When you watch a movie, or read a book, one of the highlights in a story is finding points where an event or situation is highly meaningful to the protagonist(s). But, part of the thing is, until you know the characters, what is meaningful, or the weight of the events, might not be clear to you. As you get deeper into the story, you know the characters better and understand how significant some things are and what it means in that context.
“Who is this character and why does the player care about them?”
For Narrativist play in RPGs, this is a core point of play. The juicy part is where the fictional bits are meaningful to the character, and all of that is meaningful to us – the people playing/creating/witnessing the game. To be able to consistently deliver on that requires an understanding of the character(s) which I’m calling Character Intimacy. (There may be other people who have coined this idea, maybe with better terms? I don’t know, I’ve been out the theory circles for a long time.)
Being able to answer “Who is this character and why does this player care about them?” is how you can set up the right kinds of pressure and conflicts that allow us to see those points in play where the character (and player) is dealing with something that is laden with meaning. But getting there isn’t instantaneous.
Getting fluent in the character
The first issue is that you don’t know the character until you play the character. You might have an idea, you might have some backstory, but the real personality of the character is something that will only really come out when you have to see the character in play – a lot of ideas about who this character is can only be improvised in the moment.
Depending on the game and the player, becoming fluent in the character depends a fair amount on what kind of pressure(s) and situations the character is placed in, and the players’ own investment and desire to express the character through play.
In many long-form traditional games that are not set up for explicitly Narrativist play, I see a lot of times it takes 5-6 sessions for characters to get any kind of expression up to where players can start figuring out what matters. (Given that most of these games are set up for Illusionist/railroading play, the ultimate fact is that what matters to the characters or the players is irrelevant and never really tested in play.)
But in games that are better at it, I usually find it’s a 2-3 session turn around (maybe it could happen over the course of a single session if I still ran/played 4-6 hour sessions instead of 2-3 hour ones.). The first session is everyone asking “Who is my character?” and the second session being “Who is my character in relation to your character?”, sometimes well enough we get a good feel for them.
Designed Solutions
There are some ideas that allow you to do this more reliably and/or faster. The common one I’ve written about in the past is Flag mechanics. However, I’ve also explained as well that usually the Flags you see at the beginning of a game are guide posts and your job is to better nail down more accurately what is the real emotional punch for the players.
A second solution is games that tie a high pressure Narrativist bit to a core play mechanic. Ben Lehman’s Drifter’s Escape, for example, forces the player to choose between bad choices most of the game, so the pressure tester of “who is this character?” comes out relatively quickly. These mechanics, however, still depend on the group to quickly pick up character intimacy and better apply the pressure mechanics as you play, otherwise it rings hollow like most “morality choices” in videogames.
A third mechanic is anything that lets players set up the scenes and conflicts. While it is not interesting to a person to constantly be the only one setting up conflicts for their own character (see the Czege Principle: “When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”) – it can be helpful sometimes for players to be able to set up their own character’s adversity in order to highlight to the rest of the group what kind of things are important to them as a player and what conflicts/pressure is fun for that character to be enmeshed in. And, of course, if players can set these up for each other, it allows players who are invested in each others’ characters to also set up things as well.
Obviously, this is not a full list, but a few common examples.
“Are we there yet?”
You’ve hit character intimacy in a game when a situation pops up and you can immediately identify what it would look like as “This THING is the worst possible thing to happen for THIS particular character”. (“Frank finds out John has been lying? OH BOY.” “They’ve just given Mary the perfect chance for revenge?!?”) It’s that sort of thing you can see coming in a TV or movie drama and you just know it’s going to be intense.
Character intimacy is when you can identify the overt motivations of the character, but also see the nuances that complicate it – their doubt, fear, conflicting motivations, and so on. And, of course, beyond just understanding what makes the character tick, being able to reliably put them in situations that turn up the pressure for their particular needs/desires/fears.
For me, I find this is easier to attain in the conversations and down time between game sessions. Taking time to reflect on what choices the characters made, asking questions of the players that are out of character but highlight motivations, and so on. If the game depends less on a singular GM, it’s helpful for those ideas to be available to everyone – no reason you should be stuck to only learning about a character during play, if you can extend some of the play time to provide ideas outside of it as well.
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