Re-thinking ‘Player Styles’: What are Player Characters really?
A Player Character (aka. Playable Character or PC for short) is like a fictional marionette that you control, and speak for, and otherwise inhabit to interact with the game world for the duration of play session using your imagination. This is the primary act of roleplaying.
By contrast, the characters that are not actively controlled by yourself or other players are called Non-Player Characters (NPCs), whom are typically controlled by the Facilitator (or Gamemaster).
You create your Player Character in a process called character assembly, which is a set of special rules that you engage with only during development sessions to create a believable sapient being; assembled out of lists and choices, and stats and numbers. Then, in my own game Agora, life is breathed into the character at the start of each play session by speaking aloud their Principles or motivations, which you have hand-written to match the games current setting and situation.
In general, you can only control one PC at a time, but you can theoretically have as many PCs as makes sense. That is, if they’re all relevant to the game and your Peers agree to let you have more than one character. The more likely case is that your current PC dies or retires and you’ll need to make another one to continue playing.
Player Character Styles
What really makes a difference in the success or failure of a roleplaying session is you. Your participation, whether as GM [FC] or player, has much more influence on the fun your group has than all of the game products in the world. Rule books are not roleplaying games, any more than a screenplay is a movie.
— Robin D Laws, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering
Different characters may have distinctive abilities and differing styles of play, and you may find over time that you prefer playing one sort or the other, or that your character drifts between these styles over time.
This is a spectrum, with some highlighted archetypes, not a definitive list:
The Self-Insert
Both when you first make a Player Character, and when you take on the role of that character and actually play them, your personality will bleed into them. This is unavoidable, unless you happen to be a professionally trained actor; and even then — when you think of all the stage performances, video game adaptations, and movie reboots you’ve seen — you’ll know that two different artists can bring entirely different vibes to the same character.
However, for some players, the divide between player and character is more blurry; and they either make a character who is like an idealized version of themselves, or play their character not much differently from their own personality, or both. This is not a problem, so long as it doesn’t detract from anyone else’s enjoyment of the game by breaking their sense of immersion. In fact, there’s a good chance that a lot of your characters will be like this without you even realizing, especially if you’re new to roleplaying games. Just embrace it, and enjoy the feeling of being someone much like yourself in another world.
The Artist / Engineer
This is a character created by a player who either likes to construct stories for themselves to fulfill or who wants to tinker and ‘optimize their build’ and master the rules to achieve their goals. These might seem like two different activities, but really they are two sides of the same coin: the narrative side, and the mechanical side.
Regardless of their play style, these players all want for the same thing: A sense of achievement. This is not a problem. These players are satisfied by being rewarded for their endeavors, either narratively or mechanically or both, and either in ways that they predicted or in ways that will surprise them. In fact, Agora is a game that serves these player characters particularly well, since it’s systems are designed to entwine both modes of advancement.
The Masochist
This is a player who enjoys seeing their character get hurt, either physically or emotionally. Often, in these cases, the character isn’t actively trying to hurt themselves, but their player keeps putting them in situations where injury or abashment is likely. Perhaps it’s schadenfreude, perhaps it’s cathartic; but it’s probably both, since their character is also an extension of themselves. Masochistic players are those who see a real world psycho-therapeutic value in playing these games.
Indeed, the best masochistic players know that the game is just a game, and that the shared imagined world is a like sandbox, and they embrace those facts wholeheartedly. This is not a problem, so long as you have your Consent and Safety Tools in place (to help you explore these ideas in a safe space), and so long as your self-harm does not also harm or distract the other non-masochistic players.
The Discoverer
This is a player who doesn’t know who or what they want their character to be, and wants to play to find out. They will embrace chaos to begin with — possibly deciding to roll for all of their stats and jobs, and finding ways to randomize other character aspects too, and seeing what implied stories that tells them — and they will frequently do ‘uncharacteristic’ things in play to see what that feels like or how the world reacts, until a solid character precipitates out.
This is not a problem, so long as a fully-fleshed character does eventually emerge, and the other players are happy to put up with them while they make discoveries. Once the character has been discovered, the player usually transitions to one of the other styles to continue to get enjoyment out of the game; or else they may find a way to kill off or retire that character and begin the process again.
The Participant
This is a character who just doesn’t have much of an agenda; either because they currently have a lot of ‘dud’ Principles (ie. motivations that don’t narratively explode as intended), or because their player just isn’t that interested in being proactive about carving out their own destiny, and would rather see where fate leads them.
To some degree, this is a player who takes on the role of actor and audience member simultaneously. This is not a problem, so long as they are having fun. They want to be amazed by their own actions and by the actions of their friends, and are happy to watch things unfurl. They don’t necessarily want to be lead by the hand, but they aren’t always interested in leading themselves either.
Talk to the Players
If you just read all of the entries above and didn’t resonate with any style particularly strongly, then this is not a problem either. It means you’re probably somewhere in between. In fact, most of us are. And it can change not just between campaigns or gaming groups, but from character to character within the same campaign, and even from session to session with the same character.
The Conversation
There is no right way to play a roleplaying game, but the act of playing a roleplaying game necessarily takes the form of a conversation. That conversation dosen’t begin when when you all sit down at the table, and it doesn’t end when you all leave either. Not least because we’re all connected via the internet these days, but also because we all still think about the game even while we’re not playing it directly.
This activity is sometimes pejoratively referred to as ‘metagaming’ (meaning, the game within the game), but the metagame is also a game, and games are fun to play. This is not a problem. In fact, talking about the game outside of the game is actively encouraged in Agora; so long as the conversation doesn’t detract from the experience, and doesn’t meander too far off course, or ruin the game’s pacing!
Self-directed Play
Moderating the conversation and pacing is one of the primary roles of the Facilitator, but experienced Peers may eventually find that they are resolving issues themselves, via the conversation and a steady application of the game rules, without the intervention of the FC. Once this starts happening frequently and consistently, then, with the approval of their Peers, the FC may as well make themselves a PC and join in the fun.
At this point, the line between FC and PC and NPC begins to blur — and the shared imagined world reaches it’s most collaborative zenith — and the roleplaying game becomes akin to an improvisational aural tradition.
Whether this is the stated goal of your gaming group, or whether it just happens naturally through play, or whether you are repelled by this idea; it will all depend on you, your friends and their respective play styles, and how much you trust each other. There’s a little bit of ‘The Participant’ in all of us, really, and it can be hard to let that go.