Exchange of Realities

Some of you might know that I used to have an assistant, back when I first began running my game. He was one of the reasons why I could get away with the absurdly large cast of characters my game featured; we split the cast, allowing for a bit more randomness, considerably less trouble with conversations that the group was just listening to, and our own chances to half-play at times.

He left my game about a year and a half ago. While it was an inconvenience, it wasn’t an active problem. Until, that is, tonight.

We’ve run into characters who were originally his responsibility before. Most of them were easy; canonicals, or ones we’d co-designed. Easy characters, easy voices.

Then there’s tonight. Group’s trying to track down Forged in Malice, and they think that an old friend of theirs can supply them with resources that might help them. Leaving aside the in-character issues, I have a few difficulties with this: One, this was a rather last-minute plan (I wasn’t expecting to deal with him for another few weeks), and two, this was one of my assistant’s strongest characters. Alien modus operandi. Lot of power to mess with, and I haven’t much practice in dealing with this kind. And most importantly, a very distinctive voice.

I’m decent at approximating a character from a description, and making said character sound distinctly like herself. Every now and then, I’ve even managed to predict a canonical character’s style before it’s really specified. But this one—I can’t get the word patterns together, and I’m really not sure what was going on in that head the last time he met with the group. He was always one of the more amusing characters in that regard; I liked trying to puzzle out what he was thinking.

Ah, well. It’s a challenge. And it’s been long enough since they’ve heard him—who’s gonna know the difference?

We’ve been together a while, and I’ve got a few things to say.

First, after the last month, having the Generic Villain air regularly on Saturdays is growing on me. But there’s only so much evil one person can contain, and while I have a greater capacity for it than many people would expect, even I have my limits. So anyone who has questions about villainy—concept, execution, necessary supplies, ways of cultivating a properly infuriating love/hate relationship, advice for dealing with a certain protagonist—leave a comment on the Generic Villain page, and get a linkback to your site (if applicable), your name in pixels either way, and an answer to your question. What’s not to like?

Two: Welcome to all of the new arrivals from Entrecard; I see you’re making yourselves at home. It’s a pleasure to have all of you. If you have any questions, or if you’re overwhelmed by my use of technical terms, let me know through the Suggestions page and tell you which parts of the concept are giving you the most difficulty. I plan on creating a user manual for this blog by the end of February, in case of vocabulary slippage.

Three: For the experts as well: the Suggestions page is here for a reason, so please, utilize it. Gamers know that the GM lives on feedback; so too does the blogger. Don’t be shy.

And last but not least:

Ladies and gentlemen, game designers and artists, enthusiasts all sorts—have I got an opportunity for you.

Those of you who’ve seen my About page know that I work for the nascent RPG design company Victorious Press. (Okay, technically I run it, but what’s a little title among friends?) So why am I bringing this up today?

Because we’re looking for people. Who better to ask than you?

So, important stats.

System: Primarily D&D 3.5 OGL, though if we get critical mass for 4E, or if a bunch of people have a really nifty alternate system idea, we might be able to work something out. Our current projects involve several compilations of alternate mechanics and a pair of adventures with differing scopes, but we are very open to suggestions and enthusiasm.

What’s needed: Designers and artists. If you’re both, that’s even better. Instructions are here.

Further details available on request at the forum.

Good luck!

The opposite to the silent conversation is the sound-only conversation. These are usually a result of darkness, barriers, viewpoint character blindness, or other obstructions that allow whatever’s going on to be heard and not seen, but in a more modern setting the telephone call necessitates a sound-only conversation. They’re usually more concise than silent conversations, making them better for use in games, but removing four of the five senses can make even a hearing-dominant situation extremely difficult.

Know how you plan on differentiating between the characters. It’s hard enough when you’re dealing with two distinctive voices that will be recognized by the viewpoint characters anyway. But when you’ve got two people who have no reason to be identified by name, you’re going to need to find something to tag them with. Moreover, you’ll want to exaggerate difference in speech patterns to make sure the characters seem separate; this is particularly important in two-person conversations in text, as the lack of visual elements makes it harder to insert beats, creating line after line of untagged dialogue. If the characters don’t sound different, it’s easy to get lost.

Pay close attention to tone of voice and volume; while the conversationalists aren’t going to be depending on it, the eavesdroppers (and scenes like this cannot exist without eavesdroppers) are. Have you ever gotten into an argument online, when somebody said something one way and it was interpreted another? Not including tone will result in the same effect, but with less cause; since the audience is “hearing” (or actively hearing, in the case of a face to face game) the conversation, they’d pretty much have to be getting an indication not only of what’s being said, but how it’s being said.

If the eavesdropper has good enough hearing, you may even want to pay attention to how the conversationalists are breathing; the rhythms, duration and ease of breath can say a lot about the emotions of the person breathing. In some cases, the eavesdropper doesn’t even need very good ears; imagine someone coming into the conversation after having run half a mile. It’d be hard to mistake that, right?

Note sounds that aren’t talking. This one’s useful in that it covers for some of the missing senses. Footsteps imply that a character is moving, particularly if her voice begins coming from somewhere slightly different. Rustling fabric, or clinking jewelry, might also provide an idea of how still (or not still) a character is holding, and possibly how they might be fidgeting. If someone in an argument sets down his glass too hard or slams his hands down on the table, the impact will be audible. Does magic have a sound? If it’s going on and it does, it will probably be heard. Consider what kinds of sounds might be made if one participant in the conversation is washing dishes.

Consider also the sounds of the background, particularly if what’s going on is a telephone call or equivalent thereof. Most places aren’t silent, even indoors; there are people-sounds, nature-sounds, even occasional interference from the weather. It doesn’t disappear just because the eavesdropper is focused on one conversation; it might even interfere with the ability to hear it.

One way to practice this is to go somewhere public, preferably somewhere that gets a lot of traffic, close your eyes, and listen for a while. After a few minutes, you’ll probably find yourself picking up on noises you wouldn’t have heard. It’ll give you a good sense of what kinds of sounds it makes when people pace, shove their chairs back, or fidget.

Give it a try!

Yesterday, I wrote about silent conversations, but there really wasn’t much of a chance to show what I meant. Today, I’m not going to tell you more; I’m going to show you, with a wordless conversation I created as a writing exercise for my game about half a year ago.

The dark-haired girl stands in the middle of the office, a tall stool in front of her; she leans her left elbow on it, her briefcase clutched firmly in her dangling right hand. Her audience sits in a not-quite-arc around her: an older man seated behind the main desk, a veiled figure standing behind him; on the chair on their right, a younger, blonde woman perches, flipping an ink brush between the fingers of her left hand, while on the chair to the left of the desk, another woman sits, this one in a long jacket, her auburn hair in a tight bun and a pile of documents in her lap.

The girl looks over her audience and begins to speak. At first, there isn’t much response, just the swishing of brush on silk as the auburn-haired woman takes notes, but as the girl continues they lean in closer; the blonde woman ceases toying with her brush, and the one in the jacket keeps writing but ceases paying attention to the straightness of her lines. After half a minute of the increased attention, the girl stops leaning on the stool; her posture becomes more rigid than straight, and she brings her briefcase forward to grip the handle with both hands. More time, and her sentences begin to shorten; several times her right foot, the one she isn’t putting as much weight on, twitches ever so slightly backward.

When she finishes speaking, there is a moment of silence. Then the blonde woman leans forward, gives her a smile, and and asks a single question, extending her right hand from being curled up under her chin to a half-beckoning, half offering gesture. The girl nods, shifts her weight backwards onto her right foot (decreasing her apparent height slightly), and, face downturned but eyes still raised to meet her audience, gives a short response.

It’s hard to tell who responds more quickly to this, the auburn-haired woman or the man behind the desk; the former leaps to her feet, and only by sheer reflex manages to keep her materials in order and off the ground. The latter puts both hands down on the desk and stands, leaning on them and directing his attention straight ahead. The veiled figure makes what might be a shrug and takes a step forward, moving to a position just behind the desk.

The girl finishes her step backwards, then swings her briefcase onto the stool, flicking it open and hunching herself behind it. From the case she removes four rolls of silk, each sealed with a dollop of green wax, and holds them out in front of her. The auburn-haired woman sets her documents aside, the most recent on top so that the ink can dry; she takes a scroll, slashes a fingernail through the wax and lets it unroll. The blonde woman rises to her feet and picks up a second, delicately peels off the wax and lets the scroll unwind slightly as it rolls into her palm. Then the girl places the other two on the desk in front of her, each about in line with each of the people behind the desk.

The old man’s eyes narrow as he reads, the scroll flat on his desk. The blonde woman, the top of her scroll pinned tightly between her fingers and the body lying flat on her palm, tilts her head slightly and maintains an air of nonchalance, but she begins to blink more and more regularly as she reads over it, with increasing vehemence. The auburn-haired woman’s scroll is cradled in her elbows, stretching across her forearms and dangling over the tips of her fingers; as she looks over it, her teeth unclench, and she ceases to lean forward quiet as much, her eyes merely flowing over the text rather than flicking back and forth. The veiled figure is expressionless.

It is the veiled figure who finishes first, and rolls the tube back up, setting it on the desk. The old man is second, and goes back for another reading, this time keeping his expression neutral. Then the auburn-haired woman finishes; she briskly rerolls hers, then reorganizes her materials while she waits for the last to catch up. Which isn’t long afterwards, slowly turning the scroll in her hands to reroll it. During the reading, the girl has been rearranging her own materials within the case, despite the fact that they were in perfect order when she started; she looks up at the sound of folding silk. The old man also takes that as the cue to hold off on finishing his second read, and looks up.

Again, the veiled figure makes the first move, asking a single question; as the girl responds to it, she straightens up and accompanies her response with emphatic, two-handed gestures. Both women begin asking different questions at the same time; after a series of punctuated starts and stops, the auburn-haired woman waves a hand for the other to continue, and the other does, running a hand along the edge of the desk to punctuate her words. The girl shakes her head rapidly. The old man leans forward again, palms on the desk, and says something; halfway through the girl’s response, he raises his hands, slams them down, and shakes his head firmly. His veiled companion places a hand on his shoulder, and the auburn-haired woman steps around to stand obliquely behind the younger girl.

The girl looks up and behind her; the woman’s head dips ever so slightly, and the girl looks back forward and continues her explanation with increased vehemence. The blonde woman and the old man exchange glances, then nod to her.

She finishes and pauses for a moment; there is no sign of movement from anyone else in the room, just watching her or each other. She then delivers a hasty last line, nods to the group in turn (first the veiled figure, then the old man, then the blonde woman, then as she’s turning to leave, the auburn-haired woman), then retrieves her case and walks quickly out of the room. Just as her hand touches the door, the old man raises a hand in her direction and says something; she tentatively looks over her shoulder. One more remark from the old man, and the girl nods, turns to give him a full ninety-degree bow, then opens the door and jogs out of the room, closing it near-soundlessly behind her.

So—what do you think? What can you figure out about what just happened and how these people usually relate to each other? Does it work without words?

People can’t always overhear the things they need to, or necessarily understand what’s being said even if they do hear it. They might be too far away, or the noise is drowned out by something else, like crowd-noise or waves. Perhaps they’re watching a recording in which the sound is failing or the static’s overwhelming. Or they’re using a visual-only means of magical observation. Heck, they could just not speak the language—even if someone’s talking to them and they can hear every word of it, they won’t necessarily understand!

A lot of people try to deal with the difficulty of situations like this by avoiding them entirely—they don’t cut out the sound, they make the crowd noise irrelevant, or they avoid foreign language speakers and/or always provide translations one way or another. It’s a valid strategy, and it’s certainly the easiest—but the conversation can still run, and the general gist of it can come across, without words. This is the art of the wordless conversation.

So what does it take?

Image courtesy of andreyutzu, from stock.xchng

First, pay heavy attention to body language and expression. What are the looks on the characters’ faces? How do they change as the conversation continues? What kind of posture do they take, and how does that change? Does one seem to shrink away when another gestures or speaks? Or take a slight step forward and look up at another when asking a question? If necessary, figure out what the words are ahead of time and mouth or think them while acting the parts; in a face to face game, this will get many of the nonverbal cues across, while in text it will allow you to figure out what the characters are doing so you can describe the little details properly.

Second, note the characters’ positions relative to each other. Think about your average conversation; how close or far away people stand to each other will say something about the social dynamic, and how it changes will say more about what’s going on. A character might step between two who look to be on the verge of argument, pull back in disgust when another one rests a hand on her leg, stand in one place or even step forward when being yelled at, and it’ll all mean something. Where the characters are facing can also matter; a character particularly addressing one person will probably turn toward that person, and consider what it says if she turns away.

Third, don’t be afraid to have the characters physically interact with each other and their environment. These can be obvious, dramatic things like passionate kisses out of nowhere or unexpected violence, sure, but when there aren’t words, even little things like resting a hand on someone’s shoulder or giving her wrist an extra squeeze before letting go can speak volumes. So can interaction with objects; picking them up, playing with them, using them to emphasize gestures, even stepping behind them.

If you’re dealing with conversation where the words are audible but can’t be understood, you can take advantage of tone of voice. Can you think of a single language in which there isn’t rising intonation at the end of a question? Volume, pitch, space between words, apparent emotion—they’re all more ways to get across what the characters are saying without actually saying it.

Because of its limitations, the wordless conversation is also an excellent writing exercise, both in learning to express characters’ emotions through visual details alone and in having a chance to figure out a character’s unique body language. Choose a few characters, come up with a situation, and write them through it, then hand it off to someone else to read and see how much of what just happened they can figure out. And just because the details are more useful with the sound off doesn’t mean you can’t use them with it on; the kinds of quirks and tricks that make a wordless conversation understandable can make a conversation with words more engaging.

So what are you waiting for? Leave your words behind and see what happens!

For a lot of gamers, one of the most interesting things to do is watch the character grow and change. A well-invested character will likely do this automatically, as a response to things that go on around her.

But sometimes, a concept comes complete with a character arc. Losing innocence, discovering trust, coming to terms with (or discovering the dark side of) new powers, bringing a fear under control—essentially, there’s a direction the character practically demands to go.

The difficulty, of course, is getting there—and more importantly, getting there without driving the rest of the group up the wall.

The first rule, from my experience, is to discuss this potential character arc with your GM to see if it fits with what she wants to run. If she’s looking for a piece full of human darkness and betrayal, a character made to find faith in humanity might be a bit difficult. Similarly, a character looking for recovering from trauma or stress in a game that skips over everything that isn’t an action sequence, or a character learning nurture over nature in a world where evil is innate are going to have a lot of trouble arcing.

Moreover, this can help the GM avoid things that, while they would be dramatically interesting, would scuttle the character arc entirely. I had a friend who nearly had this happen to him at one point. The character was slowly moving her way towards believing in trust and the idea that the world wasn’t entirely out to get her. The problem was an upcoming sequence in which the likeliest person to have betrayed us was said character’s mother, and that… well, would have ended badly.

Next, discuss it with the rest of the group. Coordinating with the GM and other players will also increase the odds of having events that support the planned arc occur. And yes, I mean players. You can’t really do it with just one, and everyone will probably have a few suggestions to make that might actually improve it.

Moreover, as any GM will tell you, players are oblivious. If there’s any way they can not figure out what you’re trying to do, they will. (This goes double if you’re trying for a loner looking to reach out to the party but afraid to really do it—if you haven’t told them that’s what you’re going for, they’ll just treat the character like her goal is to push them away, and nothing will ever get done. I learned that from personal experience in one of my first long-running games.) And when people don’t know each other’s plans, they will always get in each other’s way. Besides, it gives you a chance to make sure that you don’t have a pair of characters whose concepts will inevitably clash. Those get real old, real fast.

Doing these will allow you to engage the collaborative fiction aspect of the game, avoid clashes in feel (very important), and help you to ensure that the character is guided in the right direction (which should help avoid a character about-face midway through). Make sure they get done!

Here to talk you through the evil monologue, our very own Generic Villain!

Evil monologues. Don’t we all love them? It’s a chance to show off our superiority, our gift with words, and our cunning plans. Besides, who doesn’t like to chew up the scenery a little?

But they’ve gone wrong so often that every guide to villainy tells you the first rule of the evil monologue is “Don’t do it.” Is it true? Do we really have to forsake our evil monologues?

Hams of Darkness, rejoice; you need not leave your evil monologues behind. You just need to learn how to use them to your advantage.

We all know the basic rules: Ensure the protagonist is properly restrained, and that any pesky animal companions are neutralized. If you possibly can, avoid delivering your evil monologue until your plan has already been put into play. Keep a close eye out, since if there is a way for an evil monologue to be inconveniently interrupted, odds are it will be. And be careful who you monologue in front of, as people you’ve recruited to your side often have second thoughts when they hear your true plans.

Now for some more advanced techniques.

Inexperienced Hands of Darkness often use their evil monologues to stall because their plans aren’t quite ready. Needless to say, it almost invariably fails—but that doesn’t mean you can’t stall with a monologue, just that you can’t stall by monologuing. At least, not by monologuing and expecting them to just sit there and listen to you.

So if you’re in a situation like that—lie. We don’t have to worry about honor codes; we’re evil. Deliver the greatest monologue of your life, chewing up the scenery and scattering maniacal laughter like it’s going out of style, —about a complete and utter red herring. Convince them that that side project you abandoned ages ago, or the death-trap you created back during the Redshirt Revolution is your current key to world domination. Then watch as they break free, like the narrative demands, and go deal with this dangerous threat to their very world. And while they’re doing that, you can finish your real project in peace.

If they’re getting used to lies, switch it up even more. Tell the mostly-truth. Tell mostly lies. Occasionally let slip real clues. Shake it up; make it so they have to listen just to make sure they don’t miss anything. Keeps them on their toes.

If your heart’s set on stalling with an evil monologue, just change what you’re stalling for. Protagonists often humor us for part of the monologue, since it gives them time to get their people in place to attack you. Why not do the same? Make them think you’re completely taken with your own oratorical skills, let them get secure in the knowledge that you’d never interrupt your own evil monologue… and then, henchmen attack.

And why would we necessarily need to stall, anyway? The protagonists spend a lot of time bolstering their followers’ resolve with their oratory; why can’t we do the same. Let your evil monologue be an inspiration to your minions; let them feel, just for a moment, that they too are invincible. Show them what it means to not know fear!

So don’t discard the evil monologue just because it doesn’t work as originally intended. Change it, work with it, and make it just as much of a tool as it is a work of art. Go ahead; indulge yourself. It’ll be worth it.

Looking for more instructive evil monologues from GV?  Try here.

Earlier this week I talked about learning about people from their personal spaces. I considered doing this one’s living quarters, but I think one can learn a lot more from her workspace—enjoy!

She works in a small room, near the edge of her building, dimly lit through soft white lamps set into the ceiling. It smells of ink, books, and tea, and the inch-deep green carpet muffles most of the sounds made in it.

The walls are covered with bookshelves, and wall scrolls hang down the points where the shelves separate, save two points equidistant from the far corner that bear heavy brass hooks. Most of the room is taken up by a large mahogany desk, and much of that is taken up with silk scrolls and sheets of various form of paper, all arrayed neatly over most of the surface and leaving two spaces—two, centered, across from each other, and one near the left side—clear for writing. On the right sides of the two centered empty spaces rest several ink blocks, several brushes, a few other writing implements and a silver quill pen, all together. Similar materials—minus the quill pen—dot the outsides of the third space, but they’re haphazard, jumbled.

There are three chairs in this room. One is of the same wood as the desk, its arms, seat and back padded with velvet whose fuzz has long since worn off, so deep in the carpet that you could swear it’s rooted, and on the desk near that chair is a steaming mug of tea. Another, newer, sits on the opposite side of the desk. And a third, this one of a much paler wood, is pulled up to the off-center writing gap.

And the books—oh, the books! Astrology and sorcery and geomancy, observations on the dead and the living, history and philosophy, craft and calligraphy, and anything else that seemed appropriate, represented by four or five different languages, they fill the shelves and bow the wood slightly downward. Most of them have at least a few bookmarks, and only the top shelves are particularly dusty. They aren’t shelf-stuffed; any one of them could be plucked from the shelf.

Leaning on the side of the desk is a simple case—a few compartments, a handle—of some sort of metallic material; wrapped around its handle is a chain of the same stuff that dangles down the side of the case, and on the other end of that chain is a small crystal. From a distance it seems like nothing—a drop pendant, quite simple—but on closer inspection, or when the light is gone, it emits a faint, pastel glow.

Seeing it?

One of the common staples of magic systems is the ability to detect lies. It’s so simple, so logical, so useful—but many people shy away from it. Why? Because it makes it hard to bring in mysteries, or conspiracies, or much of anything that requires people to hide the truth.

It doesn’t have to, though. Everything has a counter or a bypass, and lie detection is no exception. It just requires being clever.

For the sake of this essay, I’m going to use the standard lie detection effect. It requires the user to understand the speaker, and specifically detects and alerts its user to deliberate untruth.

Now. How does a clever character get around this?

1. Don’t actually lie. This is the basis for foiling any of these things: you may beat around the bush, you may sidestep the question, you may do any of a number of things, but you may not lie, because you’ll get caught. But that’s not too specific, so….

2. Answer a different question. What you want to do is give a statement that’s topical enough to be relevant to the question, and still true. Ideally, it’s true enough that they mistake it for the answer, but one can’t expect to win all the time.

3. Interpret the question more literally than the questioner originally meant, in such a way that, through a technicality or two, you aren’t actually lying when you say no. “Did you steal Lord Vigarth’s book?” can be answered with no when you consider yourself to have borrowed it—particularly when you really did put the book back when you were done with it.

4. Interpret the question as being something else entirely, if possible. This is easiest when the question is missing antecedents, as all you have to do is fill in your own. Just make sure the antecedent’s plausible, or it’ll be pretty obvious you’re lying to yourself.

5. Answer with a question of your own, preferably one where the answer might in itself answer the question. Be careful, though; this is a common enough trick that people might see it coming. On the other hand, if you’re clever (particularly if they don’t suspect you yet) you can use the answer to lead the wannabe detective in an entirely different direction.

6. Qualifiers. “It’s been said that”, “Rumor has it”, or “[Other person] seems to think that….” make effective dodges—as long as it’s technically true that it’s been said, rumor has it, or other person is as far as you can tell under the impression that [whatever you’re about to say].

These ways, of course, are the most immediate. What happens if you know ahead of time you’re going to be asked?

7. (Particularly useful for establishing alibis.) Find something you want the opposition to believe, then convince a third party, one the wannabe detectives are likely to question, that it’s true, and find a way to make sure it comes out sometime when they’re detecting the truth (these things usually only detect deliberate untruth, remember?). That way, even if they catch you lying about it, their old results indicate it’s true. Not very good for their confidence in their system, is it?

8. Magic that foils truth detection magic. Now, most people favor something that just plain immunizes them to lie detection, but that can be sidestepped by requiring the person being questioned to tell a lie so as to ensure the magic works. Something a little more subtle would be in order. One of my favorite examples is in Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Queen; the main character creates what she calls a “Liar’s Castle”, a trick that’s half spell and half mental exercise in which she subsumes herself in one of her cover identities, so that “truth”, for her, is what’s true of that persona. It’s still possible to lie (I particularly like this one because you can choose something true of you that you don’t want the opposition to believe as the calibrating lie), but it’ll keep your secrets safe.

Then there’s the world-creator’s way of covering the traces.

9. Put the burden of proof on things that aren’t just the lie detection magic. After all, who says the person who performed the lie detection was telling the truth, or didn’t in some way tamper with it? You can’t trust anyone these days. The detective-types know what’s really going on and can’t do anything about it (leaving an opportunity to investigate and the knowledge that such investigation is necessary), the perpetrator gets to be smug, the story’s extended, and it works out for everyone eventually. It wouldn’t be the first time that a mystery wasn’t “Whodunit?” but “How can I prove it?”

Get the hang of that, and lie detection becomes a tool, and an inconvenience, but not an uncontrollable stumbling block. And that’s what makes a story interesting.

Yesterday, we discussed characters’ absolute limitations—what they couldn’t do. But just because a character can do something doesn’t mean that she will. For every person, there is almost certainly something that person won’t do.

Why not?

A lot of the time, it’s cultural context. Often, people will grow up with certain behaviors and restrictions in their households. Some they’re instructed to follow; others they get from watching the rest of the family. Or the restriction might come from the people around them: good villagers don’t do this, members of this organization don’t do that, a lady would never dream of doing that other thing, and heaven forbid a goatherd ever—you get the idea. While some of these are more valid than others, a character might take any of them as blanket prohibitions.

Sometimes, it’s the law. Maybe the character wants to keep her reputation clean, or has already had trouble with the law and doesn’t want to invite more. An immigrant might be particularly careful to toe the line in a new country, or still follow the laws of her old one.

Other times, it’s trying to emulate or avoid identification with another character. One whose role model never lies might refuse to tell anything but the truth; another whose enemy is known for bullying people into following his orders might shy away from that sort of persuasion because it would make her like him.

Still others might be guided by personal experience, or by what they themselves wouldn’t want happening to them. These sorts of prohibitions most often have to do with interactions with other people; there have to be others to do unto, right?

Then there’s religion—or (less often) superstition. Those factors can bring out some very unlikely but interesting prohibitions. Moreover, people’s refusal to break them will often be quite intense; they know what happens if they don’t follow them. Many of these prohibitions have some sort of symbolic explanation: for instance, “Never stand completely in someone’s shadow” could be because doing so is tantamount to subsuming one’s self in someone else’s.

As with what characters can’t do, what characters won’t do is dramatically valuable. Double binds, moral dilemmas and general trickery exploiting such reservations can lead to tension and intense emotion. Moreover, a character’s attempts to hide, sidestep or otherwise work around what she won’t do will set her apart from other characters like her, as will attempts to explain her prohibitions. Besides, explanation is a challenge: have you ever thought about why you consider certain actions to be crossing the line?

Unlike what a character can’t do, what a character won’t do can be circumvented, and probably will. So it’s good to think about what kinds of things would push a character to break her own prohibitions. Can they be “disproven” to her? What sort of pressure—or what kind of reward—would cause her to slip? If she’s not going to break her prohibitions for her own sake, would she break them for someone else? For her family? Town? Country? World?

“Won’t” is a very useful word for the creation of intense characters. See what you can do with it.

More characterization tips and tricks here.