Exchange of Realities

They’re a random factor, a source of chaos, an uncontrollable force of nature. Rarely does any plot which meets them survive unscathed. They forget the names of those around them, work from motivations all their own, and usually have far too high an opinion of their impact on the world. And they are our most important resource.

Who are they?

They are the PCs.

PCs, or “player characters” for the uninitiated, bring a unique quality to the table: independence. The good news is that it makes them invaluable to our learning process. The bad news is that their effect on our plots is rather like the effect of letting a small child into a room where the coffee table is covered with important and unstapled documents and leaving him unsupervised.

So why do we invite these high-maintenance creatures into our nice pristine creative processes?

First off, it’s a chance to people-watch in a semi-controlled environment. A group of well-trained players will most often come bearing characters who are, in their own right, completely self-motivated and a joy to watch; within the context of the world, the characters can be almost as real as the players are. Then all we have to do is turn them loose on our planned situations. They rarely do what they expect them to, but what they do do tells us more than doing what we wanted them to do would have, and where else are we going to get real-life impressions of how people who aren’t us would react to being up to their ears in a complex noble family feud they didn’t want to get into in the first place, discovering that a creature from before Time with rather dubious motivations is talking in their heads and finds them amusing, or realizing that yes, one of the members of the group just chewed out his god in front of all of Heaven?

Second, PCs are the best flaw-finders in the world. This is probably because they are the best flaw-exploiters in the world. If their target is an existing game system, they will be magnetically drawn towards ways of making themselves invincible, giving themselves the ability to make friends with almost anyone even in the heat of battle, or just creating world-destroying armies in twelve seconds. (The good ones, of course, will do it as a thought-exercise, tell you how, and then scrap their own plans.) If you’re running freeform, they will ask simple little questions about how magic works or what they might be capable of that will allow them to bypass many challenges, and even reproduce their failures into something devastatingly effective. How is this useful? It’s quite simple; after a while of having them find the holes in every plot we write and every magic system we put forward, or seeing them remind us that we’ve just gotten two of our own characters mixed up or that no, they didn’t kill a certain side character this session, we learn to anticipate them, to fight their logic with our own, to remember our own details and in general to make sure our plots do not leak.

Third, they only know what we tell them. Have you ever heard the adage, “Show, don’t tell?” This is doubly important when dealing with PCs, as their knowledge is (at least theoretically) limited to what they see and hear in the world. We can’t depend on exposition anymore, as it breaks the flow of the game, so we have to learn to show them the world around us through what they hear, see, feel, smell and (far too often for anyone’s good) taste. So we learn, and we learn fast.

Last, but not least, they change the story. Yes, this is a good thing. One of my favorite examples was my own very first game, when my three PCs, by the end of the second session, had recruited a group that was supposed to be the running antagonists—and that set the tone, and almost determined the plot, for the next forty or so sessions.

Yes, they’re frustrating. Yes, “like guiding PCs” rapidly becomes an equivalent to “like herding cats”. But they can make us much better writers, and better game-masters or storytellers or whichever term we choose to use, than we might otherwise be on our own.