None So Blind – Character Blind Spots

Image by Sergio Cerrato – Italia from Pixabay
With the conclusion of the Zener Gate campaign, I’ve been thinking about what comes next. In fact, it’s fair to say that it’s been somewhere on my mind for most of 2022, if not always front-and-center.
About six months ago, I decided that I would resurrect the Warcry campaign, even though it would need some revision because one of the players passed away – the event that actually led to the campaign being put on hold, six or seven years ago.
This will be something of a reboot, and I was all set to spend this post describing the processes and thinking that I was using to carry out this reboot; but as I set (digital) pen to paper, another thought began crowding it out – both insistently and repeatedly. After three unsuccessful attempts to get my thoughts back on track, I have yielded to the demands of my subconscious, which obviously thinks that I’m onto something.
To Every Character, a blind spot
Every character has limits to their breadth of experience, at least when they first enter play. There are parts of a complete society that would simply never have been experienced by that character, by virtue of who they are.
Example 1: Fur-person
Take, for example, a character who is naturally covered in fur, and whose people do not naturally wear clothing. This character would almost certainly be utterly unaware of fashion, and of the way clothing is used to signal particular social activities or functions – wedding dresses, a judge’s robes (and wig, in some locations), and the like.
Example 2: Mer-man / -maid
A not dissimilar range of options comes to mind for a mer-person. But there is something that would be unique to such a character – sound behaves so much differently under water than it does in air that ‘music’ would be perceived entirely differently, and they would be completely ignorant of the many things that particular music or musical styles can represent in our society. Indeed, much of what we call music would be unrecognizable and completely without appeal to such a character.
Who amongst us would fail to recognize a wedding march immediately? Or a woman in white dress with a long train and a veil of lace?
Example 3: Synthetic person
This is a more difficult character to work with because the specifics of time period of origins would make a huge difference. In anything reasonably modern, the internet would provide a rich but shallow source of information; in many cases, the specifics of any social interaction would be revealed readily with little or no explanation of why we do things a certain way, and where that why was also available, context and symbolic meaning would be missing.
When someone holds out their hand, it might be recognized as a gesture of greeting, but such a character would not immediately know that the hands are supposed to be clasped in a particular way and then moved up and down once or twice. They are just as likely to put forth their own hand and simply move it up and down – a literal interpretation of the term “hand shake”.
Example 4: A D&D Cleric
It can be assumed that a child who became a Cleric was given religious instruction from an early age, and that this crowded out other subjects of study as the years progressed. Most people would not have received any formal education at all, instead learning a skill through experience with a master, such as blacksmithing.
They would thus have traded expertise in one area (religion / theology / religious ceremonies and practices / prayers) for expertise in many others. They might have some limited exposure to some things outside of this frame, but would be especially limited in knowledge of anything that wasn’t traditionally explained to younger children, such as the realities of war, and romance.
Overcoming the blind spot
I’ve known relatively few players who would not accept such blind spots as a logical part of such a character. But I have also known many players who would see them as a flaw or weakness within the character, and therefore something that should be overcome as quickly as completely as possible.
There have even been a few who made a point of setting the wheels in motion for such self-improvement in one game session and who then tried to argue that the deficiency was gone in the next.
It’s not that simple, or shouldn’t be. Superficial rote learning of the most common human practices might be possible in a relatively short space of time, but the all-important social context, the unwritten assumptions and associations within society in that particular subject, and how they interconnect, would take a lot longer.
As they described it in Star Trek, The Next Generation (and I am paraphrasing), there is a world of difference between memorizing the rules of poker and hand probabilities and the actual experience of playing the game, with the inherent personality interactions that are included – bluffing, learning how to read an opponent, strategies built around deliberate deceptions and detecting same – none of that would come out of such a rulebook. Then throw in all the unwritten rules, traditions, and expressions of table etiquette that can only be learned by experiencing them in a group that already knows them.
Ultimately, these players are missing a bet; these blind spots are not character flaws to be rectified as quickly as possible, they are tools for characterization that should be exploited.
A piece-meal approach
Instead of a single act of rectification, overcoming a blind spot should consist of dozens of actions and misinterpretations and outright social faux pas.
It’s reasonable to assume that upon being confronted with a particular manifestation of a blind spot, a character would seek to rectify that specific ignorance – probably starting with a conversation between PCs. Depending on the depth of understanding that ensues, that specific ignorance might thereafter be disregarded or downplayed.
Over time, the character’s ignorance of the subject in question would reduce, but there would still be the occasional manifestation of the blind spot.
A planned approach
An even better approach would be for the player to provide a list of the ways the blind spot might impact the character, a series of plot seeds for subplots involving their character. The sequence in which these appeared would be up to the GM, and even whether or not some of them appeared, so that he can tailor their inclusion to fit the adventure at hand.
This entire approach can be taken one step further and presented as a series of episodes that, in combination, tell the story of how the character overcomes his blind spot. By making these extremely episodic and relatively brief, they can be dropped into any plot where there’s room.
Of course, the GM is then free to take these general plot ideas and twist them mercilessly (so long as the point of the plot seed is not sacrificed in the process), so the player is no less in the dark than he would have been, and still has to roleplay any encounter or situation that arises, just as he would if he had not provided the GM with plot material to feature his character.
Nor does this exclude the GM coming up with his own mini-plots to explore other, completely unrelated, aspects of the character and/or his backstory. The planned approach to a blind spot is just one source of plot material for the GM to exploit amongst many.
Personal Story Arcs
The wise GM will take this philosophy one step further, and take the time to discuss the character with the player (before he enters play, if possible), and where the player sees the character heading over time, what he wants the character to have an opportunity to do, and so on.
In every campaign that I run, with the exception of those in which it is not necessary (like Zener Gate) or that are deliberately self-contained (like my Dr Who campaigns), I adopt this approach. In the Zenith-3 and Adventurer’s Club campaigns in particular, I’m at pains to detail where characters are and what they are doing when a new adventure begins, essentially roleplaying the character’s personal lives until the main plot thrusts itself upon them – and those plots frequently start as one PCs personal plotline and mushroom to involve the other PCs.
These are plot arcs or personal story arcs, and long-time readers will know that I have been championing the concept for a great many years, now. The concept of character blind spots as plot-fodder is just another variation on the general concept. But it’s a good one.
A relatively shortish article once again, because I still don’t have internet function. But every passing day brings the hour of reconnection – whenever it comes – another hour closer.
UPDATE October 27:
My internet connection has finally been restored, just in time to publish this article! Now, to get caught up on everything!
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