Flanderizing characters
In role-playing games, character is everything. Characters are how players interact with the story, and where we pour all of our thought and effort. The plot, after all, is in the hands of the Storyteller. We control only our player character inside the campaign.
So in our desire to build wonderful and unique creations, players often give their characters interesting quirks. Which is great! Keeping a character fun and exciting through a game campaign is vitally important. We build people who are often larger than life, exaggerated and emphasized versions of the traits that we find appealing or interesting.
But it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of letting those quirks become the entire character. After all, they’re the parts of our creations that get laughs or gasps — a wizard who specializes in fireballs and favors them, regardless of how many of their friends are in the blast radius; or a robot who takes everything literally and doesn’t understand the metaphors of human speech.
These are fun, wonderful traits to play, but it can become quick and easy to always cast those fireballs, or never understand a thing the other characters say. The PCs become flattened versions of themselves who are nothing more than that one trait. One name for this is Flanderization. I grabbed this explanation of the term from TVTropes:
The trope is named for one of the examples in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who was originally just a considerate neighbor and attentive father, with his devout nature simply being that he willingly attended and paid attention in church, all to make him a contrast to Homer, before becoming obsessively religious.
Note that the key to this trope is in how the process is a gradual thing: the character starts relatively normal with a few quirks, the quirks become more prominent, then the quirks gradually become the character. If it is simply about how the character is different early on before the writers know what to do with them, that is Characterization Marches On.
In general, comedies, especially [sitcoms], fall into the trap of Flanderization because character development is far less important than Rule of Funny. Given a choice between getting a laugh or moving the story forward, getting the laugh will almost always take priority.
Especially under the pressures of real-time character interactions in a table-top role-playing game, it can be difficult to convey the full history and nuance of your character’s backstory. So it becomes easy to fall back on a schtick. And that’s generally fine! This is a game, after all, not a stage production. You’re not going to get a bad review just because you cast a few too many fireballs. But be wary of overusing any one particular character quirk lest it become all anyone knows about them.
So… how to do that? It’s fun and can be relatively easy to layer our characters on paper, but how can that influence playing them? Well, let’s take that wizard who likes their fireballs. Maybe they’re a closet pyromaniac who learned as a kid to burn down the things that frightened them, that it made them feel powerful — and fire retains its allure into adulthood.
Alright, one aspect of that is leaning on fireballs in combat… But without even delving into the scars of their early life trauma, perhaps the wizard sits close to the fire when in unfriendly territory. Perhaps they always carry a torch when exploring dungeons, even if a sunrod might be a more practical choice. Fire is still their go-to, but now we have a few ways to play with that.
There are almost always multiple easily accessible choices to explore even a single fascination for your character. Be on the lookout for more than one way to play their favored quirk, and don’t let them be reduced to a single line or action.
