Exchange of Realities

Usually, when I’m riffing about what I’ve learned, I talk about my game. But it’s really hard to show leadership through an NPC when you’re running for a bunch of high-powered mavericks, and besides, I have a much better example at hand. See, this is more art imitating life; most of what I’ve learned about leadership, I’ve learned from playing one character.

So let me introduce you to Tuyet.

What she was supposed to be was a master spy and manipulator. She specialized in delegation—mostly “you do the fighting, I’ll do the talking”, since she was weak and a bit delicate—and communication; the fact that a lot of the people who followed her instructions mostly didn’t realize that that was what they were doing was entirely immaterial. Most of her skills had been learned out of desperation, since she herself was being manipulated and wanted it to stop.

What I hadn’t realized is that Tuyet lived to flip the bird to expectations of all sorts, including my expectations for her.

It started—I think—with the time she tried to intimidate an oncoming army because they were out of weapon range and she didn’t know what else to do. And succeeded. A subsequent incident involving one of the people she trusted giving Tuyet her fondest ambition—“You can do this better than I can”—only pushed it farther. And then she put her communicator-skills to the test by guilt-tripping an oncoming legion and its commander into giving up their part in the rapidly brewing war and working with her to get things back the way they should be.

I’d started out with a spy. Only halfway through I’d ended up with a war hero, and leading by inspiration had not originally been her strong suit. She fell back mostly on her communication-skills, serving as her faction’s sense of public relations (“Now, we need to make a point of not making the first move.”) and something of a wandering troubleshooter, amassing her reputation with calculated suicidal-seeming heroism (usually meant to kick the situation into places that fit her strengths) and a gift for ferreting out the real issues. Even her motivation was a contradiction: blazing hero though she came across as, all she wanted was for the silly war to be over so she could get back to her mind-games, double-dealing, and limiting her fights to when there were assassins involved.

In playing her, I learned a lot about delegation and what to do when people were stepping on the Plan; about how to inspire different people with different facets of a character; about how to make people see the world the way I wanted them to, and how to use rhetoric to hammer the point in further; about what it might mean to be responsible for high-magnitude mistakes, and the other pitfalls of command. What I write about leadership—this week’s categories, next week’s riffs on learning to lead—I owe to my time as her, and to how it brought together all the information I’d been passively absorbing through my reading.

What else can I say? It’s been fun.