Further Notes on Creating the Character

The player's character is essentially made of four parts.  We have a loose perception of the character's personal nature, represented by the ability stats, telling us a little of what the individual is like.  Then there's the character's resilience, represented by hit points, number of levels and armour class.  This tells us the likelihood of the character surviving a conflict.  Next, we have what the character can do, represented varyingly by spells, proficiencies, special abilities, powers and feats, depending on the system version.  Finally, there's what the character owns, the list of personal equipment, tools, even property and emblems of status.

These things influence each other.  For example, the character's title (a thing that's "had") offers something the character can "do" (order soldiers into battle) or what the character is like (responsible or tyrannical).  A character's charisma gives a sense of the character's nature while also possibly defining actions the character can take, such as impressing others, or dare not take, lest they repel others.  What a character has, such as weapons, armour and magic items, can increase his or her resiliency.  It's not that any of this is new to the reader — but I wish to stress that there's a deep-seated interconnection between these different elements that makes the character a remarkably FLUID game invention.  Nothing like it has ever existed before; as a model, it's vastly more complex than those things it's often compared with, like the role an actor plays or a persona one takes to confuse an enemy.

An actor's role possesses NO fluidity at all, except in the exact way the performance is given.  As an actor, my location on a stage or before the camera is determined by the director, the camera operator, the limitations of the theatre space and the need to place me where other actors can be seen communicating and emoting with me.  In a rehearsal, an enormous amount of time is spent in a process called "blocking," in which the actor's movement is strictly defined — even to where the moment I lift my hand to brush my hair is defined by a specific word in the script.  In a good production, no movement is left to the actor.  The actor's role is to take someone else's words and directions and give it the ring of truth — to make all the artifice and fakery of the stage look as though a real person stands before you, actually going through something for the first time that he or she has actually performed hundreds of times before, in rehearsals and previous runs of the play.  NOTHING whatsoever in this bears ANY similarity to playing a character in D&D.  Those who wallow around for the actor as an example plainly know nothing of which they speak, either of role-playing games or of performance.  They're morons who have seen a play or movie and have been utterly duped into believing there aren't fifty people involved in the actor's performance.

The confidence artist hits closer to the mark, as the role requires considerable flexibility and nuance to fleece the mark.  However, the practice of playing a character in D&D has similarity to this sort of presentation when the player's character chooses to be a con artist within the framework of the game.  A con artist is a momentary effort; it's not designed to be sustained over a long period and ultimately depends on no one knowing the artist is really a different person.  Whereas in D&D, everyone knows what the character is.  There's no "con."  The character's actions are legitimate; even when the character sets out to dupe an NPC, those actions are still legitimate, because we all know what's happening.  In no way does the con artist's role reflect what a D&D character is.

We weaken the invention every time we try to define the game character as "like" something else.  It's like nothing else.  It's its own thing.  We only turn to a simile in desperation, because the character is SO absurdly different from anything in our experience, we don't know how to properly describe it.  But we cheapen the concept when we make comparisons.

The character is a mechanism.  It is not a represention of the player's thoughts, beliefs, desires or personality.  It is a machine that translates what the player wants to do into a game system purposed to determine if that want is possible.  Any rule, therefore, which is not directly affected by some metric of the character's design, is an effort to bypass the "character" in order to empower the PLAYER.

For example, the so-called "rule of cool."  The player says, "My character climbs the giant's leg and stabs him in the chest."  Within the character's design, there's no ability for this.  There's no combat rule that covers this.  There are no rules at all for climbing a giant's body ... though there are rules that suggest this would take much longer than the player imagines, and that climbing a surface actually moving and in combat would make the move impossible.

However, the new interpretation urges the DM to "overlook the rules" whenever the player shows efforts at innovation and "being cool."  In other words, skip the character entirely and let the player's "thoughts" fight the giant.  This approach allows the player to change the physical laws of the universe.  If the DM thinks this has been done cleverly enough, he or she gives the player permission to do so.

Those who play this way might just as well admit that the character, and all that makes up the character, is merely a prop.  Which is not the game.  It is some other game that pretends to be D&D.  The game is to accept limitations the setting and the player's own character places on the player's actions, so that the player must work within the boundaries of what he or she has — no matter how cool the alternative is.  The game is not based on the player's ability to invent anything that might pop into the player's head, but to invent approaches within boundaries put outside the player's control.

The best case scenario for game play is, then, for the player to enable success from things that seem utterly inadequate to produce success.  To take a single, desperate action and turn around a combat.  To astutely turn a usually dismissable object, or ability, into a powerful if momentary weapon.  To bank on the lowest stat the character possesses and swing for the fences ... and have it pan out.  Such moments always produce wild cheers and pounding of the table, not to mention incidents that are remembered.

Of course, this also means that often such efforts are disastrously inadequate, ending in failure.  Which means, as has been stated on this blog, failure is also an intrinsic part of the game.

It means the players must accept failure as a possibility — even as a probable outcome, if they bite off more than they can chew.  It means they must accept that failure with dignity, if they wish to continue participating.  It means holding players who can't accept failure accountable, even when set out to change the rules loudly, or pound the table with demands, or sit and sulk until they get their way, by turning them out from the game until their behaviour improves.  Being a DM in some degree calls for defending the game against those who would dismantle it for their own ends.  Not the "DM's Game," in the selfish context that many DMs righteously defend, but THE game, the one that is defined by the rules and structure that everyone present has agreed to play by.

If you are a new DM, you must get this agreement in place before you can play.  The best time to do that is in rolling up the player characters.  As each part of the character is generated, make it perfectly clear to all the players what the boundaries are that these metrics and numbers define.  Your strength is this; it allows this; it does not allow that.  This is how many hit points you have.  If you lose them all, you die.  No special contingent last-minute reprieve will be provided; so cherish your hit points and spend them wisely.  This die that we roll determines if you hit or miss ... and no clever mixing of words or proposed inventive creativity will turn this "7" into a "17."  So plan to fail.  PLAN for it.  Because it will happen.  And when it does, make plans, now, to accept that you've failed.  Plan to laugh it off, plan to make little of it, even if your heart is breaking, even if you doubt your future interest in the game.  Be strong.  Remember there are others here, who feel your pain ... who worry that they will be next.  So plan.  Decide that you're ready to accept the game's consequences, NOW, while we're rolling your character.  Or don't play.

This is the message you have to send.  You'll need to be strong yourself; you'll need to possess an evident composed, serious manner and style as you gently describe each part of the character's limitations.  You'll need to be fair ... and so your tone and words must convince the players that you'll not inconsiderately spend their character's lives on some whim.  You care for their characters just as you care for them as people.  Promise that if anyone dies, you'll know the rule that killed them backwards and forwards.  Promise that if there's a means to reverse a disastrous situation, you, the DM, will be the first to bring the players' attention to it.  You are not their enemy.  But you will uphold the agreed-upon rules, because someone has to.

As DM, you've accepted that responsibility.