we all have things that we want, don’t we? In fact, pretty much everything we do is based upon what we want and, just as important, what we don’t want. Which is the roundabout way of saying that we want that not to happen.

RPGs like Leagues of Cthulhu have formalized motivations that have both role play and mechanical effects. It’s a nice reminder to take some time to figure out what your character is all about.

I’ve played purely reactive characters, and I’ve played characters that had strong motivations, and I vastly prefer the latter.

Now, to be sure, motivations and desires of some sort tend to emerge during play anyhow, but when the character enters play as something other than a blank slate, it makes them feel much more real and much easier to play. You don’t have to guess what they would do. It becomes very instinctive.

So next time you make a character, don’t just determine what they can do. Figure out what the hell it is that they want.

As I confessed earlier, many of my characters are not the most tactful. In fact, you might call them very direct. What’s not to like about that?

I mean, come on, it’s very efficient. I’m not a big fan of subterfuge and wheels within wheels, and most of my characters tend to follow suit.

Does it get them in lots of trouble? Absolutely, but then again, does’t being in trouble make RPGs a lot more fun?

It certainly keeps them interesting.

I’ve seen a lot of intense characters in my day, but I can’t lie. Whenever I see the word intensity, all I can think of is Ted Nugent and the album Intensity In Ten Cities.

Because of that unbidden and unconscious association, I’m reminded that while we can have a lot of fun staying in one location for the entire campaign, I always get a kick out of characters that go see the world.

In our The Sky Is No Limit campaign of Leagues of Adventure, we’ve traveled across the ocean, discovered strange villages of natives, and even recuperated in the city hospital (well, at least Mr. Garibaldi did). Where we left off, we are actually in what might be another world entirely as we search for yet another city.

I think this kind of travel in RPGs has gotten a bad rap in later years. You might say “murder hobo”; I say “world traveler.”

The composure of our character is something that we tend to place a good deal of emphasis on: what are their stats, what are their skills, what are their motivations, their personality? We get a picture of who this person is in our heads, and then all hell breaks loose.

Sure, maybe those stats don’t change, and maybe their skills don’t. Often, a good practice is to have the players of a new system evaluate how their character felt after the first session and change a few things if they really need to, if the composure of their character didn’t line up with the actual activities in terms of their abilities and focus.

However, this carefully crafted idea of who the character is tends not to survive unscathed with actual play. Time and again, I have found that the actual personality of the character emerges without any conscious thought of mine. I had no idea that Terrence McSweeney was going to be such a jerk. I had no idea that Philippe Moreau was going to be such a hopeless romantic.

I’ve had characters hesitate who I thought were brave, and other characters rush headlong into danger in order to protect their friends. I’ve had characters display altruism or cruelty that I didn’t know was in them when I came up with the concept. It’s actually a very cool thing. I find that, regardless of our idea, the composure of our character Isn’t fully complete until play is over, and even then they can always evolve next session if we ever pick the game back up again.

How much can you endure before you finally break? How much punishment and trauma can you withstand? These are difficult things to answer in our own lives, other than by looking backwards and seeing what we’ve gone through, but for characters of ours, it’s a little different.

Some games like Call of Cthulhu provide us with a sanity rating or some other measurement of our ability to withstand repeated trauma and insult. Maybe another stat tells us how long we can function before we collapse, or at least do everything at a penalty. Like all resources, these eventually run out. If only life had a little counter like that so we could know how we were doing and when we needed to back off.

Sometimes it’s easy to disassociate from your character entirely and move them around like a pawn on a board. They don’t give up because it’s just a game. They’re not really you, right? What does it matter how exhausted a real person would be? Who cares how emotionally broken a human being would be in their circumstances? They’re just a sheet of paper with numbers, aren’t they?

It’s my preference to live inside their heads and try to assume their role and personality and personhood as much as possible. For me, it makes it a much more engaging experience. One of the benefits or drawbacks of this, depending on how you look at it, is that sometimes you realize enough is enough and they need to call it quits for a while. Some things can’t be endured any longer, and when you don’t make that connection, sometimes the GM will smile and say “it’s all just… too much”.

how does your character regard the world around them? That’s an interesting question to think about. I played many characters in many games and campaigns, and they all regarded the world around them a little bit differently.

Now, at first, you could think that all of these worlds were different, so that’s what went into it. Pretty simple. However, in any given game, you’ve got a bunch of characters that all regard the world around them just a little bit differently. It’s not just about the external world; it’s about the viewpoint of the character.

In the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game over a decade ago, my wizard viewed the world as a resource, nothing more. Either you were an asset or an obstacle, but nobody was a human being, not in his eyes. My reporter in Call of Cthulhu viewed the world as a hostile place full of duplicity and wrongdoing that needed exposing. In the sky is no limit My character, Mr. Garibaldi, viewed the world as an adventure. He got hurt a lot, but he still was filled with the wonder of it all. In alien, Leo Baxter, viewed the universe as a hostile place where you can count on your comrades and nothing else. I could go on, but I’ve made the point.

Each of our characters comes alive not only in the unexpected things they do or say that you can see externally, but they also come alive internally. It’s my experience that I start seeing the world through their eyes and viewing things just a little bit differently than I would if I was there, and that is very interesting indeed.

Tact is not something that many of my characters have had over the years, occasionally, but they’ve tended to be very direct. I wonder why.

Having a high natural charisma or the ability to be persuasive doesn’t always indicate tact, and some situations must be handled delicately.

In our turn-of-a-new-leaf Call of Cthulhu campaign, one would never accuse my character, Terence McSweeny, of tact. Far from it. However, his counterpart, Alfred Smalls, was a master of it.

This didn’t mean that he never spoke his mind. He certainly did, but he was able to defuse situations and prevent things from escalating on more than one occasion. He seemed to have an knack for it.

I don’t know what it said on his character sheet, but I do know how he got played.

He wasn’t necessarily somebody you would associate with being a master of social situations. He certainly wasn’t, but he did have the ability to say some pretty outlandish things to people and have it sound somewhat rational.

Eventually, he got thrown in the insane asylum for a while, but that’s another story.