So, like we do many weekend mornings (which usually take place in the afternoon), a few weeks ago Brand and I end up in a long discussion about life, the universe and gaming. In this particular discussion, we ended up building a rather nifty (if I do say so myself) character diversity classification system. Like Myers Briggs, it uses a set of four dyads to create sixteen archetypes. Unlike MBTI, it also uses an activity gauge and an influence scale which I’ll probably tackle in a later post. I’m also not likely to get into each individual archetypes in this post (we’ll see if I ever bother to go that deep).

So first: the point.

The point is that I love heuristic systems that help you look at play and play structure from different angles and learn something new from it. The point is that I love rich diverse worlds full of rich diverse people - especially NPC’s. The point is that I love shorthands that carry a punch in the middle of play. Lastly, the point is that it would be handy to have a system with which to evaluate your games for diversity and simultaneously help you expand it.

This is a system built out of our current game, which is the new novella of our pseudo historical swashbuckling bodice ripper. We ran it through superheroes and sword and sorcery and horror and other action genres in general and it seems to work for many. There are probably other dyads which work better for other genres specifically.

So second: The four dyads.

Disclaimer: There’s no good or bad of any pair. Neither path is more effective. If you have good or bad associations with any word, or find yourself wanting to privilege one word over its pair, get over it. If you hate classification systems or personality tests or archetypal processing, it’s also a good idea to either get over it or go read something else on the wide world of the interwebs that will be interesting or compelling to you. That said… we’re off!

Strategic / Tactical

Strategic characters are long range, systemic thinkers. They look well ahead, prepare resources, plan for the use of those resources before, during, and after an action. Their strategies may be, and often are, contextually complex and based on investigation - that is to say that their stratagems need not be simple nor rigid, but they are based on forethought and planning.

Tactical characters are people who excel at dealing with problems encountered in the middle of action. they don’t waste their time planning things out ahead of time, because they’ll do best just dealing with it as they arrive. They don’t design and smuggle in a plastic gun to kill the enemy spy, they know that there’ll always be a handy beer bottle or ballpoint pen that’ll do.

Offensive / Defensive

Offensive characters are, well, offensive. They don’t sit back and wait for their nemesi to come
to them, they go after them (and whatever else they want) head first. They’re ambitious; where there is no apparent opportunity they make or force an opportunity.

Defensive characters are then, defensive. They look for ways to protect their fortunes, their loved ones, their duty or themselves. Spider man is a defensive character. He responds to trouble and tries to keep the world secure in it’s present state. He goes after the bad guy because the bad guy has MJ, or because the bad guy’s dangling a bus full of school children off a bridge, not because he’s known to be bad and is out there somewhere.

Physical / Social

Physical characters respond first in a physical way. they punch their opponents or order their deaths. They favour war over diplomacy. To console their loved ones, they hug them, to seduce they brush up or go in for the kiss. They consider the body or physical arena as the first and best course of action.

Social characters respond first in a social way. They try to talk their way out of trouble. They undermine their opponents by starting rumours about them, or having their debts called in. They cajole or incite through social manipulation. They seduce with a classic line, a killer smile and impromptu poetry. The first instinct is to talk, and they often talk a lot even when a confrontation turns physical.

Rational / Intuitive

Rational characters do things for reasons. The reason doesn’t have to be a sane reason, it just has to come from a rationale. If you stop them and ask them why they are doing what they are doing, they’d generally be able to articulate it. They are often self-reflective, and can tell you what and why they feel the way they do.

Intuitive characters do things because they do things. The things that they do may well be (and often are) the most logical things to be done if you were to sit down and analyze it, but the intuitive character wouldn’t necessarily be interested in or able to tell you why. They follow their gut without evidence or a reason to back it up - it is what will happen.

So pick a character that you’ve played, PC or NPC and identify their preferences among the dyads.

Olivia, my character in the swashy bodice ripper is a Tactical Offensive Social Intuitive. She swings into action with her sword and a plan and the iron clad belief that she’ll succeed. As soon as she has enough information to know who she’s up against or where the thing she wants is, she goes after it head on, asap. She tries to talk, taunt or seduce her way in or out of any trouble she comes across; even though she is a sword master, her school is based on tagging and seductive distraction. She feels powerful things, very powerfully, but couldn’t ever really identify or articulate why she’s feeling that way and is about as reflective as a rock. I might know exactly why she does the things she does, but she most often doesn’t have a clue.

Try it out.

Suggestions for you out there who might be grooving on this, some of which I might dig into later:

• Have a look at the kinds of archetypes the combinations produce.
• Type out all the NPCs in a game you’re running and use the empty slots for new characters to expand the breadth of the cast
• Type out the NPC’s against gender, race, or other criteria and see what your game is inadvertently saying by concentration or absence
• Type out your past PC’s and look for ones you’ve never tried for a future adventure.

So, at the end of all of this vacation, still no post. I’m a dork.

The holidays have been very strange and draggy for me. I’ve spent the time dreading going back to work. This is, of course entirely fruitless, I know, but telling myself that hasn’t worked very well to correct the behaviour. I’ve been back into masking a little, which is a good thing. I think I needed to do some physical creation and creativity. It helps me avoid thinking myself into circles - which is something work keeps dragging me into - it’s not the funnest time in telco these days.

So, what of the immersion posts, the MBTI follow-up, an up-to-the-minute update that 1000 Stories has advanced and is ready for playtest? Nope, none of that, my gift to y’all this holiday season is bupkis, I’m afraid. The only game-related things Brand and I have been up to this season is to be playing - one superlong, ring in the new year marathon session of Unbreakable (a sorta Unknown Armies campaign that’s inspired by the movie Unbreakable) that went really quite well, even if I still have not mastered the art of GMing combat, and several sessions of T&J that were very good and hit me right in my gaming “F”, so to speak.

I do have a couple of notes, though. Brand’s got in his copy of Nine Worlds and convinced me to give it a solo run. The character I’ve created is a departure for me. After all the MBTI talk last month, I connected some dots about my characters and used the typing system and the revelations to go somewhere new. The character is more like a character that Brand would be likely to play. She’s an Aether Ship Captain of Saturn’s resistance who is coming to the end of her hope that the war can be won. She doesn’t have any kind of vision of how the world could be made right, and is despairing that it can’t be done. She doesn’t so much have a sense of duty as she has a sense of inertia. She’s a character with a pragmatic past who can’t see a place for her pragmatacism to take her, so she’s flailing at the world and those few people she has left to force the world to act so that she continues to react.

In short, she’s an ISFP where I usually play notorious ENTJ’s. We’ll see how it goes.

I think I came to a realization because I made the character after reading Meg’s thread over on Fair Game and Vincent’s thread at the Forge. It’s that I can now understand why some folks strongly think that immersion is mostly a Sim activity (Not that Vincent or Meg are saying this, the reference to those posts is not entirely germane, they are just all the points on which my brain started musing). As an immersionist, I require a certain amount of world contextualization that is very easily mistaken for a simulationist agenda. This was really clear in the chargen for Nine Worlds. I haven’t read the book - haven’t even skimmed it. Brand had, of course, and described it as “a graphic novelesque mystic science fantasy game with aether ships and greek gods and cool stuff”.

We ran into some trouble along the way because I did not have a contextual sense of the world. Brand used a technique to bring me to chargen that he had seen work very successfully before (in our T&J game) - he gave me a folder of images that *could* be integrated into the game - some characters I could play, some NPC’s that might exist, some cities, some buildings, some items. It didn’t work this time and we both got very frustrated. The difference between T&J’s chargen and this was that T&J came with a set of assumptions that I could make about the world: it was going to be classic comic book style game, the world would be based on a world just to the left of our modern day earth, my backstory could be compiled out of real-life situations, blah… blah… blah.

So when we looked at images, they promoted strong, fast, loose chargen because they evoked emotionality that drew strings across the assumptions to make stories - I could see backwards and forwards from the picture to where the character had come from, and to where the character could go. The result was a quick, painless chargen that created a character that was on the brink of action, could fulfill the premise of the game, and that was ripe for me to immerse into.

In Nine Worlds, all the technique gave me was possibility out of the blue. Without a set of assumptions to put it in context, nothing was evoked by the images but a general sense of aesthetic appreciation for the pictures themselves. I kept asking how the world worked and what the world had in it, and sounding very much like I was begging for a Sim game, all the while frustrating the hell out of Brand, who was all ready to bravely adventure off into Nar land and make choices that no one ever made before!

But the truth is, I wasn’t asking for a Sim game. I wasn’t resisting the system or the game or Brand’s agenda, I just had no context with which to arrive at a character. I needed enough information to inform me in chargen so that the character I created could have a sense of depth to me as a player and be defined enough to have an immersion seat I could climb into. My enjoyment of the game comes from my engagement with the character’s emotional involvement (or alienation as the case may be) with the world around her, and in order for that emotionality to have any relevence or power at all, I need to have a context to apply it in.

Eventually we got to this cool character by having Brand give me verbal “splats” about each of the nine worlds, letting me pick the most interesting to me, hearing a brief synopsis of the state of the world and how it’s come about, and then returning to the images to let the emotionality flow. Even then, before we started playing, I needed to ask a good two dozen questions about how the world worked before I could feel right about entering play with the character. Granted, he didn’t end up answering them all - many we decided jointly - I just needed them to be answered before we sat down to play.

I know that there are some Nar games that do (loosely) this same kind of process (world idea, character idea, world detail, character detail) as part of chargen (Brand assures me that Burning Wheel is a good example here) and some that don’t. Ones that don’t often have ways to get around this. Dogs and Dust Devils have western associations that readily provide a jumping off place that facilitate getting to the action. Where the worlds have less direct or less cliche (I’m meaning cliche in a very good way here) cultural associations, like Nine Worlds that strives to have a cool melding of different feels in order to create a dynamic universe - there isn’t a quick way to get into the action - you practically have to read the whole book, or have enough splatted at you to be able to start.

So I guess this is all just to say: if you want to jump right to the premise with folks like me (that might mean most immersionists, it might not) then you should be prepared to begin with a little cliche or build a common ground to grease the wheels. Chargen is a way to get down a set of co-ordinates which are intended to deliniate your way to interact with the system, but it is also a ritual designed to get you psychologically positioned to play the game. If you are reving towards game and someone is asking a lot of questions about the way the world works, you may not have an agenda clash on your hands, you may just have a player or three that have not received enough information to feel comfortable and positioned to start. Starting without acheiving that comfort will lead to their dysfunction in, or non-enjoyment of the game.

Hey wow, whaddya know… Maybe I did get a post done while still on vacation.

I’ve gotten sidetracked from my Immersion stuff over the last week to (further) kick around some ideas Brand and I have had about the Myers Briggs Type Indicators and their applications to gamers and gaming. Brand’s been busy writing up some of our thoughts on his blog over here. I’m probably going to be making reference to that post in later posts, so you might want to go read it.

More imnmersion posts coming up soon, promise.