Playing trouble-makers
Role-playing chaos without derailing the campaign
On Saturday, Aron ran the first session of his new Tydalus campaign. He’ll tell you more about that later. But as I started my new character, I realized that there was a line that I had to walk.
Lily and Mariah were still a little nervous about speaking in character — they’ve been watching Critical Roll and were worried about living up to that level of role-playing expertise. We told them not to worry — Aron and I aren’t that good, either. We’re not streaming the game or anything; it’s just for fun.
And we had a lot of fun! I was a little nervous about my character, Rhysa. I designed her very much around the other two characters and players. That meant giving Rhysa some social skills and ability to schmooze, since Mariah and Lily aren’t at all comfortable with talking to lots of NPCs yet. I had originally intended to make Rhysa a fairly serious, hardcore mercenary, but when Lily started rounding out her character concept, that description fit her better than me.
That wasn’t a problem. I’m a flexible player, and love playing pretty much any kind of character. So I quickly re-imagined Rhysa as more of a free-spirited, wild rebel. Even though she ran away from home several years ago, she’s still trying to piss off her absent mothers. That means breaking societal rules and starting trouble… Which can cause problems for a campaign.
If you’ve Storytold a few RPGs, then you know the kind of character that I’m talking about — they steal the town constable’s boots just for a laugh, pick fights with anyone who looks at them funny, and generally take any excuse to create chaos. They can be a great deal of fun, but can also badly derail the entire game and cause a lot of pain for other players. The group paladin can really struggle to get along with a rogue who knifes some rando in an alleyway just for drinking money, or steals from the rest of the PC party for the hell of it.
While it can make for some really interesting scenes, that sort of chaos more often just results in frustrated in-fighting among the players or with the Storyteller. I try hard to be a good player and Costoryteller, which means I definitely do not want to jump the campaign and rough it up in a dark alley.
So how could I make a chaotic character to balance out the other, more formal mercenary while still working with the rest of the party and not undermining the campaign? This isn’t my first rambunctious character, so I had a few strategies that have served me well in the past — and which worked out well in the first session of Tydalus.
1) Aim your mischief at NPCs, not the other PCs
The first bit of advice is a simple one. If you’re playing a chaotic thief, don’t steal the fighter’s prized sword, the one passed down through their family for seven generations. Don’t even steal their old boots that they never wears and just haven’t gotten around to throwing away yet. Not unless you have either discussed it with the fighter’s player ahead of time or you know them really, really well and are certain that it will be a fun scene rather than a painful one. Instead, go steal the evil sheriff’s sword.
In the first session of Tydalus, we encountered a sickly NPC. I wanted to get her something medicinal, and Lily’s character had some tea. But I don’t know Lily well, and she’s already playing someone who doesn’t like other mercenaries. I probably could have taken her tea, but that just seemed like a frustrating scene for her. She paid equipment points into that healing tea, and it would suck if a fellow PC promptly stole it before she could even use it!
Instead, I had Rhysa approach the NPC apothecary and lie through her teeth to get some tea. Given the chance, I will always cheat a non-player character over a player one.
2) Involve other PCs
No matter who I’m playing in an RPG, the goal is to create scenes, not disrupt them. And I don’t just mean scenes where the other players can watch me flirt with the ship’s first mate — which I did, shamelessly — but ones that everyone gets to play in. Role-playing is a team sport, after all!
So when I came back with the tea, I made it perfectly visible to the other players and got their help delivering it to the sick NPC. She was chained to an oar to row, and that doesn’t make for very good drinking. So Lily and Mariah went right to work getting the other rowers on that oar to stop so that the sick NPC could drink. And when the ship’s captain noticed us interfering with one of his rowers, all three of us got to quibble with him about it. Three PCs against one unfriendly NPC is a lot more fun than me fighting against the other players.
3) Do nice chaotic things
You may have noticed in the example above that it all revolved around trying to help a sick NPC. In my experience, chaotic scenes where the players are trying to do something kind go over better with the Storyteller and the other players than something cruel. It’s hard to get mad at someone just trying to help, and it’s easy for the other players to buy into a plan to help someone else.
Later in the Tydalus session, night fell on the ship and I decided that Rhysa had no intention of sleeping in a hammock. She snorted, called it a basket, and decided to sleep up on deck under the stars. But hey, I was leaving behind an empty hammock on a ship full of poorly-treated prisoners — like the sick NPC rower and Mariah’s character, who was also a prisoner. So I had Rhysa go down into the lowest level of the ship, find the two prisoners and then brought them up to take her hammock. The guard didn’t like that much, but Lily promptly joined me in glaring until they let it go. As stoic and hardcore as Lily is playing her character, she was still happy enough to use that badassery to help a couple of other characters.
4) Keep the Storyteller in the loop
Role-playing is a lot of improv and off-the-cuff playing pretend, so it’s next to impossible to let your Storyteller know every move you plan to make. But whenever I can, I try to let the Storyteller know what weird thing I want to do. If I know before the session, I’ll fire off a quick email or text. More often than not, though, I’m responding to an in-game scene happening in more or less real time. In that case, I just give the Storyteller a quick high-level overview of my plan.
In the hammock scene above, I just told Aron that I intended to give my sleeping spot to Mariah and the sick NPC. He considered very briefly, nodded, then asked how I planned to do that — thus launching us into the scene I described. But my warning gave Aron just a moment to think about my unexpected plan. He could have waved me off if it would be too disruptive to the session, and I would have appreciated the warning before getting halfway through the scene. Not that my tiny act of rebellion was anything particularly complicated, but a little warning about any crazy stunt you want to pull can help get the Storyteller on your side. And pranks go over best when everyone’s in on the joke.
There’s always a lot of chaos in a role-playing game, and that’s half the fun. But with a little care and consideration, it’s easy to use that chaos to add to the story and characters, rather than frustrating the Storyteller and other players. So go out there and sow some chaos!
