Playing a Character in a Familiar Setting (But Shorter)

I wrote a post about this topic already but I never felt like it was very successful. So, this is a second attempt at it:

Imagine I’m going to run a game for you (I’m the GM, you play a character). I tell you it’s like Twin Peaks, but the FBI never shows up. No one is coming to rescue the town from Bob and the Black Lodge. You play people from the town, and you have to solve these problems for yourself.

This means your character knows all the NPCs. Your character knows all the locations in town. So they’ve already been everywhere and met everyone, before the game even starts.

How are you going to role-play that? Let’s list the possibilities:

1. I tell you everything about your character and your character’s relationships with all the NPCs. You have to ask me about every detail of the setting before you say or do anything in-character. Hell, I might as well just write you lines, this is basically a play or something isn’t it.

2. I provide you with a document describing all the NPCs and all the locations in town, and you create a character that somehow fits into this matrix. You still need to memorize all the details in this document, or you’ll get stuff wrong and your character will seem like an idiot. This sounds like a pain in the ass to me. Also, like the first possibility, it means I have to invent this entire town on my own before the game starts, and that also sounds like a pain in the ass (especially if the players don’t care that much about it, but that’s a matter of player investment, and my point is that this is a matter that concerns your technique, not your attitude).

3. You tell me who your character is and who they know and where they hang out, and you invent those people and places yourself. If I want to invent a character, I’ll tell you what they’re like and ask you what your character’s relationship with them is. If I want to invent a location, I’ll tell you what it’s like and you tell me what your character’s history with it is. I’ll portray these characters and location in play, but I’ll honour whatever you say your character’s history with them is. The only time I make up something and ignore your input is when your character encounters something new, that they’ve never encountered before.

I think it’s pretty obvious which one is going to work best for everybody. The easiest way to play a character in a familiar setting is just to invent any part of your character's life history that is relevant, be confident about your statements, and let the GM portray them in the game.

And yet, the difference between inventing or introducing an element into the fiction and actually portraying it isn’t a difference that most rpgs ever really address. It seems like designers just take it for granted that you'll just do it the same way they do it. 

Playing a Character in a Familiar Setting

Note: I don't feel this post was successful, so I made a second attempt that you can read here. 

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.