Thursday, February 27, 2020

Emergent Character Building in Dungeons and Dragons




Image: Black Sorcerer by Oriental-Lady on Deviantart

I’ve blogged about the narrative mechanics of old school D&D before, in order to counter the idea that D&D is just a mechanical “beer and pretzels” sort of game. 


In this blog post I want to talk about how character development happens in old school games.

AD&D (my preferred edition) is typical of old school games in that it doesn’t really do “character backstory”. Some more modern systems also add in personality features to characters at the generation stage. So things like, ‘list one dislike and one like your character has” or “come up with a rumor about your character, a secret that none of the other characters know and a goal that your character has”, that sort of thing.

AD&D does none of this. Your character’s background is entirely up to you and the DM to decide. So for example, IMC the only character backstory you have is where you came from and what you do other than your class (e.g. your character’s non-class skill, like fisherman, bowyer, blacksmith or leather worker). Other than that, the only clues you have to what your character is like are their class, their alignment, their race and perhaps what god they worship. 

There is certainly nothing wrong with doing more than this, with coming up with characteristics for your PC that create the personality you will be playing. And there is nothing wrong with having more backstory. Backstory can plug you into the game world in an interesting way, create “buy-in”, and get players excited about playing the game. I acknowledge all of these potential advantages, and I have played in and enjoyed games where they have been realized at the table. 

So to be crystal clear, I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t do this, or that it can’t be part of a successful, fun, gaming experience.

However, it’s worth considering some of the potential benefits of doing it in a more minimalistic way as AD&D does. A stripped down approach might be appealing to your group, or a nice variation on your regular style.

The Benefits
The biggest difference to the old school approach is that it shifts the process of defining your PC from the beginning of the game to actual play at the table, allowing in game actions to dictate events, not backstory or character traits. 

An analogy for this difference that I find helpful is the difference between acting and improv. When you act you are given a character with particular features, and lines for them to say. The character is defined by what is written before you start to play the role. Actors interpret this when they perform, it isn’t rote, but the character is defined for the most part before they are played.

Improv gives you a bare bones skeleton of a role, and you develop that role primarily in the process of playing it. It’s funny, someone suggested to me that old school gaming produced PCs without personalities, they were sort of empty cyphers for stereotypes because the players had little to no guidance on how to play their PCs. 

But this is not what happens in most cases. Indeed, if you think about it, playing roles is a natural thing for most people. Children role play instinctively with only minimal guidance as to how the role is to be acted out, and they LOVE doing it. 

Players discover their PCs as they play. The environment produces events, and as the players make in game choices in reaction to that environment they define the characteristics of their PCs. The longer you play a PC, the more you get a feeling for how your PC will respond, the more “natural” it becomes.

These in-game defining features are no less meaningful than features created in a backstory, but they are subtly different. They are more spontaneous, and in an interesting way they feel more real because they are concrete reactions to in-game situations. It’s the difference between saying “my PC is brave because she came from a war-torn nation and had to flee for her life” as part of your backstory, and saying “my PC is brave because she took on an ogre on her own when the rest of the party was downed”. 

PC characteristics that emerge from play organically feel earned, they feel real, because they  are born out of role playing experiences, not out of backstory written before the PC has ever been played at the table. Again, there is nothing wrong with backstory, but it is important to realize that PC characteristics that emerge from game play are just as powerful and impactful.

I find that this also reduces the tendency for players to play stereotypes. The surly dwarf, the aloof elf, that sort of thing. Without a pre-set collection of backstory elements the player is free in the moment of play to direct their character whatever way they want, and this produces interesting variations at the table. Sure, some people play to type even without the backstories and such, but I find that you get something more interesting from this style of play, namely a version of the player reflected through the PC, rather than a PC directed by a player. 

In an interesting way, when a PC doesn’t have a backstory or an extensive set of pre-defined characteristics the player BECOMES the PC as they are relatively undefined when they start, they inhabit the role. Characters become defined by their actions, how they responded to the game world, what choices they made in game. And that character’s story becomes what happened in the game. 

This is important as what happens in the game is a shared experience with others, not something that happened outside of this shared experience. Other people were there to watch it happen, which in itself makes it a powerful experience. 

The difference can be expressed in another way.

Say your PC has a backstory element where they dislike wizards (for whatever reason, perhaps a wizard killed their parents). When they encounter wizards in the game they have their PC react negatively due to this backstory element. The player role plays the dislike because it’s there in the character background.

But say instead that a PC is almost killed by a wizard in game, the animosity that comes from that experience is different, as it happened to the player while they were playing the PC. It’s personal in a way that the backstory isn’t. I find that character traits generated through play have a powerful immersive element. You have lived through the experience in a real way.

Another benefit of this approach is that it works against the tendency for players to look to their character sheets to decide what their PC would do. If you have an involved backstory, goals and plot points associated with your PC then these features become reference points for decision making. The party encounters a soldier from the Halkarnian army, and in the PC’s backstory their family was slaughtered by the Halkarnian army, so they feel the need to react to that in an appropriate way because that’s something that is part of their character background. 

Having a minimal backstory and role playing guidance means that the player has to decide on the spot how they choose to respond to the situation. You don’t need to consult your PC’s written background to know what to do, you react because of something that happened to you in play. A Halkarnian army soldier killed your fellow PC, so now YOU want to attack them.

Having played D&D this way for more than three decades I can say that it can produce remarkably powerful role-playing experiences. Your character's experiences matter to you as they are your experiences as well, you were there when they happened. There is an immediateness to this sort of experience, something visceral and real. Defining your PC’s characteristics in play is a unique experience, you build the role as you play it. You could call this “organic” I suppose, but whatever you call it there is nothing quite like it.

As an added bonus, it lowers the barriers to entry for a new player. Having to create a backstory, personality traits, goals, rumors, etc. about a new PC can be intimidating and time consuming. Some players find it challenging. The AD&D approach gets you up and running with minimal prep. That’s a bug for some, a feature for others, but it is worth noting.

Now, there are some players that NEED to have a backstory, personality traits and goals in order to role play, and some that don’t. So my approach to this is to default to AD&D’s minimalist style, but I tell my players that if they want to have a backstory, defined personality traits and goals when they start the game then they can and I can help them if desired. 

The point of this isn’t to push a “there is only one way to play” argument, the point is to show some of the benefits of a different approach. 


The image at the top is the last PC I played (about 5 years ago now), Farrenthir Tellbinder, magic user.

1 comment:

  1. Back in the day we only created enough backstory to give the character a bit of color, a reason to go adventuring and, frankly, something to tell the other players when we were introduced to their characters.
    These days I'm playing in an online 5e campaign, and my PC has a pretty involved backstory. But it's one that gives him a reason to go adventuring and something to tell the other PC's when we were introduced. LOL

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