The Lego Assembly: Character Development Alternatives
Character Development for an RPG is unlike it’s analogue in any other medium.
That wasn’t always the case; we have learned how to do it the way most GMs and players do it now, the hard way.
But I’ve recently become aware of a perception that the modern way is the only way, and that’s not necessarily the case.
There are advantages to the alternatives, and denying those advantages simply blinds you to something that in some circumstances might better suit the campaign to be played.
So here’s the agenda for the day: after a quick definition of what we’re discussing, I’ll look at a number of techniques (most of which have fallen out of favor) including some from other media forms: the television model, the literary model, the existential model, the structural model, the thumbnail method, the inversion method, the window-shopping method, backstory boxes, the relationship model, the functional model, and the modern model. Having laid the groundwork, I’ll then present a new model that incorporates many of the best features from several of the techniques discussed, the Lego Assembly.
I’m not going to claim that this “new” idea (by the end of the article, you’ll understand those inverted commas) is going to be suitable for every campaign. Instead, I want to put the question itself on the radar for readers; because there is no such thing as a ‘one-size fits all’ solution to the requirement. I want GMs to at least be able to consider the alternatives.
By the time I count a wrap-up section, I get no less than 14 moving parts to this story, so I won’t be able to go into great amounts of detail about many of the options – fortunately, I’ve written about some of them before. Even so, this will be a longish article and It’s only just begun – so let’s get this show started…
Definitions
Character development is a tern that is used to mean three different things, often all at the same time or without distinguishing between the specific meaning intended.
- There is non-game-mechanical character construction, or the initial formulation of a personality;
- there is in-game refinement and extension of personality; including character personality growth (i.e. external to, but often reflective of, character improvements through game mechanics, or vice versa;;
- and there is the GM’s creation of NPCs to be dropped into a campaign in an advanced state of readiness despite their not having experienced the developmental process that the PCs have undergone to that point in game time.
The Television Model
The television model has remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s. You define a character as he is now, to the bare minimum required for usage, then add background elements and refinements as they can be made relevant to specific episodes (“adventures”). This means that the actors discover the character’s background at about the same pace as the audience.
There are several advantages to this approach, most notably flexibility and responsiveness – the character can evolve with the plot. It inherently connects the character with the stories in which he participates.
Unfortunately, these advantages can be misused, turning them into liabilities. First, there’s a constant problem with consistency; any failures in this area permanently weaken the character. Second, it ties the quality of the characterization to the quality of the plots and the seamlessness with which the character integrates with them. Clumsy and Ham-fisted integration not only weakens the story, it weakens the character. Third, there is a constant risk of the “if only” syndrome: “If only I knew about this back then, I would have done things differently!”
The distinctions between the roles of players and GMs, as compared to the roles of actors and writers/producer, mean that the television model doesn’t translate directly into RPG usage – that would put the GM in command of character development and leave the player simply to interpret the character he has been handed. Wait one – that’s exactly what happens in convention gaming, where the GM provides characters and plot!
Characters developed using this method start of inherently shallow, and only gain substance as opportunity permits. It’s easy to develop a bias or blind spot where one specific character is concerned, constantly overlooking them in the allocation of development opportunities – and dooming them to stay shallow. It’s also easy to play favorites, and these can be self-fulfilling prophecies simply by virtue of the GM utilizing early character development as a springboard to more.
So the Television Model has significant problems.
The Literary Model
The obvious alternative is the Literary Model, in which a character is defined as he is at the start of a story and that original state is refined and redefined as necessary, retroactively, to achieve maximum penetration of the character into the storyline as it develops.
This subordinates the character to his role as a facilitator of the story. It avoids the shallowness of the Television model, but can replace it with slabs of text that need to be digested and integrated in the mind of the reader. Bad writers tend to deliver this text as exposition; good writers find ways of delivering it as interactions with other characters and with the world around the character, revealing the latter as the story proceeds.
This approach often breaks down when applied to an RPG simply because it becomes infinitely more difficult dealing with a large group. There is a huge potential for character misidentification when this is the situation. It is also more difficult to grasp and apply nuance; in essence, overload is a problem that forces a more simplistic approach to characterization. I once heard an editor define a “good writer” as one who knew what to leave out, what to merely hint at, and what to establish definitively. That advice suggests that characters can be more richly developed than the depictions actually presented on the page simply to give the writer greater understanding of how the characters will react, and greater flexibility in the narrative paths possible within the story.
There is a huge focus on the writer as a solitary figure in terms of character development. It can sometimes become obvious that several of the characters derived from the same mind with the same habits and thought patterns, something I have heard described as the “generic salesman” problem: ‘Character X is approached by a generic salesman…’
This singularity makes the literary model relatively easy to translate into the RPG sphere; each player becomes ‘the writer’ of a particular character, and the GM becomes a co-author to them all, providing the situations which lead to character development beyond their characters’ initial states. However, this translation is necessarily compromised by the way in which the GM and players ‘collaborate’, i.e. play the game; the players, of necessity, remain ignorant of the story until it unfolds, knowing only what their character knows at the time. That creates a logical discontinuity between a character as a player develops them and the character variant that would present the optimum accessibility to the storyline.
If that happened in the writing of a novel, the writer can simply go back and revise the character, and this may happen a number of times at different stages of the writing process – revisions that are ultimately invisible to the reader, who only sees the end product. It also requires the writer to revisit everything already written, as character reactions and responses may have changed.
The Existential Model
This is the original RPG characterization process – start with a bunch of stats and a fairly cardboard cut-out of a characterization, and use the interactions that the character has with his fellow PCs, with NPCs, and with the game mechanics, as informed and shaped by those stats, to derive a personality over time.
This clearly resembles the Television Model more closely than it does the Literary Model. In particular, it leaves characterization subject to all the inherent flaws in that approach. Most players, after being bitten by these flaws, turn to an adaption of the literary model for their initial character development, giving their characters more substance prior to the commencement of play, even if subsequent development uses the Television Model.
Effectively, this replaces some of the potential drawbacks of one model with those of another. It also introduces new wrinkles to consider – such as the player who isn’t into roleplaying and never develops their character adequately, and the situation when a player develops a character to the point where they are actually no longer able to play that character as a whole.
Nevertheless, this also has a benefit that causes the approach to be often remembered with affection by those of us who have been playing for a long time: it adds ‘discovery of the characters’ to the sources of potential pleasure that can be derived from the gaming process. This affection tends to be colored, as does all nostalgia, by selective memory retention – while there can be no doubt that when this process works at its’ best, it can be a rich and pleasant experience, but there will also be times when it is a millstone around the players’ neck. For this reason, it is usually supplanted, eventually, by other approaches.
The Structural Model
In the Structural Model, each character is assigned (or chooses) a role within the assembled group of characters, and then employs that role and one or more other developmental techniques as the process of turning that role into an individual who just happens to have that function. When GMs started thinking about the PCs as a “party” before play began, and requiring them to design characters according to standard roles within that party, this model of character development was the result.
To be more honest, this is more about setting initial parameters for a character according to a structured approach of some sort and then employing one of the other approaches to the task of actually developing a character beyond that simple outline. Nevertheless, as a means of creating a dynamic and resourceful party who can integrate relatively seamlessly, both as a group and with the campaign, it represents a huge step forward.
I employed the simplest possible interpretation of the structural model for the Zener Gate campaign – I had the players discuss the characters they had in mind with each other before they started actually constructing their characters. There were some areas in which they desired redundancy, others in which they were happy for the other character to take the lead, and each had elements that they wanted to claim as their own provinces of expertise. But, while this worked well with only two players, I would be cautious about employing it with larger groups; it might take a LOT longer to actually resolve character designs, and its possible that no satisfactory compromise could ever be reached.
One of the greatest advantages to this approach is that it permits the GM some input into the characters, ensuring that they will fit the campaign that he has in mind.
The Thumbnail Method
The thumbnail method is something that I presented as part of the Characterization Puzzle series in 2010. This is more of a method of generating content for use within one of the models already presented, or one still to come. It functions by directing and structuring an exercise in free association, which makes the players’ subconscious desires more accessible, while sparking moments of inspiration. The article itself focuses on the GM using the technique to generate NPCs (because the focus of the blog is on GMs), but I have used it for PCs as well.
The Inversion Method
Described in part 3 of the same series, this employs two sources of information – cliches and existing characterization – and generates a character who can act as a foil for another. There are times when this approach is brilliant, such as creating an interesting cast of NPCs with which to surround the PCs, or when the person creating the character knows the personality of their ultimate opponent in the campaign, without the inputs, it might seem that this is useless for the purposes being discussed in this article.
Not so! Think back to the Structural Model – no matter how the GM defines the entries within the “casting call,” there will be cliches and expectations and exemplars. On top of that, it’s often easier to pick an existing model as being everything that you don’t want for this character – for example, if you’re in another campaign with the same players, you might decide that you want your character in this second campaign to be something completely different. There are your inputs – just build your character to avoid those cliches and embrace the opposites of the source material and you’re on your way.
Once again, though, this is more concerned with generating content for a characterization than with the process of how and when that characterization gets refined. It’s a partial solution, but it’s incomplete in this context.
The Window-Shopping Method
This was a completely new technique that I developed in early 2010 and presented in the fourth part of the Characterization Puzzle series. It works by assuming that there is a “right personality” that can immediately instinctively intuited but not articulated or defined. It then manifests that “right personality” through its interactions with the “real world” in the form of answers to the question of “what would the character buy from store X”, then uses these specific interactions as the seeds to articulate the personality. It’s not a random generator, giving more directed and coherent results, but it has even more variety of outputs possible despite this.
This is certainly restricted in its application to the purposes under discussion in this article, more suited to generating content than in identifying the content to be generated.
Backstory Boxes
This is a variation on the Thumbnail Method (above) that I presented in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity back in 2015. I use this technique for NPC development when I get stuck or feel that whatever I’ve come up with is too ‘bland’ or ‘stock’. In the past, I have used it to reinvent a PC, to generate new PCs, to generator organizations and species and even a Pantheon of Orcish Deities! In fact the biggest problem with this process is that it often produces a lot more result than you actually need – exhibiting the same flaws as the literary model, in other words.
The Relationship Model
I’ve not actually employed this one yet. It’s at its best when developing NPCs to interact with an existing established party. In essence, you define what you want the principle relationship between the new character and an existing NPC to be, then give the character a trait that will trigger that response. If that doesn’t sufficiently define the character (and it probably won’t), pick another character and a different relationship, and repeat as necessary. Then take that list of traits and start constructing a coherent character using them as a starting point; Backstory Boxes or the Thumbnail method would work especially well for this purpose. Further development then employs one or more of the other developmental techniques.
The Functional Model
The GM supplies a list of possible functions within the group (defined in such a way that there are more ‘slots’ than there are characters to be developed, and employs some selection technique to enable players to choose from those functions not yet allocated to any players’ character. This is a more sophisticated refinement of the Structural Model. This technique was used in its pure form to create the original Zenith-3 group of PCs and a minor variations later used to assemble the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Note that once a function has been assigned to a particular character, that character then develops as an individual around that central concept, without input from the other players or PCs.
In many ways, this is a more generalized form of the relationship model, focusing more on what the character has to be able to do than on his (potential) relationships, but the same advice applies.
The Modern Model
The most common approach that I have seen used and recommended, especially for the construction of PCs, is what I have labeled “The Modern Model”. A derivation of the literary model, this attempts to define a finished personality prior to play, to the standards of the literary model. The GM is then expected to conform his adventures to the characters that have been defined.
That expectation is where things sometimes go off the rails for these characters. Duplicated functions within a group are a second hazard. Different standards of being “acceptable for play” between players and GM are also a concern.
If the GM intends to “leverage” the characters that have been created by the players to custom-fit adventures to the PCs, this technique is especially strong because it gives him so much to work with. On the downside, it takes part of the world-building that is normally exclusively the GM’s domain and removes it from his control, potentially introducing inconsistencies and contradictions. Quite often, it’s necessary for an ongoing dialogue between the GM and the Player to direct a rewrite of the resulting character because the original proposal simply won’t quite fit the game world.
Like all the techniques described, this has its flaws and its benefits..
There are variations in which ongoing character development derives from whatever circumstances are encountered in-game and player choices in terms of response to those situations. This describes the outcome when the GM makes minimal changes to his planning to embed the individual characterizations of the PCs into his campaign, and risks them becoming mere observers to the onrush of events.
The Lego Assembly
The other day, I thought of a new technique to add to this repertoire, one more closely related to the Television approach, but which incorporates strengths from several of the other approaches that I have discussed – which is one reason why I’ve taken the trouble to walk through them.
It divides a character into several working pieces and turns the process of character development into a more genuine collaboration between the owning player and the GM.
Initial Profile
The player designs the Initial Profile. This is a rough draft of the character, usually in note form, concentrating on the personality as it will usually present in play, where the character comes from, how old they are, and a couple of the key turning points in the character’s life.
The Initial profile may or may not be constrained by one of the approaches described earlier, that’s up to the GM, who also sets those parameters. The player is free to make the character an exception to those parameters if he has an idea, after discussion with the GM.
Foundation Bricks
The GM then defines a number of the foundation bricks – fundamental questions that need answering. Critical events that would have impacted the character from the campaign background, parts of the personality that he thinks need to be explained in an in-game context, and the like. Basically, questions that he wants the player to answer.
The player then determines the content that is in those bricks, verifying their content with the GM when it comes to campaign background interpretation, and with an eye toward consistency with the draft character profile.
Structural Bricks
When you’re building a Lego House, the corners are the structural bricks. They hold the roof up.
These are sometimes necessary justifications and chains of events that explain selected character traits that the GM considers unusual or requiring such justification, but more commonly, they expand on some aspect of the character’s current in-game situation. The traits are the dominant personality elements described in the initial profile, but not ALL of them – the player has to select at least two and no more than four.
Some possible structural bricks of the more common type are ‘work history’, ‘work colleagues’, ‘social circle’, ‘professional achievements’, ‘education and teachers’, ‘childhood incidents’, ‘immediate family’, ‘home’, ‘ancestry’, ‘character flaws’, ‘quirks’, ‘political views’, ‘most despised’, ‘responsibilities’, ‘ambitions’, ‘hobbies’, ‘weekends’, and ‘work attitude’. There are others, such as ‘rogue’s gallery’ or ‘enemies’ but these are very common choices.
The GM can then select 2-4 more that he wants the player to complete, and 2-4 that he wants to leave at loose ends. In general, anything that will impact the way the character will perform in-play should be defined, anything that doesn’t have such immediate impact can be set aside.
The player fills out content (in outline form) for those bricks that the GM has directed, then chooses 2-4 more that he wants to be left incomplete, before completing the rest. As a general rule of thumb, 2/3 of the possible structural bricks should have content assigned.
Let’s look at some examples of these Structural Bricks:
James’ Immediate Family:
– Older Brother, Rob, hero-worshiped
– Younger Sister, Evaline, social switchboard, always in touch with everyone and has the latest gossip
– Mother +23 years, Anne, battler on struggle street* and professional underdog
– Father +26 years, Jack, mysteriously vanished ten years ago
This specifies relationship, relative age, name, and interaction with the PC, whose name is obviously James.
* I’ve used a couple of Australian slang terms simply because of the character they impart. But they might need some explanation for those unfamiliar with them.
A “Battler”, or more fully, “Aussie Battler” (or even “Little Aussie Battler”) is an ‘ordinary’ or working class individual who perseveres through their commitments despite adversity. Typically, this adversity comprises the challenges of low pay, family commitments, environmental hardships and lack of personal recognition. Exemplifies the British “stiff upper lip”, someone who keeps going, day after day, no matter what troubles are being piled on them – and there are always troubles being piled on them. The term is often used as an indicator of pride and respect for the positive qualities exhibited by the individual. The closest equivalent in American is “Little Guy” but that has slightly different connotations and lacks the overtones carried by the Australian vernacular.
“Struggle Street” is more recent in origins, and a meaning has yet to crystallize from general usage. The Urban Dictionary lists the term, but the definition they offer is completely unrelated to the common usage in Australia. So I guess it falls to me… “Struggle Street” refers to a residential locale occupied by those at the bottom end of the poverty ladder, for whom everything is a ‘struggle’. These residents are often caught in a poverty trap or poverty cycle that prevents them ever rising above these circumstances. There are consequent psychological impacts – depression, self-neglect, substance abuse (especially alcohol), and antisocial behavior, which collectively add to the difficulties to be overcome before escape from these circumstances becomes possible. Climbing out of these holes is often the work of generations – and it’s very hard for a single individual to rise above the circumstances enough to simply make progress, never mind several generations in a row who can do so sufficiently to escape the poverty traps. “Struggle Street”, as a term, can also be applied to those suffering from situations that are psychologically analogous to those more literally experiencing such circumstances.
As a general rule, these two terms are contradictory; while both refer to those in poverty situations, the difference is in the reaction to those circumstances. However, there are many variations on those responses when you view this is a cyclic pattern of existence – “the battler who continually fights his her way up to the point of escape from the cycle only to be overwhelmed by a tsunami of negative events that mean they have to start over” would be a perfectly valid interpretation of the conditions and history summed up in the much more succinct and colorful “battler on struggle street”.
James’ Weekends:
– During the football season, hangs out on the couch or meets ‘the guys’ down at Jerry’s Bar & Grill. Hates to miss either a lead-up show or post-game analysis. Always has a small amount of money riding on the game. Consumes copious amounts of beer and snack food, especially salty stuff.
– The rest of the year, tries to get in shape with jogging and visits to the gym and take care of all those chores that have built up while he’s been on the couch. Never quite gets there with either of these goals.
– Saturday Nights are movie nights (unless there’s a game on). It’s normal for there to be an argument about what to see which leads to everyone going their separate ways at the theater. They reunite for ice-cream afterwards and describe their experiences / review what they saw.
– Deliberately orients his life around making room for these activities – small scale shopping expeditions every weeknight, for example.
– Seriously resentful of overtime demands that interfere with his habitual schedule.
– It’s not that he has nothing planned, it’s that he deliberately plans to do nothing.
Just putting those two together is enough for a very strong impression of the character to start to emerge, and shows the power of this technique.
Decorative Bricks
Anything else that the player might need to reference in the course of play is a “decorative brick”, and the player can fill out as many or few of these as they are likely to need. However, it’s commonplace for the contents to be name-dropped in conversation and for players to underestimate how much of these they will need to complete. It’s also true that ad-hoc completion of these is rarely as satisfactory or well thought-out as taking a couple of minutes to do them in advance.
A decorative brick, by definition, is something that is not definitive of the personality, lifestyle, or circumstances of the character. Quite often, these are filled with nothing more than a name or location. More are often identified in the course of play. Quite often, a decorative brick is identified by extension from a structural brick – for example, who are ‘the guys’ that James meets at “Jerry’s Bar & Grill?”
Sometimes, you can open more avenues for personal development by giving just initials and a surname, rather than full names. That doesn’t work with structural bricks, because the identity of those contained therein is part of the definition by extension that they employ to fulfill their purpose.
Anything that wasn’t selected as a structural brick is, by definition, a decorative brick.
The In-play Profile
Finally, the Player takes all of this material and creates a more substantial profile for use in play, taking what is known about the character and synopsizing it, leaving out what is not. It’s a good idea to number both bricks and bullet points within a brick for cross-referencing in such a profile, which is the equivalent of “see X.X for more information”.
The process of preparing the Profile for play will often throw up additional items that can be added to the Lego-like note structure. Add them.
Then turn the notes over to the GM; they belong to him, now – especially the parts that haven’t been completed, and the content of the decorative bricks.
Brick Completion
The GM can use these notes in a number of ways, depending on their relevance and level of completion. First, he can draw on existing content to anchor the character within an adventure. Second, he can provide additional details to fill out a brick whose contents have been hinted at. And third, he can add content to one of the potential structural bricks that were set aside.
These inclusions can be strategic, i.e. centrally important to the adventure; they can be superficial splashes of color; or they can be something in between, creating an encounter that’s important in terms of what the character is doing before or after the adventure. How the GM uses them is up to him; the only caveat is that unless it’s a structural element that’s already been defined by the player, the GM has to add or expand on the content. GMs being fairly busy folk, however, they will normally do so to the barest extent possible – which is probably going to be only one or two bullet-points (as compared to the several that have been shown in the examples). They will provide only the essential information to use the NPC in the adventure and no more.
That puts the ball back into the players’ court. They can either expand on the information using the GM’s seed input as they see fit, or leave things as they are, to let the GM expand on the contents at his own pace. Sometimes, the GM may tell the player outright, “I’ve got further plans for this character”.
The GM can also give the player far greater flexibility in their character’s activities as a result of the player having done this prep work. Instead of choosing something for the PC to be doing, even from the shortlist provided by the details in the structural brick, the GM can simply tell the player, “It’s the weekend and the Hawks are playing the Jets in 30. Where are you and what are you doing?”
Reinforced Structures
Sometimes, a GM can provide content for a decorative block that the player wasn’t expecting. For example, “Romance” might be a decorative brick, one that neither the GM nor the player elected to construct in advance (leaving it open for later development). However, in the category “High School”, the player has dropped a decorative brick “First Kiss: P W Nelson”. He might be mightily surprised if the GM subsequently fills that out with “Peter William Nelson” instead of a girls’ name – and that thrusts how the character feels about homosexuality into the spotlight, assuming that the character is male. He might be ashamed of it, like to pretend that it didn’t happen that way, even have invented a “Penny Wong Nelson” out of whole cloth to cover themselves. Or he might have been intrigued, and simply never brings it up because of the social attitudes towards gays – and, of course, because he’s now in a hetero relationship. Suddenly, what was a decorative brick has become an entirely new structural element of the character, brought out into the open because “P W Nelson” is back in town.
This is an example of reinforcing the structure – adding new definitive elements to it that don’t contradict what’s already established, but that open the door to new areas of personal growth in the character’s profile.
The End of the Beginning
By integrating the development of the character with the development of adventures, the GM becomes an active collaborator in the character without taking control from the player. By leaving some areas blank, some areas only vaguely completed, and some areas of particular relevance complete, the character has room to expand into new situations within the game and in particular adventures, while the GM has the opportunity to seed the character with connections that will become relevant later in the campaign, connecting the two more strongly. The character is defined sufficiently well that the GM can throw more scope for defining adventure elements into the players’ lap, and loosely-enough defined that the character has room to grow and develop.
The end result is something approaching the literary standard that has been achieved through a more television-model approach. This takes the strengths of several of the approaches described and few, if any, of the weaknesses and unites them into a cohesive form. The character is defined enough to play and loose enough to evolve.
It may not suit every campaign. It may not suit every player, or every GM. But when it works at all, it should work a treat. And, in the meantime, a greater awareness of the options and alternatives available to them should at least permit GMs to choose how they want players to develop the characters that they will play in a more intelligent and thoughtful manner, increasing the odds that they will employ the optimum for the campaign that they want to run.
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