The Need for PC Personality in Immersive Play Styles
By Kevin Manus-Pennings
We’ve all heard (or read) the various arguments about the true definition of a role-playing game. The story-driven, more drama-focused players want more social encounters and plot while those who crave tactics and combat, victories and evisceration, want monsters to smash and treasure to claim. I’m not interested in entering this ideological fray any more than I am in discussing what truly is or is not a hat. I am interested in saying that while I try to maintain a balance of both elements in Karandrin, as a gamemaster, a PC’s personality becomes a vital part of tactical play as well as immersive, plot-based gaming.
As a young gamemaster in the late ’90s, I gravitated to more tactical scenarios in my games, as did all my friends. But after a year or two, something began bothering me about refereeing combat situations, even as I struggled to come up with new and exciting environs and challenges. I still enjoyed structuring the setting for the combat, placing cover or traps, unexpected enemies, and complex dilemmas, but I fought a sense of boredom as well. Simply put, in the min-maxing of my players, I could predict what they would do. We all knew the combat rules, my players largely knew the threat they faced, and so their decisions were, for me at least, easy to predict. For me, the delight of not knowing what my players were going to do had evaporated beneath the heat of min-maxing. I was bored. “Bruce will use his broadsword after James casts his boosting spell and then Kristy will fire from a safe distance.” I knew it before they did; I knew it even as I designed the scenario.
Worst of all, play (particularly in D&D) became unbelievably robotic. Human, Dwarf, and Elf alike would barge into danger so long as the calculations showed a reasonable chance of victory. The inhuman lack of any other motive, any other trait other than a desire for victory, made characters who undercut the wonder and imagination of the setting. Conversations were short, utilitarian, and devoid of concern for consequence…regardless of the character, regardless of individuality that would exist in the setting if it were real. The game was becoming more dominant than the world, and as an outright worshipper of Tolkien, I couldn’t take being pulled out of a world I had worked so hard to create.
Again, I don’t want to be seen as claiming what role-playing should be; I’m stating what I needed it to be. However, these characters and their decisions driven only by the arithmetic of the moment had for the time spoiled my world and made me think about the absence of human weakness in the story. And that lead me to adding personalities to my PCs. Personality traits, both good and bad, are why we in the real world aren’t always making the perfect, calculated decisions. And now my PCs were going to get a dose of it.
My first attempts at rolling personality were not great. While my list of traits was accurate enough and fairly comprehensive, I failed to grasp what the traits truly needed to do: influence play decisions. Yes, Gondo the Dwarf may love blue, but we don’t see Gondo shopping much in Macy’s, so that trait can go. I began narrowing down on traits that mattered, including combat styles and preferences. This wizard may love the exhilaration of combat and move to the front; this ranger prefers a thrown-type weapon rather than a typical bow. Honesty, trustingness, generosity, temper, all came to play a part in their decisions as well. My system wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect, but it has added complexity to player decisions (both tactical and social), and my world regained some realism.
© 2022 by Kevin Manus-Pennings
Karandrin 