Reflections on Character Deaths

Different tabletop games have different likelihoods of player character death (Call of Cthulhu has a particularly treacherous likelihood) while games which are the "tabletop game version" of a media property (I played the Firefly ttrpg many years ago and found it very, very gentle). But in all games, dying is a big deal. You've made a character, and you presumably care about them and their goals, and you've spent considerable time with them, even if just in creating them. Character deaths are the thing of story and legend for better or for worse. 

I honestly have tried not to think too hard about the character deaths that I've been party to. I understand that it's necessary to have serious consequences for risky actions, and I don't think a deathless game or story would be more compelling than the alternative. I do believe that death should be a part of tabletop games . . . in theory. It's good that the option is there for when it's the right thing. But I think very frequently in the gaming community, character death is used by GMs as a way to tell a "shocking" story (rather than coming up with an idea that would be interesting, just kill somebody). 

Let's say that you are in fact using good wisdom on how to deal with character deaths. It's still going to be one of the defining moments of the campaign, so it needs to be handled gently and with consideration. In order to really fully get at my experiences with death in tabletop games, I'm going to reflect on the characters I've seen who didn't make it to the end of the quest. 

My first GM was a gentle man, a neighbor and father of a school friend who graciously invited me to learn at his table. He became something of a surrogate father to me, and I think he saw me developing as a GM even as I learned to play. My second player character ever was for an evil campaign, a horrifying self-scarring grim reaper-inspired orcish Barbarbian. My teammates mocked her name (Morana, which they said was basically "Moron," which they said she was) and me for having a female character (I would, many years later, come out as a transwoman). During the climactic fight that was to define our opening session, I charged forward to save an ally; the ally retreated, and the rest of the party fled and left my character to be overwhelmed and killed. It was awful. 

What stung the most was the intentionality of it. My party's players wanted to hurt my feelings, so they seized on the situation and maneuvered so that I would die. I never saw it coming. Morana was torn down by enemies (I don't even remember what type at this point), and my DM decided that perhaps this party was not the best home for me. He created a new group--fostering my interest in the game--with one of my best friends where we had our own evil campaign. I played a nasty little gnomish Wizard who terrorized the countryside and always figured out a way to stay on top, and his named was Loki (I was a high schooler, okay?). 

I have so many stories of Loki that it's impossible to know where to start. I mentioned wanting a castle, and my GM presented an expansion on elaborate keeps, and I took one over and began a trade empire. I met a man with a beautiful gold ring; I shook his hand and cast Incinerate (3.5E), plucking the ring from the ashes. My evil deeds spread, and an Inevitable was sicced on me; I tricked it into believing I was dead, survived its "just to be sure" attack, and went on being evil. Loki was everything you could dream of as a first real tabletop game character--he was bound only by my creativity, I was in a friendly, safe space (the GM really made me feel at home), and Loki was the star of the show every time I played--I got to see my little character be truly powerful. 

After high school, I did some scattered GMing; nothing was professional or refined, but it was quick and fun tabletop action. Later, when this scattered fun grew tiresome, I tried more ambitious projects. I set out on an experiment to see if I could get a party to assassinate an entire royal regime (the result: not at all). This party was, as an out-of-game construct, very turbulent. We began as a group of four: my best friend, my brother, my girlfriend, and my roommate. As the game continued--and it lasted nearly two years--we added more people--more friends, friends of other players, etc--and it swelled to eventually eight players by the end. It was, in a few words, entirely chaotic. 

This is especially true when you consider that the story ended up being about the division of the city where it was set splitting in half in a compacted civil war that destroyed the ruling class. The players ended up splitting into loyalists to the throne and anarchists trying to overthrow the city, and the result was something of a compromise: a democratically run council to replace the monarchy. The wrinkle is, with all this conflict built into the game and the long campaign time, there was a practical issue. 

I said in the end eight players finished this campaign. One did not. An original player--the guy who had been my roommate--and I ended up in a difficult situation. We were living together, working together (I was his direct boss), and our social circles all overlapped. We couldn't get away from each other. Eventually, things snapped, and I threw him out of the campaign. It was, I will admit, a childish move. I should have talked things over with him, I shouldn't have let my feelings get the best of me, and I definitely shouldn't do what I did next: I killed his character in a really mean way. Specifically, I said he was run over by a stationary cart, hoping to make a cruel joke at the expense of the character and the player. The party laughed, and every so often people who played in the campaign bring up the death. I feel awful about it, honestly. I was immature, and I turned character death (something heavy and not very funny) into a careless punchline. Looking back, I was an unconfident GM who felt like something shocking would work. To a degree, it did, but I'm happy to not do things like this anymore. 

I had a vision of what I wanted my tabletop games to be like--collaborative stories, though I couldn't have articulated that yet--and I had the skills to develop and improvise open world, so I set off running. I ran an audio actual play podcast and live radio broadcast of D&D in the early 2010s called Listen Check, and while we stretched what was considered possible in the artform at the time, we didn't stray into character death scenarios. They entered on many dangerous scenarios, but there was never a moment that placed them at death's door. I consider that a blessing as a GM since I wouldn't have known how to deal with it. 

I turned my focus on a mad quest that would span three campaigns: how could I grant the most possible control of the game to the players? I made a critically wrong assumption (that the empowerment would come from outside of the game) and set to work. I made a campaign in which each player submitted a storyline specific to their player character, each of which I would tie together. I made a campaign of mishmashed references, bits, settings, and comical NPCs for an antics party based on their insane list of inspirations (one of which involved me watching the National Treasure series for reference). I developed a mystery story using themes and details from player input. Their scrapes with death were unique and taught lessons not specific to death. 

In the first campaign mentioned, the Eastweald campaign (named for the large region of the map I created where the campaign took place). One player, my best friend, in fact, told me towards the very end of the campaign that he was dissatisfied with his character. He felt that the best thing that could happen was for his character, a somewhat disillusioned Paladin, to succumb to the depression and commit suicide. I was opposed to this for a lot of reasons. What I told him was this: we can change your character. The point is to have fun. Don't feel shackled to it. Change him in a way that feels fun. And shockingly to all of us (I think including the player), the Paladin threw himself at Vecna in the final moments of the campaign, only to find Vecna unwilling to defend a former Paladin, and the fallen Paladin was slain by the rest of the party. 

To have this Paladin kill himself accomplishes nothing narratively or for the character. Having him believe that darkness would enrich him and finding no hand to support him has a similar result--the Paladin dies--but with a more interesting choice and with an end that actually fits someone who would make the choice he made. To be honest, it's clumsy compared to something I might have come up with if I hadn't only found out about the Paladin's intention to defect as it happened, but it worked, and the player who made the Paladin maintains that it was a fitting end he doesn't regret. 

What makes the Paladin's death fitting is that it takes a meaningful action (siding with an evil deity) and provides it with a meaningful reaction (he is left to deal with his betrayal of his teammates alone). Had he committed suicide, there would be no meaningful action or reaction. And keep in mind--the player chose the betrayal. He called out to a trickster deity, asking for help without anything meaningful to offer. It was a desperate plan, and it didn't work, and death was unfortunately the only option I could offer him. 

The National Treasure campaign, as it was sometimes called (along with the Western campaign, the Goofball campaign, and other various nicknames), had no character deaths. I had essentially set up the large Western continent to be a sightseeing tour--a dozen unique and interesting places with story possibilities and colorful characters. The goal was not for them to be in danger so much as free. It didn't go as planned. The Goofballs earned the name every moment of every session (they were, for instance, permanently barred from ever returning to all but one of the towns they visited), but that was the point--they were having fun by being chaotic and wild and full of surprises, and making the world dangerous wouldn't contribute to that. It was a deathless campaign, as well it should have been. 

The mystery campaign was also deathless. To be fair, it was something of an experiment. To begin, we were using D&D (a system mostly focused on combat rules) to investigate a mystery (something that could have been done more easily with something like Call of Cthulhu or another more investigative game). Next, I knew from GMing experience that you can't make one piece of information that's especially hard to find and call that a mystery--there had to be a network of escalating clues that carried them from uninformed to the solution, and I had never done that before. Combat was rare, and we limited antics to a pretty rare frequency--we were really trying to tell a story and roleplay. There were death close calls, there were meaningful NPC deaths, and there were deaths that would change the gameworld, but the trio of player characters survived. 

In the interceding years, I got to try a handful of tabletop games that strayed from the D&D style to different degrees. I played characters in Don't Rest Your Head, Call of Cthulhu, Geist, Exalted, and the Firefly tabletop game, and fortunately for me, all of those characters survived. Not all my party members were so lucky. I saw Don't Rest Your Head allies fall to risks that went bad. I saw a Call of Cthulhu ally killed, it seemed, because she pissed off the GM. I saw a near party-wipe in Exalted when our GM fostered a party split and incentivized a player to snap. For the Don't Rest Your Head players who took one too many risks, I respect it. That's how the game is designed, and we accept those risks when we play. But the other two instances I mentioned--what amounts to GM malfeasance--it's awful. It should be avoided. Remember, the point is to have fun, and this kind of behavior is not fun. 

This brings us up to my most recent work, something I am immensely proud of. I call this campaign Of Gods and Dragons, a name that at once tells you that this will concern the most powerful forces in the setting with a linguistic flair, an indication that this is literary in a sense. And in fact, the party was abducted in the opening moments by an oppressive dragon, then rescued by another dragon, all before being set loose on a gameworld I've spent almost 20 years building. It was, as the mystery campaign was, a roleplaying and storytelling game, which was important given than I gave my players immense power to begin with (level 12 at session one--they easily could have wrought hell on almost any target if they'd chosen to be more chaotic. As it was, they chose to bring kindness. For one hundred years of epilogue, all three player characters improved the world. It is the peak of my GMing career so far.

No player characters died, but characters who were as important as player characters did die. I cast a group of ten characters as dragons, people empowered and made nearly immortal by their dragonhood. Seven survived. One of the three that died fell into an unfortunate scenario, catching the party at a time where she couldn't leave them alone and they couldn't leave her alive. Another was planned, the assassination of the man scheming to bring down the forces of reality in the name of destruction and empowerment. The last was a matter of closing loose ends, taking the last truly evil dragon out of commission so that the world would be, at least at the level of dragons, more good than evil by a greater margin, and so that the world would be safer from his potential threats. These dragons had been the source of conversation and planning for an out of game year, and finally facing them was unavoidable. 

Looking forward, I don't know what to expect when it comes to death in my campaigns. I'm eager to run other systems, and death is not a huge part of every game. I am especially intrigued by running a tabletop game I created in which players explore historically accurate versions of important times and places like 1750s London and 1930s Chicago (not to mention my projection of Washington D.C. in 2050). I don't suspect I'll be encountering a lot of player deaths in my future. 

So this next part isn't really for me. This next part is for GMs who are free with player death. I'll work backwards. Of Gods and Dragons taught me as the GM that death and danger are not necessary for a high stakes game. My various tabletop experiments taught me that when used irresponsibly, player death can ruin an experience. From my experiments as a GM with radical freedom, I learned that a well-earned consequence (including death) can enrich a story, and a poorly-considered consequence (including death) can ruin a player's experience of the story. My time DMing on the radio taught me that the story cannot precede the players and their experience--I often had to be changing game expectations based on radio broadcast, and I let the story and the listeners be more important to me than the players. My civil war campaign taught me to let the players define everything except reality. My clumsy DMing in college taught me to go beyond the cliches. And my time with my first DM, my neighbor and the man who spent weekends making popcorn and hosting movie afternoons in the basement, taught me that deaths are awful. 

Seriously! I spent a lot of time develop Morana. She was this fearless warrior who I wanted to be like, and she was strange but didn't care what people thought (something I was and desperately wanted to do), and she was covered in decorative scarring, not unlike tattoo art, which I was obsessed with (currently, about 50% of my upper body is tattooed). I cared about Morana. I looked forward to playing with her for weeks. I painted a mini for her, something that took endless hours and painstaking care. Watching her get hacked to bits while my supposed friends got away with the treasure was the kind of experience that would have turned a lot of people away from tabletop games. Most people, I would wager, would take that experience and decide the whole thing wasn't for them. 

But I didn't. I was hooked. D&D was a doorway that peeked in on the ideas of storytelling and roleplaying and imaginary play and game design that I couldn't just decide wasn't for me. The fact that my DM saw that and was willing to help me is one of the great kindnesses of my life. I didn't burn out because my character died--but I almost did. It was a bad thing that only happened because my DM's hands were tied--there was no way to fudge that my character survived. A separate campaign for me was the solution he had, and it still strikes me as incredibly generous. Because of my initial interest in tabletop games was strong, because I was given a kind recovery when I was betrayed, and because my interest was then fostered, I recovered. Lots of people aren't so lucky. 

Look, if a character straps explosives on themselves, runs into a goblin den, and detonates it, that character should die. If a character makes a few bad rolls and suddenly die from factors shouldn't really be deadly, that character realistically should not die. The dice and rules might say so, but you're the GM. You are empowered by the game to decide in the end what happens. Don't be afraid to do something. 

Ask yourself a few questions. First, what's best for the character? Does a death here serve a purpose? Has the character achieved everything they were designed to and this death would fulfill them somehow? Does the character still have unfinished business that would be unresolved if the character were to die? Things like relationships with other characters are less important here. 

Another vital question is, what's best for the story? Does this character still have some vital role to fulfill? Are there things later on you can think of that would be complicated or prevented by this character's death? You're not eagerly looking for an excuse to kill the character so much as looking for evidence that the character might benefit from a death; think of it like how juries work--you must be totally convinced that the character must die to kill them, otherwise they are innocent. 

Lastly, what's best for the party? If a character's death is going to have a major impact on the party, it's important to know going in that an issue is going to occur. One example, for instance, is if the party's sole healer would be killed, in which case all manner of complications could occur. Similarly, if the party leader is killed, the trajectory of the party could be massively affected. Or as I've had happen as a player, a crucial party member missing can stop the party from completing part of a quest. Any of these can affect a decision on what to do as far as a player character's fate. 

And finally, ask yourself what the player's experience will be if the character dies. Is this a hardened player who took a risk knowing the consequences, or a new player still learning the ropes of a complicated new game? Is this player being treated poorly at the table in a way that might affect their willingness to keep playing? Will this player keep playing tabletop games if their character dies? You may recoil at the idea of factoring this in, but our goal should be making more happy tabletop game players, not less. 

I made Morana when I was 17. I'm 35 now--that's half my life ago, plus a bit. Morana was, to be honest, a pretty hollow character. She was, like so many characters made by teenagers, meant to be cool without much thought as to roleplaying or anything beyond the lethalness of her scythe. But it still hurts to think of what I lost. Morana played one session before dying, and that meant that months or even years of gaming with her could have taken place. She could have been the character I carried with me in my heart as special, and instead, she was a fallen character who never had a story to tell. Her death hurt, and it could have driven me from the game. 

Instead, I stood my ground. I got some help from a good GM, and I set to playing and learning. Tabletop games slowly became more than a fascination--an obsession, and then a way of life. This website came together. Experimental campaigns happened. Tabletop games were created. My interest in D&D became something so much larger, and all of that could have been lost had I been shaken by Morana's death. There is a timeline in which D&D became "that thing I did in high school," in which I don't return to the stories and dice, in which that world is lost to me. I'm glad it wasn't. 

For a character to die in a tabletop game, you've got to be 100% certain it's their time. Think like a juror: is there no question that this character should die? Or is there reasonable doubt? The stakes are too high to make this decision without caution. This could be a defining moment for the player. Be gentle, be kind, and be reasonable--deaths are remembered, and you want to be remembered well.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to not get weighed down by worldbuilding, reflections on the campaign of a lifetime, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!

How to Connect to Your Characters

Most of what I discuss here on this site revolves around how to be a successful Dungeon Master, but I also think that playing the game is an important thing to address. A while back, I wrote about how to go about creating a player character, which serves as a guide for developing the base ideas that help create the foundation of a character. But that's not the end of the process. Once you have the basics of your character, there is still more work to be done if you want to get everything possible out of your gaming experience. With that in mind, the following is a guide on connecting with your characters. 

In order to illustrate the steps I suggest for connecting with your character, I'm going to use my most recent character, who also happens to be the character I have developed the most (and also the one I feel most attached to). So to start, let's talk about the foundation I created before taking this step--connecting with the character. 

Many years ago, I developed an idea for a character who was a Charisma-based rogue: a con artist with a stubborn streak and the skills to back it up. It was a long time before I had the right campaign to put her in, so I spent a lot of that time imagining who she was and what she was like. Eventually, I had solidified this character into a young woman who had fallen in with a gang but chafed under the unequal weight she pulled compared to her colleagues. My character sheet's space for backstory included this as well as the detail that she had left the gang amid turbulence in order to start over on her own. I liked this idea and thought it was pretty complete even though I hadn't taken all of the steps I suggest in the article linked above. 

I was wrong. 

As soon as we started playing, I realized a few things about my character. 1: Without a more detailed backstory, I had little conception of what motivated my character--Asp, named for the snake whose bite is so pleasurable that the serpents were once used as a form of "humane" execution--beyond greed and ego. 2: Asp's independent streak made it hard for her to work with the party in the campaign; in an early session, she bothered everyone else in the group by pulling a quick con for essentially no reason. 3: An extension of this was that our mission was a good-aligned one, and Asp's independence and Neutral alignment complicated this. And finally, 4: I wasn't getting the experience I had created Asp for--getting to con people; our main quest involves diplomacy, but diplomacy among elves who don't trust halflings like Asp. All of these issues meant I needed to readjust. I needed to connect with Asp (and quickly) or risk messing up the campaign for everyone. (This is part of collaborative storytelling: you need to compromise with the rest of the group.)

So I set about connecting with Asp. The first thing I did, and the first thing I think most any player should do with a new character, is imagine what they look like. If you're artistic and want to draw them, you absolutely should. But many of us are not artistically inclined, nor do we have disposable income to pay an artist to draw our characters. Fortunately, there are ways around this. I personally recommend the site Hero Forge, where you can design custom miniatures and potentially pay for them to be manufactured. I used the miniature-making software to create distinct appearances for Asp--each of the personas she uses while running cons. You can see each of these images on this short profile on her. Because I developed such an attachment to Asp over the course of trying to connect with her, I ended up buying a mini for each of her personas (it's really cool to see all her identities side by side on my gaming bookcase), but even just having images to share with your party is the most important thing. In fact, after I shared my images of Asp's identities with my group, our DM requested that everyone do the same for their characters. It's helpful for having a picture in your mind and sharing that with your group. 

But it's not just about having an image. Designing every detail of your character's appearance gives you time and space to consider who they really are. One such example: the Hero Forge system gives you the ability to add various items to spots on the character's body--for instance, what will you character place at their sides or on their back? You can place weapons and other items in those places. The value of this is that you are essentially being asked, "What kinds of things would this character find useful/regularly important?" This helped me imagine how she portrays her various identities: her reporter character carries writing tools and hides her hair in a cap; her diplomat character wears fancy jewelry to appear more upper class and highlights her long hair; her inventor character has practical tools and tied-up hair that makes her look male. I had imagined the personas before along the lines of what role they served (each persona has different benefits and drawbacks), but I hadn't really thought about how she would differentiate these appearances to keep from being caught. Making these character portraits allowed me to really get into the practical reality of her life in a way that I hadn't considered until I put thought into it. You never know what you'll learn about your character when you add details to them, and appearances are no different. 

I treat appearances as the first step because it's usually one of the more basic parts of a character. Having a good, accurate image of your character is a great start. But it won't give you everything you need to really connect with your character. For that, you'll need to get into their head. I'm going to address two ways of going about this--they're more complementary than interchangeable, but you should do whatever will work for you. These two methods are writing about your character and imagining hypothetical scenarios for your character. Writing is more intensive and requires patience, but it gives you more tangible and helpful results; imagining hypotheticals is easier and less intense, and it helps you stay on top of your character as they continue to develop. I recommend beginning with writing (you need a solid understanding to get started in the game) and staying fresh by imagining hypotheticals. Here's why:

Writing is labor-intensive and can be intimidating to a lot of people. But here's the thing: it doesn't have to be good. It's really just for you (unless you want to share it like I do). Try to forget any anxiety you have about writing. If you have that anxiety, it's probably because the circumstances in which you've written before were forced and about something you didn't care about. (I say this as an English teacher.) This won't be like that. Here's my challenge to you: write one short story about your character. It doesn't have to be good. But it will allow you this huge benefit: session one won't be about figuring out who your character really is--it will be about sinking into the world, the campaign, and the group. That's a huge advantage. 

Before I address how you can start writing about your character, I want to show how writing about Asp helped me solve all four of the problems I mentioned above. Problem 1: I didn't know what motivated Asp. After writing about her, I had an incredibly clear picture of what motivates her. I wouldn't have known it until writing about her, but her stubbornness comes from a combination of insecurity and having to live completely on her own for a long time. This in turn allowed me to play up the wavering between recklessly bold and anxiously insecure moments, and it also helped me understand how she would fit in with a group. I discovered as I wrote that her old gang were people she also struggled to fit in with at first, and that helped me to figure out how to connect to the party. 

Problem 2: Asp was too independent to work well in a group. After I had written about her, it became clear that she actually was very good at working in a group, but only when she understood the expectations of the group. In her old gang, she became one of the most beloved parts of the outfit after some initial growing pains. She also struggled with the leader of the gang--she didn't always listen to the consensus, but learned to over time. This helped me to make her more inclined to work with the party. After the moment where she pulled a con unnecessarily, she apologized for disrupting and upsetting the group and vowed to not act criminally as long as they were together. In the party, she was cast as group leader, meaning that she suddenly had a new perspective on working as a team. These ideas allowed me to help Asp become a key element of the party rather than repeating her previous mistakes (which wouldn't have really existed had I not written about her). 

Problem 3: Asp was true Neutral in a good-aligned campaign. This was a really key problem to fix. Our mission in the campaign is to defuse a mounting war between the elves and orcs of my DM's homebrew setting is an important action which requires constant and pure motivation to do the right thing, no matter the cost. Given the character backstory I initially imagined, this would give Asp little incentive to participate in the main quest. Her independence and amorality were not good fits for the story. So I adjusted. As you know if you read the above-linked profile on Asp, I ended up writing two novels' worth of material about her life leading up to the campaign. At the beginning of the novel that leads into the campaign, Asp really is a true Neutral person whose only interest is herself and her (few) loved ones. But as she worked with the gang, she began to learn to appreciate and trust people. She had a meaningful romantic relationship. She began to enjoy the warmth of positive interactions and began to feel guided to do good things. After some very rocky times at the end of the novel, she gets to the land of the elves and orcs and quickly gets cast as a diplomatic savior of the orcs. She went back to the independence and amorality for a while on her own, but getting placed in the group quickly strengthened all her desire to be a better person. She is now the most outspoken force for goodness in the group and has even become a Cleric of Light. This wasn't the goal I had in mind when I developed Asp, but both my imagining of her life and the campaign itself demanded that she become more good-hearted. And beyond the mechanical necessities of her being less amoral, it's also been a lovely experience as a player to watch my broken little liar become someone who primarily cares about the wellbeing of those around her. 

Problem 4: I wasn't getting to con people like I wanted. This was difficult for me at first. I had so badly wanted to use the D&D system to run various cons on NPCs--I've always been fascinated by con artists, and I brought my desire to portray one to the early sessions. After the first job she pulled with the group, she recognized the offense to the party and promised to not do it anymore. But I still had the itch to see her pulling the wool over peoples' eyes. So in writing about her, I scratched that itch. The novels and short stories I've written about Asp are largely developments of relationships she's had with NPCs (a much more important detail than many players recognize since those relationships inform the ones formed in-game) or about her pulling off incredible cons. In one such story, she plays both parts of a two-person con in order to prove a point. This was so much fun to write, which is its own reward, but I also got to get the con artist stuff out of my system. The campaign we're in clearly has no room for a self-interested criminal, so I cut the cons from the game. I wrote about them instead, and now my imagined version of Asp is rich with a history of diverse and exciting cons. This is a problem I really couldn't have solved without writing about her. 

So writing helps us in a variety of ways--but how do you start? With Asp, I started with a conflict. I knew that she had broken off relations with her family and that her stubborn streak meant she'd probably be slow to join a gang like her backstory called for. So I made one conflict lead to the other: her mother sold her out to the guards, and she had to run to a gang that could help me stay safe. So I wrote a short story (only about three pages) that depicted her clashing with her mom, pulling a con, getting sold out, and meeting the head of the gang. That might sound a little crazy--covering all of that in just a few pages means lots of action in a small space. But it's really all you have to do to get great results. From that short story, I learned so many things about her. 

One such discovery was that Asp was a lot more vulnerable than I thought. I envisioned her as being someone who was very closed off in general, but writing about her changed that. In that first short story alone (which ended up becoming the first chapter of a novel), I realized that Asp cared deeply about her cat, who she loses in that chapter. She had enough of a tie to her mother that her mother could threaten her safety. As much as she wanted to do everything on her own, she needed a gang to help her start over after getting burned. I very suddenly realized that I had been thinking of her being a con artist as a powerful strength, but it's also a weakness--she's susceptible to all kinds of threats. I wouldn't have figured this out without writing about her, or at least, I wouldn't have figured it out until I'd been playing her for a while, and that's too late to know in my opinion. 

Another discovery was that the cons are actually difficult to write about. In order for things to be exciting, there has to be risk and tension. That means that at least some of her cons have to just barely work in order to be engaging. That meant having to find the sweet spot between being in control of the situation and dealing with realistic dangers. Finding this delicate place between these ideas was difficult at first. The con Asp pulls in the first chapter goes off entirely without a hitch, which I used to establish her skill as a con artist, but I had to add complications to later cons to keep them exciting. And this meant realizing that Asp is something of an adrenaline junkie. In one passage later in the novel, I wrote about the way she thinks about this danger inherent in conning people: she both dreads the uncertainty of it and revels in the thrill of it. She's wary of getting caught, but lying to a person's face and being believed is pure excitement. This revealed a new element of her behavior. Now, when I play Asp, I make her a bit more reckless than I originally imagined her. This makes the game more exciting, obviously, but also serves just who she is as a person. 

The short story is a great way to get your head around the big pictures. Continuing to write is where you get even more out of the situation. When I finished that first story, I was overwhelmed with how much I had learned about Asp. So I kept going. I wanted to know what life was like with her gang. It turned out to be very rocky. But I knew that she would become one of the crew before too long, so I wrote more. Soon, she was beloved in the gang and operating like a real member of a team. I needed this dynamic worked out in my head so I could know how she works with the party. And with all that momentum picked up, I pushed into how she ended up leaving the gang. It ended up being a complete revision of my initial backstory. She ended up not leaving the gang because she thought she was above the rest of the gang, but instead because she was (due to complicated circumstances) forced out of the gang and had to move on. This was--and I can't stress this enough--a vital realization. Knowing that she was coming into the campaign with a feeling of loss changed everything. It informed the decisions she made and the relationships she formed. 

Now, obviously the writing I'm talking about is more work than most folks will put into this process. That's okay. I know that I got fairly carried away with myself--you don't need 1,100 pages of writing to understand your character. In the "creating a character" article I linked above, I suggested writing general notes about character history (I again went overboard with the amount of this writing, but the point still stands). If you are 100% opposed to trying to write short fiction, I recommend the notes method. Good questions to ask yourself include:

• What important and defining events have occurred in the character's life? 
• How did they feel about these experiences? 
• What are common experiences that the character has often? 
• How do they feel when they experience those things? 
• What are things they enjoy doing? 
• Why do they enjoy these things? 
• What kinds of relationships (good and bad) has your character had? 
• How have these relationships affected them? 
• What does your character want? 
• How does your character plan to go about realizing these goals? 

Don't just think about the surface level things or the life-changing events--think about your character's internal world. What they think and feel is just as (if not more) important as the events themselves. Once you have answered these questions, revisit the idea of writing a bit of short fiction. Putting these ideas into an actual scene will undoubtedly show you dimensions you hadn't considered. 

Whatever writing you decide to do, you will have given yourself an advantage in knowing who your character is at the beginning of a campaign. But the campaign continues long after that. To stay on top of your character as they grow and change (or even to just stay in touch with your character), begin to imagine hypothetical scenarios involving your character. Many players do this unconsciously--it's fun to imagine what your character would do in various situations. But it goes beyond fun; you can also learn things about your character. Let's talk about what kinds of situations to think about, and then I'll illustrate some of the benefits using hypotheticals that I have used with Asp. 

A good place to start is by looking ahead in your campaign. What sorts of moments are likely to occur? How do you envision the conflicts ahead happening? What do you want to happen? These situations shouldn't just be considered in a descriptive way--you should try to imagine them as though you're really playing the game and your imagination is the DM. As you imagine the scene, roleplay it like you would a moment in the game--what comes naturally? Pay attention to what you feel about how it's happening. This is actually how I realized that I needed to make Asp stop conning people. I ran one small job in front of the party, and they voiced their displeasure at it. I kept daydreaming about the con element of her character, though. I would try to imagine situations where she could use her skills, but I always felt bad about it because I knew it would rub the group the wrong way. That's where I got the idea to write about her doing those things instead. So it can be a really productive place to begin imagining your character in hypotheticals. 

From there, you can branch out into less campaign-based thinking. Unless you've chosen to play someone with literally no attachments, there will be people in your character's life who evoke strong feelings from them. Family and friends are great for this, as are respected competitors. Try to imagine what your character would say to them if they ran into them. What kinds of feelings would meeting again bring up? Does your character have any new desires or plans after meeting with them? Does anything change about your character's feelings about this person? These are all deep mines of inspiration and discovery. With Asp, so many big ideas have come from imagining scenes like this--not to mention genuine enjoyment. As I wrote more and more about her story, she formed a lot of complicated relationships, especially the one with her partner. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what she would say to her ex if she got to see her again, and it all started with my DM dropping a character from her backstory into the campaign for just a moment. I thought, naturally, that Asp would ask about her ex. Learning where she was now was something I noted but didn't think much of at the time. But later, as I imagined their next meeting, I noticed how much affection Asp still had for her ex. As I kept imagining what she had to say, I began to see that she truly intends to track down her ex and talk things over, and that's put a completely different perspective on how Asp feels in the campaign. Her mindset is now, "I have to do this important and dangerous thing, and then I'm getting out of the game." It's added something tangible for me, and it came from just thinking about Asp talking to people. 

One last recommendation I'll make for hypotheticals is consciously seeking out a particular thing you find interesting, meaningful, or just confusing about your character. This is also especially helpful as a tool when you feel like something isn't working completely at the table; this exercise will help you diagnose the problem. What I mean by thinking about this particular detail of your character is to try to describe what this detail is. It might be something like, "I feel like I'm not expressing my character correctly," or "I really like how my character wants to stand up to people." These are big picture issues that many of us face. So devise a situation that would challenge or stress that detail. For the player who's afraid they're not expressing their character right, imagining a similar scenario to one that challenged them can be a great way to reevaluate what's going on. It also gives you the chance to think about these things in advance and come to the table more familiar with their character. Or for the player whose character is so willing to stand up to people, flip the tables on them: how would the character react if they couldn't stand up to somebody? What do you learn about your character when the strength that defines them is taken away? 

This is actually a scenario I've put Asp through a number of times. At various points in my writing about her, she gets very close to getting caught (and closer still in the book about the earlier years). But part of her character is that she's cool, confident, and in control of any situation she's in. So even in those moments, I didn't really get a sense of who she was when things really went sour. That's about when our DM introduced our main quest: bring an end to the coming war between the elves and the orcs. Our "final boss" (diplomatically speaking, of course) is the High Queen of the Elves, who seems fairly predisposed to war. When Asp first met the Queen, she panicked a little. I was really curious why that was, so I started to imagine her having other conversations with the Queen as well as other situations in which she had dealt with important people. Something I noticed was that she tended to get more anxious the more powerful a person was. I realized as I thought about this that she knows the consequences of getting caught grow exponentially with the status of the person you're conning (and yes, she does kind of view diplomacy as con artistry). So her anxiety was natural, and I didn't necessarily need to change that about my performance with her. But without noticing all of this, I never would have realized that I would need her to get more comfortable with the royals if she intended to succeed in her mission. And that's why I've roleplayed her as getting slowly more comfortable around royalty, which I think reflects that she grows and learns quickly, so increased exposure to dealing with royals is making her less anxious. And being aware of this change--even guiding it--allowed me to really enjoy it as an element of the story. I have easily a dozen more examples of ways that I've used these hypotheticals to explore characters, even before I consciously realized what I was doing (and how it helped me). 

Here's my last word: you read this far because you wanted to be able to connect with your characters. As a lifelong gamer whose first character was made for me and whose second character featured customizations in every possible way, I really do understand the drive to connect to these products of our minds. And if you feel the same way, I want you to know how rich and rewarding it is. It does take time and work, but you're here, seeking it out. I know (again as an English teacher) that not everyone loves to write. But at a certain point, it's worth the work to really familiarize yourself with who they are. 

Oh, and as a bonus suggestion, I suggest writing a journal of the campaign and doing so in the first person as your character's actual thoughts. Not only does it keep you engaged with the character throughout the session, but rereading your notes from the previous session before starting a new one is an excellent way to get back into the right frame of mind. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: clothing by culture in my homebrew setting, how to figure out your style as a GM, and lessons from 15 years of my GM notebooks. Until next time, happy gaming!