On Paper Men and Disposable Characters

I occasionally peruse Dell'Orto's Dungeon Fantastic; it's good stuff, and he gives me shoutouts and he's still blogging while a lot of my favorite blogs stopped, but a lot of what he discusses isn't that useful to me (and I suspect, a lot of the stuff I discuss isn't that useful to him). Part of it is our respective genres, but there's also a difference in philosophy between how he runs Felltower and how I generally run things, and I think it's typified by the paper man ethos, the amount of investment in your character that I would encourage and that he would discourage, and what that difference means for a lot of games.

Still, I'm fascinated by how other people run games.  I like to explore what other people are doing, because a change of perspective can show me things I never would have considered before.  Even if my style doesn't change, I can still incorporate some of what I learn, and I gain a better understanding of what I am doing.  And, of course, sometimes I find something very good, or I start to see a flaw in some thing I'm doing. So, I wanted to muse on what he seems to be doing and how I might approach a similar thing, or what I might suspect would work well in that genre.

I also want to note I wrote this post months ago. And then rewrote it.  And rewrote it.  So if it seems a little odd and scattered, that's because I've had to take a long time to sort out my thoughts on it.

What is a "Paper Man?"

So what do I mean by a paper man? Dell'Orto refers to it sometimes, and he's got links to someone else talking about it. I've mostly picked up what he means by infering it from his discussions around the concept, as well as where his tastes seem to lie, so if this is all covered elsewhere and I'm just repeating things, or fundamentally misunderstanding things, please forgive me.

The core idea, as I understand it, is this: your character is just a "paper man." He doesn't matter. There's a joke among many D&D players about "Bob the 3rd," which is that the player didn't consider his character particular important, so just named him "Bob" and when he dies, just makes a new character named "Bob" and notes that this is the second or third, etc.  This is a paper man epitomized: your character isn't important, your character is disposable, so you shouldn't get too attached to them. You should accept their death, when it happens, and move on, making a new "paper man."

It's Okay to Love Your Character

The Paper Man ethos is generally a counter to the more prevalent approach to gaming, which we might call the precious snowflake character, where every character treated like a pristine and exquisite work of art that should never be harmed. This tends to go along with advice like "never kill the PCs" or "Never say no, say 'Yes but'" etc.

I tend to subscribe more to this theory of gameplay, as I think it solves numerous problems that RPGs often encounter. First, characters who make "Bob the Third" aren't deeply invested in the character, and thus unlikely to become deeply invested in your game.  Characters who become invested might write up considerable backstory that you can borrow and drag into a game.  They're more likely to come back week to week, because they want to know what will happen next to their character.  The creation of this unique character teaches system mastery and it creates a deep bond between player and GM.  Where I come from, "Bob the 3rd" is not a desirable thing to see, but a symptom of a problem, and the solution that that the problem is the Precious Snowflake Character.

But is it really the best approach? I think, having run games like this for a long time, I think I can point to some flaws.  First, the Precious Snowflake teaches players to invest in their character but not in the setting or the game.  It sells this idea of "Whatever you want" and that the RPG's goal is to make you, personally, happy.  We bend over backwards to give you your special character.  This can result in a lot of problems, such as the dreaded "I'm just roleplaying my character" excuses, or all-important Mary Sue characters.  Because you're so focused on your own enjoyment, you might not stop to think about the enjoyment of others. Players also tend to deliberately put such characters on rails: they know what they want from their character, and where they want them to go, and they're not especially open to deviating from that path.  This sharply limits the freedom of the GM and begins to create clashes among players when they both stumble onto the same narrative niche; it also prevents some of what makes RPGs the most interesting: the freedom to improvise. Finally, if players have spent hours, days or weeks lovingly crafting their perfect work of art, then they'll resent any changes and certainly the death of the character.  This drains tension away, because creating dire circumstances for the character, or even killing them off, will drive the player away, and once that becomes established, they begin to lose all fear of danger: their character will always survive those deathtraps for the same reason we never really worry about Batman in his own comics.  When you internalize "never say no" you lose the ability to effectively surprise your players.

Does the Paper Man fix this? Well, some of it, but it also introduces its own problems.  But thinking in absolutes like that betrays the fact that running RPGs is an art, not a science, and there's no one-true-way to run an RPG.  Instead, looking at how we might make a Paper Man RPG work, while trying to solve the problems it creates, even if we don't away as converts, we'll have a deeper insight into what we want out of gaming.

The Secrets of the Paper Man

Before I go further, know that I have little experience with the Paper Man, and most of it bad, at least when it comes to the Tabletop RPG. What good experiences I've had come from games like Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Maid, and lots of CRPG rogue-likes.  Most of these musings arise from that, what I've picked up reading Dell'Orto's blog, and my own attempts to model and explore such a game logically. I'm not a hardened veteran telling you war stories, I'm an external spectator that's explaining what I've seen that works and what doesn't, and wondering what that means and how I would handle it.

Note, further, that I will also be discussing this from a contest of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.  That doesn't mean it can't apply to GURPS Action, GURPS Horror, GURPS After the End, or to D&D or what have you.

With those disclaimers out of the way, let's dive in.

The (Mostly) Generic Paper-Man

Stop worrying, and learn to love Bob the 3rd. I notice that the "best" Paper Man RPGs, like Warhammer Fantasy, involve minimizing the necessary investment from the players.  Warhammer Fantasy allows you to literally roll up everything about the character.  You're less creating a character than you are seeing what the lottery system of the RPG spits out at you, and it takes like 15 minutes top. So if Bob dies, that's no great loss, because Bob the 2nd can join in shortly thereafter.

GURPS character creation is notoriously time-consuming, and so would seem to be the antithesis of the Paper Man, but I would argue that a DF character (or any templated character) can be tossed together very quickly. Problems only arise when you start to nitpick, personalize and optimize, so don't.  You can do some, but if you understand the character is probably going to die anyway, it'll limit your interest in that specialization.  If you let go of this personalization to just whip together "a random generic PC" then you'll find it can save you a lot of time.  More importantly, though, it'll put you in a new frame of mind, which is important for some other benefits down the road.

I wouldn't completely abandon all personalization, though.  Make the character matter, just not as much as usual. GURPS allows you to choose some disadvantages to give your character some personality; choosing even a little personality and a decent name will go a long way to making the character feel more interesting, but more importantly, it makes the character a potential receptacle to interesting results, which will be more important down the line.  What I'm saying here is don't make "Bob the third" but that doesn't mean you have to make "Fastidia the forlorn, the Last Princess of a Lost Continent." You can make Bruce the Black, human knight of questionable morals, or Romeo Starstruck, elven swashbuckler with terrible luck in romance. That alone, race, class and one, singular flash of personality, can be enough.

Can't Stop At Only One

Once you've made a simple character in short-order... why not make another? Why not make 5? If you usually take "all day" to make a character under normal circumstances, and taking my advice above shortens the time involved, why not use that extra time to make a few extra characters?

This does a few things. First, most players I know have several ideas they want to explore and struggle to narrow it down to just one.  This lets you have your cake and eat it too.  It also makes you less invested in one character.  Perhaps given a choice between Romeo Starstruck, Bruce the Black and Archibald the Forgetful Wizard, you'd play Romeo, but if you like all three, then the death of Romeo matters less.  It also means that when one character dies, joining up again is no more difficult than pulling another sheet out of your folder.  This greatly speeds up play.

More importantly, though, I think making multiple characters will change your mindset about the game.  If you have to make one character, that one character tends to take up all of your creative energy, and often they can become quite complex as you seek to stuff all the various things that interest you into that one character. If you make three, then you have to divide your attention, and what ideas you have get spread more thinly across the characters.  This will tend to make each character a little more generic, less overdetermined, and a little more open to change.

As a quick aside, one thing Warhammer Fantasy's random character generation does is give you characters you might not normally try. If you're going to make multiple characters, why not make a few characters that don't fit into the mold of what you usually play? If you never play an orcish character, or a druid, or a multi-class character, why not whip one up? If you have a reasonable belief that your character will die anyway, this can be a "test" character. If you don't like it, don't make another one, but if you do, explore it further the next time you make a character.

A Reliable World, Waiting to Be Discovered

Once you have a variety of characters that the GM is free to threaten, I think it becomes safer to shift the focus of the gameplay from creating a predefined narrative. The GM can focus more on creating a world in which the rules and results are consistent, rather than bent and warped by the narrative need to keep precious snowflake characters alive.

If you go into a dungeon knowing your character can die (which is fine because you have two other characters at least), then the GM doesn't have to worry about coddling you.  I'm not suggesting that the GM go out of his way to kill you, as that's not fun either.  But instead, the group can focus on exploring the dungeon and learning the system. The game can become about overcoming the challenge of the dungeon, not seeing how the GM goes about surprising you with his particular interpretation of your narrative desires for your character.  In a lot of ways, I think this is ultimately the point of Paper Man games: it frees the GM to create a reliable, consistent world to challenge his players with; he can create clearly defined and internally consistent rules, wherein stupid actions or bad luck will get your character killed, while clever actions and good luck will let them reap great rewards.  The players learn the rules of the world, and then use their master of them to "win."

Collaborative Chaos

One of the great strengths of RPGs is that they are not (usually) played solo.  I find many RPGers, especially when they are new, miss this point.  They may see an RPG with 5 players as a game of 5 individual story threads. I certainly saw it that way for a long time.  But what I've come to see since is that the five players are more like five instruments in a jazz band, with the GM as a conductor. You're improvising in ways that impact one another.

The typical precious snowflake has a player with a strong vision of what that character is.  If Fastidia the Forlorn, Last Princess of a Lost Continent is bitten by a werewolf and loses her magic but gains the ability to wolf out and kill people, the player might be very frustrated with this, because that's not how she saw her character.  If this happens to Archibald the Forgetful... well who cares?  At least he's not dead, right? Now he's Archibald the Forgetful Werewolf.

This lack of attachment gives the GM, the randomness of the world, and other players, the freedom to mess with one another's character.  This means the character can evolve in ways the player would never expect.  It means that characters gain an emergent storyline.  The cool thing about Warhammer Fantasy is that it gives you characters you'd never think to play yourself ("A medieval rat-catcher") and then see how they evolve in a world beyond your control ("who gained magic via an ancient relic and became a Grey Wizard" or "who found a magic sword and married an elf" or "who devolved into Chaos through no fault of his own, and wanders the wastes as a champion of Nurgle"). A good Paper Man game should have that option too.

The Persistent Legacy of Investing in the World

One of the things that struck me about Felltower is that I understand it to be persistent. If PCs delve into it and, say, all die, the dungeon doesn't reset.  Their bodies and items linger down there, somewhere.  I think most players look at this as merely a neat bonus, but I think players should realize it's the killer app of a proper Paper-Man game.  Games like Dwarf Fortress, Rogue Legacy and Felltower turn on the lingering accumulation of events.  Each adventure layers another set of stories atop the world, and each layer makes it a little richer.  The world can shape the player character, as noted in Collaborative Chaos, but in a paper man game the players get to shape the world in a more meaningful way than "everything has to be about my character."

The problem with "Bob the 3rd" is a lack of investment in the game; the Precious Snowflake character attempts to fix this, but it results in investment in the character rather than investment in the game or investment in the world. Rather than focusing your attention on the characters, consider focusing your attention on the world.  If the GM has created a persistent, reliable world, then the fun is about understanding and shaping that world, not getting your character into the circumstances you most enjoy.  And understanding and manipulating that persistence is the key feature of such a game.  But I see a lot of players just ignore that aspect of the game, and I'm not sure why.  I'll give you an example of what I mean at the end, but the core of it is this: don't be afraid of losing your character, be afraid of not leaving your mark on the world!

Bundles of Paper Men

Once you accept that your characters can impact the world, especially through cooperative action, and that you can go ahead and make several characters ahead of time, it might occur to you to theme your characters somehow.  Why not have all of your characters belonging to some organization that seeks to change the world in some specific way?  GURPS DF even has a book, Guilds, which can provide lots of ideas.  For example:

Extended Family (DF 17: Guilds, page 14): What if all your characters belong to a family cursed by some monster within Felltower.  They delve into the dungeon to break the curse.  Each character shares the same family name and certain family traits.

Students of the Master (DF17: Guilds page 22): All the characters belong to a martial arts temple, and have studied different styles or techniques.  Only those who have achieved some specific thing within the dungeon are considered to have "completed their training" and achieved some special rank.

Delving Company (DF 17: Guilds page 13): All the characters belong to a single company that specializes in delving into this one particular dungeon.  They've been gathering resources and notes on it, and hire themselves out as mercenaries to help other delvers.

University (DF 17: Guilds page 27): The characters all belong to a University that funds expeditions into the dungeon (or various dungeons) to bring back important forms of knowledge.

Once you have an organization your stable of characters belong to, then you can start to think of the group's objectives collectively.  Perhaps Archibald the Forgetful died, but not before writing a ton of useful stuff in his journal that Romeo Starstruck can try to recover and bring back to the university.  Bruce the Black can donate all of his loot to the Delving Company and collect his pay, and the group becomes collectively richer, so when Margaret the Maleficent needs some support, she can tap into what Bruce the Black left behind.

In addition to providing theming to your characters, it allows you to exploit persistence to your advantage. Instead of worrying about the advancement of one character, and seeing their death as wasting what you've one with them, everything you do can advance the agenda of this organization.  It can also give the GM opportunities to give you smaller, more specific tasks that make the game more interesting than just "see how deep you can get into the dungeon." Of course, you'll have to work with your GM to make this work, but I think most would welcome the worldbuilding and focus they bring to a game.

Take Risks

Once you have internalized all of these ideas, you're ready for the greatest and most important step for anyone new to playing a Paper Man game: taking risks.  Most people who see paper men games get defensive of their characters.  They think the risks they face heightens tension, and it does; they know their character could die, and they would see the death of their character as a defeat.  But if your character is generic, part of something larger than themselves, and you have your focus on learning how the dungeon, how the world, works and on leaving your mark on the world, you should understand that the death of your character isn't that important. If you're willing to let go of your character, you're willing to make dumb mistakes to learn a bit more about how the world works.

The point of this exercises is not learning to hold tightly onto your character in new and innovative ways ("If you were good, your character wouldn't have died!"), it's to learn to let go of your character, and relax as you see what happens.  Sure, there's skill involved, but this is still a form of play, it's not a final exam. Sure, if you're the only person to survive a particular encounter, that's bragging rights, but so is being the character that made it the deepest, or who died in the weirdest or most spectacular way. And defeating the challenge before you is the greatest bragging rights, and that will often involve the sacrifice of a character.

The Challenge: How Mailanka Would Play Felltower

A lot of this post arose from me pondering the paper-man, especially Dell'Orto complaining about how conservatively people played and how I would exploit what I thought he was trying to do with the game.  I thought I'd share that specific approach, because it ties a lot of the ideas above together, and I thought it might be interesting for someone to try.  Of course, you can change the specifics, but I think if you understand what I'm trying to do here, broadly, you might play your games better.

So, first, our character. I think I'd ultimately make him a Knight, but a Swashbuckler could work too.  There's a few key elements he needs, though.  First,  he's very important to the setting at large, and part of a large, important organization.  I'd go with "the Crown Prince of an important Royal Court" if allowed.  The most critical thing here is that his death would be bad and cause chaos in the world, somehow.  Second, he's rich and has some really sweet swag. I'd take as much signature gear as allowed (and was reasonable), and try to make it as unique and interesting as possible: not the Sword of +1 Slicing, but some truly interesting, legendary gear.

Next, we'll want some collaboration with the other players, because they'll need to play along a little with us, and what we're going to do with this character might not work as well for all characters.  Because the point of this character is to die.  We're going into the game knowing this is a doomed expedition.  We're not going to sabotage ourselves, we're just going to walk into this with full willingness to die, and with the objective of seeing how far we can go.  It might help to create some sort of backstory to explain the desperation of our actions (though high levels of Overconfidence may well be enough).

Then we'll delve into the dungeon.  The only rule is: no retreat.  We'll play as well as we can, but we're not leaving until we're dead or until our character has beaten the dungeon.  This will do a few things.  First, we'll learn a lot more about the dungeon than we would if we just cautiously played with an eye towards escaping.  I would expect, in the very least, to double the depth most characters get, which means we'd see a lot more of the game than usual. We'd challenge the GM more than usual, and you might actually win.  A lot of times, players tend to see these as a greater challenge than they actually are.  It'd be a great, epic experience to just go "Tallyho, boys, you only live once" and then one-shot a GM's mega dungeon through sheer hubris. But chances are, we'll die.  And when we do, we'll die very deep in the dungeon, and all of our swag will just lie there, a new treasure in the Felltower, and we'll throw whatever organization we were part of into chaso.

Then the game can begin in earnest.  Our next character will also belong to the same court, and seek to find the fate of our headstrong prince, recover his artifacts and perhaps prove their worthiness for the throne and settle matters back home. You can play these other characters more conservatively and cautiously if you wish: you've already learned a lot about playing the game by "throwing away" your first character; you don't have to do it again.  Though you shouldn't be afraid of doing so either, if you wish.

The point of this approach is to lean into what such a game is about.  You're exploiting the persistence to create a somewhat twinky scenario ("First, I made a 250-point character who is like 125 points of signature gear, then he dies, then I make a full, 250-point character who is 0 points of signature gear, who now has that sweet swag too") but it's balanced by the fact that you've contributed a lot of story and character to the GM's world, building this legend of a fool prince and his magic sword. You're alo not going to get that sweet relic "for free."  You're going to have to work and take risks to get all the way down into the dungeon far enough to find it, and that's even assuming monsters didn't pick it up and run off with it.  It also puts you in a right frame of mind: you're not thinking about the story of your character but the story of your world, and you're invested in the setting now. You are actively investing in the setting, working at building on it.  And you're much more open to letting what happen happen. Maybe you have three characters all vying for the lost relics, and seeing who gets it, what they have to do to get it, and what that means for their royal court, is half the fun of the game.

Conclusion

Would I run a Paper Man game? Yes.  I think after thinking my way through all of this, I think there's a lot of fun gameplay to be had in such a game.  But I think my real takeaway from this is pondering the idea of a stable of characters, encouraging players to allow more collaboration from other players or even random events to shape their characters, and encouraging a sense of persistence in the world.  I also found it valuable to think about differentiating between investment in character and investment in the game and the world is important, and thinking about what it is you want to encourage people to do.