Characters as Arrows

Discussions often revolve around character backgrounds and how to build them in a way that allows players to better tie in with the story being told or with the other characters/players at the table.

Specifically, a frequent pitfall is to build a character without any motivations to go into an adventure or to get involved with a story. A local folk hero who decides to go adventuring through the world might sound interesting on paper, but unless we understand what made him leave his home, his family, we run the risk of lacking a clear character motivation to help us push forward and embody them when the first decision has to be made.

At the same time, as a game master, it might sound simple enough to put things along the path the players are headed to and hope they will just engage with them. Attempting to do that will result, more often than not, in your players ignoring your hooks and your quests, just getting interested in the details you did not think of. While this makes for excellent roleplay, it might disrupt any structure you might have had in mind for a plot.

This is often addressed by suggesting to create characters with goals and expectations, and while this is a good idea in principle, I find it hard to conceptualize in general. I prefer a different simplification of this idea, which is to think of characters I create for myself or find at tables I run as arrows.

An arrow can be described simply as a line with a direction from point A to point B. It inspires a sense of direction, of motion; it's dynamic, not static. To think of characters as arrows means thinking of them as coming from, and looking for an experience. A character in this sense will have an origin of the arrow, a small detail in the background, an idea of who they were before getting in the adventure, and they will have a direction of the arrow, intended as the goal they start our adventure with. Notice that this will not describe who they are in the moment directly, but that will emerge organically from the two points.

Going back to our local folk, we could now think of their arrow origin for example as them being the village's bread maker, and their arrow's direction as finding their lost son in the big city. This already gives a lot of fuel to the player, who will be empowered in taking decisions led by the origin or driven by the direction. As such, we have a character who is in motion in the beginning of the session, and not static.

Remember, as a Game Master, it is very hard to deal with static characters, as the motion must be provided by the Game Master themselves. On the other hand, having to lead a moving character (and maybe finding the direction together) is way easier. Think of kicking a static point into motion versus guiding an arrow in a new direction.

Additionally, as a Game Master, you might want to help new players find these two points for their characters. Especially in a one-shot, spending a couple of minutes helping the players find the answers to these two questions can be very helpful to start your session rolling.

So the next time you create a character, try to define their origin and their direction. And if you are a Game Master, see if visualizing this motion helps you run a more dynamic session!