I love puppies. Do you love puppies? Anyway, this article isn't about puppies, it's about making your campaign world relevant to your players, but puppies are so fluffy oh my gosh you guys, and they're pretty much the Number 2 thing googled for on the internet so puppies puppies puppies puppies puppies arf arf arf #somanypuppies. Anyway, now time for the article!
Sun Tzu said “Know your enemy.”
The Temple of Apollo said “Know thyself.”
A common refrain in any creative or business endeavor: “Know your audience.”
Curious thing about those aphorisms applied to D&D and other RPGs: they all mean basically the same thing. They mean, “Know your PC’s.”
The PC’s are your “audience” because they are the avatars through which the players experience your creations, your events and scenes and plots and enemies and locations. The PC’s are your “enemy” because what you make is antagonistic toward the audience: they will endure tests and need to overcome obstacles and struggle against you. The PC’s are even “yourself,” because their choices say a lot about what kind of game they expect you to run. If you’re prone running combat-heavy orgies of violence, don’t expect a lot of pacifists.
The exhortation should be obvious: know them.
Indeed, if you know nothing about the game you are to run except what PC’s are going to be played in it, you know enough to plan out a session, and adventure, even a whole campaign, and for those things to be rewarding and compelling and interesting.
The more you know, the more you can exploit...
The Narcissism of RPGs
You are engaged in a creative performance whenever you play an RPG.
That’s play. Not plan. Creating a character or creating a setting or creating a villain is certainly creative, but it’s kind of narcissistic creativity: you make something, and then appreciate how awesome this thing you made is. If you’re a DM enraptured with your own NPC’s political maneuvering or dramatic villain, or a player so proud of your damage output or your elaborate backstory, until it hits gameplay, you’re just sitting in a room marveling at your own creativity.
When you use it in play, the creativity gets presented to others: “Here’s my elaborate backstory,” you say, “Enjoy!”
Only, often, the response is “Meh.” Or a polite “Cool.” The thing with our creativity being expressed in a game is that if the creativity isn’t meant to be played with, it’s not doing very much. The audience ultimately doesn’t care that much. The reason they don’t care that much is because they’re here to play a game, not listen to a story: your elaborate character or world history is all well and good (though don’t be surprised if folks tune out while when you get to about the third or fourth new proper noun…), but that’s just exhibiting your creativity, putting it on display. It’s saying, “Look at this cool thing I did. Isn’t it cool?” The best possible outcome there is assent: “Yep. Cool.”
Playing an RPG is a creative performance. It’s not about making an awesomely detailed campaign world. It’s not about having a 10-page setting bible. It’s not about having a complex character history. It’s about how those things are actively done, in the moment, in a room with you and your friends. This is one of the things that separates RPG’s from board games or video games. However elaborate your prose for your in-character World of Warcraft character, it’s not performed, in person, in a room with other people, actively in the moment, using your body and your eyes and your voice and your gestures. However exciting a game of Ticket to Ride is, you’re not pretending to be a train, or getting into the mindset of the passengers.
That performance means that your setting history and your character’s sky-high defenses aren’t important until they are something that is used in play. And being used involves more than just being stated – it involves being interacted with, manipulated, played with. Nobody cares about your awesome creation until someone else at the table picks it up and runs with it.
That makes narcissism nearly impossible. It involves taking something you’ve created, and trusting the other people at the table to take it and use it in a responsible way, getting their own unique spin and interpretation on it. It indelibly changes the thing, making the other players part and parcel of the experience. If another player takes your complex back-story, and says, “Well, I was there for most of that, too, because my character and your character were friends,” it changes your back-story just as it changes theirs. It’s no longer just your creation. It has a place in the minds and histories and games of the other players at the table, too, and their own creations. You have influenced others. You’re not just exhibiting your creations, you are sharing them, seeing them altered, and getting them back.
It’s a potent mix.
Using the Illusion
So, what’s the point of all this talk about performing creativity? What does it have to do with making our games better?
It works like this: imagine you are in a formless, shapeless, colorless void, deprived of sensory stimulation, surrounded by nebulous nothingness. This is your game before it is played: nothingness. Nonexistence. Nirvana.
Then, one of your players comes up to you. Lets call her Cecilia. Cecilia says, “I’m going to be an elf wizard.”
BOOM. The universe is created, and it has elf wizards in it. But it does more than imply the existence of that particular elf wizard. Suddenly, you can start building a world around them.
Like: do other elf wizards exist? How about elves that are not wizards? Wizards that are not elves? What kinds of elf wizards might there be? How are elf wizards made? How do they live their daily lives? How do they die?
You start building the world around the player, like a planet forming around a rocky core, collecting more mass as it spins, suddenly full of interesting topology. More than just a world, though, you’re creating a relationship, something that can be performed in play: Cecilia, as an elf wizard, is going to be different from some elves, similar to some wizards, involved with them at various levels. This is relevant in pretending to be that elf wizard: if she’s a typical elf in a world full of elf wizards, the expectations are going to be different than if she’s an unusual elf in a world full of non-elf wizards, where she’s an exceptional character. Those two little words are two little hooks, ways that the setting you’re creating applies actively to the character Cecilia has created. You can play with her character by having, say, an NPC comment on how strange it is to see an elf as a wizard, and she can play with your setting by having her character blow that NPC to smithereens for his foolish impudence. Or whatever.
There’s more than just context, though. An RPG, like any game, is driven by conflict, and so not only do you have an elf wizard, you have, implicitly, a group that opposes elf wizards, simply by her choice to create one. Those who oppose elf wizards are going to be dichotomous in some way: maybe they’re anti-intellectual fire elementals who love to burn trees and books. Maybe they’re dwarven lumberjacks who believe all wizardry is evil. Whatever they are, they have context, too, which means that not only has Cecilia’s elf wizard given birth to crusading dwarven lumberjacks, she’s also given birth to the mountains in which they live, and the valley in which they war with the elves, and their Lumberjack-King, who sleeps all night and works all day (his work is elf-murder).
In addition to context and conflict, a character has a relationship with the other party members: Cecilia is playing an elf wizard, but Matt’s playing a dwarf cleric, which means that even with the cruel dwarven lumberjacks, there’s something that unites her character and Matt’s character. Perhaps it would have to do with Matt’s conflict: perhaps they both oppose the Cult of the Night Sky, which is made up of vampires. Maybe they ALSO both oppose the Lumber-jerks: perhaps this is a splinter group (HA!) of dwarves, or perhaps Matt’s character belongs to the minority faction working for peace and mutual prosperity. So what do the rest of the elves think about these dwarves? And what to these dwarves think about those elves? And more interestingly: what do the vampires and the dwarves think of each other? Why might they work together? What plot could benefit both of them?
By the time you have 3-6 different PC’s, you have more world material than you will ever need, and all of it precisely relevant to the characters in your games, which means that it will not just gather dust in your notebook or be met with apathy at the table. When you say, in that first session, there is an arcane library on fire because of dwarven vampires wielding chainsaws, Matt and Cecilia will both be very interested in how and why that happened, because you’ve taken elements of their characters, and woven them into the world. You took their contribution, and responded.
…And Knowing Is Half The Battle!
As you dig down to the intricate details of the characters, their precise stats and their abilities, it becomes clearer what elements of the world they cause to exist. A high AC, for instance, implies not only the tools to achieve it (the armor, the agility, the training), but also the existence of things that create those tools. If your knight is clad in brilliant armor, somewhere, there’s a crafter who considers that their masterpiece, and somewhere, there’s a villain who doesn’t rely on weapons to kill the PC’s. This villain might be the same villain implied by their class or race, or might be a DIFFERENT villain. If Matt’s dwarf cleric also has a high AC, maybe the vampires love using poison gas. Or maybe some other wicked group uses poison gas.
Any particular game element – a skill bonus, a weapon, an ability score – that is high or low or common or unusual in a character can be sprung out and spun into a world where that character is very, very relevant. This works as much for you as for the players, too: if you’ve got an awesome villain, consider how that villain impacts the PC’s. Suddenly you’re not putting your creativity on display, or keeping it bottled up, but putting it down on the table, so that everyone can play with it. That’s the point after all: playing the game.
So I want to hear from you: what elements of PC’s have you spun out into world or story elements? Or, what story elements have you embedded in your PC’s? Has your knowledge of what the PC’s are capable of translated into a compelling game, or not? Let me know down in the
If you'd just like to post pictures of puppies in response to this article, that's cool, too.
Sun Tzu said “Know your enemy.”
The Temple of Apollo said “Know thyself.”
A common refrain in any creative or business endeavor: “Know your audience.”
Curious thing about those aphorisms applied to D&D and other RPGs: they all mean basically the same thing. They mean, “Know your PC’s.”
The PC’s are your “audience” because they are the avatars through which the players experience your creations, your events and scenes and plots and enemies and locations. The PC’s are your “enemy” because what you make is antagonistic toward the audience: they will endure tests and need to overcome obstacles and struggle against you. The PC’s are even “yourself,” because their choices say a lot about what kind of game they expect you to run. If you’re prone running combat-heavy orgies of violence, don’t expect a lot of pacifists.
The exhortation should be obvious: know them.
Indeed, if you know nothing about the game you are to run except what PC’s are going to be played in it, you know enough to plan out a session, and adventure, even a whole campaign, and for those things to be rewarding and compelling and interesting.
The more you know, the more you can exploit...
The Narcissism of RPGs
You are engaged in a creative performance whenever you play an RPG.
That’s play. Not plan. Creating a character or creating a setting or creating a villain is certainly creative, but it’s kind of narcissistic creativity: you make something, and then appreciate how awesome this thing you made is. If you’re a DM enraptured with your own NPC’s political maneuvering or dramatic villain, or a player so proud of your damage output or your elaborate backstory, until it hits gameplay, you’re just sitting in a room marveling at your own creativity.
When you use it in play, the creativity gets presented to others: “Here’s my elaborate backstory,” you say, “Enjoy!”
Only, often, the response is “Meh.” Or a polite “Cool.” The thing with our creativity being expressed in a game is that if the creativity isn’t meant to be played with, it’s not doing very much. The audience ultimately doesn’t care that much. The reason they don’t care that much is because they’re here to play a game, not listen to a story: your elaborate character or world history is all well and good (though don’t be surprised if folks tune out while when you get to about the third or fourth new proper noun…), but that’s just exhibiting your creativity, putting it on display. It’s saying, “Look at this cool thing I did. Isn’t it cool?” The best possible outcome there is assent: “Yep. Cool.”
Playing an RPG is a creative performance. It’s not about making an awesomely detailed campaign world. It’s not about having a 10-page setting bible. It’s not about having a complex character history. It’s about how those things are actively done, in the moment, in a room with you and your friends. This is one of the things that separates RPG’s from board games or video games. However elaborate your prose for your in-character World of Warcraft character, it’s not performed, in person, in a room with other people, actively in the moment, using your body and your eyes and your voice and your gestures. However exciting a game of Ticket to Ride is, you’re not pretending to be a train, or getting into the mindset of the passengers.
That performance means that your setting history and your character’s sky-high defenses aren’t important until they are something that is used in play. And being used involves more than just being stated – it involves being interacted with, manipulated, played with. Nobody cares about your awesome creation until someone else at the table picks it up and runs with it.
That makes narcissism nearly impossible. It involves taking something you’ve created, and trusting the other people at the table to take it and use it in a responsible way, getting their own unique spin and interpretation on it. It indelibly changes the thing, making the other players part and parcel of the experience. If another player takes your complex back-story, and says, “Well, I was there for most of that, too, because my character and your character were friends,” it changes your back-story just as it changes theirs. It’s no longer just your creation. It has a place in the minds and histories and games of the other players at the table, too, and their own creations. You have influenced others. You’re not just exhibiting your creations, you are sharing them, seeing them altered, and getting them back.
It’s a potent mix.
Using the Illusion
So, what’s the point of all this talk about performing creativity? What does it have to do with making our games better?
It works like this: imagine you are in a formless, shapeless, colorless void, deprived of sensory stimulation, surrounded by nebulous nothingness. This is your game before it is played: nothingness. Nonexistence. Nirvana.
Then, one of your players comes up to you. Lets call her Cecilia. Cecilia says, “I’m going to be an elf wizard.”
BOOM. The universe is created, and it has elf wizards in it. But it does more than imply the existence of that particular elf wizard. Suddenly, you can start building a world around them.
Like: do other elf wizards exist? How about elves that are not wizards? Wizards that are not elves? What kinds of elf wizards might there be? How are elf wizards made? How do they live their daily lives? How do they die?
You start building the world around the player, like a planet forming around a rocky core, collecting more mass as it spins, suddenly full of interesting topology. More than just a world, though, you’re creating a relationship, something that can be performed in play: Cecilia, as an elf wizard, is going to be different from some elves, similar to some wizards, involved with them at various levels. This is relevant in pretending to be that elf wizard: if she’s a typical elf in a world full of elf wizards, the expectations are going to be different than if she’s an unusual elf in a world full of non-elf wizards, where she’s an exceptional character. Those two little words are two little hooks, ways that the setting you’re creating applies actively to the character Cecilia has created. You can play with her character by having, say, an NPC comment on how strange it is to see an elf as a wizard, and she can play with your setting by having her character blow that NPC to smithereens for his foolish impudence. Or whatever.
There’s more than just context, though. An RPG, like any game, is driven by conflict, and so not only do you have an elf wizard, you have, implicitly, a group that opposes elf wizards, simply by her choice to create one. Those who oppose elf wizards are going to be dichotomous in some way: maybe they’re anti-intellectual fire elementals who love to burn trees and books. Maybe they’re dwarven lumberjacks who believe all wizardry is evil. Whatever they are, they have context, too, which means that not only has Cecilia’s elf wizard given birth to crusading dwarven lumberjacks, she’s also given birth to the mountains in which they live, and the valley in which they war with the elves, and their Lumberjack-King, who sleeps all night and works all day (his work is elf-murder).
In addition to context and conflict, a character has a relationship with the other party members: Cecilia is playing an elf wizard, but Matt’s playing a dwarf cleric, which means that even with the cruel dwarven lumberjacks, there’s something that unites her character and Matt’s character. Perhaps it would have to do with Matt’s conflict: perhaps they both oppose the Cult of the Night Sky, which is made up of vampires. Maybe they ALSO both oppose the Lumber-jerks: perhaps this is a splinter group (HA!) of dwarves, or perhaps Matt’s character belongs to the minority faction working for peace and mutual prosperity. So what do the rest of the elves think about these dwarves? And what to these dwarves think about those elves? And more interestingly: what do the vampires and the dwarves think of each other? Why might they work together? What plot could benefit both of them?
By the time you have 3-6 different PC’s, you have more world material than you will ever need, and all of it precisely relevant to the characters in your games, which means that it will not just gather dust in your notebook or be met with apathy at the table. When you say, in that first session, there is an arcane library on fire because of dwarven vampires wielding chainsaws, Matt and Cecilia will both be very interested in how and why that happened, because you’ve taken elements of their characters, and woven them into the world. You took their contribution, and responded.
…And Knowing Is Half The Battle!
As you dig down to the intricate details of the characters, their precise stats and their abilities, it becomes clearer what elements of the world they cause to exist. A high AC, for instance, implies not only the tools to achieve it (the armor, the agility, the training), but also the existence of things that create those tools. If your knight is clad in brilliant armor, somewhere, there’s a crafter who considers that their masterpiece, and somewhere, there’s a villain who doesn’t rely on weapons to kill the PC’s. This villain might be the same villain implied by their class or race, or might be a DIFFERENT villain. If Matt’s dwarf cleric also has a high AC, maybe the vampires love using poison gas. Or maybe some other wicked group uses poison gas.
Any particular game element – a skill bonus, a weapon, an ability score – that is high or low or common or unusual in a character can be sprung out and spun into a world where that character is very, very relevant. This works as much for you as for the players, too: if you’ve got an awesome villain, consider how that villain impacts the PC’s. Suddenly you’re not putting your creativity on display, or keeping it bottled up, but putting it down on the table, so that everyone can play with it. That’s the point after all: playing the game.
So I want to hear from you: what elements of PC’s have you spun out into world or story elements? Or, what story elements have you embedded in your PC’s? Has your knowledge of what the PC’s are capable of translated into a compelling game, or not? Let me know down in the
If you'd just like to post pictures of puppies in response to this article, that's cool, too.
