How to Make A Character You Care About: a case study.

A couple of my fellow fiction game players have commented that I make characters who I get really into. I want to share my technique because it’s really satisfying to me. This is strictly for Narrativist play by the Forge definition; without rules to support this kind of play, I think you could really wind up making yourself unhappy.

First, some nondefinitive definitions:

• Protagonist: An active character in a moral conundrum sufficiently similar to our own experience that we understand why that character behaves the way they do.

• Antagonist: A character taking the opposite moral stance from, and acting against the interest of, the Protagonist.

• Situation: The circumstances over which the *Tagonists conflict.

So, let’s take a look at my character, “Jesus” (pronounced the English way, not the Spanish way) from last weekend’s game of carry, a game about war. The following is kind of explicit, so I’ll put it behind a cut so you won’t accidentally read it if you’re not up to hearing a story about soldiers losing their shit during the Viet Nam War.

Jesus is American, from California, but his family is Mexican. He’s a calm guy and likes to smooth out trouble between people. He’s the team’s medic, which is a responsibility he takes very seriously. He hates to see his comrades hurt and is troubled by the fact that he has to kill people to keep them safe. He tries to put that in the back of his mind, though, and just keep his friends alive. They call him Jesus because of his shaggy hair and the fact that he saves them.

This was pretty much a given at the beginning of the game, on a little 3 x 5 card, though I’m paraphrasing.

Then carry does something really neat, once you’ve got that. First, you write down an Issue. This is something that the player will need to resolve one way or another with the character. And this is where I think there’s tremendous opportunity to start your character to strong protagonisthood: a situation that is unsolvable without substantial transformation of the situation, the protagonist, or the antagonist. I wrote down

“I want to marry the Vietnamese girl I raped.”

This is an unsolvable problem, given my moral stance as a player. Coincidentally, it’s a problem for the protag, as well, which is good because it means that I’m going to sympathize enough that I’ll care about what he does from here. Interestingly, Ben Lehman points out that it’s probably a fairly common vector for marriage and I guess he might be right. But it sure turns my stomach, and that’s what I need.

Now, carry does something else neat: you pass your little slip of paper with this horror you’ve given yourself one seat over (we went counterclockwise) and someone complicates the matter. Everyone does this together, so I got Adam Dray’s character, Big White, who was a black man who wanted the respect he was due as a Marine, irrespective of his color. So I added in that he hates the White Devil — he wants to be treated equally with something he hates. Then you pass along one more time. Then everyone gets back their original little slip to find out the total baggage of the character you’ll be playing for the next few hours. Adam and Dave did an admirable job of complicating this guy I’d have to play. They added,

• She’s pregnant.
• The baby is your best friend’s.

So I had to come up with a best friend. It turns out it’s Saint, this big, blond, blue-eyed Viking looking guy. There’s no mistaking us for each other. So you can see where that’s going.

So, we’ve got a firebase (a word I just learned) and we’re on recon for several days. We come across the NVA. Saint gets his arm blown up pretty good by a booby trap as we overextend and I’ve got to stop the bleeding. He says to me, “You know Deng, that girl?”

and I say, “Yeah, I know her.”

He says, “I want to see her again.” All this is while I’m stopping his fucked up arm from getting worse and waiting until a helicopter can come get him out of here.

“OK,” I say, “You’ll get to see her again.”

“I want to see my baby,” he says, with a meaningful look.

“You’ll get to see her again, I promise.”

Nathan says to me, “Are you deliberately misunderstanding?”

“Like crazy,” I say.

So, Saint gets flown out. He gets to see Deng about 25 years later when Jesus and she are married and have raised his son. But that doesn’t happen for four hours. In the middle are a bunch of desperate attempts at solving the unsolvable problems I’ve got for this guy. They wind up confronting each other and he’s so riddled with guilt about her that he shoots one of his fellow Marines for calling her a VC and threatening to shoot her. She is a VC, as it turns out, or at least was until Jesus kidnapped her to keep her safe. Eventually, she starts suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and “falls in love” with him after he beats the shit out of his commanding officer who was trying to get her out of the camp in the middle of the night. Hooray. I’m winning.

There are some scenes that would be touching if they weren’t really horrible: she’s teaching him Vietnamese at one point, and he makes it very clear that no one is to hurt her at another. He’s terrified that she’s going to die all the time. There’s no sex until she totally trusts him in this brainwashed sort of way. They share a bunk bed. She gets the bottom one (he thinks it’s safer there — I guess because she can’t fall out) and they’ve got a curtain around the bunk so no one will bother them.

Now, what’s important to me on the whole is not whether or not this character actually solves the problem. I have to let go my attachment, as much as I can, to his well-being. I mean, from the getgo, he’s totally fucked; if what I care about is him being an exemplary individual, I’ve put my money on the wrong horse. He’s done something horrible and has to go out and do more horror in the morning. He’s got a moral debt so deep he’ll never again see the light of day. But from moment to moment, what does he do? Does he do something good, for good reasons? Does he do something bad for good reasons? Something good for bad reasons? And holy shit, I want there to be some moral miracle by the last act of the story. I want things to come out well because they’re so bad. So I start thinking, “What’s the best that can happen?”

And who knows. But they ran off into the jungle after blowing up some stuff. His loyalty had long since stopped being to the US and became loyalty to her, and when he finally found out that she was pregnant at the very end, he was ecstatic that he was going to be a daddy.

If I were to write down a list of the things that make this character work for me, they’d be these:

• An unsolvable situation that involves another character.
• Materials with which to affect change on the three elements of protag, antag, and situation.
• Fellow participants (Thanks, Nathan, Dave, and Adam) who are willing to push forward questions that amount to, “Well, if that’s OK, is this OK?”

If you want a character you’ll be completely tied to, make one who starts from a position of unassailable failure, where all the decisions are hard decisions, where the price for everything is high. You’ll find a protagonist at the end who’s bruised or dead, but undeniably showed you some things about yourself in a difficult situation.

(More about carry: a game about war can be found at the Hamsterprophet site.)