# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 10 - Origin tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] So we're on about origins today, are we? Fantastic.  Despite your first thought, we are not talking about superhero origins. Well, not directly. But any excuse to use my favorite Ookla the Mok song is a good excuse. It is entirely applicable here because there's something that sets role-playing games apart from board games and has a hazy border with war games. That is the role—the idea that you are representing a character. That character has continuity. The character existed in the world before you picked it up, and in theory, in some way, by at the very least how it affected the world, it will continue to have consequences within the world after you put it down. Yes, I know I can hear the guys in the back screaming about how they don't want to read your three-page backstory for your character from a small village who has neither parents nor siblings, nor actual memory, and woke up one day just in time to see the village burn down. And in a sense, they're right. In a sense, they are correct to reject three pages of something that ends up explaining why your character is emotionally unavailable—unavailable in a way that isolates them from things the character could and should care about in order to inhabit a role. But, as always, they go too far. They disdain the very idea of backstory, that there may be something to be known that gives the character form and function. Anything beyond the mechanics, to them, is an offense. Why waste your time and my time on it? I'm going to tell you why you should: to make the game worth playing. This goes back to something I've said on multiple occasions, including multiple occasions this month. There are three things that a character needs in order to be interesting: 1. They need to want something. 2. They need to not be able to have that thing. 3. They need to have an active reaction to not being able to have that thing. Remove any of those three, and the character falls flat. If they don't want anything, then there's nothing that motivates them, and they don't have any reason to act. Unless something acts upon them, a fully, purely reactive character is just boring. They never do anything. They're a camera, not a character. If they are able to get the thing that they want, then there's no tension. There's no conflict. They just do it. That's not a character in a story. That is a background figure in someone else's story. Somebody who actually wants something and they can't get it, perhaps because your character took it. But your character, absent something they can't have, isn't a character at all. Just a figure. Lastly, they have to want to do something to change the state of affairs. If they're okay with not being able to get what they want, then they don't really want it, do they? And again, we collapse to the first failure mode in which it's just not interesting. They aren't motivated to engage with the story. If they aren't motivated to do something, then none of this matters. It's moot. It's not even words on a page. The character is dead (and not even dead in the context of most of the games that we like, right? Even the dead have some sort of motivation). Which brings us neatly back around to Origins. Now, I'm not saying that you need to embrace *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*. On the contrary, I'm saying that particular literary formula has done more harm to tabletop roleplaying than the Satanic Panic. It has stunted more minds in the crib than thalidomide. What's the problem with the Hero's Journey? The problem is that a large portion of our hobby has been caught up in the idea that the Hero's Journey is the only story to tell. That all stories are the Hero's Journey. That if you want to do something other than the Hero's Journey, you are a heretic—and worse. And must be excommunicated and shunned from the Church of the Proper Game™. Of course, that's bullshit. The Hero's Journey is just one very specific type of character motivation. And just because it's found everywhere doesn't mean you have to find it in your character. One of the innovations over the last 15 years in the RPG hobby that I have really been pleased by is the greater emphasis on Session Zero and subsequently character creation premises, which come just before the act of character creation itself. Thinking and talking about where the world is narratively, how it's formed, the players giving input into the actual truths of the universe. And the reason is that if they are invested in understanding those truths, they will make characters for whom those truths matter, either to reinforce them or challenge them. It gives them hooks to hang their wants on. The more common element in character generation of creating links to other characters, both at the table and in PCs, also serves to drive your origin and give you something to talk about. Don't be afraid to have family members. Yes, the determined GM can use them to target your character. That's what they exist for. They exist for your character to care about and to create situations in which you can't get what you want in regards to what you care about. I'll set a challenge for you if you're playing a game in which figuring out your bonds to people and communities isn't part of the underlying character. I challenge you to add this to your character generation process: sit down and figure out two characters or communities that you have a relationship with which is unfulfilled. That is, you want something from them that you aren't getting. - Maybe you live with your sister, but she isn't holding up her end of the rent, and it's a constant source of friction and problems. - Maybe you love your town, but the new mayor and his cronies are pushing things in a direction that you are not happy or comfortable with. - Maybe you're a member of an order of vampire hunters, but they are becoming softer over time and you're not sure why—and you don't like it. Some of you are cringing already because you know that your GM is just going to use these things against you in a way to push you onto the railroad tracks of their pre-written plot. For you people, I'm sorry. They probably will. If you get the feeling they're likely to, they're going to. You know them better than I do. Yet, even under those conditions, I would still suggest this is the way you proceed. Give your character fictional vulnerabilities. And I don't mean false vulnerabilities, but vulnerabilities which exist purely within the fiction. Let the world affect you. Give the character things to pursue other than what's immediately in front of them. Give them motivations which may be at odds with other motivations. Let complexity come to the role. "Lex," I can hear you say, "I'm just playing in the most vanilla kind of dungeon-delving game with my buddies. Why do I need to worry about all this role stuff? All this background garbage? Why do I need to even care about my family? That's not going to come up in the middle of the dungeon." Then I would counter to you: are you really even playing a role-playing game if your role purely consists of the skill you bring to the table in a very limited slice? Or is it just a board game with a pawn card in front of you? I'm not saying that's not a valid way to play and that it's not fun. On the contrary, sometimes I just want to go kill dungeon inhabitants and take their stuff. Fair enough. But if the character that you are doesn't affect who you are, and it doesn't affect what you're doing, then it doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter, why even pretend otherwise? **[Four Against Darkness](https://www.ganeshagames.net/product_info.php?cPath=1_55&products_id=295)** exists. A pile of other games, which are explicitly not roleplaying games, but involve doing any number of classic **D&D**-style adventuring without worrying about roles, exist. **[D100 Dungeon](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/244214/d100-dungeon-book-1)** exists. **[2d6 Dungeon](https://drgames.co.uk/2d6-dungeon-a-classic-dungeon-crawler-solo-player-game/)** and **[2d6 Realm](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/491996/2d6-realm-an-overland-expansion-for-2d6-dungeon)** exists. Maybe it's a better match for what you're doing than calling it a roleplaying game. Not only is it perhaps a better name, but it's more honest. Let's keep gameplay interesting. Let's make our characters fictionally vulnerable in order to strengthen their interest. Family members, organizations you're a member of, neighborhoods, people you grew up with, teachers, mentors, rivals, enemies—all of these people, places, and things fill out the actual role that you are playing. They give your character hooks to the role-playing itself. A good GM won't just kill them off. They may threaten them. They may put them in peril. They may actively set them against you. But killing them removes their usefulness and their interest, and reduces the interest of your character. Far more useful and effective to just put strain on the relationship, or if it is already a strained relationship, have the world provide pressure that will reduce the strain. How does your character deal with getting closer to getting what they want? You can't ask that question unless they want something. All of this possibility, all of this flexibility, goes right back to the beginning—the origin, if you will. Spend time thinking about your origin. Don't write three pages of backstory that tells everyone why your character is untouchable, but three pages of backstory about what they want, why they want it, how things could change, and what you're going to do to try and affect that change? Man, I'll read that three pages every day. Twice on Sunday. So will everybody at your table. Then you're going to have motivated play, where people are actually aware of their role and yours—not just as, "I do this in the dungeon exploring party," but your role, your character, your place in the ongoing story. What is the role you play? What's their origin?