in our case) being aware of it. We draw inspiration from sources that have these undercurrents baked into them, and inadvertently carry them into our games with those inspirations.

If you don’t know something’s in your game, you can’t work with it, can’t explore it (except by accident), can’t manipulate it to create something more interesting or unique, and aren’t as fully in control of the campaign as you probably think you are.

I’m sure that this is the case for every one of us, myself included. But being aware of the likelihood at least lets us look for these infiltrated concepts, and take charge of them when they are found.

If you’ve ever run an adventure that just didn’t seem to ‘fit” the campaign when you were in the middle of it, it’s a fairly sure bet that something in that adventure’s background or assumptions is conflicting with those of the campaign. In most cases, if it was something obvious, you would have changed it – if necessary, as you went along – because that’s what we do as GMs. Which elevates the likelihood that the conflict is with an embedded concept that you hadn’t even realized was there.

You can’t fix a problem until you know what the problem is. Hopefully, readers will now be more aware of the potential for such problems, and better able to solve them as a result.

The Relevance To RPGs

If I were structuring this article with consistency, the preceding conversation would form part of this section. I certainly intended to put it here, because the final paragraph is a great note on which to end the essay – but it stubbornly refused to play ball. The introduction needed to connect it with the topic of conversation ran to almost 500 words, all of them redundant, before I yielded to reality, deleted those 500 words, and left it positioned where you read it now.

But for all that, it does segue into the subject of this section extremely naturally – so much so that the section title comes as more of an afterthought.

In addition to those (hopefully) wise words in the preceding section, there are three specific relevances to RPGs in the discussion so far: Casual NPCs, Casual locations, and relationship metaphors. These are all also beneficial to fiction writers in general.

Casual NPCs

In addition to the groups who would find this useful, I think it would also be valuable in screenplays to give actors some direction that matches the characterization the writer had in mind when writing the dialogue, but I’ve never heard of them doing so. Maybe it’s a technique that the actors use when in guest/supporting roles? I don’t know.

The idea is a simple one: describe the individual using a single emotive term, and then translate the qualities that distinguish that emotive term as analogies that you can interpret into characterization as needed, when needed.

Let’s do an example – (and I don’t want to use “Rose” because I’m saving that for the location example that follows). So let’s do a character named Wilton Downes, whose personality will derive from the word “Creek”.

A creek – a narrow body of water, often relatively fast-flowing, usually over a rocky surface, may only function seasonally and be dry the rest of the year, but becomes turgid and gentle after a while, especially after combining with others of its own kind.

Lots to work with there, more than there might seem at first.

This character is narrow-minded and fixed in his ways. He is hard to stop when he builds up a full head of steam, but hard to get moving in the first place; usually, he’s fairly placid and easy-going, especially in the company of those he’s comfortable with. Usually fairly prickly when first meeting people, quick to take offense.

Notice that there’s no real effort to actually psychoanalyze the character, usually a requirement for any sort of complex personality traits – yet it would be easy to formulate a deeper understanding of the character if one were needed, because the traits are so internally consistent. Hint: the character is driven (or not) by his insecurities.

That’s more than enough personality definition, created on the trot just from thinking about the qualities that we associate with the word “creek”. What’s more, if the situation in the game pushes this character in an unexpected direction as a result of PC actions, it’s easy enough to think “creek” and come up with something that defines the response – if what you already have isn’t enough.

For example, the PCs have to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear attack on the planet below. “It’s the only way to be sure” is the ‘yes’ argument, but there’s some equally-compelling ‘no’ argument – “think of the widows and orphans”, let’s say (purely for the sake of argument). Somehow, this NPC ends up being the deciding vote. The relevant traits already defined are “slow to action” and “placid and easygoing most of the time” – so he would probably choose a third course, and vote to delay taking any action at all in hopes that the situation would somehow defuse itself. But when time runs out, push that trigger without wasting time in taking a vote.

That would be his approach to most problems – play for time until that was no longer an option, then go all-in. You can apply that approach to anything from paying a big bill to the Christmas shopping.

Let’s try the same character in another situation, one in which an immediate decision is needed: the kids are arguing about something, and he has to settle the argument right now before it gets out of hand. He could try and find out what the argument was about, but he wasn’t listening and doesn’t really care. None of the character traits we’ve identified quite fits, but the GM/writer thinks “creek” and associates it with the word “Lazy” – and so makes the lazy choice, the one that requires the least effort from him.

This is the sort of personality trait that leads to a parent inadvertently playing favorites, which never works out well in the long run, but ‘never waste effort solving today problems that won’t matter until tomorrow’ fits both the Lazy trait and the placid, easy-going nature that we’ve already assigned him. Problem solved – in rather less time that it took to describe the solution.

Casual Locations

So you find yourself needing a tavern on short notice (like, none). You come up with a name – “The Wounded Boar” – on the fly, and then face the serious questions: What’s it like? How big is it? How expensive? How decorated? What’s the clientele like? The staff? The owner?

Having zero time to think about it, the GM first thinks about the name, but doesn’t get much inspiration from it, so he picks a suggestive term that has nothing at all to do with the name, giving him two quite disparate sources of inspiration to work with: A “rose”.

Rose qualities: Petals, Thorns, soft, pleasantly-scented, strongly colored, expensive and stylish, often fashionable, especially at formal occasions.

Interpretation: The Wounded Boar is a tavern with three different characters in different ‘lobes’. One part is used for formal receptions and ceremonies, and is elegant and quite expensive; one is clean, comfortable, and middle-class; and one is rougher and cheaper. The first is picked out in deep reds and bright whites, the second is yellows and earth tones, and the third is dark and dingy, with plum-colored seating covers and decorations on the wall to hide the ale-stains. The first has polished hardwood floors and red rugs, the second has plain but clean wooden floors, and the third used to be a root cellar with straw over stone floors. The owner is fop but you don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to discover that it’s all an act, a civilized veneer over a very rough-hewn man, one of undeniable intelligence – he’s “sharp”. The same kitchens service all three sections and are designed to flood them with odors that stimulate the appetite, on the theory that even fresh-baked bread needs butter and honey before you can eat it – so you’ll come in for the scent of the bread and pay a premium for the ‘extras’.

If you can’t get a workable location out of that foundation, hang your head in shame. It doesn’t matter what the PCs want to do there, the location has an area suitable for just about anything, and well-dressed but somewhat sleazy owner that will keep quiet – for a price.

Relationship Metaphors

Using a metaphor as a summary of perceived qualities is a shorthand means of communicating subtleties about something that would take pages of dull exposition to communicate, enabling us to synopsize a relationship, or just one side of a complicated relationship, in a single term. “[Pronoun] is the eggs to my ham,” is a deeply-meaningful expression of personality and relationships in a superficial form that most of the world would understand immediately – it wouldn’t work so well in Islamic cultures, though, where Ham is forbidden, or with people who have been vegetarian since birth. You need a different metaphor for those situations.

I once argued that (in an RPG context) an image should be worth 1,000 words or you would be better off using some fraction of those words. I don’t know it the same can quite true of a metaphor – maybe expectations need to be scaled back – but the principle holds.

“He’s a bear of a man, big, gruff, bad-tempered, and protective of the young in his care.”

That’s just 19 words, but it articulates a personality and an appearance that would otherwise need far greater exposition to convey.

“At 6’3”, this is a tall man, and made more so by a tendency to rear back as though afraid of overbalancing forward. His cheeks and chin are hidden deep behind a brown beard of epic proportions that comes down to his chest and is as wide as it is long. Deep-set brown eyes take in every motion, seemingly without moving. His arms are short and thick as tree-trunks, as are his legs, but there is no doubting the power that they can express. He wears brown pants, a straw-colored shirt, and a tan jacket, all worn to the point of looking shaggy and unkempt. Rumbles of discontent and disapproval fill the air from deep behind that formidable beard, each accompanied by a glare from those ill-tempered eyes, but little more articulate. Behind each leg, clinging to it like limpets, are two children of tender age, wide-eyed and fearful; a third lurks behind a chair, and a fourth peeks out from behind a sturdy wooden door. One meaty hand, closed into a fist, smacks into the other, threatening to respond to the slightest impertinence with mayhem.”

So, that’s 191 words – to say essentially the same thing as that first 19. Ten-to-one is about the level of compression that I expected, so I would consider this to be fairly typical. The second does have a lot more specifics, such as the location of the children in question, and does make the character render in the imagination more vividly – which is useful if the NPC is to be significant, but wasted time and effort if he’s a throwaway encounter.

But here’s the good thing: you can use the 19-word description and then sprinkle the ensuing encounter with bits and pieces from the longer one as they become relevant. Ninety-nine times in 100 that you use the 19 word description, I guarantee you that at least one player will ask “Children?” – that’s the strength of ending with something about which more clearly needs to be said. So, instead of pressing you for irrelevant details like what the NPC looks like, or what he’s doing, you are describing a dynamic situation – children hiding behind legs, behind chairs, behind doors, clearly afraid of the PCs. Who will react to that situation and before you know it, your into character interactions – roleplay. “Children hiding behind legs, behind chairs, behind doors, clearly afraid of you” – that’s another 12 words.

19+12 = 31. Throw a word or two from one of the players in response to the first nineteen, and leading to the 12, and you’ll be deep into character interaction before you would even have been half-done with the long description.

It works both ways – you can start with a long description, and by getting a solid handle on the character, can compress that description down to just what’s relevant by finding a metaphor for the image you have built up. Of course, if you’re already playing, it’s too late – but if you make such compression part of your game prep, or even of your adventure creation process, your game will be leaner and more efficient for it.

Save the narrative passages for when they will give you rewards in-game for their delivery. Compress the rest, and let the NPCs and locations that you create.live a little in your players’ minds. This is just as much a part of stylish narrative as being able to spin words into structures of gossamer, shadows and light, smoke and mirrors.