Exchange of Realities

Wrapping your head around a large number of different kinds of people is generally difficult. There’s always a mindset you don’t understand, a kind of person you’ve never met before, or a set of traits that logically seem to go together. As a result, a lot of people find themselves writing variations on the same set of character archetypes. For some people, this can be a standard fantasy race/supernatural creature variety and its primary stereotype. Others tend to base their archetypes on characters they run into in fiction a lot, or traits they see occurring together regularly in the real world.

Photo by woodsy

This isn’t necessarily something to be ashamed of; even some of the better professional writers do it. (Consider Lloyd Alexander’s novels; in most of his young adult novels, if you run into a competent young woman who associates with the main character enough to have lead character status, no matter what the setting is, odds are she has at least four points of personality in common with Eilonwy from the Prydain Chronicles.) In fact, some people appreciate tendencies like this; if someone associates you with a kind of character that they like, they might come back to see more of that archetype from you.

The first thing you need to do to figure out how archetype prone you are is to figure out what your archetypes are. There are two ways to go about this; I recommend using both, just to be complete about it.

One way is to look for archetypes yourself; it’s a bit time-consuming, but watching the patterns emerge can be fun. Start listing off characters you’ve created or used at some point: make sure you’ve got most of your major ones and a decent sampling of your minor ones. If you work in multiple worlds, make sure you have at least a few from each world; archetyping may be more noticeable when it’s all in the same narrative, but people with enough information can and will notice even when the characters are spread out over five or six projects. For each of these characters, list off four or five major characteristics. Some of these things might be vital statistics—age, build, personality, skill set, powers, tone of backstory. Others might be more subtle, like hobbies, favored drinks, or balance between good luck and bad.

Another is to ask someone else who’s familiar with your work. Sometimes, characters are created vastly different, but since most of their differences are things that don’t actually show up on stage, they come out looking extremely similar. You might not notice those similarities yourself, since you know where the differences are, but other people probably will. Asking someone else “Are there patterns you notice between my characters?” will allow you to get an audience-eye view of your own habits.

I’ve recently found myself rather prone to archetype use, mostly with common combinations of personalities, age ranges and backstory types. So I’ll often have cunning manipulators who seem to take almost as much pleasure in their game as in the results; experts in whatever field they choose who show little emotion beyond determination and are driven almost to the point of monomania by one specific goal; individuals fiercely loyal to a person, ideal, or organization or combination of the above with some level of self-sacrificial tendencies (one of my best characters combined all of the above); young and rather confused lads tossed into worlds with which they aren’t familiar and looking for a guide; optimistic young ladies with childlike demeanors whose energy is rivaled only by their interest in a certain academic pursuit; and of course, familiars who are far more self-promoting and have bigger egos than the people to whom they are connected.

So take a turn and leave a comment! What are your favored archetypes?

Click the link for more tips on making interesting characters .

For many people, pre-existing settings are the way to go, gaming or writing. They save a lot of the work of world creation, freeing up the adapter to focus on plot or to create little details that would take too long to work out otherwise; they give the audience a background of things they know about the world, saving time and effort on exposition from the adapter and active research from the players; and it’s easier to find someone “in the know” to bring in as a conspirator, as people with an idea how the world works are more common.

Photo by verserk

But there’s one major problem with pre-existing settings: most of them come with pre-existing characters. Leaving aside the issue of managing to sound true to a character who existed with someone else’s voice, there are a lot of reasons why they might just not work with the adapter’s approach to the world. Sometimes they just aren’t detailed enough, or you just can’t wrap your head around them. Some would, as originally written, kill your plot just by existing. Some (particularly in games that get reissued; this happens to me a lot) were fine a few supplements ago, but the new details just don’t work. Still others are just fine except that their original characterization incorporated a rather obnoxious stereotype that really isn’t necessary to the character (though this is highly subjective).

The easiest way of dealing with these people is to avoid them. The adaptation might be in the wrong region for the canonical character; conversely, the canonical character may currently be off solving a problem more appropriate to his skills elsewhere. Some people just write them out entirely, though that can backfire if the character’s impact on the surrounding world isn’t also written out or otherwise compensated for. Some kill them off as soon as possible. (With some of the canonicals out there, I can’t blame them.) Some just change whatever they need to and call it a project.

But some people try to write them in a way that the audience won’t object to, turning working with the canonical character into a personal challenge. The difficulty, of course, is the audience itself, and the audience’s expectations. How do you work around people who “know” the character at least as well as you do?

First, figure out who the canonical character is. This is the most important step: changing the essence of the character is the surest way to get called out for adaptation decay. The character’s mindset is likely to be one of the most unchangeable features; you can’t just turn a sociopathic zealot on a one man holy war into a friend to all. Similarly, known major backstory events and existing relationships are probably not to be too heavily altered. If you must change something (and if so, I recommend making sure people know it’s likely/going to happen; people can get touchy when their expectations are foiled), it’s best to leave it at the one change and whatever ripples that change might have, so people can still accept the results. Some of the essence of the character is what the character isn’t; keep this also in mind.

An exception to the no essential changes rule is if you have a time gap to play with. People aren’t static; the untrained pick up new skills or give up on their studies, the perceptive realize their impact on people and (usually) adjust accordingly, the driven might achieve their goals and find new ones or get worn out trying. Having a time gap means that changes can be excused to a certain point; if you can explicate how the change occurred in a character-consistent manner, you can get away with a lot more than if you’re just straight-modifying the character.

Once you’ve got the essence nailed down, the rest of the details are fair game. In my games, I favor seeing how many gaps I can fill in without contradicting the source material, or how many new directions I can go in with the information I have. Is there a power or personality quirk that hasn’t been explained, or that the original creator didn’t consider all the ramifications of? How might this character be affected by whatever changes to the existing timeline you’re considering using? What about interactions with newly created characters? Are there any interesting hobbies the character could feasibly have? What are their current plans?

Note that this is mostly from a roleplayer’s standpoint, as that’s where all my experience lies. Are there any fanfic writers or readers who can tell me what their community’s other rules are? Gamers who think I missed something? Combinations of the above? Let me know what I’m missing!

More for RPG Blog Carnival.

Some comic relief characters spring up to fight back from the grim darkness of the grim dark world where everything is so grim and dark that readers and gamers alike would flee if there weren’t some sort of humor to keep them stable. Others are there because the creator of the world needed a laugh. Still others seem to have been created by some sort of dramatic necessity. But all of them serve about the same purpose: they’re there to lighten the mood and bring in laughter.

Unfortunately for many writers and quite a few game masters, they’re also rather prone to backfiring. What causes the comic relief character to go wrong?

The most common issue they have is being nothing but the comic relief. You don’t design characters whose entire schtick is their class or the thematics behind their powers, right? So why should a character be designed purely for the sake of being “The person we always laugh at”? Let me show you how this can go wrong.

• Sucks to be him: This one-note comic relief character gets all of his laughs through schadenfreude. If his creator’s prone to physical humor, he’s the one who slips on bananas and isn’t warned in time about that first step, or who gets trounced in every battle or trapped under the defeated enemies when he wins. He might be the one who always looks for love in the wrong places, or whose memory will always fail at precisely the wrong time. It’s just who he is. The problem here is that the joke gets old after a while. It stops being funny to watch this character get targeted, particularly if he’s even remotely sympathetic.
• The repeating flaw: While our last example’s laughs came from what the world did to him through no fault of his own, this one technically brings all her problems on herself. But since it’s because of one glaring weakness, that’s okay because she can’t help it, right? This is where we find the uncontrolled kleptomaniac, the hopelessly clumsy student, the bumbling mage-apprentice and the perpetually distracted—ooh, puppies! One is that the joke gets old, particularly if this character is in a game and the flaw is messing up the PCs’ ability to function. Another is when, in an otherwise serious setup, the flaw has none of the consequences you’d expect it to because real consequences wouldn’t be funny. Can we say ‘breaks the fourth wall’? Still another is that if it does have consequences, the flaw disappears when it would be inconvenient for it to come into play. The last is that they never seem to attempt to do anything about these flaws of theirs, unless doing so would allow the world to start making punching bags of them. I don’t know about you, but I find this more irritating than amusing.
• The joke repository: This one’s purpose in life is to be comic relief, and he knows it; he actively attempts to play for laughs, delivering a joke in every situation. He has the advantage of avoiding the verisimilitude issue most of the time, as we all know he’s trying to be funny. In fact, if he’s got a good in-character reason for this trait, he can get away with a lot. The problem comes if this character doesn’t know when to shut up. Imagine you’re in the middle of an intense scene—a shocking revelation, perhaps, or a desperate battle. Something where you’ve got a definite mood you want to convey. And just as you’ve hit that mood, your friendly neighborhood class clown insists on piping up with a one-liner, and the mood just dies. No, that doesn’t work.
• The one-note joke: This character has been gifted with an aspect which her creator can use as an endless joke mine. (For female characters, this as often as not has something to do with sex.) And any time this aspect can be used in this manner, it will be, to the point where if she has any meaningful character development you can’t remember it because The Joke Mine Aspect is the first and last thing you associate with her. I shouldn’t need to explain where the problem with this is.

Now, in material that’s meant to be light humor, or with a group that finds these templates amusing, this can still work. But in a lot of cases, they’re just going to detract from the overall impact. Think twice before including a one-note comic relief!

Census listers. My game group. I found myself comparing them a lot, particularly on days when I was looking forward to session at the end of the day. It was partly a fact about cohesion, and partly a fact about proactivity; my listing crew beats my game group hands down in that regard.

As with all of my other attempts to learn from the United States Census, I find myself asking why. And the answer, it seems, comes back to the clear instructions.

With the Census, you know what you’re doing. It’s been ground into your head over a week with a manual that could stop a bullet and still have enough structural integrity to serve as a club, and even after that the Powers That Be will cheerfully inform you what your expectations are. At least 25 hours a week. At least 20 addresses per hour. (It’s actually a pretty decent average, assuming a brisk walk and nothing but uncomplicated single family structures, but I digress.) The important part is that the goals are clear, and it’s not too hard to figure out how to meet them—you move your potential scheduling conflicts, make sure your crew leader knows when you’ve finished an assignment area so you can get your next one ASAP, cultivate the ability to end a conversation cleanly and don’t let yourself get distracted on the road. It’s pretty straightforward.

What happens if there aren’t clear and defined goals? Suddenly the group has as many objectives as it does players. Or everyone can agree on an objective, but no two of them can agree on methods. Alternately, some of them might be able to agree with each other, and you get a smaller number of groups practically at war over the direction of the party. I can think of games in which this wouldn’t be a problem, but I haven’t been involved in any of them.

So what do we do? We make sure we know the processes behind the objectives we have planned for the group. Consider the Census objective: Count everyone in the country. The two major steps for this are “locate everyone” and “send out forms by which everyone can be counted. Now, let’s look at “locate everyone in the country”. The easiest way to do this is to have people run out and find where people are living—that would be census listers like me. But a country’s an awfully big place to cover, so they divide it down from there; they divide the country into regions, and the regions into local offices, and the local offices into crew leader districts, and stick someone in charge for each division. Then the crew leader districts get divided into assignment areas, and from there into blocks. This turns the task into something quantifiable and manageable. Each lister has to list every living area in her assigned assignment areas—and to make sure they do it fast enough that their answers can be checked, they’re given a target rate to match and an hours worked goal to work toward. The crew leader has to make sure that all of the assignment areas in her district are given listers. And up above us, they’ve already filled in the people responsible for those below them.

Ensuring a player group has a process is similar to that. If they don’t seem to understand how to accomplish the goal they’ve been given—or even the one they’ve chosen themselves—it becomes your job to figure out how you’d do it. Break each requirement into a few steps, then offer options for how to do these steps. For instance, if one of the things you’ve puzzled out is that they need ways of giving themselves energy in the otherworld to which they’ll have to go to defeat the vengeful ghost at the bottom of the ocean, you’ll want to figure out what would constitute an energy source, a couple of ways they might get one, and what that would entail, then find a way to sneak the information in front of them. They might still debate over which one to take, but at least they’re not completely lost, right?

Doing this can give an otherwise directionless-seeming group a stronger sense of purpose, allowing them to actually get things done rather than dithering about arguing over how. It might also get rid of the lack of direction—sometimes people just don’t know where to start, and a little push is what they need.

So if you’ve got a group that doesn’t know what to do, drop them a few possible goals and see what happens.

Stick around for more lessons learned from the United States Census.

We’re still on Aywren’s question about staying antagonistic; a long one, yes, but vital to the cause. Without antagonism, we aren’t Hands of Darkness, now, are we?

As I pointed out last week, a good villain needs to have a self-justification that can stand up to long-term contact with people. Not just heroes, mind you, but even people with common decency. We have a knack for running into people who believe in us. Who show devotion, and self-sacrifice, and all those little things that, whether the people mean them to or not, translate into a sort of emotional blackmail towards altruism, to us. As Aywren pointed out in response to last week’s post, caring about someone else or being cared about by someone else can really put us off our darkness.

This, of course, is a problem. What are we without villainy?

So our justifications need to be able to hold up to people going power of love and friendship on us.

One way to do this is strength of justification; these people may be interesting, sure, but the overall goal is more important. While someone sufficiently strong-willed can do this with “The world would be better off if I were in charge” or “All things must eventually end”, oftentimes it’s cleaner to do this with an agenda that would have direct benefits to the ones that matter to us, or those to whom we matter. The world reviles you for what you are? Controlling them so that they no longer do so will keep these people who hang onto you from being reviled with you. The only person you would want to see in charge of much of anything is yourself? Once you’re there, you can give them whatever they want. In need of ultimate power to fulfill a plan? Ultimate power has many uses. Sure, they probably won’t have the long view to understand at the time. But when you’re finished, you can show them why you were right, can’t you?

Another is to tie these people to your justification. We all know how dangerous fanatics are, right? Utilize that power. Go ahead, care—and paint everything you do so that it fits with that caring, no matter how dark. To protect this person, you will destroy all those who threaten them. Sure, they might object, but they don’t have to know, do they? Hold them apart from the world, deal with your darkness in their name. Perhaps you can grant them immortality through placing their consciousness in something more durable, or literally take them away from this world that would so destroy them, so they don’t need to see what it is you do for them. Fill your mind with what you feel they would want you to do, and let those echoes block out their protestations to the contrary. Reinterpret what you do hear them say; you know best, after all, do you not?

If you’re really worried about caring getting in your way, consider subsuming it into other emotions. We already do this when we’re finding love among the ranks of the villainous, don’t we? I knew a family once, a few universes over. Overlord and progeny—twin children, and their older half-sister. The family dynamics were interesting. The twins hated their sister for being their father’s favorite, but lay one hand on the older girl and both of them would be out for blood, as they were the only ones allowed to mess with her. The older one—nice to a fault, caring, honestly thought the world would be a better place if their plans succeeded and could convince almost anyone of anything, but her greater good was her family’s greater good, and she was willing to go against her personal code for it. And the overlord? His offspring were valuable to him—but almost more in the way you’d value a fine vase, or an ancient artifact. He’d allow none to harm them, as they were his, and anyone else to whom he formed an attachment he considered the same way, whether they were on his side or not. And yet he kept his darkness, even when the twins had given up and the eldest had changed sides, even when he himself had been killed and could only live on as a figment in someone else’s mind, even when his main contacts were protagonists. Losing them, he would have taken bloody revenge. If they had opposed him, he would have removed them from his path and corrected their mindsets when he had a free moment. The world was to be under his control; that was all that mattered.

That, then, is what we need. Dedication to our goals, and a willingness to reinterpret those things that stand in our way in a manner that is more… favorable to us and ours. Give us that, and we can keep our devotion to the villainy we are supposed to be performing.

Earlier this week, I talked about player absences. Timing was perfect, as my game’s about to deal with one: one of my players is going on foreign exchange, and even for a play-by-IM like my game, the resulting time differences are near-impossible to work around. What else could I do but write him out?

Fortunately, my setup was also pretty much perfect. The character in question, during my five weeks in the swamp sequence, ran afoul of a location of concentrated nastiness, and reacted strongly, to say the least. I saw this not only as excellent characterization, but as an opportunity. This mission of theirs is under the auspices of an NPC they know mostly for her near-obsessive devotion to her goals; however, one of her major secondary traits was a tendency to take care of her subordinates, particularly when they had undead things messing with their heads. This definitely qualified.

So when it came time to write him out, I had her show up, ready to explore this nifty new places that had once housed one of her enemies. She paused in the doorway, looked over the group—and decided that taking care of these people, particularly doing something about the damage to this one’s mind, came first. At least, that was the plan. It didn’t work out quite the way I’d expected, since some things that I’d thought were going to be resolved weren’t, and some people don’t know how to quit adding complications. But overall, it seems to have gotten the point across. The fact that I still managed to strongly hint at her gratitude to the group for what they’d done just made things better for me.

Character safely removed until player can return. Facet of other character better illuminated. And as a bonus, lots of crazy hints and things for the remainder of the group to work from. Not bad for a night’s work!

Last week, I talked about how to develop a character through her clothing. But it isn’t just characters who can benefit from these sorts of techniques. Instead, you can try to characterize an entire culture through what it wears; not only does this allow you to hint at the culture as a whole, but it can carry over, by parallel or contrast, to the clothing-based characterization of individuals from that culture.

Photo by zolenys

The most logical thing a country’s dress will tell you about that country is the climate. This isn’t just “warm climates have less and lighter fabrics, cool climates have more layers and heavier fabrics”, though that’s an easy place to start. Think also about variation; a country with real seasons is likely to have clothing for the winter and clothing for the summer, while one with less seasonal variation won’t need to differentiate as much. Weather might come into play as well; in places prone to precipitation, garments that have loose fabric that can double as hoods will likely be more common than in dry areas, and a place with a lot of wind is likely to have heavier fabrics and minimize the amount of cloth that can catch the wind so as to avoid the wearers being blown off course.

Clothing can also tell you a lot about what materials and techniques are available to the culture. In some places, people depend on skins, particularly if they know how to treat them. Wool requires wool-bearing animals; while these are normally sheep, alpacas and their ilk can be used, as can goats (heck, I’ve had a dog you could probably get decent wool from), and it’s hard to get cotton without the proper growing conditions for cotton plants. Silk, similarly, requires some variety of silkworm—this was why the Silk Road was so important, as in many hotter climates they had the need for light fabric but not the materials. You’re not going to get woven fabric if people haven’t figured out how to weave.

Even fitting and fastenings are going to say a lot about their cultural antecedents. In general, the simplest clothing is going to just tie on, and some cultures find it easiest to leave it that way. Laces are also a straightforward way of keeping clothing together, if you’re looking for a better fit. Buttons and buckles generally come later. And in general, if clothing fits well, one of three things is going on: either you’ve got a really advanced textile industry, there are a lot of fastenings to work with, or you can afford a personal tailor. Probably a combination of the above.

In some places, differentiation in clothing can be used to demonstrate separation between groups. This doesn’t have to mean that one group is considered ‘lesser’ than the other, though it can. It might simply mean that they have different priorities. In our world, divisions have included rank, gender, profession, religion and bloodline; when you get into fantasy worlds, you might add things like favored source of magic, elemental association, or relation to some sort of divination system. Almost any kind of divide can be mirrored by clothing; you just need to figure out what sort of aesthetic the clothing matches, and then demonstrate it by making sure people are dressing according to their station.

Even colors can be used to characterize a culture. If one dye’s particularly common, and another’s particularly rare, odds are the use of the rare dye is going to be a sign of rank or wealth. Some try to blend in with the world around them; others try to contrast. Sometimes, coloration of a certain group’s clothing is supposed to be symbolic of what they do; other times, it’s more practical, like dressing a soldier in a sufficiently dark red-brown that bloodstains won’t show up; yet other times, it hearkens back to their religion.

Patterns and embellishments can tell you just as much. Many cultures favor stripes in their fabric, as those are easier to weave and to plan out. Cloth with integrated, rather than embroidered or applique, patterns are likely to imply more advanced weaving techniques. If they use animal or nature patterns, those are probably going to be reflective of their surroundings; if they don’t, think about what they use, and why they don’t use patterns like that. Do they have different rules for jewelry than for textiles? If they use animal imagery, is it stylized or realistic? Does it mean something? Do they do patterns, or do they favor small numbers of images?

So when you’re trying to make a member of a certain culture stand out in a crowd with what they’re wearing, think about these—give your audience a chance to make guesses about the culture before you’re even finished introducing the character. Won’t it be fun?

Usually, I talk about topics that can fit both role-playing and writing. Today’s a bit different, though; I’m going to talk about a topic that fits both role-playing and real life, and that’s the importance of the ability to effect change.

I’ve written about this before, in mentioning the importance of agency, but from what I’ve seen, it’s impossible to write about it enough. I’ve seen games end because nobody thought they could do anything but be pushed around by the storyline; I’ve seen fights that were never resolved because both sides believed there was no chance the other would bend.

Conversely, people who think that there’s a chance to change things might stay in a situation longer than it really makes sense to do so. Even success being nigh on impossible won’t necessarily get people to give up. I’ve seen people who would do anything for the respect of that one authority figure, or for a chance to make a difference in someone else’s life. I myself spent four years fighting a losing battle trying to prove myself to a band director who seemed to take every opportunity possible to keep me out of the jazz band. Shinali phrases it more succinctly: “I tend to work hard at the slightest chance of success because I fear giving up—better to fail than quit.”

The take-home lesson is that if you’re going to set a task in front of people, or set up a circumstance that it’s their job to change, they have to believe that change is possible, and that they are the ones who can effect it. If they don’t, they’re probably not going to try. If Plan A fails, and Plan B fails, and C looks like it’s about to fail, and there’s no way to tell whether the plan was flawed to begin with or if Fate just says No, is anyone really going to want to risk all on Plan D? Similarly, if you can tell exactly where the people above you are going wrong, but as far as you can tell the only thing that will happen if you try to explain this to them is that they’ll take away the little you have left, are you really going to want to help them fix things? What if there’s something that’s very obviously a plot point in need of addressing, but you haven’t the slightest idea how to address it or even where to start addressing it; are you going to try to push on in your ignorance, or are you just going to find something that you actually know how to do?

The game master needs to understand this, and act accordingly. If it’s a problem that’s supposed to be solved, there needs to be some sort of apparent clue as to how to solve it. If there are a lot of problems, at least one of them should look like it can be solved.

In general, it all comes down to this: If you imagine yourself in the scenario you’re setting up, and the only answer you can reach to the question “But what can I do?” is “Nothing”, it should be no surprise when the people who are supposed to be in that situation don’t do anything.

RPG Blog Carnival is on humor this month. It’s a large and varied subject, and has many uses—not only do people often try to display it within their narratives, but individual or cultural senses of humor can make variation between people and cultures seem more realistic and set them apart from each other. But to understand how to use humor, we need to make sense of how humor patterns itself.

Photo by forwardcom

To think about how humor works, you have to start by looking at things that people have been known to find funny. You probably won’t agree with all of them; I know I don’t.

A lot of today’s humor seems to be based on shock value. “Ma’s out, Pa’s out, let’s talk rude,” as Flanders and Swann would put it. So you get jokes about sex and anatomy, jokes about bodily functions—the more controversial it is, the more they joke about it. Heck, there are some people for whom “Yo mama” jokes are funny just by being in their category, or for whom “That’s what she said” is a 100% reliable response. I’ll admit, I’ve never found them funny in their own regard, but I suppose when the choice is either to be shocked and demonstrate oneself as out-group, or to laugh and save face, laughing would make sense.

Similarly, there’s humor based on people making fools of themselves. It’s practically a staple of comedy these days, at least in the media I’m prone to watching; there’ll invariably be someone who doesn’t know when to shut up, who consistently makes the wrong move, or who otherwise will end up with egg on his face by the end of the movie. This sort of humor can run the gamut from people not knowing any better or just having bad luck to people who deserve what they get through sheer stupidity.

Other humor is based on cognitive dissonance—two or more elements of the situation just plain don’t match up, kicking it into the realm of the absurd. This can include things like blatant anachronism, self-referential humor (particularly the breaking of the fourth wall), or ludicrous absurdity. This is why we snicker at drunk shapeshifters deciding that a porcupine quartet would be the height of entertainment or at the sleeper who wakes with “No, not the syrup! Put it down, I’ll deliver the antelope!” They’re absurd, and we love them for it.

In some cases, it’s all about the context. This includes humor which depends on the line’s delivery, timing-dependent humor, and in-jokes. I’m sure you’ve had an anecdote that’s fallen flat and been explained away with “You had to have been there.” In-jokes are particularly common among subcultures; a non-roleplayer probably isn’t going to know about Pun-Pun or the Dread Gazebo, and it takes immersion in the university system to understand what’s so amusing about the Academic Food Chain.

Then there’s wordplay—generating humor through deviations from words’ expected patterns and meanings. Much of this comes in the form of the dreaded pun, which usually bases itself on similarity in sound or spelling and differences in meaning. The pun itself covers a wide variety of levels of humor; while some puns are so obvious that anyone could get them, others require cultural references, understanding of different dialects or languages, or knowledge in a certain field. Wordplay is one of the reasons why subtle insults, to some people, are an art in their own right.

Most of the humor out there combines the above types. Consider the following passage by Michael L. VanBlaricum, which took Runner-Up for Vile Puns in the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Awards:

The Jones family held their annual family reunion on Easter going through over six dozen spiral-cut, hickory-smoked hams and several bottles of a fine Australian shiraz, before Farmer Jones, the head of the family, took the leavings back to Manor Farm to slop Napoleon and his other champion hogs but the seventy-six ham bones fed the pig’s tirade.

The phrasing makes it pretty clear that this one is supposed to be wordplay; it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. But it’s also contextual; to really understand it, you have to have seen “The Music Man” (or at least have heard or know the lyrics to “76 Trombones”), and it probably helps if you’ve read Animal Farm.

So there you have it; an introduction to humor. Coming soon: Now that we’ve got it, what do we do with it?

One of the hazards of roleplaying as a group activity springs from the fact that it requires a group, and requiring a group means requiring people’s schedules to line up. Needless to say, this doesn’t always work. People get dragged away for family events, overwhelmed by school or work, laid low by illness; sometimes someone can’t get transportation, or someone else had a previous engagement, or someone else really needs to stay home and take care of the pets/younger relatives/older relative. Occasionally it’s longer term, like a player’s work schedule messing with time zone alignment, or someone moving away or going off on foreign exchange. And sometimes people just blow it off, either short-term or long-term.

Photo by Jeff Hire

So what do you do when a character clearly exists, but the player’s not around to play him? Sure, in some games you can get away with “You find that some of your teammates have mysteriously vanished, and others have mysteriously appeared”, but if what you’re going for is internal consistency, that’s usually not going to fly.

Some groups just have the absent player’s character go mysteriously silent; sure, they’re around, but they don’t tend to say much, or they follow the group quietly and don’t do much else. While this does address the immediate issue of the character not being there, it can occasionally cause its own problems; what happens when a character who ordinarily would be fully involved in planning doesn’t have a player there to contribute? Or when a problem comes up that would actively involve them?

One method people take is having someone else play the character by proxy. This often falls to the game master, since she’s already taking care of every character who isn’t a PC, but might be handed off to a fellow player with a crib sheet in order to avoid overwhelming the GM. It’s a good technique in the short term, as it means you don’t have to figure out where the character went, allowing the player to come back and pick up where he left off. On the other hand, no two people see the same character the same way—and while most of the time this will just be a minor nuisance, people occasionally tell horror stories about characters being killed or rendered unconscious because they weren’t played the way the original player would have played them. A good thing? Not so much. Moreover, it requires coordination to pull off, and the other player variant may require telling secrets that wouldn’t otherwise have come up until later.

Some groups have the character himself removed from the situation, possibly even making his removal a plot point. I’ve seen a number of forms of this myself, with future absentees being abducted, given alternate errands to do, put in magical stasis—heck, when I got a job that kept me away from one of my play-by-chats, my character was written out of the story for several months by having him pass out through magical backlash after channeling the spirit of a murdered woman. Though making it a plot point makes it easier for internal consistency, it can be difficult for the absentee player; what happens if he gets back and the conditions for his character’s return haven’t been reached yet? Or what if he’s gone too long?

And of course, many people’s solution to permanent absences (most often a player moving away or losing interest) is to kill the character in question. On one level, this works; nobody has to learn how to play the absentee character, and it explains why the character is gone. On the other hand, it has its own difficulties. The character isn’t just going to die out of nowhere, and his teammates are probably going to have something to say about his death (I had a friend who nearly lost one of her characters trying to save the life of a character who was being deliberately killed off and hadn’t told her; awkward situation to say the least). Moreover, the character might be a link to some of the other NPCs, or otherwise important to the game, and would be more useful alive than dead. And what happens if someone finds a way for the player to come back?

I’ve seen all of these work, in one circumstance or another. Which technique works for you?