Feb 06 2009
Mrs. Brown and the Dice
Have you met Mrs. Brown?
I was first introduced to her by through an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, who in turn had gotten her introduction through Virginia Woolf. Though introducing is an odd word when you consider that the point of Mrs. Brown is to be elusive, always walking away.
Image courtesy of Zitherica from stock.xchng
The original Mrs. Brown was an old woman in a train car, asking questions about oaks and caterpillars, who grew upon entering one of Woolf’s essays. She is small, yet strong, uncertain, yet determined. Human. And without a strain of her, somewhere between the covers, a book is not truly a novel, for the novel form by the original definition focuses on character. Le Guin finds her next, summarizing the original essay and asking a question in return:
“Can Mrs. Brown and science fiction ever sit down together in the same railway carriage, or spaceship? Or to put in plainly, can a science fiction writer write a novel?”
Le Guin asked the question while looking back at the Golden Age of science fiction, and talks about how, for all that time, from rockets for rockets’ own sake to the dark warnings of Orwell and Huxley, there were plenty of characters but no people, a horde of symbols and archetypes but no real names.I look at this, and something resonates; I find myself understanding why so few of the books I read satisfies me, why a small part of me takes the popularity of Inheritance and Twilight as a personal affront. I’m not seeing any people, nor remembering names.
But what does this have to do with role-playing games?
Most people would tell me that they’re a silly place to seek out Mrs. Brown. I already see a lot of “We can’t critique games like literature” as it is. And if, as Le Guin implies, she’s too round for the spaceships of the Golden Age, then how could she fit between the columns of numbers or the rows of dots that make up today’s character? Having watched concepts lose themselves to fit between the lines, I almost agree.
Yet at the same time, Mrs. Brown is as much her limitations as her strengths. And when a game is willing to put its wild forward momentum on hold, to take a look at who its heroes are when they aren’t being heroes, I think there’s a chance at looking at one of the characters and seeing her, or at least a part of her. The demigod crafter with the quirky moral sense, who sneaks up on fish to hug them, and whose solution to the improbability of his tales is that everyone should learn to detect lies? Could be. The arrogant young researcher in the long black coat, torn between saving the city for Right and reputation and leaving it to its own squabbles so he can save those who matter? He may be, but I don’t know him well enough to say. The frail ice girl with the white hair, spending a week among the demons for reasons she herself cannot articulate? One can hope. The paladin-ensemble playing and carving and dodging slanderous songs s they wait for word of why they were summoned? I think I saw her there.
Mrs. Brown cannot fit where the focus is the plot, and would have trouble in a world-first world. But in a role-playing game with a GM willing to go off the rails a bit, we can look for her, alone between sessions or as a group. We can hang up characters as dream-catchers, sit under them with dice in hand, and see if she will come a bit, stay a while, let us watch her stretch her legs and see which parts of the world are round enough to support her.
You can keep your XP and your god-slayers, your irresistible forces that shove immovable objects and your 15 minute adventuring days. For you they may work, and I will not tell you otherwise. I will travel with you, and fight alongside you, as long as our roads converge. But I will not hold still, nor wait for a plot-hook, but walk among the mundane places and peer into all the reflective surfaces.
My quest is for Mrs. Brown.
Want to see what else I’ve found while looking for Mrs. Brown? Look over here http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/series-and-motifs/engaging-secondary-characters/.
Asking where Mrs. Brown is makes me think of that kids show some time back, where in the world is Carman Sandiego. I keep hearing that in my head now…yikes it might drive me crazy.
Characters do need, like people in real life many layers to make them interesting. None of us are always strong, or always week, or always funny etc.
Have a great wkend
Sandy
Ambrose: You play your way, I’ll play mine.
Catana: You’re right, this is something different. The video game jobbies are console RPGs, or what happened when people realized they weren’t always going to be able to get game groups together; my subject is tabletop RPGs (defined in the How to Use This Blog tab, above.) They suffer from many of the same limitations, though; getting across internal motivations and flaws in a tabletop RPG is rather like doing the same when acting.
Mrs. Brown isn’t dead, though, just hiding. Part of my aim with this blog and the page full of characterization links is to see if I can coax her back out of her bunker; I’m of the opinion that the world needs more Mrs. Brown.
Sandy: Ah, yes, I remember that song. It’s been popping up in my head a lot over the past couple of weeks.
I think part of it is letting the players know you’re interested, and then trusting them to follow through.
I’ll see if I can come up with a few other tricks for teasing the scenes out of players; bribery comes to mind, though that seems almost too easy.
Sometimes, you just need to lead by example. I didn’t really get too much Mrs. Brown from my game’s PCs until long after the NPCs were starting to show bits and pieces of her, and that can be slightly easier to set up: oftentimes, when the group is coming up to talk to a certain NPC, they find themselves catching the tail end of a conversation between that one and another one. (As an added bonus, it makes the NPC in question feel more connected to the world by demonstrating that she has a life–and if you’re really lucky, they’ll start getting curious about the prior conversation.)