Let people make their own decisions.
- Principle
- Let people make their own decisions.
- Type
- Core Principle
- Primary Agenda
- Meet interesting people.
Most of us would probably think of a game like this as an imaginative exercise, involving fictional people that we make up, but people like those in the Fifth World understand an activity like this rather differently. They experience imagination as something that belongs to a particular place, which we get to participate in when we go there. They experience stories as persons in their own right, and the characters as other-than-human beings who know exactly what they want to say and do. Experienced authors often talk about their stories and characters in similar ways, illustrating how deeply this perspective runs in our unfiltered human experience. Try to accord the characters in the game such respect. Give them the opportunity to speak for themselves and make their own decisions. As much as you can, make yourself a conduit by which these characters can express themselves when you play them, rather than making their decisions for them.
#Examples
- In many ways, this principle follows quite naturally when you acknowledge everyone’s personhood, reveal relatable motivations, and tell us what you see. If we’ve already established the character’s motivations and other interests, then what hen decides will often seem obvious. Going with what seems obvious, in this case, means letting the character decide for henself. And, as in any other case, what seems obvious to you might not seem so obvious to others, so this can still make characters surprising from time to time.
- Remember that even with your own character, you’ve taken on a role. This person has a different history than you, and with that, different thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. Think of how hen would think of the situation, rather than how you would. Try to immerse yourself in hens life, experience, and perception, until you know exactly what hen would decide.
- With secondary characters, you might have the chance to play them sometimes, but other people have played them before you. Take those portrayals as a chance to learn a little bit more about them. As they pass from one player to another, they’ll begin to accrue their own personalities, separate from any of the people who’ve played them, but made up of each of your interpretations. When you then explore those character further by acknowledging their personhood and revealing their relatable motivations, you’ll start to discover complex characters that don’t belong to any of you individually, but only to themselves.
- If no particular answer seems obvious to you, roll a die. If you need to choose between two options, assign one option to even and the other to odd, and go with the one you roll. If one option seems more likely than the other, go by the roll’s value. Something that would only happen 16% of the time will only happen when you roll a 6, while something that might happen one time in three will happen if you roll a 5 or a 6. Or, you can roll the die to discover what drive propels this person right now: autonomy if you roll a 1 or a 2, competence if you roll a 3 or a 4, or community if you roll a 5 or a 6.
- “What my character would do” has become a euphemism in certain roleplaying game circles with good reason. Too many players hide behind a terrible character as an excuse to do and say terrible things. Remember that in the Fifth World, racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, and every other kind of bigotry died out generations ago. People with ideas like that spurned allies and good help for no reason, and so failed to survive the perils of collapse and the Rusting Age. How would a person in the Fifth World even find such ideas in the first place, much less adopt them, when hen lives in an egalitarian society? You might nonetheless find that some of your characters have some odious opinions and viewpoints, but letting them make their own decisions doesn’t mean you have to act them all out with the same level of devotion. Mentioning that the character devolves into an unhinged rant can suffice, without subjecting anyone at the table to its particulars.