# RPGaDay 2026 - 03 - Poise tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] You know how some days things just don't come together? That was yesterday and today, which means that our schedule's a little bit off from what it should be, but that's okay. These things happen. We adjust. Sometimes you have a sick day. Sometimes you've got to go downtown and be horrified by the teeming masses. So it goes. Getting down to a few thoughts about poise in the context of TRPGs is a lot harder than it sounds, because poise itself is a personality trait that reflects your coolness under pressure, essentially. That is a core narrative element of a whole lot of genre fiction. The unflappable hero, the character that can't be shaken by whatever comes along. Yet, if a character is completely invulnerable, they are unmoved by anything. If they don't flinch at any point, they can become a self-caricature. They can become boring and stale. You know at any given time how they're going to react, because they are going to react in exactly the same way, passionlessly. This is a problem with a lot of modern media writing. In fact, the characters come out flat, even though the writer thinks they have really done something. They're going for that Whedonesque excitement, the rapid-fire patter, the almost cartoonish gestural inhabitation of their space. That's not necessarily a terrible thing. But like all things, only in moderation. It's not a structure that you can build an entire franchise on. In fact, you can't really build a whole movie on it. Like all Chekhov's gun elements, if you introduce an unflappable character, then by the end of the third act, they have to be flapped. That's the part we see a lot of failure in media these days. To bring it back around to the RPG sphere, lots of people make unflappable characters, or at least try to. The cool trench-coat-wearing edgy guy who has seen it all, done it all, and carries two silver katanas and dual-wields Desert Eagles, that guy. You know him. You've seen him at the table. You know how it turns out. Either the character is just a pawn to be moved around and is deliberately constructed to have as few emotional affordances as possible, or the player is terrified of actually engaging with other people and has created a character as a plastic, seamless shell, which doesn't allow for anybody else to get a handle on them one way or another. The first is a playstyle decision. If you're just going into a dungeon to kill some monsters, loot gold to get a higher number, and go back to the next dungeon, a pawn is fine. Emotional affordances are overblown if the only role they're playing is their combat rotation in the party. Let it go. It's fine. No one cares, including the player. If, on the other hand, you want to run a game in which characters have some nuance and have things that they have to grapple with, and just as importantly, can be grappled with by the setting and by the other players, then the unflappable character has to be deliberately and consciously flawed for that character to work, not just alone but with others. For some players, this is easy. All their characters, no matter what, have their emotional flaws, which provide places of vulnerability. For some players, this is beyond their capacity. A lot of them have been beaten up by their GMs for having a vulnerable character. This is, of course, bad GMing, and always has been, but it also is a mainstay of the bad GM, and there are always more bad GMs than good ones. When you think about what kind of game you want to play, you need to really sit down and consider what can make a character lose their poise, what can put them off their game, and what can make them respond in kind. ![[Call of Cthulhu (cover).png|200]] Some games make this very easy. **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** has it built into the architecture. Sanity is a stat. Things that are beyond human conception or would be shocking to a normal person require a SAN roll. It's built in; there's no question. **[[Vampire - the Masquerade|Vampire: the Masquerade]]** has this built into the architecture. Your humanity is a stat, and Rötschreck is a mechanical construct. You know what is going to destroy the poise of your character, and it's doubly important because the core concept of a vampire is a cool and collected bloodless predator. Pun fully intended. The next time you're sitting down to make a character, think about their poise. Are they a character who other characters will see as poised, collected, calm, or do they violate the expectation? Are they intended to be the iron pillar of the party, or are they the force that erodes other characters' poise, whether they're allies or enemies? Where do they stand, and when do they fall? Food for thought. Hopefully, I'll get back on schedule here shortly, and we'll have more RPG a Day discussion the whole rest of the month. Check back later today or early tomorrow for the next one.