Playing a Character in a Familiar Setting

 Role-playing games began with the exploration of a literal dungeon, and it’s obvious why this premise has remained an influential concept. When the setting is an unfamiliar place to both the characters and the players, they can explore it together and there’s a unity of purpose. The experience of one is replicated in the experience of the other.

But not everybody wants to rely on this premise. In Call of Cthulhu, your investigators are probably long-time residents of the town where the mystery takes place (unless maybe you’re playing the globe-trotting Indiana Jones version of the game). A campaign of Vampire: The Masquerade is usually presumed to take place entirely within the same real-world city. And superhero games also exist.

But then you might find that unity of player and character experience falls apart and becomes a problem, when your character is supposed to be familiar with the setting and be comfortable navigating it (physically, socially, or both), but you the player are not. Which leads to a question that doesn’t get asked enough and also doesn’t get answered even that much: How do you play a character that exists in a setting they are familiar with?

The Real World

You could always restrict your game’s fictional setting to real places that all the players know, but if you did, who would you actually play rpgs with? We have the internet nowadays, you can play rpgs with people who have never even been to any of the same physical locations as you. Besides, if you play fictional characters, they are going to have jobs, families, friends, hobbies, and past experiences with most if not all elements of the setting. How do you portray a character living in their own hometown?

The real world is convenient because what you end up doing is using archetypal locations. You all know what “a corner store” is like, or “a restaurant.” American cities are especially generic, because people build so many of the same things in so many of them (you can argue against this point, of course, but I’ve seen this enough playing games with modern-day settings to know it’s true).

But that’s only half of the situation (or less than half, even), because that’s just physical space. If your character is familiar with their setting (it’s their hometown for example), there’s still the social space. Your character still knows a bunch of people and does things with their life. Whether you use a real-world setting or a purely fictional sci-fi or fantasy setting, somebody still has to make up all the details of that life that the players’ characters are supposed to be familiar with. There’s basically 3 options.

Option 1: Use a Reference

You can demand that every player familiarize themselves with the same body of knowledge about the setting, from the same reference materials. This can be difficult to achieve, since most published setting include material that is supposed to be only for the Game Master. If you were sticking to the dungeoncrawling concept, players would learn the setting over time, by interacting with it, and at some point they would end up with characters that have become integrated into that setting. If you have documents that give you all that knowledge up front, then maybe you can act like you know how the setting works, the same way your character is supposed to act.

But if they don’t give you a pre-made character, complete with a life history and everyone they know, then that stuff still has to be invented at the table. And you’re basically in the same situation as when you use the real world for your setting but don’t have your character’s social life all mapped out already.

Option 2: The GM Makes It Up

If somebody else is making up all the details of the setting, and thus all the details of your character’s life (because your character’s life is embedded in the setting), how are you going to manage that? Are you really going to ask the GM for all relevant setting details before you make literally any decision about what your character does? “Where did my character go to school? Where do they live again? Is there a bowling alley I could go to? Does that exist in this world? Do I know somebody who works at the villain’s factory? Have I met this guy?” Even just thinking about playing this way is exhausting.

As I noted in a previous post about GM materials, the idea that the characters exist in a setting they have no prior experience with leads to the idea that the GM is supposed to be responsible for the entire world. That works if the job of the players is to explore a setting they aren’t familiar with, and have the GM reveal it to them, but it’s a lot of work for the GM to just do that much, nevermind what results in basically creating the players’ characters as well.

Option 3: The Players Make It Up

Obviously if you just make up all the details of your character’s life and history, it’s easy to portray them in play. You can just decide “yeah, I know a guy,” and then make one up, complete with a story about the first time you met them. You can just say “yeah, I’ve been to this town before,” and tell the GM what it’s like (and why you might want to be returning).

What are the problems with this? Well, it might be abused by players looking for advantages. Or they might make up things that contradict the setting that the GM has created. To which I have to ask: And? So what? Sure, it could be a problem if the GM’s job is to be some kind of referee. It could be a problem if the GM’s job is to create the setting for the players to explore. But then why are you playing characters in a familiar setting? Those sound like jobs for a GM running a game where both players and characters explore someplace they’ve never been to before.

If instead the GM’s job is actually just to provide adversity and challenges, or to introduce elements that are unfamiliar to the player’s characters, and not to invent the setting on their own, then these are not actually problems. Even if players give themselves creative advantages by inventing setting elements that help their characters overcome obstacles, so what? Is the GM going to run out of problems they can cause? Probably not.

Example 1: Kult

Even though I grew up running Call of Cthulhu for my friends, it was Kult that made me realize the potential of letting the players make up the settings their characters exist inside of. Character creation in the first American edition of Kult is a point-buy system, which is cleverly subverted by the fact that the difference between good and bad traits equals your mental balance (the game’s version of sanity). You have to spend points to be honest and generous, because these advantages make you more mentally stable, whereas a game like GURPS gives you points for literally any trait that restricts a player’s choices.

Thing is, the game doesn’t really need this. It’s supposed to consist of personal horror, where things you did in the past, or even in a past life, come back to haunt you. The horror might be cosmic, but it’s not alien or impersonal. It knows what you did and wants you to pay for it.

So it doesn’t really matter whether your character is a billionaire oligarch or a schizophrenic vagrant. Ideally, players should be able to invent any kind of person with any kind of life, because the GM is going to invent horrors appropriate to their psychology and past experiences. Then you can explore their present psychology as things get worse and worse.

Much like those early editions of Vampire, however, Kult did a better job of setting a mood and telling you how the game should be played, and not such a great job of providing rules that produce such intended results when followed. Made me think, though.

Example 2: Apocalypse World

And then Apocalypse World came out and that’s pretty much exactly how it plays. First edition page 109: “The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel, and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damn world says and does except the players’ characters.”

So nobody else gets to say what your character remembers, and thus nobody gets to say what their history is, and yet the MC gets to say everything about the world (or is that “except” attached to both clauses in the sentence instead of just the second?). Well, it’s not exactly the least ambiguous paragraph ever written. It doesn’t even distinguish between inventing a element of the fiction versus portraying it in action. To me, that seems like an important distinction to make, if the players are supposed to invent their characters’ lives, and then the GM or MC is supposed to portray all those elements (characters, locations, relationships, etc) going forward.

But then there’s that section of text on pages 125 to 130 entitled During the First Session, with not just instructions but also examples that make it really clear that yeah, that’s how you play the game: the setting that the characters live in is mostly made up by the players, and the MC’s main job (more than just “say everything else”) is to turn that setting into a problem for them.

So anyway, 15 years later and it seems like it still works fine. The way it’s done in AW isn’t the only way to do it, of course. But I haven’t encountered any better way to role-play characters in a setting they’re familiar with than to have the players make up most of that setting themselves.

Summary

Anyway, I've spent more than enough time writing this post, so to sum up, here’s 4 tips for role-playing a character in a familiar setting:

1. Play a game where the players make up the setting elements from their characters’ lives and histories, instead of a game where the GM makes up the entire setting.

2. Play a game where the GM’s main job is to inject unfamiliar elements into the lives of the players’ characters, instead of a game where the players’ characters have no life except to explore an unfamiliar setting.

3. Play a game that allows the players to solve problems by inventing setting elements their characters are familiar with, and not just by finding a clever way to use the elements the GM has already presented them with.

4. Play a game with rules that help you do 1, 2, and 3 above. If you can find one.

Types of GM Materials

I tend to think that rpg taxonomies are usually based more on vibes than concrete details so I decided to try something different, and the result is this post.

Types of GM Materials: A List

When you run an rpg as the Game Master (or whatever you call it), you have a bunch of materials you use, right? The stuff that comes with the game, or in a module, or you have to make it yourself. I mean the GM materials that are separate from the rules for resolving actions. So, one list (the one I’m writing here) separates that stuff into five categories: a pre-designed map, a pre-designed world, a linear storyline, a pre-designed relationship matrix, and materials for improvisation.

1. The Pre-Designed Map

In the original rpg, this was a map of the dungeon, or more specifically, the dungeons below Castle Blackmoor. Overland exploration maps followed soon after and nowadays you can buy all sorts of maps of varying weirdness for your friends to explore via fictional little guys.

When the pre-designed map is the central element of the game you are playing, you can roll up a new character in the first 5 minutes because nobody cares who this person actually is, but if the GM (or DM) doesn’t bring a map that has all the necessary details on it already, there’s no game. That’s not really what most players want from an rpg though. Most people want rpgs to be more about their characters.

2. The Pre-Designed World

Of course, some people aren’t satisfied with just a dungeon map. They want to design an entire world for their players to wander around in. I’ve included this here as a separate section because this is more than just a map, but really this part of the essay is mostly an aside. Creating your own secondary world takes an amazing amount of work and is only entertaining for a minority of rpg players, because even though you get a much larger map to explore, the game is still about the GM’s setting, more than it is about your Original Characters (do not steal).

3. The Linear Storyline

Call it the Dragonlance Effect if you want to, but the most obvious way to run your players through an adventure, where one nail-biting situation leads logically to the next, is to write a linear (or mostly linear) set of scenes and then play through them. People derisively call this railroading but it’s also the main model for modern D&D and the adventure modules of most trad games, from Vampire to Shadowrun. Take a string of set piece combat encounters broken up by some non-combat stuff that leads you to the next one in line and you have a basic recipe for an episode of cinematic adventure.

That’s all pretty obvious I think. But there’s a similar evolution of sandbox to storyline in mystery games that’s worth looking at.

4. R-Maps and the Evolution of Mystery Games

While some early Call of Cthulhu adventures are pretty explicitly dungeoncrawls, many of the better adventures take the sandbox approach and apply it to a relationship matrix instead of geography. This isn’t the explicit r-maps popularized by Vampire, I’ll get to those later. What I mean here is that the relationships between the clues form connections that map out a kind of pointcrawl, which players explore in a way similar to a dungeon. Any location can be like a room, but instead of doors you have clues, and instead of delving deeper and deeper into the dungeon’s geography, you dive deeper into the mystery (which is always a one-way trip).

Is there a snappier name for this out there? Like somebody calling it the Mystery Matrix or the Web of Clues or something? Probably, people love jargon, even when it’s less than useful. And giving this a name and describing it thoroughly would probably be pretty useful for many people.

 

An example mystery scenario:

There’s a break-in at the museum. A pagan idol has been stolen, and weird slime was left behind. Questioning witnesses reveals that the museum was burgled by men driving the kind of truck that is common in the nearby countryside. Researching the slime leads to reports of a slime cult in the countryside. Researching the idol leads to an old book in the library that claims the idol can summon an evil god, and a librarian who says Old Man Moldy, who lives on a remote farm in the countryside, was researching that same book only a few months back. Investigating the countryside leads to Old Man Moldy’s farm, where the slime cult is using the stolen idol to summon an evil god.

In this example scenario, each line of inquiry leads back to the same instigating event. If it were an actual adventure module, there would be enough clues scattered around so that the players wouldn’t have to find them all in order to end up at the barn with the slime cult’s god.

However, this is still a lot of work. Not as much as making your own pre-designed world, but it’s still not really worth it to write three different lines of inquiry if your players only go down one (unless maybe you plan to publish it or run it at various conventions). It’s easier to just write one line of inquiry and run the players through it: the slime is what leads to the countryside where the slime cult has the stolen idol. This of course leads to the problem where the players don’t find the one clue they need to progress along the storyline, which in turn leads to the Gumshoe solution (popularized by games like Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents) where they always get that clue. And so the linear storyline structure stays useful.

These materials are also useful in combination, of course. For example, the overall structure of Impossible Landscapes is a linear storyline, but each of the actual investigations is a sandbox clue-matrix.

Okay, moving on to the last one.

 

5. Materials for Improvisation

Let’s maybe not leave the mystery genre just yet, because there’s more evolution in technique that can lead us into this section. While the Gumshoe games provide one solution for running a mystery without having to do too much work, still other solutions are possible. In Brindlewood Bay (and other Gauntlet rpgs), the scenarios come with pre-designed clues, but instead of a solution, there’s rules allowing the players to improvise their own solution to the mystery.

One could also do the opposite, and write a game where each scenario provides the source of the mystery and its instigating event, along with guidelines to help the GM improvise clues based on where and who the players investigate. Haven’t seen that become a central rule in an rpg yet, but it’s how I prefer to run mysteries myself.

Even though I’ve put them all in one section in this essay, there’s a vast range of different materials meant to help GMs improvise:

·        Random tables is what most people think of immediately.

·        The relationship maps from Vampire setting books. After the PCs interact with somebody, consult their connections on the r-maps to see how other NPCs might react.

·        Mechanics for faction play, like those in Worlds Without Number and Blades in the Dark.

·        Also from Blades in the Dark is the cycle of play, which goes from score to payoff to downtime and back to score, so you always know what you’re supposed to be doing next.

·        Beats in the Heart rpg, where you request specific situations and the GM tries to present you with them at some point in a later session. These become an arsenal of cues for you to draw upon in play.

·        Even detailed NPCs are meant to aid improvisation, since their interactions with the PCs aren’t scripted.

You can probably think of more. Improv aids can do lots of things, but if you want an rpg that makes the player’s characters more important than the GM’s pre-designed maps and storylines, this is the stuff you need.

One Possible Conclusion

While rpgs are often categorized by vibes, I think that the GM materials an rpg provides are a major factor in producing those vibes.

Consider for example these three rpgs: Blades in the Dark, Fiasco, and Shadowrun.

Unlike the other two games, Fiasco is GM-less and doesn’t have rules for resolving character actions, and yet according to most people it goes in the same “storygames” category as Blades, while Shadowrun is “trad.” This has always seemed kind of ludicrous to me, because Blades in the Dark and Shadowrun are obviously the same kind of “outlaw party of PCs doing missions against the GM’s antagonists” rpg, which Fiasco is not. But it makes a kind of sense if you consider that Blades and Fiasco both prioritize materials for improvisation a lot more than Shadowrun does. From this perspective, what the players and their characters do is less of a factor in classification than what materials the GM is given.

Anyway, another conclusion is that I was thinking about the actual materials a GM uses when running an rpg, and I've never seen anybody list out the differences like this. It seemed like it would be useful to me so I did it myself.

Detective Fiction Part 2

Okay since I outlined the difference between American hardboiled detective fiction and classic whodunnit in the previous post, I suppose I should say how to use this knowledge in an actual rpg.

So to reiterate without rambling:

1) for the classic detective, the status quo is good and is worth restoring, which happens by solving the mystery; and
2) for the hardboiled detective, the status quo is oppressive and must be survived in order to solve the mystery (and protect whomever needs it).

So the difference doesn’t really lie with the players’ characters, it lies with the setting, and with whichever person or persons that has the responsibility of portraying it (usually the person with the Game Master role).

In both types of stories you have protagonists that stick their nose into things they might be better off leaving alone. Miss Marple and Marlowe both do this. So all you really need to encourage that is tying xp to investigating mysteries. Just because the cops are always happy to see Miss Marple in her novels doesn’t mean you can’t play an rpg where the cops try to put the frame on an old woman, who has to find the real killer to prove her innocence, yeah? Then again, if Philip Marlowe didn’t have any police corruption to complain about, he wouldn’t be the same character, would he? Not really. The environment he has to live in is what makes him the cynical detective he is.

So anyway, that means if you are going to GM a hardboiled detective setting, you portray the cops as corrupt and in the pocket of the rich who are evil. Nobody wants the detective protagonist(s) around, except the ones who want to use them. The hardboiled detective solves the mysteries that the police don’t want to solve because they don’t want to do the work and because powerful people don’t want the truth to come out. The harboiled protagonist has to fight against all that to get anywhere.

And if you want to GM a classic whodunnit, you portray cops as either incompetent or merely no match for the clever villain, who is some kind of evil anomaly (even if they murder for inheritance). The classic detective solves the mysteries no one else is able to solve.

And everyone is grateful when they do solve it. For the hardboiled private eye, maybe their client is satisfied and maybe they aren’t hated by the cops. Maybe.

So there you go: build some tools to do those things and voila you’ve got yourself a game that emulates the genre.

Detective Fiction Part 1

 

I think it’s easy to assume that American detective fiction differentiates itself from other types of mysteries and crime stories by its aesthetic gloss, but it actually follows a completely different narrative.

In the classic (mostly British) detective story, a mystery throws the world into chaos. The detective solves this perplexing riddle using their intellect and restores order to the world. But that detective can be anybody smart, from Holmes to the Hardy Boys (or Miss Marple).

In sharp contrast, the American detective is someone who used to uphold the status quo, but quit when he discovered the hegemonic class is a murderous rape demon that debases people for fun and will destroy whoever opposes it.

This is not the story that American detective fiction tells, however. It’s the protagonist’s backstory. Chandler didn’t write any stories about Marlowe working for the DA, only him being a private eye afterward. The actual story is this character being reminded, once again, of exactly why he quit doing the dirty work and why you can’t just quit and walk away clean. This is an important distinction to make, because if that backstory was the actual story, it would be very much a white man’s story because that’s who runs the meatgrinders for the rich white people. This is America, after all.

But this formula also works when Walter Mosley writes his novels about Easy Rawlins, a Black detective in post-war LA. Rawlins fought in the war, which makes his status-quo-upholding past explicit, but the story would still work without that. Easy Rawlins doesn’t need the white American detective backstory to be an American hard-boiled detective. He’s Black. He already knows what kind of damage rich white folks (and the people who work for them) do to the world.

Where the classic detective removes a source of uncertainty (and usually a source of harm in the revealed criminal), the American detective is just trying to make it through another round of the shit that never stops. How they find out that power is corrupt isn’t the real story, so it can be changed. Being reminded (again) that power is corrupt is the story. Which means just about anyone can be the lead in the American detective story, as long as they begin that story knowing.

As much as I like Chandler, there’s still occasional moments of racism and homophobia in his books that go beyond him just writing about crooked people. And it’s too bad because, according to my opinions stated above, the form doesn’t need it.

This is definitely an rpg post, by the way. Don’t show it to people who only read books and don’t also play them.

Part 2 can be found in the next post.

Game Balance

A popular topic. Personally I think it's easiest to comprehend when viewed through the lens of making choices meaningful (ie giving players choices where all options have meaning within the game).

Let's consider the following: here are three options and you get to choose one when your character gets a bonus.

• +1 attack bonus.
• +1 damage bonus.
• +2 damage bonus.

I said three options, but what's that one in the middle? That's the option you choose in order to show everyone what a fuckin dumbass you are. The only two viable options presented here are an attack bonus or a damage bonus, and if you are going to take a damage bonus, you take the +2 and not the +1. The middle choice is a trap.

What happens if we add more context to each choice?

• +1 attack bonus, vorpal blades.
• +1 damage bonus, acid.
• +2 damage bonus, fire.

Now all three options have some narrative flavour to them. One bonus comes from blades, another from acid, the third from fire. Fire and acid do different things, and can be used for different purposes. Escaping from handcuffs or a jail cell is much easier with acid than with fire. Now each of these three choices is a distinct and meaningful option. Yes, the actual damage bonus rating is different, but that only matters if you don't want acid more than fire. If you want the narrative properties of acid, the lower damage bonus is worth it.

I wrote this real fast because the above is one of my go-to examples. Anyway, here's some more just to wrap it up:

Now apply this logic to all choices in a game. If you have a choice between four different character classes and one of them is obviously overpowered, everyone will choose to play that one. Perhaps some people will choose another because of the aesthetics or whatever promises it makes, but if the play experience shows the same one class getting all the spotlight time, then those classes are out of balance.

Imagine a game called Caster Supremacy, with 4 character classes:

• Archer: +5 attack, +3 damage, Bow, Attack Range: 100 feet.
• Fighter: +3 attack, +5 damage, Sword, Attack Range: Touch.
• Thief: +1 attack, +1 damage, Dagger, Attack Range: 30 feet.
• Wizard: +6 attack, +6 damage, Magic Missile, Attack Range: Sight / Infinite.

If these are the only stats that differentiate characters and the game is mostly fighting, there is no reason to play any class other than a Wizard, unless (for some non-game reason) you want to play an ineffective character. Or you just don't know that one choice is clearly superior. But you will find out in play that either you choose Wizard or you suck. This game is not balanced because there is only one meaningful choice.

If one class looks overpowered, but playing the game shows that actually all four classes get spotlight time, have meaningful roles to play, fill different niches, and follow through on whatever promises their aesthetics made to the people who play them, then those classes are balanced. Even if they don't look like it. Because balancing choices isn't always about making all the numbers equal, it's about making different people's different choices enjoyable and not suck.

This is true of every choice a game offers players. If they all lead to distinct outcomes, each of which might be desirable for different reasons (or different people, different circumstances, etc), and none of those choices are traps, then the game is "balanced."