Yesterday, I mentioned that I find some rather interesting interactions between my interest in seeing characters as individuals and my approach to backstories. It’s pretty much inevitable given my own approach to both writing and role-playing, and it’s something I like trying to analyze.

When at all possible, I like to write characters’ backstories in first person. It gives me a sense of their voice before someone else hears it, and it allows me to see who they are in a way that a dispassionate narrator showing highlights of their lives wouldn’t. Since my inspiration style is character-based, this point is absolutely vital for me; I can do a tolerable job writing for a character I don’t know, and I’m technically capable of playing a character who’s a build and not much else, but I don’t enjoy it as much, and it doesn’t show the same spark that the characters I’ve been chatting with in my head for a while tend to have (at least, until the character in question bops me on the nose and says “No, I’m like THIS.”)

My backstories are usually as grounded in the world as I can get them. Yes, this causes problems when I don’t know the world too well, and even more when I don’t know what I need to ask about the world. It’s one of the reasons why it takes a near-Herculean effort for most people to get me into a setting I’m not intimately familiar with, particularly for a one-shot; if I don’t know the world, how am I supposed to give you a decent character?

When I can, I try to include at least three or four other characters (possibly counting the character’s familiar), with at least two of them still alive. Sure, I could play a tabula rasa, but why would I want to? I learned the hard way not long ago that if I don’t have any preexisting social connections in the setting and I’m accidentally offending the group, I go slowly but steadily nuts during session. Preexisting connections both let me avoid that and give me a couple more influences to shape the character herself.

I find all of these near-vital to having an individualized character rather than an archetype, one that responds as herself and not as everyone else of the type would do. The first person viewpoint lets me see her voice, with all its quirks—is she snarky? Somewhat formal? Can she laugh at herself? What kind of education does the vocabulary suggest? Cultural context? It also helps me identify with her. The world-grounding, likewise, ensures that I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t read to me like a transplant from the modern day, and in game characters increases the odds that I’m not accidentally clashing with half of the GM’s vision. (In a world I know from, I don’t think I’ve failed yet.) And the other characters from the background further push and pull her in different directions, as she tries to emulate one, avoid turning into another, steer clear of a third, impress a fourth—you just don’t get that from someone who has known no-one.

How do you backstory? Are there any special tricks or patterns you use, things you try to include, or is it just whatever comes? Fire away!

People who know me pretty well know that when it comes to forming attachments to fictional characters, whether written or introduced through RPGs, main or side, PC or NPC, mine or someone else’s, I’m both rather indiscriminate and unnervingly picky. And without creating a character attachment, it’s very, very hard to get and keep my attention. So this leads me to try to figure out what it takes to create a character that I like, because I like making attachments to characters and want more opportunities to do so.

I like a character who definitely has an arc of some sort going on. People who are static are hard for me to learn from; they’re there, they aren’t changing, and I either can’t or don’t want to identify with them. Give me internal conflicts! Let me see them expand their viewpoints to fit parts of the world they aren’t completely comfortable with, slowly learn to shake off misapprehensions they took in as gospel truth, stretch and compress and adapt to a world rather than the world doing all the adapting.

I like a character who has qualities that I myself can admire or identify with. It’s not the morals that matter too much; I’ll take a snarky and eloquent villain over a one-color protector of the innocent any day of the week. But something in them has to call to a quality I want, to one that I find interesting (these are usually synonymous), or to something I’m struggling with as well so I can see how they handle it. If I’m acting as a PC at the time, I’ll tend to be influenced by his or her preferences as well, to the point where I might loathe a certain character when channeling one of my lot, be vaguely amused by them when I’m being another, and like them when I’m channeling a third.

But while I like the characters I deal with to have that identifiable or admirable streak, I also want a controlled touch of the unfamiliar, or even the alien. I role-play, read and write in part to understand what goes on in heads that are not my own, since I know my viewpoint doesn’t match with a lot of people’s very well. So why would I be that interested in a character just like me when one who has one or two important differences and thus gives me something I can learn from is standing right there, right where I can change a few variables and see how they react?

I want a character who reacts as an individual, rather than reacting to things on the surface the way just about everyone else of that archetype does in those situations; to see the things that make that character different from all the other ones out there. (Looking at how this particular interest of mine interacts with my treatment of characters’ backstories is an interesting experience, let’s put it that way.) Even little differences go a long way towards establishing a character’s reality for me.

I like characters who are connected to the people around them. And I don’t just mean strong attachments or strong antipathy; those are as likely as not to make me want to throw the books instead. What I’m looking for is connections that take into account the specific personalities of both sides of the connection, whether wholesome or downright creepy, functional or dysfunctional, and incorporate those into their relationship such that of all the examples of that kind of connection between two characters, this one can only be these particular two or more.

There’s what I like in a character. What sorts of things get you attached? Does it make a difference if you’re in another character’s head at the time?

One of the best things about villainy is the wide range of apparent roles we can fill. You get five Hands of Darkness together, there’s a more than decent chance that each of them will have some sort of skill or narrow specialty that isn’t duplicated by any of the others. But while our diversity is a wonderful strength, sometimes we get too caught up in not seeing our similarities—and in that, we lose a great tactical advantage when it comes to dealing with heroes. We should remember that most of our unique tricks are variations on a small set of specialty areas, and know how to choose which of the set to work on and how to figure out who’s doing what.

So what are these areas of villain specialty, and what sorts of skills do they require? Here are a few examples.

Combat (small scale). This, of course, is where we find hand to hand duels, dirty fighting, really small group tactics, self defense and efficiently subduing potentially useful individuals. As a result, almost all of us tend to have some skill in this area, even if it’s just enough to stall until our next contingency kicks in. Useful sub-skills include hand-eye coordination, weapon skill, general strength and toughness.

Combat (large scale). This area of specialty is where the armies come in. It’s more hands-off than small scale combat, generally involving a lot of working through intermediaries—while this gives you plenty of chances to “fight” the heroes without actually risking your own life, it also requires a lot of resources. It’s nearly vital to have a good sense of tactics, an understanding of your resources and what they can do, and an idea of the land—though it has been proven on a few occasions that large numbers of people gullible enough to die in swarms for your ideal and consider it an honor can sort of make up for a lack in those areas.

Manipulation (small scale). Why fight at all when you can just convince people that you were right all along? Small-scale manipulation gives you a way to turn Good’s greatest weapons against it, from confusing them into hesitation to actively recruiting them. While one can get away with depending on mind-altering magic, it’s more reliable to depend on having a great deal of background about one’s targets, a gift with words, and an in-depth understanding of psychology. (The ability to lie well is useful, but the ability to mislead without lying will also stand you in good stead.)

Manipulation (large scale). The small-scale manipulator influences individual people to do her bidding. The large-scale manipulator, on the other hand, isn’t content with that; her favored targets are corporations, guilds, demographics, armies, even countries. Like her small-scale counterpart, she needs to understand psychology and fares better if she has background to work from; but instead of needing to be very convincing in face to face interaction, her understanding needs to be more along the lines of the relationships between her targets, their needs, and their optimal uses. Whether she’s a propagandist or prefers a style that targets parts of the groups, her advantage is in getting a lot of people moving in the same direction.

Tool use (development). This is where we find our mad scientists, experimental mages, general inventors, and similar creators of potentially dangerous wonders. These people bypass the need to talk to or fight their enemies—instead, they aim a death ray in their general direction or turn them all into housecats (careful: in some worlds, this makes them more dangerous) and let that do all the fighting or convincing they need for them. A tool developer needs to have knowledge of whatever passes for a unified theory of metaphysics, possibly more; artificery, science, magic theory, whatever the predominantly useful knowledge is; she also needs resources, and the ability to keep people off her back while she constructs.

Tool use (improvisation). Sure, this is more a hero thing, but what’s to say we can’t use it ourselves? For an improviser, it doesn’t matter what the resources are; she can make them into whatever she needs. Some just focus on physical objects, but others (usually with a side specialty in manipulation) can turn anything into a tool given five minutes and a clear head. Being a good improviser requires quick wits, problem-solving skills, and lateral thinking—a good memory for detail also helps.

Note that these aren’t mutually exclusive; many people combine different levels of most and possibly all of these, and it’s important to combine a few just to keep from having really glaring weaknesses. Which one are you?

I play a lot with cultural required reading in my games, or rather cultural things the character’s been reading. It’s a fun kind of detail for me to throw in, and let’s face it, I’m so used to being surrounded by books and quotes and things that I’d find it a bit odd if my more literate characters weren’t throwing around quotes like anything.

One of the first times I had people appealing to authority was Ruby quoting two different strategists (with opposed viewpoints, no less) in response to one of the PCs asking her about how she’d handle a certain situation. Now, Ruby quotes all the time, but usually it’s quoting her mentor Lirit; this time, though, it was a situation she hadn’t actually found an answer for yet, so she stalled by disseminating a couple of the major historical opinions on opposite sides of the issue.

My charming PC Tuyet, on the other hand, was one of the ones for whom the body of literature made up a largely defining part of the character. Tuyet’s big schtick, at least at the beginning, was the fifty rules of spycraft, most of which I don’t remember because it was make up a number, fit it to a rule, hope like anything I haven’t already used it. Except for Rule 47 (“Use EVERYTHING to your advantage”), which she tended to invoke at the drop of a hat. She also occasionally utilized epic poems. There was one that made three appearances: once as something she was ready to draw an analogy to, once as the source for the name she gave her familiar, and once as a recommendation she made for someone whose reading she wanted to guide in a slightly safer direction. Another ended up being the source for a name she used for a hastily thrown together cover identity.

And of course, my primary game being in the Exalted system and set in Yu Shan, I get to take advantage of a pre-existing “body of literature”: Sidereal scripture. Now that’s fun, at least for me. At various points, I’ve used it as the key to a puzzle, as part of one character’s explanation to another about why she’s not too worried about trying to extend her life, as the framing of the same character’s attempt to turn a small-scale dream battle to her advantage (it makes sense in context, I promise), and as a source of inspiration for my player-bribery Kes-toons.

It’s good practice, and it’ll come in handy later; at the moment, I’m courting a novel idea based around an apprentice calligrapher, and there’s no way that isn’t going to require a body of literature thorough enough to be applicable to almost any situation.

As a side note, tonight marks my 600^th post on this blog. Scary thought, isn’t it?

One thing that just about everyone seems to gripe about with regards to their own schooling is required reading. There’s just something about a body of literature that people are expected to go through that makes them not want to get anywhere near it. But books aren’t the only thing this happens with, just the main thing that the school enforces: we also seem to have cultural required viewing for popular movies, and required playing within the video gamer subculture, and probably a number of other things depending on what sorts of people you hang out with. Every culture carries expectations that you’ve looked into a certain body of its creative/academical work. Heck, as far as I can tell every branch of the military has a required reading list, none of which is 100% about military strategy (I can guarantee you the Marines and the Navy, anyway).

We-as-worldbuilders can use this. Not only does it further characterize our societies, but it also allows us to distinguish between subcultures by showing where one declares one piece the larger society requires ‘optional’ but insists on another that the larger society ignores.

How do we express it, though? It’s not just occasionally dropping names or describing the title and author of something found on one’s bookshelf, though that rarely hurts. It’s also realizing just how much this sort of thing permeates day to day life. For instance:

• Slang and jargon. Did you know that the term robot was derived from a word for drudgery found in a number of Slavic languages by the brother of the science fiction writer who originally popularized it? (Then there are the writers who rather deliberately reference other writers this way: one of Robert Asprin’s Phule books referenced a robot’s “Asimov circuits”, presumably the ones that enforced the Three Laws, and a short story I wrote for class not long after my first encounter with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress included the term “Mycroft threshold” for the point at which the computer’s connections reach critical mass and it gains sentience.) Have you ever referenced Big Brother or talked about something as a Catch-22? Discussed kissing a lot of frogs to find a prince? Check it out—it’s the cultural reading list talking.
• Analogy. From what I’ve seen in the real world, this one’s more common with fictional works than with nonfictional, presumably because people are more enthusiastic about identifying with characters than with abstract situations. I’ve had sociology professors explain things in terms of The Matrix (an awkward situation for me, since my closest encounter with that movie before that point had been a philosophy book I’d read while prospying at Pomona), have spent more time than I care to think of hanging around other role-players who put things in terms of shows and movies I’ve never seen and video games I’ve never played, and had a character who at one point was ready to summarize a situation in terms of an epic poem that hadn’t even existed until I was looking for an analogy to use.
• Direct reference. Sometimes, it’s all in the quote. The armchair general quotes the famous strategist, the member of a cause quotes one of the books that set the cause’s adherents off (or quotes someone the cause is opposed to; nobody ever said that because a book was mainstream meant that everyone agreed with it)… they’re all over the place. People who have a higher authority of any sort often love getting use out of it—as far as they’re concerned, it makes them right.
• In-jokes. With more obscure media, this is likely to be used as a way for members of sub-cultures to recognize each other. In other cases, it might be a way for someone who’s in other senses an outsider to reinforce points of connection. And of course, there are the times when the objective is to, well, make a joke. (One of my biology professors once based a sequence of genetics problems around the odds of a certain match producing a serial-numbers-removed Geico gecko, with genes for coloration and accent. Connection? Reducing tension? Both? I never found out.)

So what are your characters supposed to read or listen to? Who expects it of them? And how does it show through in the culture?

Hello, my name is Erika, and I have a passion for literary criticism and metatextual analysis. But you’ve probably figured that out and accepted it if you’re a regular reader here. I’m a compulsive proofreader and proud of it, I’ve taken writing classes, I read crit blogs for fun, and my major in science makes me try to pick on the reasons for everything. That, and I consider critique to be the most valuable tool in my attempts to become a better writer and GM; if I can figure out what I don’t like about someone else’s work rather than just saying I don’t like it, I’m that much likelier to be able to see it if it crops up in my own.

The problem, of course, comes when this passion of mine runs into other people. For some reason, critics tend to be seen as spoilsports, trying to tear down other people’s work and spoil other people’s fun out of some sort of jealousy or inferiority complex or what have you. (The fact that I’m something of a terrier when it comes to activism-critique doesn’t exactly help.) So, for my own sake and that of others like me, I’d like to point out two major misapprehensions that people dealing with metatextual hobbyists like me have.

Misapprehension 1: The critic’s main goal is always to tear down the thing that she is critiquing. I’m not going to say that most of us don’t tend to take a certain amount of glee in ripping apart the things we don’t like. But that doesn’t mean that everything we find flaws in, we hate. Many of us are as likely to find the holes in the things we like, and discuss how we’d fix them; it’s how we improve, and it’s something we can use to improve our own skills and maybe if we’re really lucky to talk to the creator and make this thing we love better. (Sometimes, we even are the creator and are testing our own chops; I spent about half an hour this evening applying an article I’d read on emotional intelligence and gender stereotyping to my own game and finding I didn’t like the results much.)

Misapprehension 2: The critic is addressing flaws in the creator and not the creation. This one seems to be applied really strongly to activist-critics, the ones who are looking at privilege and how it shapes the narrative. (I run beside and about five steps behind that particular pack; they’re better at that than I am.) But just because someone is pointing out a potentially problematic element doesn’t mean they consider it emblematic of the creator’s viewpoint. Heck, one common thread I’ve found among activist-critics is that many of them have had to train themselves to see the things they’re pointing out now, and that’s why they’re pointing them out: because they know perfectly well the creator didn’t mean to, and want to help her not make the same mistake next time, both for her sake and for the sake of the people who didn’t have to be taught to notice it. (You would not believe the number of things that I didn’t notice I wasn’t noticing until the last two years or so.) In sum, there is a difference between “This could be interpreted as a [insert prefix]ist element” and “THIS PERSON IS [insert prefix]IST!”

I’ll grant that some people actually do fit both of those patterns, ad-homming against a creator and trying to tear down work because they dislike it. And even the people who are doing their level best to stay reasonable under most circumstances do occasionally slip and go into full snark mode against something (yeah, guilty as charged, no throwing stones here)–though in my experience we do try to keep that to things that are so bad they’re horrible and to do it mainly as a way to have fun with other people who agree with us.

In short, critics like me aren’t as malicious as they’re made out to be; most of us just want more of a chance to make the constructive part of our hobby work and build a better world through metatextual analysis. So cut us some slack, ask questions instead of assuming the worst—you may even find you enjoy yourself!

When you think of the phrase “fantasy setting”, what do you see?

I asked that around on Twitter and got a bunch of rather telling answers. Dragons, lots of dragons. Armor and swords, many swords. (For some reason, apparently you don’t often see halberds). Mountains, marketplaces—beards and funny hats.

Presumably, there are dwarves under a mountain somewhere, elves in treehouses somewhere else, little burrows with round doors that creatures whose name changes to avoid copyright issues occupy, something with a one-syllable name that’s predominantly consonants off causing trouble in the mountains. And there are forests and meadows everywhere, and icy gray mountains in the distance, with maybe a desert or two (with cacti, plausible or not, for flavor); the villages are made of wood and thatch, the cities of wood and stone, the castles of stone and stone.

Sometimes, to get away from this, we go somewhere else entirely. Someone creates cities underwater, or at the center of the earth, or in the sky; the world is given waterfalls that cascade off of its edge or cracks that run down its center. For some people, this is too far. For others, it’s only just far enough.

But people can change their settings without having to go the direct opposite of the English countryside Fantasyland. It takes a little research, sure, but it can create something that one group of people sees as an entirely different world and another as, for once, close to home.

Have you ever seen or read about scrubland, where nothing grows higher than eight feet but they’re tight enough together that you may as well be dealing with a thicket? How about the taiga, frosty most of the year, snow over conifers with needles like knives? Deserts of earth rather than endless dunes, where April monsoons bring May wildflowers, and bats suck on nectar in the unnervingly cold nights?

What about buildings of adobe or bamboo, woven reeds or cliff faces? What about yurts or other portable dwellings?

There’s a lot of world out there that people tend to avoid in favor of the typical fantasy land, and a lot they’re missing out on. One of my current adventure design projects, as I’m writing it now, involves a chase scene through the equivalent of a California scrubland. Imagine sprinting through a low tangle of red-barked trees, the paths barely wide enough to fit you, the ground below uneven and full of miniature gullies where water has washed through, dead wood like twisted white bones crunching underfoot. This is real; I’ve actually done it.

Sure, we can create new plants or new species of animal, rewrite entire ecosystems—but why not use the less well-trodden ones we have? Not only does it create an entirely new sort of area, but the people who know from these places will recognize them and be impressed by your willingness to do at least some of your homework. And hey, given half the people who write about forests wouldn’t know a birch from an elm anyway, you’ll probably get cut a bit of slack for trying somewhere new.

After yesterday’s riff about minimum skills, I figured I’d better give a nice thorough example. And where better to demonstrate a range of minimum skills than to look at what’s expected of the friendly neighborhood Marine library technician?

Needless to say, there are the standard requirements, the kinds of things you’d expect from a library employee of any stripe. Know how to use the local organization method (in our case, the Dewey Decimal System with modifications), how to find the different sections in the library, and how alphabetical order works. Know how to use the library computers, both circulation software and most of the MS Office suite (Excel can be worked around but one should know the basics, PowerPoint is optional). Know hours, location, the names of your coworkers, and when your shift is. Simple enough, right?

Then there are the other decently typical ones. In general, a library employee should be able to mend and cover books; use and troubleshoot the public-access computers, copier, wireless network and/or fax machine; handle opening and/or closing procedures; and carry off whatever special tasks are required for the current library promotion. It’s a good idea to be able to either multitask or know how to split tasks with a coworker when the patrons are piling up. Anyone in a bureaucracy or a chain of command should be able to recognize not only her immediate superiors but the ones who are at another location but still have the power (in our case, this includes the Community Services Director, the Commanding General, the Colonel assigned to our division, and a number of people whose position titles I can’t remember but who I know perfectly well I should go out of my way to be nice to). Those who go out of their way to be nice to some people need to know how to be nice enough to everyone that the people who aren’t in that group don’t get too shirty about special treatment. And one patron’s disparaging comments about our tech level aside, I’ve never seen a single library system that didn’t require at least some of its employees to know their way around a typewriter.

One of the most interesting requirements is being able to sort rank. Because of the brass’s interest in tracking our patron demographics, we need to be able not only tell our active duty patrons from our dependents, retirees, civilians, guests and the occasional reservist, but to differentiate between members of three different ranges of pay grade among our active duty patrons. Since most of them come in in uniform on the weekdays, this results in our learning to shoulder-read before we get to shelf-read: they won’t let you go spend time on library maintenance until you demonstrate that just by looking at the collar or sleeve insignia, you can tell the officers from everyone else, and the E1-E5 contingent from their E6-E9 counterparts. (At least, on the Marines. They’ll cut you a little slack for visitors from the Navy and Coast Guard, and even more slack for the rare Army and Air Force visitors.) Being able to tell specific ranks helps even more, particularly when the Commanding General drops in unannounced and it’s the one day when you’re the most experienced employee on duty.

While it’s necessary to know who to at least give the appearance of special consideration to, a library technician also needs to know when to be firm. Being technically outside the chain of command, we’re allowed and in fact required to tell people that their books are overdue and they cannot check materials out (or will be being watched carefully) until this is rectified, regardless of station. This means that we need to know at least one way, preferably more, to contact any given patron; how to get ahold of their superiors if they can’t be reached or refuse to cooperate; and how to tell people up to and including the Commanding General (where applicable) that their materials are overdue.

It’s not just about the materials, either; it’s also about the services. At my library, we’re expected to know how to copy people’s driver’s licenses so that both sides show up on the same sheet of paper, and (on the Tuesday that marks the beginning of each Recruiter School session) to do so at a rate of three or four licenses per minute while remembering how many we copied for our records. We need to be able to tell just by looking at ID who signs up for Rosetta Stone with us and who has to go through MarineNet, who’s eligible for Tutor.com according to HQ’s latest instructions and who isn’t, and then get them registered in the span of half a minute to a minute.

That’s not even counting the optional skills. And this is, as far as our library goes, an entry-level job.

There you have a spread of minimum skills suited to a relatively low-rank job in a complex work setting. I hope this gives you some ideas for your own organizational skill requirements!

Yesterday’s Generic Villain riff on minion work skills got me thinking about the idea of minimum acceptable skills or knowledge (or other traits) for a job, social context, or similar set of surroundings. Minima aren’t just practically ubiquitous in the real world (and thus realistic in other worlds), but also dramatically useful for writer and roleplayer alike. How are they useful?

Minimum knowledge can provide a way to tell the experienced member of a group from the ones who are only pretending. Did you know that at the height of the use of venereal nouns, to be in hunting company and not to use the correct ones led to being deemed a churl? (I have a character concept in part influenced by that little tidbit somewhere.) This leads to “To be able to fit in, you must be able to do x, y, and z,” leading to ways to locate impostors or newcomers, challenges for characters trying not to be caught as such, potential sources of culture shock, and ways of characterizing particular subcultures.

Similarly, positions or situations requiring minimum knowledge, skill or other qualities are a good way to give a character a path for improvement and a reason to try to improve. I don’t know about other people, but I have an easier time believing a character going out of her way to improve in order to qualify for something rather than for improvement’s own sake. These also allow a way to demonstrate another character’s abilities without showing or even telling them: they made it into such and such a subculture or position, therefore they must be able to do this, this and this. (One can, of course, subvert it later.)

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be under the character’s control. Think about minimum heights, the bane of every rollercoaster-fan child—or conversely, maximum weights (annoying enough for the person who’s actually over, but worse for the one who’s under but is being denied to spare the feelings of someone else who is actually over).

For the game designer and the GM, the skill minimum can serve as a way to limit access to certain mechanics. In some cases, it’s just an item that requires certain traits to wield, or a feat/power/what-have-you only accessible through getting other numbers up to a certain level. Other times, it’s a whole chain of things, like prestige classes in D&D 3.5.

On the other hand, designers often use a skill minimum (or more often, a set of skill minima) to encourage that people branch out into abilities that aren’t necessarily optimal (or at least, that not all GMs can handle) as well as to suggest the norms and requirements of the societies that they’re part of. One example that comes to mind is Exalted, where at least two different groups have more dots of abilities to play with but have to have certain minima in skills they might not otherwise invest in.

Motivation tool, balance enhancer, power limiter, subculture characterization element, source of realism—the minimum skill (or other thing) is a versatile tool for the savvy worldbuilder. Have you ever gotten use out of it?

Many of our plans are most easily foiled by the actions of our minions. I get that. It’s Dramatic Necessity. But just because it’s Dramatic Necessity doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least make it difficult for the heroes to take advantage of our little lambs rather than just utilizing holes a mile wide in their training. Around here, if you’re going to be a minion, you have to know things.

All minions are required to know how to recognize each other. Yes, in the big faceless mass. How many heroes have managed to sneak into the middle of a seemingly secure group in the uniform of the minions, wreak havoc, and maybe even leave the minions doing their victory dance completely unaware of the source, just because people weren’t trained in recognition beyond “It wears the uniform, it must be one of us!” No. My minions will be trained in vocal, facial and other forms of recognition; one who is faceblind will be paired up with at least two who are particularly observant, heavily trained in other modes of recognition, and otherwise shored up. This goes triple for the leadership. And along with being trained to recognize each other, minions will be required to be able to learn faces quickly, so that when the description of the latest heroic troublemaker goes through the ranks, they will know who they are dealing with when she shows up.

Minions will be fully trained in the use of all their equipment. This not only includes its use in as many possible situations as can be simulated (particularly ensuring that they are as good against moving targets as they are against stationary ones), but proper care and maintenance. Sure, the hero can exploit the condition of the weapon regardless of the minion’s effort, but it’s a lot harder against something that’s been taken proper care of. And particularly, if one of my minions is running around with a valuable magic item, that minion needs to be willing and able to use it. No excuses.

Minions will know at least the basics on the detection of falsehoods—and preferably evasions while they’re at it. How many have let the heroes get away because they assumed the little snot in front of them was being completely honest?

Minions will understand the importance of double-checking things. If someone comes in with a story that doesn’t add up, they will first call in a reinforcement so that someone else is watching the person with the improbable story, then go to check the story, and only then let the person with the improbable story in. (If the story doesn’t line up, they will take the person telling it around the long way. Through an ambush which they will have set or had someone else set on the way back from checking the story.)

Minions will know which skills and abilities to use against which opponents. If one very clearly has an immunity to one form of magical injury, and another has a weakness, the minions will be trained in knowing which one to target. They will also be given courses on threat assessment, resource management and teamwork.

Last of all, minions will learn to sprinkle all conversations with references to their lives outside the workplace. If they do not have personalities and lives outside the workplace, they will be issued one. Not only does it make it that much harder for the heroes to dehumanize them enough to salve their little Light-blind consciences, but it also makes it easier for us to provide proper employee incentives.

Just because Dramatic Necessity favors the heroes winning doesn’t mean we should make the job easy, and the bottom of the ladder is the first place to stop. Implement minion reform today!