Exchange of Realities

Even a created world can be a big, big place, with lots of people. But never is it larger than when you’re trying to make sense of a world’s inhabitants with only your perceptions to guide you. Who are these people? What do they want? Sure, one could ask for backstory, raid the author’s world-guide, see if the GM’s willing to share background materials, that sort of thing. Yet that’s a lot of work, so most people are likely to take a quicker route.

And in many cases, that quicker route is using the unknown character’s relationships with a known character as a yardstick. This person gets along well with my closest friend who I consider to have decent judgment? Must be all right. My teacher respects this other person? Probably respectable. This one wants to hurt my mentor? Enemy!

As a result, pre-existing character relationships will often become shorthand for an incoming character’s personality or role, guiding the player or the reader towards a certain view of that character. Sometimes this is just a fact about the audience and their preconceptions; sometimes it’s a deliberate decision by the creator.

Needless to say, we can use this.

The logical way, of course, is to play it straight. We take our viewpoint characters, whether they’re our own creations or the incoming PCs, get them to establish strong relationships to a few characters, then introduce those characters in terms of the ones they know—the one the mentor is afraid of, the one the perceptive best friend takes a shine to, the one that causes a normally serene friend of theirs to go into a tirade. These impressions transfer to the audience, and there we go. Of course, one of the catches with this is when it’s the only way the world ever works. Imagine a book in which someone can get a true impression of every character’s intentions from how they get along with the main character. There’s no challenge in guessing who’s likely to turn traitor, ‘redeemable’ antagonists may as well have “Good with the proper encouragement” emblazoned on their chests… you get the idea. Would you be able to keep interest in something like that? I don’t think I would.

Inversion is another way to go, having the character whose reactions are serving as the Personality Barometer be in some way wrong. That fellow the mentor’s afraid of? Got luckier than he’s willing to admit during one fight. The best friend’s new buddy? Knows exactly how to come across to seem nicer than she really is. Like playing it straight, though, this gets predictable after a while, and even alternating between the two can be a bit obvious.

Then there’s mixing it up a bit. Who says a character needs to be defined by the reactions of just one other member of the cast? I’m sure you’ve got plenty of people. And who says any two people have to react to the same character in the same way? If someone managed an odds-defying act that saved the day, but could just as well have failed and only made the losses worse, isn’t the duty-bound character who won’t trust that maverick anymore just as right in her opinion as the direct beneficiary of the stunt who worships the ground that character walks on? Isn’t it possible that the character reminded of the cousin he’d idolized once is going to cut the character doing the reminding a lot more slack than the one who’s eerily reminded of an old girlfriend he has an unfortunate history with? One of my favorite examples of playing with this is the character of Ooishi, from Higurashi no Naku Goro Ni; keeping pretty much the same agenda, with slightly different contexts and different viewpoint characters, he manages to go most of the series without making the same impression or serving the same plot role twice in a row.

And what’s to say the character isn’t doing it on purpose? It’s not like normal people don’t try to come across in different ways to different people around them. Sure, this may bring up images of obvious and malevolent two-faced-ness, like the bully-girl who goes Sweet Innocent Young Thing whenever there are people in authority around, but there’s also minor gradations: haven’t you ever felt that there are certain emotions that it’s “safe” to show to some people, but dangerous to even hint at in front of others?

In sum, there’s a lot that can be done by playing with character impressions. Give it a whirl sometime!

Feel free to swing by for more on characterization.