Game Ideas Un limited: Types

  Last week in Relocated I wrote of a dream, and said that there were several ideas that sprang from it.  This is another of those ideas.  There were people in the dream, as there usually are in my dreams.  The people in my dreams are peculiar, because most of my dreams are populated in the main with one specific sort of person, rarely another, and this dream thus stands out as having two kinds of people I don't recall from other dreams.

  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  Let me suggest that there are four sorts of people in dreams, or at least in my dreams.  Recognizing these four types and thinking about how they fit into our game worlds may help us introduce new characters into play.

  My father sometimes appears in my dreams; when I was younger, my mother did, as well.  There have been a handful of other people in my dreams whom I knew when awake.  Not all of them were people I knew well; in one dream long ago there was the father of a boy in our scout troop whom I had met on one camping trip, but since that campground was the site for the dream it made sense that he would be there (or at least as much sense as anything in that dream).  The first type of dream character is people we really do know, whom we recognize within the dream because they are who they are in real life.

  Yet in describing the dream, I mentioned hitching a ride with the person in boxers and bathrobe who looked a little like Drew Carey.  No, it wasn't a nightmare, actually; it seemed quite ordinary for someone to rush out of the house so fast he was still in his night clothes.  Haven't you done that yourself?  I have; but then, I wear a sweat suit to bed, so I often go outside in it.  (I started doing so when we got a dog, and it was evident that I was going to have to go outside with the dog in the middle of winter in the middle of the night, so I'd better be dressed for it.  That was the beginning of my understanding of why my parents never owned a dog.  Our fenced in yard now is a better solution, but I still wear the sweat suit.)  In the dream, I knew exactly who this guy was, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I would hitch a ride with someone I knew.  Obviously from my description of him he was no one I really knew at all; he wasn't even Drew Carey, but only someone who looked something like him.  I find that most of the characters in my dreams are exactly of this sort:  people I don't know, to whom I cannot put names, whom I have never seen, usually composites or alterations of real people (in that I can usually describe them by saying they look kind of like this person but different in specific ways, or like this person crossed with that person), but who within the context of the dream are well known to me.  Thus the second type is people we know only in the dream.

  Yet when the apartment door opened to my knock, I encountered a type of character I rarely notice in my dreams.  The young woman who opened the door was a complete stranger to me, not only to me when I awoke but to me in the dream.  Obviously, most of the people I pass in the world are strangers to me; we spoke long ago of those Encounters with people we know, but in the main we don't know the people we pass on the street or see in the store, and usually we don't think we know them, either.  It is unusual for me to have such unknown people in my dreams, save perhaps as faceless extras I never really see but know must be there.  This was unusual to me.  Yet it represents a third type, people we don't know at all, even in the dream.

  You may deduce the fourth type of character from this, and you may wonder whether it actually exists.  The odd thing is that I'd have challenged it myself prior to this dream.  It was a detail I didn't mention.  When the door to the apartment opened, there were people inside whom I could see beyond the woman with whom I spoke, most of them that sort of faceless extra just mentioned, present but completely devoid of detail, like the computer generated people waving from the rail in Titanic.  One of those people, however, was a boy who attends our church, with whom my wife was chatting just a few days before after the service.  I didn't know more than his first name, which I only recently had learned.  I didn't know how old he is, or anything about him, really; but he was a real person known to me, not a composite.  Yet in the dream I did not know him, even though something in the back of my head clicked when I saw him.  In a sense, I noticed his presence in the dream because he was someone I knew, even though my dream self did not know or recognize him.  Thus the fourth type of person in our dreams would be people we really do know but who are strangers to us in the dream.

  Role playing games are a bit like dreams in some ways; and the people in our games may be informed by these types.

  In running Multiverser, I have used real people as characters.  Of course, as it is usually played as an I-game, the player characters are realized versions of the players; but there may be other real people included.  As I suggested in Clones, you can use friends and family known to you as instant characters for your games.  That's not necessarily the same thing, though, as these people are not necessarily known to your players.  Yet I have done the other at times, throwing in people who are friends of my players as characters in the story (in modern setting play), and even at times creating alternate versions of the players themselves with whom they may interact.  These are people known to the players and to their characters.  In some settings this can include famous people the player has never met but knows from afar, whether film stars or historic figures or world leaders or others who would be recognized and so in some sense known.  In my forthcoming spy scenario (Why Spy, in Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds), I recommend that the player character can be teamed up with characters from movies, such as Die Hard's John McClane, characters known to them even though not real people.

  Most games are filled with characters who are somewhere between the first and second types.  We don't know them, but we meet them through our characters, and after that they are known to us.  This isn't really the second type, and is much more the first type.  We meet them through play, and thereafter they are known both to us and to our characters.

  Yet I think there is room in our games for the second type of character, people who are known to our characters but not to us.  We probably don't use these very often, in part because once they've been introduced they become known to us as well.  Yet it is often the case that we will include minor characters as knowns.  If the game is set near the place where the character grew up, it makes sense that he would know the butcher, the priest, the baker, the town drunk, and scores of others who would recognize him and know his name, and whom he would similarly know from the years he has been there.  Even if he is elsewhere, it is entirely reasonable that he could encounter someone he knows from before the game began, someone unknown to the player but known to the character.  In some games, it would be entirely appropriate for the player to create such a character.  In nearly all games, it makes sense for the referee to do so.  It also makes sense to do so at times when it is not intended to be a hook to the next adventure.  After all, if it means trouble every time the characters meet someone they once knew that the players don't recognize, the players are going to start running extremely rude and unsociable characters.

  Obviously, our game worlds are full of the third type, people unknown to player or character.  Sometimes these become known, but the vast majority of them remain unknown.  They can be used in passing encounters, such as a conversation with a waitress or a shared moment with a shopkeeper, to be forgotten amidst the thousands one passes over time.  They remain in that sense unknown, and don't need to be more than what was discovered in that moment.

  My suggestion of using real people as characters in play may well be the fourth type of person in the game world.  After all, if I decided that the driver of the car would be played by Drew Carey, you would recognize the driver of the car and know some things about him; yet it wouldn't be Drew Carey, but someone who looked, talked, and acted very like him.

  Of course it wouldn't be Drew Carey; that wasn't well said.  Drew Carey isn't going to come by to play himself in one of my games, or at least not this week.  What I mean is that Bruce Willis is not John McClane, and Steven Seagal is not Casey Ryback, but that each actor brings aspects to the role which are recognizably his own.  More precisely, I could create a character who was John McClane in everything but name; I could even include his name in most games, since just because you know who that is doesn't mean your character knows.  If I knew your family, I could perhaps play a character as your brother the computer expert, or your sister the village matchmaker.  You would know him or her, and yet your character would not.  Similarly, I could inject characters into a game world who actually were real people known to you, but who were not known to your character.  This can lead to interesting possibilities in play.

  Creating good characters for your games can be challenging.  These ideas hopefully will provide some ways to overcome those challenges, or at least to look at the options from a different angle.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.