Today is running out on me and a lot of things are swirling in my head. Lots of approaches, and most I am not sure how to express. So a series of short meta stories about characters.
The Character Arc
Some years ago we finished a session of Rhapsody of Blood and I was driving one of the players home. We barely knew each other, only through a few one-shots we had played together. But I had a good feeling about him and that is why he was invited to that home game.
So, we are driving and in passing, like it was the most common thing everyone does, he mentioned how during the session he was thinking about his characters arc for both the session and this part of the campaign. And you cold hear it in his attitude – it was literally being aware of those things, but not making it a set road.
The Subversion of Expectations
In a campaign of The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power I made a character using The Gauntlet playbook, a warrior completely under the thumb and direction of his ambitious twin sister. Everything I had was done to be a dreadful killing machine whose best course of action was violence. I had a very scary sword, was effectively a small unit of men, and the first XP I blew on getting a small unit of men to call my own. My character could stand against a smaller army and would most probably win.
And then during play I consciously tried my best not to use violence. Playing it that way was a challenge I loved every moment of. Sometimes around the middle of the campaign we were drawn into an ambush and my character threw his sword at some NPC, and the reveal of his true power was interesting and satisfactory to me.
But I am still a bit on the sad side I didn’t manage to go through the whole campaign without drawing my sword at all.
The Slow Burn
During a faux-Slavic Dungeon World campaign I introduced an NPC tied to my player’s characters – all brothers and sisters in service of four mystical Mothers. But Davor was introduced only when we would talk about their histories and memories. It went on and on for sessions.
Three sessions before the end things are tight. We start the session and Iskra (playing The Immolator) does something and we recall the first evening she came to the Mothers house. How little she was, scared, and Davor came and crawled into her bed to comfort her. And then as things were picking up in the session, she misses a roll and uses the move Burns Twice As Bright to turn it into a success. I ask her what did you lose, and I see the player struggling to thinking of something impactful. And another moment I ask her if she would be OK losing a memory. A memory of when Dima, the youngest of the player characters and Iskra’s favorite, came to the Mothers house. How small he was and scared. How she crawled to his bed to comfort him.
It is five years later and I cry at that scene, as I did that day, as Iskra’s player did and will when we talk about it again.