The Inversion Substitution: Quick Characterization

This montage combines an image of the Grand Prismatic Spring of Yellowstone by Steppinstars from Pixabay with an image of an Icelandic lake by nextvoyage from Pixabay to illustrate the point that a change of perspective can yield creative insights. Bridging section and rotation of the Prismatic Spring image by Mike.
It’s happened to us all at some point: the adventure has sidetracked down an unexpected alleyway and brought the PCs face-to-face with a character that you’ve made up on the spot.
When this happens, you’re generally thinking only in physical terms, at least in the immediate term; that is because the first interaction that the players will have with this new NPC is through their awareness of his or her physical presence, and that requires some sort of physical description.
In fact, and in general, you start with a noun and an adjective, and from that beginning, everything else sprouts. You embellish with details and then try and come up with a personality – and that’s where the cardboard stock-character problem creeps into the games of the most astute GMs.
“The angry Elf”. “The ancient Ogre.” “The harried Grandmother.” “The albino Barkeep.” See what I mean?
In the past, I’ve shared many different methods of creating characters, but they pretty much all rely on having the prep time and anticipation of the need. The whole point of this situation is that you don’t have those luxuries. You need a technique that will produce playable results in seconds, and only a handful of them at that.
Yet, at the same time, you should not be willing to compromise your standards any further than absolutely necessary, and whatever the product is, it should be both immediately playable, and extensible after the fact.
It should be a springboard for ideas that you can capitalize on immediately, and develop and finesse later, when you have the time. And it needs to be even faster than the time it takes to say so.
Now, techniques like that don’t grow on trees. I’ve been looking for a better one for quite some time now, and only marginally satisfied with the ones already at my disposal. But finally, the right combination of thoughts finally clicked into place to satisfy my prescription. Today, I share the results with you, my readers. Today, I offer you the Inversion Substitution.
The Inversion Substitution Technique
This is a four-step technique.
- Replace the adjective with something ridiculous, in your mind, and look for a context or interpretation which makes sense.
EG: “The Albino Barkeep” – becomes “The Chocolate Barkeep”. That could mean dark, or sweet, or smooth, or bitter.
- Then replace that substituted word with something that does make sense – but if the current term describes personality or an emotional state, use something social, or political, or physical – and vice-versa.
EG. “Albino” describes a physical condition so use a personality or emotion item – “The lonely barkeep”, “the jealous barkeep”, “The greedy barkeep”, “the love-struck barkeep”.
- Replace the noun with something personal to the character.
EG. “The albino Lothario”, “The albino musician”, “The albino drunkard”, “the albino ex-soldier”.
- Finally, put all these thoughts together. At least one of the terms should refer specifically to how the character will relate to at least one other participant in the encounter – usually a PC, but I’m keeping in mind that this might be a scene that they are observing or overhearing and not engaging in. One more should describe the character’s appearance or apparent social standing. Everything else goes to personality traits that can be expressed at once.
So far, we have “The Albino Barkeep”:
— ‘chocolate’ -> dark, sweet, smooth or bitter;
— lonely, jealous, greedy, or love-struck;
— Lothario, musician, drunkard, or ex-soldier.That’s 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 possible combinations. In practice, you wouldn’t work through all of them, you would cherry-pick something that seems consistent and interesting.
CHOICE 1:
Dark -> brooding, angry, slow-boiling. Jealous. Dresses like a Lothario. = “The albino barkeep is perpetually at a slow-boil because he and ‘his girl’ have had a fight over the way he attracts other girls to his side. To get back at him, she has started going out with other men – hence his anger. This is an imminent Shakespearean tragedy.”CHOICE 2:
Smooth = suave, sophisticated. Love-struck. Musician. = “The albino barkeep is overdressed in an immaculate 3-piece suit and putting on airs to try and impress someone he is sweet on. He is spending every moment not serving a customer trying to write an ode to his beloved.”CHOICE 3:
“Bitter” implies anger, betrayal. Greedy. Ex-soldier. “The albino barkeep is dressed in a faded military uniform with decorations from some long-forgotten border war. He is instantly suspicious of everyone other than a regular, sure that the government has sent them to spy on him. To anyone who will listen, he will complain bitterly about the way ex-servicemen are mistreated by the government, how they are all corrupt, etc. His obvious biases would make this a perfect breeding-ground for sedition, a gathering-point for paranoid hard-heads looking for privacy, no questions asked. Make no waves, and you might eventually fit in; attract attention and you will become everyone’s target.”Those are three perfectly-serviceable characters, all of them with much greater depth than what you had a few seconds earlier.
Note that it doesn’t matter what the original adjective was, but some choices add whole new twists. For example, try applying the above three personalities to:
— The Gnomish barkeep, or
— The Undead barkeep, or
— The artificial barkeep.
Why this approach works:
The first substitution is designed to kick-start your imagination by deliberately picking something ‘ridiculous’ and then trying to make it sensible in some way. By relegating one of the terms to description, which can be set aside at will (so long as you’re running through this process before opening your mouth and committing yourself), you are able to cherry-pick the resulting ideas to form the core of a personality profile.
Because it doesn’t try to give you anything more than a starting point, there are very few constraints on you. You can extend the concept in response to direction questioning and interaction with the others in the scene, or in subsequent scenes, if you have to; anything not so extended can be detailed as extensively as desired after the end of the session. Until then, it places demands on the GM that are as small as possible.
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