GENREALITY

Some of you might laugh at this.

I’ve been playing tabletop role-playing games off and on since college.  Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous of these games, but they come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors:  superheroes, vampires, cyberpunk, steampunk, space opera, Star Wars-based games, Firefly-based games.  Even games based on Lovecraft.  I’ve played them all.  Though role-playing is famous for being all about geeks sitting around drinking Mountain Dew and rolling funny dice, for me it’s about storytelling.  As a professional writer, it’s about recreational storytelling, not to mention the socializing:  I get together with a bunch of friends and we tell a story together, and it’s all for fun, and I just have to worry about my character rather than the whole thing.  Each person plays a different character, and none of us have any idea what’s going to happen next.  There’s a game master to guide the story, and games run by the very best game masters are like reading a spectacularly plotted novel — they’re fun, exciting, startling, and yet the story is well-planned and satisfying.

I’ve brought various lessons I’ve learned from gaming (like don’t forget to look out for the bad guys that fly. . .) into my writing.  One useful tool:  character alignments.

This is a system of character development that Dungeons and Dragons uses to get players to think about where their characters fall on a moral and ethical spectrum.  Are they law abiding or do they flout the law?  Do they care about what happens to other people, or are they selfish?  Are they so selfish they’re actively evil?  The system creates a spectrum:  a character can be good, neutral, or evil.  They can also be lawful, neutral, or chaotic.  In combination, a character can fall anywhere on a nine-square grid.

For example:  A Lawful Good character is law-abiding and good.  He cares about protecting people, but he won’t break the law or his code of honor in order to do it.  A character who’s a police officer or a sworn knight might fall into this category.  On the other hand, a Chaotic Good character cares about helping and protecting people, and will happily break the law to do it.  Robin Hood is the archetype for Chaotic Good.

On the other side of the spectrum, a Lawful Evil character values well-ordered systems and codes of conduct — and will exploit them in order to oppress people and get what he wants.  Saruman in Lord of the Rings is Lawful Evil.  A Neutral Evil character won’t actively seek to overturn a code of conduct, but they’re not particularly loyal to it, either.  They may be a pure form of selfishness, always asking “What’s in it for me?”  They may follow the rules or may not, depending on what they get out of it.  A Chaotic Evil character will hurt people and break the rules just because they like it.

Most heroes, as you might guess, fall in the “good” category.  We don’t want our heroes to be selfish and cruel, we want them to fight for what’s right (which isn’t necessarily what’s lawful).  Most villains fall on the “evil” side of the chart, of course — enjoying the suffering of others is what makes them villains.  But what I really appreciate about this chart is how it marks out finer gradations of good and evil:  why is this character good?  Why are they evil?  How far are they willing to go in the pursuit of either good or evil?  What happens when they come up against a conflict in their own personal code of behavior?  Yes, evil can be governed by a code of behavior.  And what happens when one person’s good is another person’s evil?

And don’t assume that your hero is good all the time.

When I was writing my stand-alone superhero novel a couple of years ago (After the Golden Age is now under contract and should be released in a couple of years), I realized my main character was edging toward Chaotic Neutral — she isn’t always a good person.  She doesn’t always do what’s right.  In fact, she spent some time as the villain’s henchmen.  She’ll occasionally be a bad guy just because people aren’t expecting it, or she wants to see what happens.  Thinking about Celia as Chaotic Neutral helped me get a handle on her character arc, why she did some of the things she did in her past, and what she might do to overcome that.  After writing a lot of stories where I just assumed the hero was Lawful Good — because isn’t that the definition of a hero? — it was really eye-opening and mind-expanding to write a hero who wasn’t.

It’s a good writing exercise, I think.  If all your main characters are Lawful Good, or even Chaotic Good (a popular choice among gamers who want to be heroes but also want to be rebels), think about what it would take to write a Neutral character — someone who doesn’t really care what happens to other people, but won’t actively go out of his way to hurt other people; or someone who will play both sides against the middle in a conflict, having no loyalty to either.  If you have a character who keeps doing unexpected — and possibly unpleasant — things, the alignment system might help you understand why and how the character might be like that.

Find a more detailed discussion of Dungeons and Dragons character alignments at the Wikipedia article.

Tweet This Post

Related posts:

1. Excerpt: Voices of Dragons
2. Writing a Series