So, Josh wrote this:

And I realized I had thoughts.

We all know the usual thing, as Josh lays out: everyone around the table plays one character, and the GM plays literally everyone else in the world. Then along come games like Wraith: the Oblivion and others and they say “hey, maybe you can play two characters: yours, and the voice in the head of someone else’s”. And then games like Apocalypse World say “how about you just get another character to play, as an advance, but I guess don’t play both sides of a conversation if you can help it, that’s boring”.

And and and. Obviously lots of games push at this question. Because we’re not on a stage having to do quick costume changes, or on screen having to keep things clear to the audience, but all around the table just doing voices or whatever, we can play as many characters as we like.

I just love the idea of playing more than one character, having more than one character who’s yours, but there are two big things I’ve noticed in my time playing around with it that I think are worth writing down:

1. It incurs a cognitive burden. Each character past the first takes away from your ability to fully inhabit each, and give them the time and space to really be main characters. That burden is on the GM, too, if there still is one!
2. It is best when you don’t play both sides of a conversation, and so you want to have a set of characters who largely aren’t entangled with each other.

On point one: If a lot of playing an RPG is making space for your friends to have fun showing what they think is cool about their characters, then giving everyone more characters gives you more chance to do that, but also requires everyone to, at the same time, make more space.

On point two: I think that if you want to have everyone play a bunch of characters, find where the shear lines are, or to put it another way, what the clusters are, and have folks each have characters inside each cluster. Like, if we have an English country manor type game, have everyone play someone from Upstairs and someone from Downstairs (and maybe from the village, and and).

Finally: if you’ll allow me a moment of linguistical self-entertainment, I have heard “playing one character” called “character monogamy”, and playing many “character non-monogamy” and I hate these terms; you’re not marrying a character. So, borrowing from the Greek for “mask”, and thus “role”, I humbly submit: monoprosopony and polyprosopony. (In both, stress on the antepenult.)

I’ve been thinking about this post from Chuck Wendig. In it, he talks about making the reader care about the characters you’ve written. It pertains to RPGs, too. Rather than the reader, though, both the other people you’re playing with and you yourself need to care about the character, though perhaps in different ways.

I feel very strongly that human struggles make a character matter to me—not style, not setting, not powers. I’m a sucker for a dramatic game, over a procedural one, in general. What does your character want, from whom, and why—and why can’t they get it? If those questions can be answered with emotional concessions rather than, say, physical items, I’m even more on board.

There are a couple games that help me do this: two that come to mind are Promethean: the Created, and Primetime Adventures 3rd edition.

In P:tC, you play an artificial construct who wants to become a human. To do so, you have to better understand what being human means, and pass through a number of milestones in that understanding. This means that you need to think about how your character conceives of human-ness, and how that relates to their particular shortcomings. You need to articulate this to the GM (whose job it is to define the actual milestones you need to achieve), so you can’t really elide it. (Well, maybe you can, but I am willing to discount that as non-cooperative play!)

In Primetime Adventures, characters have an Issue, a dramatic question at the core of the character. In Matt’s words:

Choosing an issue is about maximizing your opportunity to explore something meaningful to you, and that applies to all the choices you make in creating the protagonists.

Yes, that. Very much that.

And so, this is leading me to think about the zero-prep style of indie games. I actually, dare I say it, like taking the time to write a little backstory. Not to have an epic history, but to get to know the character I’ll be playing, and change them around if they’re not the one I really want to play. It doesn’t have to be extensive, but a little more quiet and contemplation and a little less rush makes the experience so much richer for me.

And of course, answering those questions all together, to have a web of interconnected characters, who feel things about each other and want things from each other and whose relationships may grow and change, that is just the sweetest thing.

Finally, let’s say it once again:

Plot is Soylent Green. It is made of people.

I’ve spent the day at the National Gallery, looking at Andrew Wyeth, Degas, Cassatt. When I was little, this was my least favorite museum (Air & Space and Natural History always claiming my affections), but as I grow older, I grow to appreciate it more.

What struck me today was looking at a wall of studies Degas did for his series of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre. Eight or so paintings, each more or less “complete”, each with their own moments of brilliance and their own failings. Eight of them, arrayed side by side, showing much (but by no means all) of the process involved in creating the final work.

The final work was definitely more polished, probably better than any individual study, but it got there because of the work put in to the studies. And there were some bits that didn’t come off as well in the final piece, for sure, but you know, that’s just how it goes. Maybe they wouldn’t have been as good in that final (overall better) context, maybe they were just impossible to capture again.

So it is with a game. Maybe, even, if it helps you, don’t call them “playtests”, call them “studies”. Each one is a whole game (gamelet?) in its own right, with some strengths and probably more weaknesses, but not made with an aim to completeness and publication, rather with an aim towards preparation and honing your understanding of the space and your art.

Make more games. Maybe most of them never make it out of your studio, but that’s not at all “failure”.