If I had to point to why I enjoyed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so much, I could do worse than pointing to the episode of “Waltz.”  In some ways, it’s very much a bottle show – the captain of the series and the character who’s been long set up as a villain facing off against one another and simply letting drama develop.  But I particularly love the amount of insight it gives into that villain, a look into the mind of Dukat.  We have a character who is sharply analytical and has looked deep within himself to figure out his flaws, only to come up with a conclusion so far from redemption that his subsequent actions are at once deplorable and expected.

And it also gives chilling mirrors of any time that the viewers tried to self-analyze.

The thing about introspection is that it’s tricky to do properly, because as the audience and the author we have a different perspective.  We can see what characters are doing wrong when the characters themselves often can’t.  So that raises the interesting question of how much introspection is too much and how to put yourself in the right place to see what they would see.

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Let’s start this off with a trivia question: what’s the difference between Iron Man and Batman, other than their powers?

If you think about it, they’re closer than you might think.  Both of them are inheritors of immense fortunes while being brilliant in their own right.  They both created weapons to fight against injustice and horrible things – sure, Iron Man built a suit of armor while Batman made himself a weapon, but the only reason Batman doesn’t have an armored exoskeleton is because the writers choose not to go that route.  Yet you know the characters are very different in so many ways, despite their similarities.

At the core, it’s because of their respective flaws and weaknesses.  For all their similarities, Tony Stark’s weaknesses do not belong to Bruce Wayne and vice versa.  It’s sort of a supertype of avoiding cabinet flaws as I discussed two weeks ago, wherein a given flaw is directly related to the sort of problems that a character has and what sort of story the character works within.

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Show me a game setting without drugs of some kind, and I will show you a setting that is either intended for young children or one that has not been adequately developed.

Pretty much every setting has alcohol, and The Secret World by definition has all of the usual real-world chemical cocktails.  Final Fantasy XIV has somnus, milkroot, and presumably moko grass (it does turn into hemp, after all).  WildStar features beer and cigars as more or less background elements.  World of Warcraft has bloodthistle, and blood elves in general.  City of Heroes had superadine on top of real-world drugs.  That’s just scratching the surface.

Odd though it might seem, drugs are pretty important in roleplaying, even if you’re not playing a character who actively has a problem.  The cultural impact and overall implications have a major impact on your character no matter what, and you can use them to add a fair bit of nuance to your portrayals.  So with the understanding that you as a player should probably not be taking illegal drugs, let’s talk a bit about using drugs in RP.

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Once you get the idea in your head that characters should be flawed, you don’t immediately know how to go about making that a thing.  So you wind up with characters who have cabinet flaws, and over time you solve those flaws, and then suddenly your character isn’t flawed any longer.  You’re right back to boring old square one, but you can’t not address the cabinet flaw, right?  The whole reason it’s there just cries out to be addressed and rectified!

Of course, it would probably help if I took a step back and defined what I meant in the first place by a cabinet flaw.

See, the idea of character flaws is easy to comprehend.  You want your characters to have problems, to have to struggle to overcome something.  At their core, flaws are problems.  So you give your character an obvious hole in their abilities, something that they distinctly cannot do rather than will not do.  The archetypical example is a paladin who’s ruggedly handsome, brilliant, and fearsome on the battlefield – but per the name, he can’t fix cabinets.

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Two weeks ago, I put forth what I think is a fairly simple philosophy for getting storylines moving in games – I don’t build the story.  I just lay out tools, and the other people involved happily build the maze themselves with a minimum of prompting from me.  I’m proud of the article and think it’s pretty completely on-point.  What I didn’t go into depth about was how you do that.

Sure, it’s all well and good to say you assemble tools, but I’m willing to bed that if you put some lumber and some tools in the yard and then hide, you will not find people coming by just to build you a shed.

A lot of it comes down to tricks that work during tabletop roleplaying and are easily ported to roleplaying arcs just as easily, with a few added tricks brought on by the nature of the beast.  So once you’ve got a plan in mind, it’s time to start putting your tools in place and using them to let players assemble a maze you never even had to sculpt.

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