Playing a character from a book or movie
We recently posted about playing characters in your wheelhouse. Role-playing games are about having fun, and knowing what kinds of characters you enjoy is valuable insight in helping you to enjoy the game. But while taking inspiration from your favorite movies, shows, and books is a great way to help you create a character, we don’t recommend actually trying to recreate Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker.
But we also posted about reusing an old character concept recently, and said that it can be a lot of fun. So why are we recommending against reusing what amounts to someone else’s character?
The characters in a movie or book already have their own stories. That story is probably what inspired you to play them in the first place, and to recreate it. But books and movies are a very different story format than RPGs. In a movie, everything has already been created and scripted to play into that character’s story… But role-playing games are unscripted and chaotic. There are other people trying to play, all of them the main characters of their own stories.
And then there’s the dice! A book character has predetermined points of success and failure that (hopefully) feed into the author’s vision of their arc. In an RPG, the dice can always roll up an ill-timed critical failure. Which is exciting and fun to recover from! It pushes the character and story in new directions — but it’s not a good way to re-create a character from another media form.
We’ve had a few people try to play characters from shows or stories, and it rarely goes well. While it’s never been a catastrophe, the player is also never really satisfied. Their creation can’t measure up to and/or mimic the original version — and in trying to force them to, players lose out on the chance to play someone new. RPGs cannot perfectly recreate the experience of a movie — but neither can a movie do the same things as a role-playing game.
Now, a quick side note… This is advice for players, not Storytellers. In a Star Wars game, if you can play a convincing NPC version of Luke Skywalker, that’s great! Your players will be stoked to meet such a legend. But a different version of this same advice applies to NPCs, too — know how much you and your players are okay interacting with a main canon character, and how much you’re comfortable touching on the original Star Wars material.
Back to players! Unless you’re really invested in bringing in a character from some other media and are reasonably certain that you can enjoy the experience, take inspiration and build something new. RPGs are immersive, wild and unpredictable. Don’t cheat yourself by trying to play someone whose story has already been told. Come make your own stories and experiences!
