May 20 2009
Dealing With Large Casts of Characters
We all know the story. Having more people makes the world seem bigger. Or the cast started small, but people kept sticking their noses in, and next thing you knew you could fill a football stadium with your characters. Either way, you’ve got a cast problem—there are so many of them that even you are having a hard time keeping them all straight. How do you remember who’s who and what’s what? And just as importantly, how do you make sure the audience can?
Photo by RobinUtrac
One trick is to come up with ways to ‘tag’ the characters that make them more memorable to you. In some cases, these are distinctive features or habits, things that few if any other characters share with each of the characters in question. Other people give characters different roles, further separating them. Still others use meaningful names that remind them of at least one feature of the character’s personality. When I started color-coding dialogue in my game so that my players could tell who was speaking, I found that it, too, helped me remember who was who. (As you can guess, I do all of the above, simultaneously.)
Another important tactic is to keep notes: lots and lots of notes. As you’ve probably guessed, this can be a lot of work, and easy to misplace things in. If you’re using a notebook, you’ll probably want to have separate pages for each character, and mark them with sticky-notes or color-coded corners or the like. Some people use Excel spreadsheets, or Word documents; again, though, when you’ve got a lot of characters running around, you’re going to need a quick organization method. In either case, if you’re dealing with a game group, you’ll want to make sure the players either are taking notes or have information they can reference themselves; if you’re writing a book or a series, a character-list appendix will probably be in order.
Others utilize wikis, either public or personal, as those have navigation built in; I group the characters into general categories (usually by either status in the plotline or social group, sometimes with a little of each method). For a RPG campaign, a public wiki will probably be more useful, as it means you can make sure the players remember the things they need to know as well (unfortunately, it means you need to find somewhere else for your secret plot points); otherwise (and possibly in addition), a private wiki will do better. (While I haven’t actually tried it, I hear good things about Tiddlywiki for private use.)
Of course, both of the above methods attack the issue of large casts from the creator’s memory angle. But that’s not the only way to look at the large cast problem. Another way to fix it, particularly for a writer able to go back and fix the list or for the GM who hasn’t introduced some of the characters yet, is to—gasp—remove or combine existing characters from the story. Think about it—if you can’t remember them, your audience will probably have trouble keeping track of them as well. So look over the characters, and see if there are any whose parts can be merged, or if any of them can be removed wholesale. If you can’t remember them, or if they only do one thing that someone else could probably do, they’re prime targets for removal or condensation.
Unwieldy casts can be extremely problematic, but there are ways to keep them from being too overwhelming. Give it a try!
That’s an awkward place to be in; I’d definitely suggest moving your notes into electronic format, so you can at least keep track of which one has the most recent date modified.
I usually keep control of a large cast by making sure to keep each character in their context - so for example, the central characters may be deeply involved in some economic trouble affecting a village of taciturn barbarians, and also participating in some religious concern with a bunch of catty dance party wig types, without necessarily needing to impress both groups of people at the same time.
This has a few beneficial effects. First, when the players go back and forth from one setting to the other it can provide a kind of thematic relief. After a few sessions of flowery language and dance party intrigue, the straightforward manner of the barbarian can be relaxing - and similarly, if one gets tired of the laconic conversation and axe-throwing contests of the frozen plains, one can always go back to the Hall of Roses.
Second, instead of having the two settings fall together by default, you can bring them together in a controlled manner for better effect.
Clamberly: My *dear* - wearing fur in high summer! How do you manage?
Frafgor: By not wearing very much…
Catty wig ladies: *swoon*
Frafgor: Is it getting hot in here?
Catty wig men: *also swoon*
UrbaneZombie: So assigning a habitat to a character and trying to keep them there–I like that. (Though it gives me mental images of a nature documentary featuring the characters or their types. “And now, we venture deep into High Society, home of the–look out! It’s a Catty Wig Dance Party Type! Note the ‘I say’, a typical warning that their territory is being inva–er, what am I doing? Nothing! Nothing at all! *darts behind fourth wall and out of sight*)
Shakespeare: That’s one way–and definitely important. If you can’t keep track of your own characters, who else will?
I had half an answer, but I think this might be post-worthy; if I don’t have a post on it by the end of the week, I’ll come back and try to answer here.
It’s a fantasy convention to some extent - of course, fantasy stories often underline geographic and cultural differences by making them genetic as well. I suppose when people say “Gygaxian Naturalist”, they usually aren’t thinking of David Attenborough…