The Intersection of Ability and Desire

A jukebox is a great metaphor for a personality – the individual experience is a series of choices that define and shape the personality as they accumulate.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
One of the newsletters to which I subscribe offers advice for scriptwriters (“The Story Guy Newsletter”). Occasionally, there’s a nugget that can be adapted to service a TTRPG, it’s well-written, and not too long to read (having said that, I’m about 4 behind).
One post that dropped shortly before or just after I moved talked about the creation of coherent, realistic, and interesting personalities. While reading it, I happened to think to myself how much richer the foundations were that we had access to when creating an RPG PC or NPC.
And with that thought, this article began taking shape…
Click Here to read the newsletter article online.
Click this link if you feel that you, too, would find this newsletter interesting enough to subscribe. Note that this is a completely unsolicited reference from me.
The Central Core
Central to the premise of the article’s method was defining what the character was good at, and what they were not, then using that information as a starting point to grow the character.
Scriptwriters obviously have a more open field in such considerations, but we TTRPGers have something better – we have stats!
All we have to do is interpret them, and there are lots of articles and advice out there on how to do so.
But then there was an extremely profound point made – partially by the newsletter content, and partly by my own extrapolation of that content. “What is the character bad at when they shouldn’t be, and why?” – and, of course, the corollary, “What is the character reasonably good at, when they shouldn’t be, and why?”
The Character Diagram
Musing on that, and on the concept of archetypes / character classes, led me to sketch out the following diagram:
Inside this colored box, absolutely everything that a character might know how to do can be placed. The position of any given item reflects natural ability (from race / species and stats) and how useful / necessary that ability is for the character’s archetype / class.
The Definitive Arrows
It’s the four red arrows (and the two subordinate arrows) that then become most instructive. These are literally definitive of the character, so let’s study them one-by-one.
Up-Left: Career Advantages
These are things that come naturally to the character. These advantages may be the reason why the character has the class / archetype that he does, even if it’s not one he would have personally chosen.
If he did choose it, that tells you something else about the character, and how he will respond to the down-left elements. But we’ll get to that in due course.
The more of the character class / archetype / career that can be found in the top left, the more competent the character will be within that career.
Up-Right: Hobbies & Interests
As you progress further to the right on the chart, the more effort replaces natural capability – thought there may be some ability, it takes effort to translate it into actual skill. The further up the chart, the more effort has been invested by the character in becoming competent. And you don’t invest that much effort unless you’re forced to, or you are genuinely interested in the subject.
Straight Up: Forced Studies
If you presume that all abilities and skills start somewhere in the lower 2/3 of the chart, and that study / practice then moves them up the chart, then you can add in another upward arrow (a shorter one) that points to a middle region in between the two discussed so far.
(Actually, for technical reasons that I’ll get to in a moment or two, it’s an invisible line running from top to bottom through the whole chart, not just a region in the upper space). This is where ‘enough’ forced study can place a skill or ability, at best.
How much is enough?
Answer – it’s a relative term. Every X units up the chart requires twice as much effort as the previous 1/2X did; in other words, it’s a logarithmic vertical scale. Certain sources of ability act on potentials as a linear function, so that +X moves a skill upward X units. The third factor is the initial starting position of that skill or ability, because that defines the scale of effort required to achieve a given vertical shift in a skill.
You’ll also note the conspicuous absence of any sort of scale or grid-line on the chart. That’s because these points are ultra-technical and don’t yield any great increase in knowledge of the character commensurate with the effort involved. I’ve deliberately kept the whole thing more abstract because of this.
Down-Right: Disinterest
If you start in the middle of the chart and head down and to the right, you’ll find the region where all the skills the character doesn’t need or want end up. Those skills that the character is no good at, and doesn’t care about enough to change that condition.
This region gets more interesting when some ability that carries a social or professional expectation lands there. I vividly remember statements by some of my peers in school asking why they needed to learn X, when they would never use it. Sometimes it was Algebra, or Physics, or Art History – the specific skill varied from one student to another, but almost all of them had something that they were willfully putting into this ‘worthless’ category.
Once there, it was clear that minimal effort would be expended on that subject by that student. They simply didn’t care about that subject, and no-one could “make them” care.
Down-Left: Career Handicaps
The fourth major arrow points to the bottom-left quadrant of the chart. In this region, one finds the skills that the character has to be good at or it will impact their ability to progress in their ‘chosen / assigned’ career, but that don’t come naturally to the character.
It’s at this point that the observation made earlier becomes important. If the character chose his career / archetype, then he has done so in spite of these disadvantages; either his desire for that particular relevance is enough that he is willing to work on these handicaps, or he is willing to tolerate the handicaps holding him back.
If the career was chosen for him, perhaps because of demonstrated ability, perhaps for reasons of tradition or whatever, these become the reasons why the character finds his occupation to be oppressive and unsatisfactory. If there is enough of importance to his or her career down in this corner, they ultimately become a career roadblock.
Up-Middle from Left-Down: Midnight Oil
Finally, there is the minor arrow pointing upward from that last region. Note that it’s not pointed toward the center of the chart; there is a bias toward the left-hand-side. In fact, the angle is about 35° to the horizontal.
This arrow shows the path that improving the skill will take until it hits the middle vertical discussed in ‘forced studies’ above. Making sure that it extends down far enough to ‘capture’ the study effect is the reason it’s a vertical band the height of the entire chart.
Four Movements
Exactly where the skill or ability is located within the lower-right quadrant is critical. To illustrate this, I threw together four examples.
Movement #1
#1 shows a skill that’s mediocre more than deficient, but that the character is only going to improve because he has to. If each unit of movement (and I chose the scale to match the size of the “dot”) is 1/4 of a year of intense study, then the character can completely master the skill in question in 1023 / 4 = 255.75 years. If each step is a month, this drops to 1023 / 12 = 85.25 years. That’s a lifetime’s study for a human. If it’s a fortnight, there will be about 25 periods in a year (and 2 weeks off for holidays and religious festivals), so that gives 1023 / 25 = 40.92 years. That’s fairly reasonable in terms of a working life – the character achieves mastery of his profession about 5 years before he can start to think about stepping back / retiring. or he might still have another decade in him after that, who knows?
Movement #2
In #2, the character is genuinely unskilled, but is just as indifferent. To get to roughly the same position in terms of ability, it’s going to take longer – 8191 / 1023 = a smidgen over 8 times as long, to be exact. Even if the time-span represented by 1 step is a single week, a mortal lifespan isn’t going to be enough, and a day seems to short a period of study for even a single step.
But most of that time is spent in the final steps of the chart. At the same time as #1 reaches mastery, this character reaches adequacy.
One final factor needs to be pointed out – any improvement to raw abilities (skill bonuses etc) operate linearly, not exponentially. A single +1 (magical or innate) can be worth years or decades of study.
Movement #3
This represents pretty much the worst-case starting point. Unsurprisingly, we’re talking about the longest period of study if that’s the only means of improvement. But with +5 in innate or magical assistance, the time involved matches that of case 1.
Movement #4
The more to the left, the more important the ability is, in terms of the profession / career / archetype, so even a small shift leftward massively increases the significance of the handicap. Being mediocre in a critical area is a massive handicap.
Normal Career Progression
There are typically low-level positions which only involve a subset of the abilities of the professional. As a character progresses in their career, climbing the ranks within his profession, more and more skills become critical. You don’t need supervision skills until you have the authority to supervise someone. You don’t need management skills until you have personnel to manage. – and so on.
What this system describes is a situation in which a character’s career stalls each time they reach their level of incompetence – the Peter Principle in ‘glorious’ action. Diligent study can prepare you for the next step up the ladder, but this grows ever more-difficult to sustain; there are just so many hours in the day.
But opportunities can arise unexpectedly, and even if we aren’t ready for them, it’s human nature to grab hold with both hands and hope to grow into the role. This is especially true if the ability to self-appraise is deficient, as it seems to be in many people; most of us wear (metaphoric) blinkers of some sort..
Developing a Character with the chart
Life, and personal history, is broken down into a sequence of milestones. Sometimes, these happen in close succession, and sometimes they are months or even years apart.
Each milestone represents a significant development or event in one of the four quadrants. It’s exceptionally rare for two milestones to occur in the same quadrant of the chart twice in succession.
Beyond those restrictions, the only limits are your imagination.
Quadrant 1
Professional life. It might be a new posting, a new boss, a promotion or opportunity for promotion, an achievement, a significant challenge – you name it. But it should always be potentially positive for the character.
Quadrant 2
Hobbies / Social Life. It could be a significant event within one of the hobbies – a chess tournament for example, an eclipse-watching*, the death / movement elsewhere of a friend, a discovery of some kind, recognition, even a personal feud.
* My spell-checker suggested “apocalypse-watching” for this word, which raises all sorts of inteersting notions!
Quadrant 3
This is where events from the character’s personal life that are not directly hobby / social life -related, manifest. A romantic attachment, the end of a romantic attachment, death of a partner, birth of a child or sibling, death of a child or sibling or parent or close relative…. There’s lots to choose from.
Quadrant 4
Events in Quadrants 1-3 are distractions from progressing any skills or abilities that fall into this category. Using whatever scale the GM has decided on (try to be consistent in this!), assess the impact of non-Q4 events in terms of time away from effective study. Count up how many periods it has been since your last development in Q4, subtract the ‘distraction penalty’, and the result is how much time you have to progress skills in this area, as per the four movements described.
It’s up to the character to decide whether or not to advance one skill a lot, or several a little, or some combination.
Note that in any game system in which skills must be purchased through some internal game mechanic such as skill points, if the character doesn’t have the required skill points to advance the selected (skills), the ‘event’ is them realizing that they haven’t been putting enough effort into their studies, being reminded of this by some employment / career setback.
The nature of a milestone
It’s easy at this point to fail to see the forest for the trees. You aren’t trying to build a history of the character per se; you are building a history of the formative events in the character’s personality.
A subtle distinction, but an important one, I think. Whatever the event is, it had to have some influence on the personality, for good or ill.
Alignment Influence
It can be argued that, in games where alignment is still a thing, it should influence that “for good or ill”. Good-aligned characters should have preponderance of good influences on their personality; Bad-aligned characters should have a preponderance of influences pushing them to the Dark Side, and neutral characters should have a more balanced list.
Nothing wrong with going that way if you want to, but I’m always attracted to characters that invert or subvert expectations. The evil character who had mostly good things happen to him, such that his ego has become uncontrollable. The long-suffering good character who has experienced (almost) nothing but woe and tragedy and managed to maintain a positive outlook despite it. So think carefully before you discard such interesting options.
It’s the central character concept that should control the way in which you apply any alignment influence. What I suggested as inversions or subversions are ‘central concepts’ of a personality, and now that you know that, you should be able to generate your own and use it as a guideline for any other purpose – such as how alignment will influence the milestones that get generated by the process.
Characters With A Purpose
If you are generating an NPC to have a particular role in an adventure or campaign, your first question (right after defining that role or purpose) should be “what sort of character would lend itself to filling that role or achieving that purpose?”
Even if you can’t be definitive in your answer at this point, simply asking the question plants it in your head, where a more specific answer can percolate, even while the purpose itself steers your choices of milestone.
The ultimate answer to the question is the ‘core concept’ of the character.
More help with central concepts
Back in early 2010, I wrote and published a series offering a suite of techniques aimed at generating character concepts, “The Characterization Puzzle” (and there have been others since). They work wonderfully well at forming the initial focus of a character concept for use with this process.
Altenatively, you could say that this process is a wonderful way of translating those more abstract concepts into a character definition.
If you’re having trouble defining a character concept, that’s the place to start.
First milestone
The first milestone in most people’s lives tend to be one of only a few things. Something family related; something that demonstrated to the person that they had a natural bent in a particular direction; something that fascinated them, leading to an interest or hobby from an early age; or something that they were forced to study for some reason – with the first two outnumbering the third by a fairly massive margin.
That’s something from each of the four quadrants, but the first two tend to outweigh the third in frequency, and the third also occurs more frequently than the fourth. Most early education tends to be practical life skills, it would take a pretty arrogant and presumptuous personality to say something like “I don’t need to know how to read or write, I’ll be rich enough to hire someone to do that for me.”
So I would suggest a d20 breakdown as follows:
1-6 |
1st quadrant (profession / talent) |
7-12 |
3rd quadrant (family) |
13-17 |
2nd quadrant (hobby / interest) |
18-20 |
4th quadrant (forced to study) |
Interval to next milestone
Once the first milestone is established, it becomes a tale of breadcrumbs, one event leading into the next as the character’s history and personality takes shape.
The interval to the next milestone is therefore a critical question. It’s rare for this to be very short, and rare for it to be very long; 3 months-to-12 months tends to be the most frequent gap.
I suggest a d20 table such as the following:
1 (or less) |
1-20 days (d20) |
2-3 |
1-3 months (d3) |
4-6 |
3-6 months (d4+2) |
7-10 |
6-9 months (d4+5) |
11-14 |
9-12 months (d4+8) |
15-17 |
11-16 months (d6+10) |
18-19 |
13-18 months (d6+12) |
20 |
15-24 months (d10+14) |
Two modifiers:
- subtract +1 for each increase in stat bonuses etc since the last roll.
- subtract +1 for every 2 positive events in succession after the first.
The first shortens the interval in response to a change in the character that makes a success or positive milestone more likely, and includes the acquisition of a relevant magic item.
The second counterbalances a run of good fortune / success with a more neutral or negative event; the longer that run, the more quickly something will happen to rain on the character’s parade.
Choice of Quadrant
There’s only one rule here, but there are a few recommendations. That rule:
-
Unless the character has received a linear boost (stat modifier increase or magic item or equivalent), no two events in succession should be in the same quadrant.
Implementing the rule
So roll a d3 or d4, as appropriate, and count quadrants clockwise from the last event, and there you have it.
Recommendations:
I have two for you to consider.
- No quadrant should go more than 6 events without representation.
- If there is a logical consequence or interaction between the previous event and a prior one, that should take place either instead of, or in addition to, the indicated milestone.
Longer term development
After the first 4-6 events, you have to start thinking about the bigger picture. The character’s age at the start of play and the 6-month average between events gives you some idea of how many of them there will potentially be – though, since we haven’t specified how old the character was at the time of the first event, there is some flexibility in that respect (have you ever known someone who just drifted along for the first 20-25 years of their life, or more? I have).
But by now you should have enough information to make a vague estimation of the direction in which the personality is heading, and time enough to turn the character’s life around if you don’t like it.
So, from this point on, it’s better to avoid the random rolls and make deliberate choices (while keeping the rule and recommendations in mind). This process is a starting point, a framework, and a structure; the majority of the personality’s evolution will still be directed by the creator.
Because I Haven’t Explained It Already
I should probably close by explaining the title of this article, for anyone who doesn’t already see it. The vertical axis on the original chart is Ability, from low to high; the horizontal axis is desire, from pro-forma on the left to fascination on the right.
Different Stats
One other point that needs to be made: the description above generalizes because it doesn’t nominate any specific stat as the basis. I think that’s actually a good thing, because it gives permission to generalize when considering a character. I would group stats three ways: Physical Ability, Mental Ability, and a wild-card. That wild-card could be Health (CON-based) or it could be Class-based or Social Based. You decide what’s important to the character, based on the central concept.
The more extreme a result (high or low) that you get for a stat, the more suited it is to being the foundation of a table.
Of course, as soon as you have three tables, you need to have some mechanism to choose between them. So maybe you aren’t completely done with your random die rolls, after all – how you choose to handle this aspect of the character development is up to you (but don’t use the same answer all the time – variety of approach yields variety of characters).
Wrap-up
Nothing can guarantee that you will end up with a unique individual being generated at the end of any creative process. In fact, a good starting point is a variation on some existing trope / concept: “A Batman-type whose goal is religious reform instead of Criminal Justice,” for example.
The trick is always manifesting and translating that concept into logical implications and a coherent backstory that sheds light on other aspects of the personality, making it more rounded and complete. That’s where this process enters the picture.
It’s not there to do the heavy lifting for you; it’s there to make that heavy lifting a little easier. Hopefully, readers will find it a useful tool to add to their kits.
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