I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.
Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.
The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.
A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.
Infinite anything in a dnd game is always a risky move haha.
Session 1 - revealing would break character, so I don’t need to hammer out the details yet.
Session 40 - well shit. I knew I was forgetting something.
Full credit to the guy for managing to play 40 sessions like that, though.
Characters rarely, if ever, turn out exactly as they’re envisioned- that’s part of the beauty of them. As long as you play someone that works well with the team and keeps the party together so everyone can enjoy the adventure, then you’ve done well. Sure, this guy probably turned out to just feel like a haunted, cold person travelling with the party for no clear reason, but that can still contribute to having a solid party dynamic.
One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.
Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.
If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like
The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].
The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don’t recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.
This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
You’ve sort of reinvented Fate. In Fate, you can spend a fairly renewable resource to “Declare a story detail”. You typically need to justify what you’re trying to do with something on your character or the scene. So if your character has the property “Everything I do is to avenge my father”, it would be likely be an easy sell to the group to be like “That bandit! I saw him the night my father died!”
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/fate-points#declaring-a-story-detail
Fate has a lot of good ideas that are more in line with how I think people would intuitively play RPGs. I think a lot of people playing D&D and its close relatives would enjoy Fate more. D&D is by comparison extremely limited in how creative you can be, rules-as-written.
The GM in Fate is also encouraged to invoke your character’s backstory. If your character has like “Cultists want your blood” Trouble, the GM can offer you fate points to make that come up. That’s a core part of the game’s resource economy. So when you finish dealing with the bandits and settle in to the inn, the GM can be like “As you’re sipping the host’s tea, you catch him grinning at you slyly. You hear footsteps outside. For a Fate point, how about this guy is in on the cult and signaled for his friends.”
This puts a lot more narrative control in the hands of the players. Some people really like this. Extremely controlling GMs probably won’t. Players who just “want to be told a story” but aren’t watching a movie for some reason also probably won’t. But when it works, it really makes the game’s story collaborative.
By comparison, D&D feels absolutely barebones, especially for character and narrative. It’s just missing whole systems
I really enjoyed the few times we got to play with fate. It was definitely a head scratching moment for all of us, as we’d played nothing but d&d until then.
That was a really interesting explanation. Thanks for typing it up.
Various Powered by the Apocalypse games do include player initiated exposition
Feels like every would-be Double Vergil Sephiroth player fails to land step one drafting the “loner with a dark past”. There still has to be a reason to gaf about the party. Now, what’s fun is ‘naturally thawing the ice prince’ over the course of the first arc of his interaction with the party.
I call it the Law of Zuko: it shouldn’t take more than like five sessions for an ice prince/lone wolf/edgemancer archetype to either start visibly, but plausibly-deniably caring for the party they’re in; or to start accidentally leaving blatant hooks to the tune of trust for other players to grab onto as far as inter-personal stories are concerned. Ten if the ice prince you’re running is especially crotchety; but it’s hard for me to keep that kind of energy going that long. The only thing better than an edgy badass action hero is when the hero stops feeling the need to project edgy badassery.
One of my recent characters was your classic racist greedy dwarf. But it was her greed that knew no bounds so the racism part rarely came up because why would they be an asshole to a bunch of adventurers helping them get rich beyond imagining? Why would they be an asshole to the people giving them a ton of money for running around to save the world? It mostly manifested when we’d get minor encounters and I’d suggest we have better things to do than help out these elf randos, or during combat I’d be on top of healing any dwarves but drag my feet just a little for other people. It’s important that your character flaws still function within a group and that you’re not using them as an excuse to force solo play or excuse being a dick irl
I’m playing a Star Wars Saga Edition game right now where my character is a former privateer fighting in the Jedi Civil War for the Sith. He was fairly honest with his party members about his former criminal affiliations, that’s how he met them in the first place. The fact he was on the wrong side of the war only came out when a conversation about the war came up and he was directly asked about it. The Jedi in the party took it surprisingly well, but that’s probably more due to the conversation being completely unserious other than his admission.
Lesson learned: you can probably trust your party with your dark past.
I’ve always wanted to make a rogue with a super edgy back story and they are wearing black and all that with a mask but as soon as you talk to him he is just super enthusiastic about helping people and is super friendly with an NZ accent.
Had this happen in a Savage Worlds campaign set in the old west. My gunslinger Mark Reid was only 5’ 6”, slight of build, and appearance half hidden by their slightly oversized debt hat and tinted glasses.
They were actually Maryrose Caroline O’Shannon, from a semi-wealthy Irish family. She’d ran away to US to avoid an arranged marriage.
I’d dropped a few vague hints, but we were playing online, so they were easy to miss. I thing the GM was planning on her old life catching up with her at some point but the group broke up before anything was ever revealed.
(Mary/Mark Read was a real life female pirate who posed a man until she ran into Anne Bonnie & Calico Jack Rackam. The character was kind of a combination of Mary & Anne, visually leaning towards the pretty boy appearance of Leo from Quick & the Dead.)
I’m in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I’m playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he’s really bad at it and it’s obvious he’s an alien infiltrator, and because he’s bad at it he has no idea that it’s obvious. The party’s superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.
It’s been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I’ve finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we’re now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.
Still, I’ve been having fun so I don’t mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they’re PCs. :)
Sometimes it’s different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn’t interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there’s this list of quests he’s working on and he’d appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there’s anyone to be instantly suspicious of it’s someone like that.
