Character & Characterizations

In the halcyon days of my youth, mostly during university, I spent hundreds of hours sitting in writers' groups and literary discussion seminars in a quest to learn how to write better.  In that era, I learned about the adoration that writers have for the shape and sound of words, an adoration that does not extend therefore to messages and communication.  I also learned about the love and infatuation that writers have for characters, while simultaneously dismissing any notion that these characters should change or adapt to their circumstances.  Slowly, I learned that for many writers, writing is a fetish.  For many, a group of words or a character is something like building a power drill that is intended to be framed and hung on a wall, never to be used for any purpose except show.

Of course, it doesn't really matter if someone wants to write that way or even to say it's "good writing."  I don't want to read books like that; most people don't, and it's standard among those kind of writers to carry a grudge against people who don't "get it" and "don't appreciate" what they're trying to do.  It is an indisputable problem of fetishistic books ~ if the reader isn't into the same fetish, the writing won't carry the day.  Thus, fetishistic writers tend to be successful when writing about highly popular subjects: teen romances about vampires and rich businessmen, or books about mothers about to give birth to children, etcetera.  In which case, it doesn't even matter how well the books are written, or how long they anguish on with their themes while nothing is actually happening.  If I want to read about 19th century prostitution, and its agonies, there are a number of books I can pick up ... and it won't matter if the characters of those books ever do anything.  I'm not reading the book for it's plot or that plot's relationship with my life.

The habit of making characters an end in themselves, however, bleeds into role-playing ~ where players and DMs alike develop models that are intended to exist as inviolate entities, meant to ride above the waves of the game setting.  My angst-driven overly impulsive half-elven fighter, who feels he cannot be happy as either a human or an elf, will carry on that motif into every battle, every adventure, every conversation, for dozens of sessions, without ever learning anything about anything, and certainly never getting over his entrenched angst.  Because, obviously, that's how I want my elf to be.

This gets exhaustive for everyone else, who have heard every pre-scripted line a hundred times already, who get to where they can speak my elf's words before I do.  Fetishes are like this, even those that are not blatantly sexual or bigoted (though these get noticed at once).  Fetishes are tiresome.  They're boring.  They contribute nothing to game play except for the fetishist ~ and as such are at best selfish and at worst perniciously narcissistic.

I don't expect to change anyone's approach to character building, naturally.  I'm only explaining why these characters grow increasingly unsatisfying over time ... even for the fetishist, who eventually needs to create another like character with a slightly different fetish.  Characters who do not change over the course of time are sterile and ~ more to the point ~ unbelievable.  As "characters," they fall into the uncanny valley of stereotypes ... the sort that makes others around the table roll their eyes when the totally inflexible character decides to face down the dragon one on one or commit suicide for totally stupid reasons.

To them, the answer is obvious: "It is what my character would do."  The more accurate sentiment would be, it is what their characterization would do.  That's not a character.  That's a tool hanging in a frame where it doesn't get used.

Excitement comes from change ~ from the process of learning from mistakes, adapting to new circumstances, accepting that the past is past and making the effort to recreate ourselves from the new ideas we discover as we progress through time.  People who cannot get past their old lives, their old belief systems and their old habits are considered to have sociological and psychological problems.  Since those problems apply to the actual players, who are most likely to play characterizations rather than consider the possibility of character growth, we need to ask ourselves, what psychological drama is being played out at our gaming table.

This is a taboo.  We're supposed to pretend that if a player wants a character that is a stubborn idiot, this is a "choice" and not a red flag indicating the player may have other problems than our game world.  That is, unless those old buggaboos of sex and bigotry arise.  Then we're empowered.

Otherwise, our hands are tied.

A number of features have arisen surrounding the game to cope with this resistance to change.  The DM changes the genre, or the campaign, or shifts from party to party, or runs all adventures episodically, with a complete new list of characters for every one.  In addition, we start characters at 9th or 12th level, so that players are empowered to create their characterizations without having to worry if they're "strong enough" to play that particular ideal.

This is the saddest part: the game is clearly structured to encourage player character change!  The characters are expected to start off weak and legitimately humbled, knowing that virtually everything in the setting can kill them.  With effort and time, the humility is shucked away, the new character potential emerges, the characters are given larger prospects, the player swaggers a bit more knowing what's already been accomplished ~ and everyone can poke fun at each other, talking about the old days when "our characters" were soft and easily breakable.

All that is casually swept away in favor of jumping straight to 10th level, so that everyone can swagger immediately, and create back stories that make sense for high level characters (that would be ridiculous for a 1st level), while stiffening themselves with as much starch as needed to make their characters utterly inflexible.

This turned out to be a large problem with two online campaigns that I ran, in which the players had exact, intractable visions for what they were ... a vision that I began to screw with, because the world just doesn't care who you are.  My game delights in forcing people to lift themselves out of their prejudices, to make themselves suitable for new conditions and a shifting setting.  I want to push my characters into dilemmas, because these create drama without my having to return again and again to the old saws of more monsters and more puzzles.  The players I had, however, came from a different game experience; one where their pigheadedness was encouraged and even celebrated, because it didn't have to last more than a few months or just one adventure.  By next year, everyone is going to have a new character anyway.

I believe this sentiment underlies a great many unhappy game tables, without the participants being even vaguely aware of the problem.  This is my only reason for shedding light on it.  The diehard, steely-eyed character can't even sustain a modern-day, 100-minute film, much less a campaign expected to endure between 20 and 100 hours.  Why are we still encouraging this character in our game worlds?

Think about it.  This character is not interesting because he's inflexible; he's interesting because he's complicated.