Player-Characters Are Over Rated

 

I'm going to perform a magic trick right before your eyes. Are you ready? Okay, turn around and look at the book shelf behind you. You know, the one brimming with RPG rules, splatbooks, game guides, and so forth. It's okay, we all have one. Now, grab a random role-playing game book. Turn to the very first chapter. My mentalist prediction is that contained within that chapter are rules dictating how a player-character ("PC") is created. Was I right?

I once asked the question "Can an RPG exist without player-characters?" to which I got a resounding "no" from everyone who answered. So it should be no surprise that the vast majority of role-playing games focus an enormous page count on player-characters. How to create them, what special abilities they get, what kind of equipment they can buy, level advancement, and so on. However, today I'm going to posit that most RPGs focus entirely too much on these avatars and not enough on, well, everything else.

But you might be thinking "Wait Kyle, isn't player-focused game design a good thing?" to which I would answer yes. Player-focused design, not player-character focused design, is a good thing. But I believe that most RPGs approach the game from a fundamentally wrong direction. Allow me to explain.

Every adventure begins with a designer. This game host is often called a "Dungeon Master" or "Game Master". It is their job to essentially provide the evening's fictional events to the players. One of the many perks of being a GM is the freedom to design an adventure however they want. People who fancy storytelling, world building, game design, puzzles, and so forth, often gravitate to this role. The Game Master can design entirely new fictional universes, worlds, cultures, creatures (both evil and helpful), and special objects, artifacts, and magical spells. The creative power bestowed upon a GM is limitless.

As a GM myself, I enjoy imagining new fantastical worlds. Within those worlds, I want to populate them with my own creations. Those creations are each steeped in unique cultures. So should it be so strange that I, the GM, also design unique player-based species, classes, and spells? What I need, as a GM, are the tools to permit me to bring my creations to life.

But the way most tabletop role-playing and adventure games take is to start with the players picking a pre-designed character archetype. "Lets start with the player-characters!" they say. They then spend several chapters talking about PCs. But when it comes time to offer tools to the Game Master to master creative writing, visual storytelling, pacing, game design, level design, and so forth; the rules are not nearly as long.

The player-character archetypes printed in every RPG book were designed by someone else other than the game host. FUDGE is perhaps a rare exception to this fact. The arbitrary options that game publishers offer players try the "kitchen sink" method of including every conceivable possibility imaginable. In turn, players may spend many hours carefully creating their perfectly-balanced characters, all in accordance to the myriad of proprietary game rules.

For some of us, such a decades-old ritual may not seem problematic. But let's examine it a bit deeper: to start, for new players, they're being asked to put in a considerable amount of time and thought into a game they may very well not know how to play. You're asking them to make important decisions about something at a time they know the least about it!

But maybe you sent all the players a PDF of the rules ahead of time, so they could get acquainted with the game before game night. However, from my experience, very few players actually reach the rules before the game. Or if they do they'll only ready, you guessed it, the first chapter. Worse yet, if the people playing have never playing an RPG before, the whole experience may come as a shock. You have to remember that you're asking someone to play a game that has over 100 pages of rules! Pathfinder alone had a rulebook over 500 pages in size. To a layman that sounds not only intense, but borderline crazy. I mean, would you play a card game, sport, or video game with that many pages of rules?

Second, players are often hit with analysis paralysis. Too many options up front. Worse yet they may end up regretting their decisions later after they learn more about the game (buyer's remorse).

Lastly, I'm sure we can all relate to this one: I can't tell you how many game sessions, lasting 4+ hours, I've spent where the entire night is devoted to nothing more than creating player-characters. Filling out a character record sheet is not a game (unless maybe you're Traveller).

Now I want to use some real world examples of why player-characters are over rated. You see, in the 70s and 80s, when video games were becoming a thing, many early designers set out to re-create their D&D adventures in video form. Early adventure and role-playing games mimicked tabletop RPGs by offering a multitude of character creation options and customization choices. In fact, it was often assumed you, the player, would pick out an entire team of PCs to game as. This involved putting points in all of each character's stats, picking out some special abilities, using a set amount of currency to buy equipment, etc.

But overtime this method proved inefficient and has since over the last 40 years been dropped by almost all AAA+ game studios. Sure, some modern titles will have some stream-lined character creation methods, but the choices offered are usually emotionally-based (e.g. "What do I feel like playing as?") more so than numerically based (e.g. "How many points do I need to get a +10% XP bonus?").

It turns out that allocating points, min/maxing abilities, and choosing a balanced team composition before you even play the game is kind of boring. It takes too long and is a barrier to entry for new players. Players wants to get straight to the action. David Brevik, one of the masterminds behind the Diablo series, once said that he wanted the players to go from the main menu screen to slaying monsters in less than a minute. It turns out, he was right. Focus on what matters and hand-wave (aka automate) everything else.

The same emphasis on game play is in other games as well. World of Warcraft, arguably the best RPG video game ever made, has no point-buy system during character creation. Just pick a race, a class, and a name. Even level advancement is entirely automatic. Now some of you might be thinking "But Kyle! Diablo and WoW are all about grinding for great gear, and end-level play is all about getting the best stat buffs you can." Yes, that is correct. It's all about the treasure you find during your adventures. But if you don't really care about pesky stats, you can focus on whatever you enjoy the most. Maybe you like to play for the social aspect, or the PVE (player versus environment) aspects. Maybe you like the story. The point is, that games like Diablo and WoW a future-facing form of character creation. Instead of focusing on numerical composition, what matters is what the character actually does inside the game. If the end result rewards the players, great.

If you're still not convinced, let me ask you did anyone complain that most of the customization of tabletop games was removed from Blizzard's early adventure games? If so, I've never heard them. Does anyone cry over the fact that Mario doesn't have stats, or that you can't customize Yoshi's jump? It's a shift of focus away from the player-character, and onto the adventure.

I believe what matters most in role-playing games is the "doing". It's more important to provide players with a great story arc, cleverly crafted dungeons, challenging monsters, sneaky traps, cunning spells, and so on; rather than dwell on your character's background. As game designers, and game masters, I encourage all of us to focus on player motivations (e.g. immersion, creativity, action, socialization, etc) and less on the vessel that the players use to explore those motivations. Keep the story moving, encourage the players to continue exploring the dungeon, to engage in the world that you spent hours designing. The player-characters, outside of some special abilities and unique quirks, is ultimately inconsequential. It's not who you're born as that matters, its the decisions you make and the person you grow into that does.

It's less important about "who" is inside the game world, and more important about what the game world is like, what exposition is unfolding, and the challenges in-between the player and their goals.

Now, some of you might be thinking "But I like the acting and role-playing side of games. I like theater of the mind.". I think that's great! I'm not saying you can't have those expressive moments. In fact, I believe that true role-playing supports my argument. You see, professional actors, when taking on new roles for TV shows, film, theater, etc. immerse themselves in the mental, emotional, and personality-based intricacies of their character. They don't spend time rolling 3d6 for stats, or which weapon they're proficient in. If anything, actors are more concerned with a character's internal make-up. Things like the character's motivation & goals, contradictions, fears, and incongruities.

To me, the true definition of what makes a game, a game, is the following: it must have a goal, a challenge, rules, play (e.g. what players can do within a possibility-space), and participants (the players). Player-characters are nice, but not required. I certainly enjoy playing with PCs, but not at the expenses of the other elements of a game.

As for the definition of role-playing, I believe only needs three elements: the Game Master describes the scene to you, you tell the Game Master how you would interact with the fictional world, and the Game Host describes the consequences. This, I believe, is an RPG distilled into its purest form. You see? The focus is not on the player-character, but instead on the player and the adventure.

So go out and design some wonderful player-characters, but don't get so caught up in the PCs that you forget that there's a great big fictional world out there to explore!