Alignment and Advocacy
None of my readers should be surprised to learn that my concept of alignment is rooted in (you guessed it!) action and objective.
Objective pushes my character towards good or evil. Action pushes my character towards law or chaos.
If my characters want revenge, they’re evil (or at the very least a selfish neutral). If they’re motivated by keeping others safe and happy, they’re most likely good.
But how far would my characters go to get what they want?
While my rogue clamors around the Dessarin Valley, they’ve stopped at nothing to attempt freeing prisoners from both their physical and psychological prisons. Breaking and entering. Stealing. Spying. Murdering. Some of these actions might bar them from being morally good, but they all defy code and convention, making my rogue chaotic.
And what of revenge? My paladin Jana Gunn has a score to settle, but she’s still sworn to uphold the law in Phandelin. As the self-proclaimed sheriff of the small town, she may bend the law to get what she wants, but she won’t break it. She’s classic lawful evil.
There’s more to it than that, but the conversation surrounding alignment — its finer points and its relevance — is too large and out of scope for this entry. What I mean to talk about is how to play any alignment, especially the evil ones, convincingly.
In my last post I mentioned that actors draw on previous personal experience to play their character. The closer you get to a fantasy setting, the more difficult that might be. You’ve probably never had to smash a soldier’s head in with a hammer in real life, but your character might even be fond of doing it.
So what do you do when your character thinks and acts so unlike you?
Short answer: you have to become a lawyer.
The tactic is called advocating for your character. Even if your character does things you don’t agree with, you’ve got to find some way to empathize with them. Otherwise, you’ll end up only playing a caricature of them.
Don’t play “good” or “evil.” Play your character. You are the only person in their corner, who understands who and why they are. You’ve got to let that understanding shine through when you play.
Being your character’s advocate doesn’t mean you need to hide or stretch the truth. You’re not trying to get them acquitted. You’re only trying to justify their actions.
How do we build that kind of case?
First, gather the evidence.
Jana Gunn was was meant to be a cameo gunslinger in a western-themed campaign. The goal was always to create a character rooted in evil, so that’s where I had to start when making my misguided sheriff.
But playing Jana is another thing entirely from writing about her. I’d never do half the things she does. Jana’s the type to shoot first and ask questions later. She scares everyone in town and makes no effort to fix that. I’m more indecisive than she, but at least I’m likable.
I needed to find something about Jana that really resonated with me, that made her compelling to me. I needed to keep asking myself why she was like that:
Why is Jana the sheriff of the town if she holds people in contempt? It’s an inherited position. Her father was the sheriff before her.
Why can’t her father do it anymore? He was murdered several years ago by a notorious group of criminals.
Why did Jana love her father? Aside from the fact that everyone loved Hank Gunn, Jana looked up to her dad as not only a father but also a mentor. He taught her everything she knows.
If he was so great, why is Jana’s view of the law so warped? Jana’s grief and rage at the loss of her father have poisoned her ideals. If the law as it stood wasn’t enough to save her father, what good was it?
There are many ways to dig to the bottom of your character, but I find asking why over and over until the story unravels itself to be the most effective.
There’s a lot I can use in the above exercise: love of a family member, losing someone you looked up to, having your world view blown to bits. If I can understand why Jana does the things she does, I’m halfway to sympathizing with her. From here it’s easy to use substitution and circumstance to portray her.
Cherry-pick information from other sources.
Evil people are pretty selfish. Even if they know about what other people are going through, they usually don’t care. Good people, or otherwise empathetic ones, are going to listen and try to help when people ask for it. Most players are of the latter sort. They hear something is up, and they want to get around to solving it.
When I played as Jana, I shut my ears off to everyone else’s backstories. She doesn’t ask, and she tries not to let people get into who they are or why they’re in Phandalin. That works fine when you’re playing a cameo character, but it would get pretty frustrating for players if a member of their actual party (or a GM) acted that way.
That’s when you’ll have to compartmentalize. As a player you have to listen to and remember the party’s backstories and goals. But don’t work them into the circumstances for your own character.
Compartmentalizing, naturally, is an excellent skill for a GM to employ when playing the villain. A convincing villain helps suspend your players’ disbelief and keeps the stakes raised and real. If you want to be the kind of GM who really goes after players — to the point of stepping on their heads to make sure they’re dead — you’ve got to remove yourself from what your players’ characters want.
Conversely, if you’re playing a good character, keep your listening ears dialed to a maximum. The more you know about what’s going on, the more you can help.
Don’t submit your evidence for review.
Here’s the part that I struggle with the most: once you have your evidence and your cherry-picked circumstances, you’re not supposed to present your case to the others at your table. At least, you don’t do it explicitly.
When an actor plays a character, they keep this information to themselves. They’ll tell no one: not their cast mates, not their director, sometimes not even an interviewer twenty years after the fact. These secrets range from the sense memories or substitutions they use on stage to actual facts of their character’s life: a dead childhood dog, or how their character really feels about their scene partner’s character.
Actors won’t share their work for several reasons. For one thing, it can be either very personal or very mundane. The thing that connects you to your character could be as deep as a heartfelt yearning or as commonplace as the scent of drying paint. You shouldn’t have to share that stuff. But also, magicians never reveal their secrets! And bringing a fictional character to life at the table is real magic. Treat it as such.
Think of all of your favorite fictional characters. They work because of everything you don’t see. You will never know everything about them. You only have your perception of them and their actions. You may learn more about them as the story progresses, but you never learn all of it.
Let your characters speak for themselves; don’t spill the beans too much about their motivations or your connection to them.
It’s a lot easier for me to do this on the stage. When I get to the table, I fight real hard to suppress the urge to tell everyone everything. I’m proud of the stuff I’ve written, and I want to show it off.
Don’t be like me! Resist those impulses.
But there’s another issue with keeping secrets at the table. Playing an RPG is different from playing a character on the stage. No matter what side of the table you’re on, withholding important information makes the game less fun for everyone. Make sure the secrets you pick are small enough that they can’t change the narrative, or ensure the secrets are told to the appropriate people.
If your character’s secret is their family is dead, your GM might want to know that. If your NPC’s secret is they have murderous intent, your players will want to be able figure that out before they get stabbed.
The bottom line is this: your evidence is ultimately for you. It’s bits and pieces of your character that you believe in. Even if it’s good stuff, the other people at the table won’t resonate with it the way you will. If you want them to see the work you’ve done, then let that show through in the acting (or start writing blog posts about your characters).
Jana Gunn’s indomitable glare doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from no longer being able to discern what is good and what is bad, and deciding to treat them both the same — with callous disdain.
The other players know about her father, and they can guess how she feels about it. But the bits of her life that happened before that, the memories she holds on to, the moment she saw the knife running through Hank: these parts we’ll never tell.
When I told my dad about Jana Gunn he bought me a book about real old-timey guns. It’s called The Peacemakers, and I recommend it.
