Stock Characters

This is a western from 1957. Some readers will recognize which. I'll give a hint: it's the opening scene. The main character is dead center, moving from left to right.  He's the good guy.  The others are background characters ... they're here because it matters that this not be an empty saloon; the plot requires lots of witnesses.  These characters have no lines, however, because the story is told through visuals — meaning these other unimportant people are extras.

The good guy is the player character.

This is a bad guy.  He's not "the" bad guy, he's "the" bad guy's brother ... but he's here to commit a murder that sets up the film's plot.  In film parlance, he's a stereotypical fictional person of a specific type, age, social class and motivation.  He's a stock character.

In D&D parlance, he's a plot hook.  He's there to taunt the party and get them inextricably invested in the adventure, which must be resolved before the party's safe.  Note the mocking gaze, the mottled leather vest, the low gun-belt, the flashy wide-brimmed hat, the choice to buy a full bottle of liquor.  These are the tell-tale cliches that rush to the front of a DM's imagination — every time.  But we can talk about visuals another day.

The stock character is a problem.  Savvy players recognize him immediately: because typically he's the only NPC that notices or addresses the player characters.  Or, to be more accurate, he's the only character the DM describes in the room at length.  "There's a room full of people; one of them is wearing a big brimmed hat.  He's standing at the bar, watching you as you enter; his lips curl in a smile."  The message is obvious: the DM wants you to address this guy.  I can do this set up all day long and every time the players will dutifully do their part.  It's like a monkey hitting a lever to get grapes.

But turn on the DM and say, "Describe any other person in the room," and almost certainly the DM will launch into a general description of everyone, and not the one person asked for.  "Uh, they're cowboys, having drinks, wearing basic cowboy clothing and, uh, there are a few women at the table with them."  This is because the DM doesn't want us to talk to these other people; they're not relevant to the DM's story and therefore of no use to the adventure, except as set dressing.  Quite quickly we'll be back with the man and his black hat, conscientiously moving the adventure, um, "forward."

This happens without anyone's noticing it.  We're forcefully brainwashed from a young age to recognize how these people appear on film as opposed to those people.  There's a deep, intensive science involved in grabbing our focus and directing it, one that we're unconscious of.  Look again at the first picture.

To get a good, clean screenshot, I waited until the character, moving through the crowd, pauses; as he does, he turns his face away from the camera.  His waist is framed neatly between the girl and the two cowboys at the bottom, with the vertical candle pointing upwards to force your eye to look up.  His head is likewise framed between the lantern and the vertical seam in the wall ... while the adobe brick is horizontal.  There's a lone cowboy on the right, who's looking up at the character, turning your eye away from the darkness on the right (which will be used to frame the actor again later on in the shot), while the one fellow who's standing is gently leaning towards the shot's centre.  None of which, I promise, you'll notice when you watch the film; the moment is less than one second long, probably about 21 frames, and your thoughts are full of the lead actor (whom you'd have recognized in 1957, like recognizing Brad Pitt in a film now).  Some readers who don't know the film have figured out who he is by now, and are looking him up in IMDb to figure out which movie it is.

While you don't consciously recognize all this, the cinematographer is paid serious money to set this up; hours and hours are spent on this framing; good actors learn to hit their marks perfectly so the work isn't wasted (one reason why a seemingly popular actor stops finding work, while some other tiresome actor gets three movies a year).   You don't see it but your brain does.  A scene like this and you instantly, habitually ignore everyone; you know none of these people will matter, so you don't look at them (unless, of course, you're a youtube doof with hundreds of hours to pick over films frame by frame looking for someone's wristwatch).

So when the DM tells you to look at the character at the bar with words alone, your brain filters the scene through a hundred thousand film hours, scrubs out the extras and spotlights the relevant NPC.  The bar might as well be empty.

This is generally fine for most worlds ... but the system breaks when it meets with a sandbox.  The difference between the film above and you actually walking into a random western 1875 American saloon (recognizing it wouldn't look like this saloon, which I covered yesterday) is that there are no extras or stock characters.  The saloon is full of people, actual beings who haven't read a script, aren't told where to stand, don't dress like stock characters and have reasons for being there that have nothing to do with you or a film audience.  They'll respond to you exactly as any group responds to you in the real world right now ... and without the cues you need to tell which of them are of such-and-such a social standing, an experience level or of a particular motivation.  The good guys and the bad guys look alike.  And none of them care a whit about you.

They're not necessarily there to advance a story line or a plot.  Oh, yes, of course I can have one of them be a plot hook if I want, I've written about that before.  But it's important to understand I don't have to.  AND it's important to understand that every person in the room has a story; every person is potentially a plot hook; every person might be be beneficial, or malevolent, towards the party.  A roomful of people are like 40 dungeon doors waiting to be opened ... with any number of them leading to nowhere except a home and kids.  But you don't know; and I'm not going to definitely tell you.

Therefore, if someone starts a conversation with the party in my game, that might be a plot hook.  It also might be a local being friendly, with no agenda whatsoever.  If a local trips over the player's chair, that could be totally innocent.  People in saloons trip over chairs all the time.

But a genre savvy player that's been weened on everyone-that-talks-is-a-stock-character, this gets a bit ludicrous in short order.  Every NPC who offers to help the party is a suspicious, dangerous character; every comment is an invitation to a saloon fight; every glance is loaded with intrigue and overthinking; no one is taken at their word; this is obviously a set-up for a dangerous fight that's definitely waiting outside the front door.  And as the players drift conclusively into rank paranoia, I'm forced to adopt William Goldman's strategy in the Princess Bride: "She does not get eaten by the sharks at this time."

"I give you my word," I explain, "that when this guard says he intends to help you, everything your character knows having lived 25 years in my world, and the nature of guards, and the expression you see on the guard's face, that the guard is being genuine and is not a random plant in the employ of the bad guys at this time.  You can trust him.  As a DM, I'm not going to fuck you on this."

It has to be made extremely plain, you understand.  Otherwise, it still won't be believed.

My face-to-face campaigns were easily purged of this illness, perhaps because of my body language and because my family and friends know my character and recognize I get zero pleasure from "gotcha D&D."  It just isn't my game.  I enjoy offering odd, ordinary, loyal, dutiful or lackidaisical characters as potential resources for the players to use ... not as false fronts hiding mastermind criminals.  What I said about my game being "political" is relevant here.

Greater success in my game, above that of surviving and advancing the character's ability, lies in reconciling oneself with the natural and cultivated elements of the game world, such that the faithful are rallied together as allies against the unseen, as-yet-unmet holders of power, who jealously hate to lose any of that power to newcomers.  To survive a dangerous world, the players will need to bring some of it under their control, to ensure a safe refuge against the outside; this will be seen as a challenge to others who also hold spaces of their own.   These will see the players as a threat; and they will use their minions to test the players, and if possible, eradicate the players.  The players alone, being relatively few in number, cannot rely on themselves alone.  They will need friends; they will need support networks and goodwill.  They will need to play a long game to obtain these things.  They will need to trust NPCs.

This requires seeing every NPC as a potentially rich, motivated character ... which I can make of them, step-by-step, as the players deliberately seek to know them better.  Faithful NPCs can be retained; questionable NPCs can be reconsidered or ejected.  But none of them are necessarily as simple and bald-faced as a stock character made for a two hour film.  A D&D setting sustains itself for hundreds and hundreds of hours; there's time to let the actors be people.