red-headed android

part 2 of a series that started with ‘becoming aragorn’.

do you feel like a ‘bad player’ when you play TTRPGs, like dungeons and dragons? do you feel inadequate, or like you’re letting people down? do you wonder how you can fight these feelings and improve as a player, so everyone at the table has more fun?

in the bhagavad gita, a climactic scene of the mahabharata, the central character (arjuna) is about to fight a battle in which thousands will die. many of his friends are fighting on the opposite side. he doesn’t want to (who would?), so krishna, a god, has to talk him into it.

and krishna says look dude, you think you’re just a human being sitting here in this world, but the truth is that this is a story about killing people and your life is a story about being a warrior. that’s who you are. that’s what you have to do. the moral order of the universe depends on it. detach yourself from it if you want. absolve yourself of guilt by internalizing this idea, if you want. but you have to go kill those guys. the moral arc of the universe does not bend for you. you cannot break it. and right now, the moral arc of the universe wants everybody here dead.

your job as a player isn’t to be arjuna, to imagine yourself as a little guy living in an imaginary world. it’s to be krishna. characters in ttrpgs are people who live in the world—but more importantly, they’re Avatars For Doing Cool Shit created and controlled by divine forces with psychic powers (that’s you!) and your number one psychic power is knowing what the game is about.

have you ever noticed that characters in shows and movies and video games do really dumb shit all the time? it’s because they know what the world is about. teenagers in horror movies say “don’t worry, I’ll check it out” and wander off alone instead of calling the police because they know they’re in a horror movie. action movie protagonists jump off of bridges without a parachute because they know they’re in action movies. romance characters have stupid fights about nothing in the third act because they know they’re in a romance.

being a good player means finding out what kind of story you’re in, first. here are some ways:

you read the game, and you see what kind of genre it supports. that gives you a good framework for understanding what it wants its characters to do. D&D wants you to fight monsters and be a hero. Masks: A New Generation wants you to be a teenager with superpowers wrestling with emotional hardship. Traveller wants you to be a scrappy, clever spacer with brains and business sense.

you ask the GM “hey, what kind of tone are we going for? what do you want us to do, how do you want us to act?”, and if they say “do whatever you want”, ask some leading questions based on your best guess about the tone, and if they still say that instead of telling you their vision, find another game. life is too short.

you look at anything the other players and GM are saying about what they’re excited about, and if you see anything that’s clearly a tonal element—like “damn i hope we get to do some heist movie stuff in this Blades in the Dark game” or “i’m tired of sandbox D&D, i want to make connections with NPCs”—put that in your memory vault. if someone has made a character that’s all about social interaction and keeps talking about their goofy little quirks, this game is going to be slower, more fluff-driven, and have more social engagements in it.

once you know what kind of story you’re in, you use your second, way cooler psychic power that nonetheless relies on the first: you make a character who knows what kind of story they’re in.

when you create them, create someone who wants to do the kinds of things that you know the game is about. but that’s not ‘making’ a character, that’s just creating them. characters emerge through play. it runs deeper than that.

here’s how: you control everything they do, so anytime you want, anytime that feels right to you, anytime you see a golden opportunity to do The Thing that the genre demands, that the tone demands, you can tell them what the game is about.

you can whisper in their ear “look, i know you think you’re in a gritty medieval fantasy world and your life is in danger, but we are playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, and if you fight that horde of goblins you’re going to rock their shit. go get ‘em tiger.”

you can halt time and tell them “listen, i realize that this sounds like a stupid idea on every level and you want to cut your losses and run, but we are playing Blades in the Dark and if you take a huge risk for profit and glory, then and only then will the moral arc of the universe be fulfilled. it doesn’t matter if you die. go get ‘em tiger.”

you can beam, directly into their mind, the words “it seems like this is a good time to keep your emotions bottled up and try to calmly smooth things over with your superhero mentor, but you MUST do the stupidest fucking thing you can think of, right now, because we’re playing Masks, we’re in a comic book about teen angst, and it would be awesome. go get ‘em tiger.”

if you want your character to be smart and always do the cleverest thing you can think of all the time, there are games for that, like old-school D&D. in those games, matching the tone means playing as smart as you can with limited resources and trying not to die. that’s a good kind of game! if you feel most comfortable with characters who act ‘real’, play one of those.

but if you want to see cool shit happen and daring people do daring, stupid things, or if you want to see emotional shit happen and caring people do caring, stupid things, you must sometimes use your psychic powers to make them dive headfirst into an active volcano, or challenge the archwizard who killed their father to a duel, or otherwise have the worst day of their life in service of the experience.

use your powers. remind them of their purpose, the one you decided on long ago. they are all you have to create the story; don’t let them get in the way of that!

if you always keep it in the back of your mind that your character is a tool for creating awesome moments and not a real person to cherish and keep safe, if you always make them do the thing that best matches the moral arc of the little universe you and your friends are creating, you will find yourself telling stories about a much more interesting world.

and when you tell the story of their exploits, when you actually see it play out in front of you or when you recount it later, what you’ll remember is that the moral arc of the universe was beautifully intact. don’t make a character and then try to jam them into any old story. know what the story is about, make a character streamlined to do just that, and then hammer ‘em home. and if they ever forget what kind of story they’re in, do what you want to see, not what they want to see. that’s how you make a tale to remember.