This always happens. Well not always, but often enough that it’s time to talk about it.

Everyone wants their character to be special. That’s cool. That binds you to your character. That invests you in him or her and that is good for the game. But if everyone is special then no one really is, and a game about the antics of a group has to see the group as the central feature because it will need to stick together somehow. So it’s more important that the group be special than that each character be special. I promise — play will make you special in ways that are cohesive as well as fun.

Anyway in my upcoming game special is not really the problem right now. Everyone is special, but in fairly subtle and undisruptive ways. We have only one non-human, so the group doesn’t stand out as a bizarre anomaly for the world and nor does it imply a D&D-style world of roughly equal racial representation. That’s good. In fact that’s really good. Magic is supposed to be rare and there is only one person who can wield it. Non-humans are rare and there is only one in the group. Not too special. Hurray!

No, the problem here is slightly different but oh-so-familiar. In creating characters we have many with opposing interests. Not just different, but flat-out opposite. Specifically, we have a wandering revolutionary and two people whose job is hunting revolutionaries. I’m not a big fan of just covering that land-mine up and walking very carefully and pretending it’s not true undermines the character stories and makes the characters significantly less of what the players wanted from them. So what to do?

I game with adults. That means one of the things I can do with some reasonable hope of success is just push it on the players. “Here’s the problem folks, tell me a story that makes it work.” But that just sidesteps the issue, because then the question is just, “what can they do” instead of “what can I do?” So what are the options?

We could declare that past jobs are past. The spy is no longer a spy and the hunter is no longer a hunter. Or the revolutionary has reconciled with the new government.

We could find a way to reverse a loyalty. The revolutionary now believes in the right to rule of the new government. The spy turns on his master. The hunter has become a revolutionary.

We could find an over-riding motive. The political interests of the individuals are overshadowed by some much more urgent and dangerous issue. This of course risks returning to the problem when the new issue is resolved, but it might be credible at that time to have the characters reconciled, having worked together through some great hardship. This is kind of nice because it gives us a starting point — the revolutionary arrives in town where the spy has laid a trap for him and the hunter (working with the spy) arrests him and then bang zoom a much more terrifying thing happens. That’s pretty nice and suits my opening image idea.

Hmm, in fact I think that by writing this I solved my problem. I open with the scene of hardship and bonding disaster and maybe let the players handle the backstory for the capture and so on as a flashback.

Damn I never really got the idea of flashbacks in a role-playing game before but this is singing in my head now. Thanks for your help, folks!

–BMurray