Whether you’re writing a novel or playing a role-playing game, there comes a time when you have to develop a character. There are a number of ways you can approach this and this series of articles will explore some of those.
I’ll start with the character development that I’ve dealt with the most: Developing a character for a role-playing game, specifically DnD.
Fantasy gaming is rife with clichés from the bumbling human wizard and the gruff dwarf fighter to the kid with a birthmark who turns out to be the rightful heir to the kingdom. Searching the web for clichés in fantasy, it’s easy to find plenty of articles on how to avoid them. However, is that really necessary? Clichés are clichés for a reason: They work as motivations and personalities that resonate with us.
So where did these clichés come from? What makes one idea from fantasy resonate to the extent that it becomes a cliché? And what can a writer or designer do to use those clichés that will work for them while avoiding those that will come across as ham-fisted?
Through all fantasy games, single- and multi-player, virtual or table-top, runs a common thread: The writing. It has been argued many times, and reasonably successfully, that the history of fantasy gaming was born of the ground-breaking work of Tolkien, however it is more correct to say that he was the great populariser of a genre that has been with us for hundreds of years. The archetypes that exist in his work still inhabit the games we play today: Orcs, Dwar(f|ve)s, Elves, Trolls, etc.
The images that those names invoke, and that are visualised in modern MMOs, aren’t too far from the descriptions found throughout fantasy literature. So what of the state of writing in fantasy games themselves?
The separation between player and character is at the core of the role-playing experience which is what separates DnD, MUDs and MMOs from other multiplayer games. By definition, when you’re playing a role it’s assumed that the role is not that of “person playing a role-playing game”. Aside from the physical and sociological differences between the player and character, how is this split realised in the game? And how has the separation between player and character developed from DnD through MUDs and through to MMOs?