Are you ready for the ultimate role-playing challenge? Tougher than trying to get a king to give up his crown. Tougher even than trying to seduce Tiamat?
Let’s be nice. Let’s be really nice. Let’s be paragons of virtue. The goodest goodies that we can possibly be.
It’s genuinely very difficult. None of us are that altruistic. Otherwise, we’d be out manning the barricades right now instead of reading TTRPG blogs.
This video is a guide for both players and for game masters on how we can bring these lovely, but potentially difficult characters into our groups and to make sure that they don’t end up splitting an adventuring party apart.
Instead, we’re looking to work together with the rest of the group to help bring our morally questionable friends along, and to help everyone be a bit, just a little bit, more heroic.
This post is a follow-up and a bit of a companion piece to one I did a few weeks ago about how to be a liar, a thief, a scoundrel, while still making sure that the character is a good fit for the rest of the party.
For our good characters, we’ve got a lot of the similar problems, but from an opposite perspective:
They’re likely to be against any unnecessary killing or any stealing. This is going to put them in immediate opposition to any rogue-like conniving characters, and the inter-party squabbles can tear a group apart.
On the rare times that I’m a player in a campaign, rather than running a session, I really enjoy these characters. For me, it’s a fun challenge to figure out what would an actually good person do in this situation.
I know what I’d do personally, but that’s not role-playing the character.
To begin with, before we separate out a Player’s Guide to a Game Master’s Guide, here’s something that is essential for everybody.
You’ve got to find the reason why this person would be adventuring with the rest of the group.
If the majority of the group are more “pragmatic”, shall we say, it might be difficult to find out how would this character fit in with all these scumbags.
The best way of doing this is to make sure that your character is not just one-dimensional. If they are utterly single-minded to serving their deity, to following their one true path, they’re probably going to be boring. They’re probably not going to be interesting conversation.
So if I’m making a character like that, I’m always looking for opportunities to give them something more about themselves. This heroic character, they don’t need a secret dark side. What they do need is a bit of nuance.
So players and game masters, you need to work together to figure out what that could be.
Here’s what I did – a “campfire introduction” for a character:
I got injured early in the war.
I thought I was safe recovering with the medics, but you’re never safe… you’re never safe when you’re fighting the undead.
As the soldiers, as they died, that field hospital, it became the front line.
I shouldn’t be here.
But this light appeared of nowhere.
Came into this medallion.
Saved me from turning.
I got out of there.
Most of them didn’t.
Now I’m learning to be that light in the dark, learning to help others however I can.
That’s my path now.
Player’s Guide
Players, the first piece of advice for you is that “good” is not the same as “stupid”.
A rule from improv that I always try and keep in mind is that you should always be playing at the top of your intelligence.
There’s the cliche of the paladin of the party being “lawful stupid”, that they just turn their back and hope that the rest of the group won’t be committing crimes.
You don’t need to do that.
And actually in real life, the most good, the most moral people I’ve ever met are some of the smartest that I know.
This is actually about finding the nuances of your character. What makes them tick? What makes them go? What gets them excited that’s not just saving the world and fighting the good fight?
I meant what I said in an introduction about this being a real roleplay challenge. I’d argue that what makes a good person in real life and in our roleplaying games, it’s not someone that’s looking to pick a fight all the time, but they choose their moment.
They choose the time where they can have maximum effect.
There’s a wonderful line in Deadpool of all places that says exactly this.
Four or five moments.
That’s all it takes to be a hero.
People think you wake up a hero, brush your teeth a hero, _________ into a soap dispenser a hero.
But no, being a hero only takes a few moments.
A few moments doing the ugly stuff that no one else would do.
The best way of making sure that your character doesn’t immediately fall out with the rest of the group is to make sure they’ve got other things in common.
It’s likely that they will have common goals in terms of the arc of the campaign, but if you can, have your character volunteer to help others achieve their personal goals.As long as that doesn’t contravene your moral code.
On moral codes, it’s worth thinking about this in advance:
Just like all of our favourite rogues and thieves will have lines that they won’t cross, it’s worth thinking about the true values that your character has.
Our heroic hero characters work best when they’re not being dogmatic, when they’re not fighting for the God of Light because they say so. They work best when there is an inner drive and inner fire and passion to achieve these things.
It’s also okay for our goody two-shoes characters to have some secrets from the rest of the party. Just because they’re a nice person doesn’t mean they’re an open book.
I wouldn’t recommend making these secrets something like, “Ha ha! I was secretly evil all along! Ha ha!” That’s lazy. We can do better.
A good one that you’ll see often in different types of media is that a character is trying to do good to make up for some past act. They’re trying to find peace and serenity somehow, and they’re choosing to do it by doing good things along the way.
I say this one regularly, but it’s really worth repeating.
Story is change.
The story of our character should not be static.
I’m not saying that over the course of the campaigns you’d have a whole personality transplant, rather that they should grow, either in power as they level up, or in terms of their connections with others.
Maybe at the start of the campaign, our characters good as gold, and naive about what happens in the world. But as the story continues, they learn more about the real shape of things, and they still choose to do good.
A character that I played recently in a campaign was called Virga, and she was exactly this archetype. This was someone that was too good and too moral, even for the god that she served.
She started as a Cleric, but ended up as a Monk of the Way of the Four Elements, after realising that her god was telling her to do things that were just outside of her moral code.
This led to some lovely character development, and some brilliant roleplay with the rest of the group. An improvised line of hers that she said to one of the party members was,
“I choose to trust, even though I might get hurt by doing it.”
And that was actually a way for her to build a bridge with one of the other characters who was struggling to fit in with the rest of the party. That character was very suspicious and very slow to trust, but Virga, by being open to this new person, was able to welcome them into the fold.
The last bit of player advice before we go into the GM section, is to remember that they don’t have to stay that way.
They don’t have to remain as this goody two-shoes the entire time.
There might be a traumatic event that causes them to become more cynical. Likewise, you might have started with a cynical character, who then, over the course of events, realises that their path has to be a righteous one.
Both of these are really fun to play with, and I’d recommend chatting to your GM if you’re thinking that your character might go in either of these two very disparate directions.
Game Master’s Guide
GM’s, your first piece of advice: in session zero, is this character going to be a good fit for the party? Are they going to fit the world properly?
If you’re playing a game like Mork Borg, it’s probably not going to work well having a Pollyanna type character who’s happy and sunshine and full of rainbows.
That character is likely to meet a very sticky end, so aligning your player’s expectations with the world that you’re building is such an important first step.
Having said that, there is still room for a little light in a grimdark world. Having someone who hasn’t quite yet given up hope can be really inspiring for a whole party, and bring an adventure into different directions that you might not have considered.
In general for this one, are the vibes right? Is this character going to fit in nicely and play well with the others?
On that eternally recurring theme of “Please let’s talk with our players”, one of the key questions to be asked from the player of this very, very nice character is what do they want from this character? What do they want from the campaign?
If they say that the game they want to play is one of heroic heroes heroing heroically, your grimdark setting inspired by Dark Souls probably isn’t going to be the one for them, and if I was you, I’d be encouraging them to look at rolling up a new character, or finding a way of toning this person back a bit so they fit better into the world that you’re planning to build.
It’s likely that this character have no problems whatsoever in making enemies within the party, but if there isn’t someone who is an obvious foil and obvious counter to them, invent one outside of the group.
Maybe it’s an NPC who’s pretending to be nice but actually doing nasty things, or someone who’s maybe even better, even more heroic than our hero in the party, and they then end up getting jealous, they end up being spiteful of this other person.
Both of these can give you some more story options if your group isn’t necessarily great at interacting with each other.
If you’ve got a character like this, one of the most fun things to do is to test them a lot – regularly – make things tough for them, make their life hell, throw them up some difficult moral choices and see what they do, see if they will continue to keep on the side of righteousness.
Obviously this can get frustrating if you overdo it, but your player is likely to enjoy the challenge.
The inverse of this, is we should be giving these characters opportunities to show off, opportunities to prove just how good and righteous they are. Have the party find someone wounded at the side of the road, let the character heal them, and don’t give them a nasty consequence.
Don’t fall into the trap of punishing the good behaviour.
You might assume that with a character like this, everything in the party will be harmony and sweetness and light, but I’ve found these characters can pull parties apart and leave the party entirely if the rest of the group are doing things that do not feel right to them.
As GM it’s something to keep an eye out for and talk to your players about how you want to handle PvP and how you want to handle this kind of delicate situation.
Assuming the group finds ways of hashing it out and sticking together, you should be on the lookout for this character’s arc, because it can be a fascinating one.
Often player characters will have these nice redemption stories getting better and more heroic as they go, but for a character that’s already starting in a good place, who’s already starting off being true and good and light, their arc is often going to be a downward one, potentially from someone who’s naive and lovely to someone who’s more cynical, someone who’s seen the darkness in the heart of people and it’s hurt them.
These are the stories that I love to see coming out at the table.