May 14 2009
What Would You Do Without….
Just about everyone has something that seems like a part of them or their life. It’s pretty much a given; you get so used to an item or a skill, a convenience or a fact about the environment, and next thing you know it’s hard to imagine it not being there.
Writers and game masters are fully aware of this fact, and even more aware of the potential for drama. So it shows up a lot, particularly when a character is clearly dependent on a certain feature. Spellcasters lose their magic, fighters their weapons; people get separated from their secondary characters or find themselves without their items of plot importance. As a narrative technique, it has a lot of purposes; it highlights how vital that particular thing was for the person who lost it, shows a bit about their personality and how they react to that sort of adversity, and both showcases and rewards improvisation as people try to either apply other skills to the situation or locate a substitute for the missing thing.
While most people seem to focus on skills that a character leans heavily on, even less dramatically important skills and attributes can be taken for granted. As anyone who’s had laryngitis knows, even half-losing one’s voice can be a massive inconvenience. Do you remember what it’s like not to know how to read, or what it’s like to have to learn again with another language? What about partial loss of senses—for instance, seeing everything as a bunch of blurs or losing depth perception? And there’s always the question of what happens when you mess up a limb.
It doesn’t have to be an intrinsic skill or character-specific item, either; conveniences can be just as troublesome for a person and a lot harder to work around. Consider running water; most of us take it for granted, and removing even some of a pipe system’s functionality can really mess up how a household operates. What do you do if the dishwasher breaks and you can’t just fix the problem? How about if something goes wrong with the drain for the kitchen sink? What about the shower? The toilet? What happens if you get multiple versions of this at the same time? On a similar note, what would you do without your favored mode of transportation? And what if—gasp—you lost access to the Internet?
Even before this kind of plot is implemented, a character can still be characterized by it. Does it occur to a given character that she might at some point have to deal with one of her major resources being lost or unavailable? How does she deal with it; does she try to reduce her dependence on it, come up with a backup plan in case it’s lost, or just go to lengths to reduce her chances of losing it? How many of her skills and resources does she treat in this way?
Absence—of things, of skills, of conveniences—can provide an excellent dramatic element. Do you think about it? How would you use it?
