Here’s my character, take good care of it, okay?

Well, the games running are chugging along at a decent pace, with L5R taking a good lead right now.  I’m having a lot of fun playing in the L5R game, as I’m trying my hand with a different kind of character with very strong motivations and a concept that I don’t usually trust to just any GM.

I’ve been thinking about it, and it comes as a surprise to me that I’d actually have that kind of statement.  Once I believed that characters are the domain of the players and players alone.  Of course, now that I’ve been GMing for quite some time, it’s become clear to me that GMs have as much responsibility when it comes to the care and feeding of character concepts.

As a player, I come up with a character concept and bequeath a section of it’s future development to the GM.  In essence, I therefore invest a part of the character to another individual and what happens in game becomes canon.  This presents an interesting situation since players have a say in what their character is  like only up until the game begins.

From this point forward, the player then surrenders authorial control to the GM, and the player now loses the stability of being in absolute control of situations that he would like and not like his character to be in and how to react.  Instead the player is now assuming a co-authorial position on one end, and a game participant position in the other.  The Character ceases to be a literary form, and becomes a hybrid game piece.

This is where the GM traditionally steps in.  And once again, where I will bring up the topic of the social contract.  I’m going to slip a bit into a little anecdote here, but one of my players just recently raised the issue if she would be allowed to change her character in mid game.  It turns out that she was not satisfied with the way things had been going, and had different expectations towards the campaign.  I had no issues against such and allowed her time to think of what she’d prefer to play instead of her current character.

Her dissatisfaction in the game stemmed from a conflict of expectations.  Some players come to have a beer-and-pretzels game, one where the group sits down, has a few laughs, kicks some ass and goes home.  Unfortunately, my current campaign was more of the introspective type with a little more emphasis on Power vs. Responsibility, and the Consequences of One’s Actions.

By sticking to the social contract of the game, this could have been avoided.  My mistake was to have assumed that the player knew the kind of game I was going to run, but it seems that her expectations weren’t adequately set.  Thankfully this wasn’t one of those times when we would be left with a boatload of issues where players grow steadily frustrated that they weren’t getting the game they “signed up for” and leave.

Now going back to the idea of Trusting Character Concepts to a GM… I’m not going to mince words here, but some GMs do better with certain character concepts.  For example, my current L5R character is essentially: “the aging veteran who has a boatload of regrets, and a single motivation to insure that the next generation lives the best life it could possibly enjoy, even if he must build their future upon his own bones.”

Not exactly something I can bequeath to any GM and expect something out of it.  Thankfully the one running the L5R game is one of the few people I feel I can trust with a concept that complex.  If I had given that to the others, the concept wouldn’t probably have seen much use, or the GM might downplay it in favor of other “more exciting” plot hooks they have in mind.