#13 - World Building Lesson 102

While reading through the rules of a Star Wars role-playing game. I saw that if a character accumulates too many dark side points they cease to be a player character. If you fall to the dark side you cannot continue to play as your character, the hero becomes an NPC. A friend of mine asked me about this, they seemed to think it was unfair, "why would you loose control of your character just because you turned evil?"

The justification was one of simplicity. If a character did fall to the dark side, then we all would know what they would do next. There is no more need for a player to delineate the characters actions.

In finished fiction character can be simple. Their motivations can be summarized in a few sentences and everyone can appreciate their decisions. This is fine and all, but it is unrealistic.

For one thing real people resent being categorized, for another they contradict themselves. Characters in a novel have a purpose for the drama, and their actions push this along. Fictional characters are plot devices, their decisions are not always their own.

Reality rejects simplicity. Real people behave with nuance. We all see ourselves as exceptional, and we know what motivates us but find others a mystery. Creating characters with every detail fleshed out can be quite reductive. Paradoxically it makes them simpler and smaller.

This is not to say that your characters cannot be well detailed. Just that fixed details makes them more of an object to be seen - "objectified." Knowing all of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a person can lead someone to manipulate them. If I know a person in and out as well as my car, I can drive them anywhere.

Such perfect knowledge is rare in the real world, or at least an uncomfortable thought. You can just as easily give an impression of some part of you fictional world without showing how the magic trick is done.

It might also avoid the tail from wagging the dog.

A good way to avoid this is to have unfixed details and to be vague. A character might be working through their anger problems, instead of having anger issues. It allows the character to surprise us with a moment of calm, or an outburst after a still period. We still know they did what they did, but we are unsure where it might go next.

What happens in the following scene could go either way, a shouting match or an apology. Such is real life.