Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable
Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable
I would hazard that many of us, as players of TTRPGs, tend to play some particular characters - defined at the topmost level as the conventional ‘brawn’, ‘brains’, ‘sneaky’ and ‘face’ types - more than others. For myself, I have gravitated over the years from predominantly playing ‘the sneak’ to ‘the brain’ to ‘the face’ and only in perhaps the last couple of years have I begun to play with ‘brawn’ characters. It seems to me to be inarguable that, in opting for any given preference of this kind, we are saying something about ourselves. This need not be a question of seeking to express through the choice of broad character type what we wish we were actually like in reality. Rather, the mechanics and assigned meta-level role of a character type within a group dynamic clearly play a part in their appeal to us as players. I know people who can be relied upon to play thieves or rogues in every game I’ve ever run for or played with them, and as many who will almost always opt for the ‘brain’ of the mage or the professor or the scientist. And that’s fine. Everyone is entitled to have fun in their own way and those who do opt for such consistent choices often make excellent players. Their wide experience of playing the same category of character in different systems and settings affords them mechanical fluency and an ability to see in-play possibilities based on their broad knowldege of the tropes of the type.
So on one level it is inevitable that we will play ‘characters we like’ in the sense that what attracts us to to them is usually some aspect of the mechanics that lead to a style of play that appeals to us. It would be a bit mad if we were, as a person, not hugely interested in combat in RPGs but somehow ended up playing fighters over and over again or aren’t concerned with in-character interactions but consistently play plausible, charming, high Charisma individuals. In other words, a preference for a given character archetype can often reflect a player’s preferred method of problem-solving in RPGs. This bleeds into the eternal discussion about the space between player knowledge and capacity and character abilities - ‘Well, I don’t really know how to wield a flail, but my warrior does, so how come just because Tommy isn’t a loquacious loudmouth in real life he shouldn’t play a smooth-talking conman?’ - but that is for another discussion. Because what I am concerned with here is not just ‘mechanical avatars of the sort we prefer’ but the subtlely different notion of ‘characters that we like’.
There is a spectrum at work here that runs from the full-strength ‘self-insert’ to the more common idea that one plays a person that we find likeable or identifiable.
There are some games that positively encourage players to insert themselves as characters in the game. Outbreak is an example where players are guided through a process of converting themselves into characters in a post-apocalyptic setting. Know a little history in real life? Give yourself some skill in that subject as a character. I’m sure there are other games that mention this as an optional possibilty, but this formal mechanical procedure in Outbreak is, as far as I know, a relative rarity. Marginally more common - or so it seems to me from my very limited exposure to the wider modern culture of TTRPGs - is something of a trend towards a form of self-insertion in games that is connected to the broader social and political idea of representation on the basis of some real world characteristic, identity or viewpoint. There is nothing objectively wrong with that and, as a dirt-bag leftist, cis-hetero, more or less healthy white male with a certain level of financial stability, it’s not particularly for me to get worked up about this desire. But it does seem to me to be oddly limiting in the context of an RPG. Here we have a hobby - an art form - that has offered since its very inception the endless possibilities of creating an infinity of worlds and exploring them through the minds of people radically different from ourselves. Given all of the available options, why on earth would I choose to be… me?
But, in truth, I suspect that self-insertion in these most literal senses is uncommon. More ubiquitous, I think, is the slightly less full-on notion that people often play characters that they find agreeable or sympathetic and move through a world that holds them - more or less - in the same estimation. One might not be playing oneself, strictly, but by playing characters we find appealing we are inevitably creating someone who is, to some extent, a reflection of our real and personal values, aspirations, opinions and beliefs. In some senses, this is readily explicable. It is objectively harder to try and portray consistently a personality with which one shares few common assumptions about life and the working of the world. It is easier to maintain character consistency when they have an internal map of reality that accords with our own as players. Faced with the sheer number of possible character reactions to the enormous array of situations in a game that do not admit of mechanical resolution but instead demand some insubstantial role-playing response, it is tempting to grasp for the hand-hold in easy reach and say ‘What would someone like me, or someone that I like, do in this situation?’ Further, playing agreeable people cuts down on the risk that unpleasant character actions get muddled up with player attitudes and behaviours.
I don’t play characters that I like or that I want to be liked by other characters. I’m not interested in transposing myself into other times and places because, almost definitionally, characters that exist in those times and places are not going to share my assumptions and preferences acquired by virtue of my accidental place in 21st century western society. To plant my vanilla liberal self in medieval Europe or ancient Babylon or colonial Australia is to risk the collapse of verisimilitude (though there can be an exception to this, which I will discuss below). Nor do I want to play in more ‘fantastical’ settings that offer nothing but shallow and easy assumptions that ‘the good’ accords with those personal and cultural moral imperatives that happen to prevail for me and everybody I know today. If I wanted nothing but validation of my own footling and inconsequential views, I wouldn’t play RPGs, I’d have an account on X. At the same time, I don’t care for the trivial and cartoonish portrayal of villains any more than I do for the saccharine banality of the hero.
A Brief Aside About the Vacuity of Heroes and Villains
I cannot adequately explain why I have never been particularly interested in ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ in TTRPGs. True, I got my start in the more or less conventional high fantasy assumptions wrapped up in AD&D 1e in which the formal alignment system mandated a world of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. But by the time Forgotten Realms was published in 1987 I was already moving away from that. The AD&D home-brew campaigns that I ran in the late 1980s and early 1990s tended to be grimey, nasty stories about vicious struggles on the fringes of the geopolitics of the Realms - the characters caught up in the grubby schemes of the Zhentarim who were ruthless, cruel and brutal but not ‘evil’ simpliciter.
This preference was greatly influenced by my introduction to Call of Cthulhu via Games Workshop’s second edition boxed set c.1983, which revealed that characters can be - perhaps even should be - flawed and, in the grand scheme of things, small. No doubt my opinions were also coloured through my absorbtion of the wider cultural trend in the 80s and 90s that accelerated the deconstuction of the heroic genre that began in the 1960s, particularly in the comic book world. Jean Grey became Dark Phoenix; Superman was depicted as a morally blank high-grade weapons system in The Dark Knight; John Constantine, and The Preacher showed us morally ambiguous protagonists and the entire superhero genre was parodied and critiqued in Watchmen. Villains went through a similar process of being drawn chiaroscuro - think of the undoubted sinuous charm of Alan Rickman’s Hans Grüber in Die Hard and, more famously, the redemptive arc of Annakin Skywalker in Episodes IV-VI.
If I had to distill it, I think what bores me about ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ is that they lack (or do not require) any sense of internal life: they just do what they do because they are who they are - which is a cloyingly circular state of affairs. Heroes and villains are clockwork toys.
I am generally unwilling to burden readers with detailed accounts from my own games, as such tales are often laborious and as interesting to others as someone describing at inordinate length the fascinating details of that dream they had the other night. But this subject does perhaps require some context that can only be provided through concrete exemples. Between them they will illustrate what I think are the three basic ways in which one can play unsympathetic characters - by unfavourable contrast to our own world, when internally measured against the game world itself and by importing anachronistic notions into settings.
I’ve mentioned Aelfsige of Kirkdale elsewhere. He is my character in a long-running Malestrom Domesday campaign - an aged and partially blind Saxon Benedictine monk sent by his monastery to counsel the new Norman lord of a Yorkshire manor (played by another member of the group). Aelfsige is, by some measures, sagacious and kind. He is also profoundly compromised - a man who rationalises his past and ongoing moral shortcomings and cowardice by telling himself that his failures of nerve are for a ‘greater good’ - the preservation of peace and good order. He is, therefore, weak, lacking the courage of his convictions (if he has any left) and altogether not someone that most people would proudly aspire to be.
Aelfsige also lives in a world in which the normative standard of the good - that which ought to be done - is that of late 11th century England and would make him a monster by almost any modern lights. One of the households in the manor consisted of a widowed father and his two teenaged daughters. It was well known to all the locals that this man was a tyrant and an abusive bully. Aelfsige’s advice to his lord? It is not for any of us to tell a man how he may rule those who live under his roof as long as that behaviour does not rise to the standard of a crime. If roleplaying is - at least in part - about inhabiting other minds (which I think it is) then one test of that is the in-game character adoption of sometimes horrendous ideas as an act, if not exactly of empathy, then at least of imaginative adherence to ‘the truth of the fiction’ in the service of telling interesting stories about times and places very different from our own.
This is, I think, a slightly different proposition from playing characters that are actively dislikeable in the context of the world that they inhabit. There is a more delicate balance to be struck because, in these instances, character unlikeability flows not from meta-knowledge and a contrast between real-world versus in-game sensibilities, but from their actions and attitudes in play towards other characters and the world. This is where the danger of confusing character and player attitudes and actions and reactions needs to be guarded against. To offset this potential risk to group cohension, and in order to avoid descent into crude cardboard cut-outs, there is a need for some countervailing character traits that give the other characters a reason to put up with the unsympathetic figure.
Here I will introduce Jaken Creetch. Jaken was my character in a now defunct Symbaroum game. For those who don’t know it, the lore of Symbaroum is that a quasi-medieval European culture of people - the Ambrians - colonised new lands, their own kingdom having been ravaged by a war that left it barren and poisoned. In conquering their new home, the Ambrians exterminated one tribe of indigenous ‘barbarians’ and subjugated others as part of their self-appointed mission to establish a kingdom under their virtual god-queen, Korinthia. Creetch was an Ambrian - a poacher and thief newly arrived in this ‘promised land’. He was crude, entitled, vicious and deeply, deeply chauvinistic - a fawning, unthinking monarchist who despised the ‘savage’ barbarians with whom he came into contact. He was also a stunning hypocrite - lauding the rightness of the queen’s justice and the ‘civilization’ of the conquerers while, at the same time, quite prepared to use, abuse and even murder his fellow Ambrians if it served his purposes. Creetch was not just a brute by reference to our real-world standards, he was a bastard by the measure of his own society.
I have, of course, left some things out. Jaken was a teenager - perhaps 17 years old - who had only ever known deprivation and brutality. He was also a cripple, his left leg hopelessly mangled after he broke it during the passsage north through the mountains to reach Ambria. His fellow refugees abandoned him to death and he survived only by a supreme effort of will, snaring and eating rats and pigeons raw and bloody until he was rescued by the other members of the party on their way north. We came to know that he buried three of his younger sisters who died of starvation in ‘the old country’ and had hints that he had to do much, much worse things than eat bloody, lice-ridden vermin to live. He was extraordinarily resilient and self-reliant, impatient with quitters, whiners and those who did not appreciate their great good fortune in being alive and with full bellies. He despised those unwilling to take risks and suffer hardship in pursuit of a better life and reserved his deepest contempt for those who were ungrateful for what they had. For all of his deeply vile qualities, Jaken was also immensely loyal to those very few people who he regarded as friends. I loathed Jaken Creetch. I also had some of my most interesting moments of role-playing when inhabiting this crude, bigoted, unsentimental, proud, tough and strangely generous youth.
I did promise I would discuss one other aspect of playing ‘unlikeable characters’ - those that are thoroughly decent when measured against our modern assumptions, but who are viewed as eccentric and perhaps even dangerous in the context of the game world that they inhabit. It is, therefore, a mirror image of the first example and, like that instance, relies on the GM and the table more generally to impose and maintain the discipline of the fiction in play.
I alight upon the most recent example in my gaming experience as an illustration, a pre-generated character for a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game. Nellie Sharpe is the widow of a Cornish tin-miner killed in a disaster caused by the negligence of her late husband’s employer. Now, having emigrated to Australia, she is a union activist who used her meagre widow’s pension to put herself through an engineering and mine safety course. She travels around the outback mining concerns agitating for union recognition and improved safety standards. A pioneer of feminism, workplace rights and equality, Nellie would be a ‘sympathetic’ character to play in many people’s estimation. Notwithstanding the fact that she is a 'pre-gen’, I could have made her more ‘spikey’. Nothing in her back-story precluded me from making Nellie a rather nasty eugenicist of the kind that so burdended the inter-war British left, for example. But I don’t need to inject that ‘grit’, because the Keeper and the players conspire with me to make Nellie an oddball to be patronised, demeaned and ignored because of her potentially revolutionary ideas.
Now, there are pehaps some who have spotted a potential problem in all this. If everyone played unlikeable or unsympathetic characters then the chances of games collapsing into inter-character (and perhaps even inter-player) argument would rise enormously. I don’t think I’d dispute this. I freely concede that, often, I am able to play disagreeable people because others at the table do not do so and their forebearance allows the game to proceed with the requisite degree of co-operation amd harmony. My tendency could be deprecated as selfish freeloading in the same way my preference for non-mechanically optimised characters can be. The charge would carry more force if it were the case that I expect other players to facilitate my desire and therefore, in some senses, prod or coerce them into making a ‘nice’ character in order to make the entire game workable. To this I can only answer that I trust that I have sufficient social grace to notice when a group dynamic is not going to afford me the opportunity to indulge myself. I will also add that the quality and experience of my regular group of players and GMs is such that it is not uncommon for an entire party to consist of characters that are each flawed or dislikeable in their own way, and yet for games not to collapse into anarchy but to flourish as the story of rich and nuanced characters.
The second way in which I try to avoid the possible negative consequences of my choices as a player is to ensure that the nature and form of my character’s sharp edges are derived from and in service of the setting and the story. I think it is probably a bad idea to try to come up with an unsympathetic character ab initio without reference to the tale that is being collectively told at the table. This is particularly true of sandboxes, where perhaps nobody comes into the game with much of an idea of what it is about or what its focus and tone will be. If one doesn’t have that narrative or stylistic foundation and one also wants to create an unpleasant character then one is almost compelled to create some rather shallow, two-dimensional villain (ZZZZZZZZZZ) comprised of a series of rather uninteresting ‘bad qualities’. Although I very often have a hazy idea that a character will be flawed or unpleasant, the process of emergent character creation allows me to colour in the details as the game proceeds. Hoepfully, this means that I can finely calibrate just how much of and what species of a dick my character is, providing enough friction to be interesting for everyone but not so much as to be disruptive.
I will conclude with one more observation. I have often said that I don’t play RPGs for vicarious catharsis, validation or affirmation through in-game events. I’m not at all interested in ‘winning’ by any metric - whether that be defeating the BBEG (bleurgggggggh) or levelling up or completing the quest or what have you. While it matters to me profoundly that the players and GM are having a good time, I couldn’t care less if my character is. This matters because, if one is going to play unpleasant and unsympathetic characters, one cannot complain - indeed, you should welcome it - if the world and the other people in it (PCs or NPCs) react and behave accordingly. You have to be able to separate yourself from your character in order to revel in the discomfort that the latter both engenders and is subjected to. Instead of getting some species of sweet but cheap satisfaction from ‘winning’ as part of a happy collective of soma-addled characters, one can, perhaps, learn to acquire the more bitter taste for frustration, disappointent and loss piled upon narrow shoulders. Be prepared, also, for the fact that, sometimes, a story will dictate that your character has come to the end of the road - that their relationships with the other party members are broken beyond repair. This final fracturing - and the host of lesser fissures that lead up to it - can be among the most satisfying moments at the table.