Don’t stay true to your characters.

This articles concerns gamers just as it does authors.

I have heard countless times in my gaming life that one had to stay true to his character. A character is made with a certain mentality, and that should be respected. I have heard the same of readers of fiction, including many aspiring authors. Respecting the initial idea behind the character, and keeping him true to that vision through the whole story, is a crucial principle in the eyes of many.

This is pure hogwash. Good characters flow like water and bend like the willow. They should never be stuck in stasis, unchanging. If nothing in the story can affect them enough to make them evolve, then either the story is not worth being told, or the character is not worth portraying.

The most profound, but also the most subtle, failure of this static vision for characters occurs when people forget that the purpose of the characters is to awe, shock and enamor us. They exist not to be themselves, but to entertain people. Both as a gamer and as a player, when you realize a character, as written, breaks the flow of the story and becomes a hindrance, you have to make him change or evolve in such a way that will enhance the story instead.

In a game, if you or a player have made an all-powerful tyrant that prevents other players from truly participating, you can either make him too bored to bother and mess with the others, or create a number of flaws in him that give the other characters a fighting chance. If a character is beaten down and lost everything, give him something strong he can grab onto and fight back. It is especially important in games, since players who are stuck with nothing to do and nothing to work towards will grow bored fast. It is also most difficult there, because some players will fight you every step of the way to keep a problematic status quo that is advantageous to their characters.

Authors are not as limited as storytellers are concerning this. You control everything that happens in the story, and you don’t have to make sure every player has fun the whole time. However, as an author, you still have to be careful not letting too many “This character wouldn’t do that, even though the story wouldn’t work without it” moments ruin your work.  If you need your character to behave a certain way, try to find why he would do that, or how he might do something equivalent.

The other reason why characters must not be static is simply entertainment value. Many characters, especially primary and secondary characters, have to evolve, one way or another, to maintain the reader's interest. Many heroes will evolve by growing up, gathering their courage, learning to love, etc. Most good villains either develop a more and more dramatic bend, or you get to see their evolution, using flashbacks and old newspapers, in a way that justifies what they have become.

Tertiary characters tend to be much more stable throughout a story, mostly because they would derive too much attention away from the main characters if they changed too deeply or too often. Still, if you read Harry Potter, you will note that Neville and Ginny, who are clearly backbenchers throughout the series, evolve a lot, and that makes them much more endearing than Lupin, who remains pretty much the same from his introduction on. A large 7-novel series does grant an author the room to treat those subjects, while a beginner's 125 pages novella will not.

Professor Rogue, likewise, is not a static entity of established beliefs that cannot change. He is playing the middle against both sides throughout the series, for very personal reasons and aspirations. He seems to sway between those two poles. Also, he is far from the frightened child or the nerdy teenager he once was. That all participates to making the reader's hatred, love and passion for him that much stronger.

Let us face the facts here: people who do not change are boring. They are Autumn people, never progressing, never trying anything new, always the same. Nobody cares about their stories. Who would want to read about them? Who would enjoy playing them? I know I wouldn't.

Examples abound of characters keeping our interest through their evolution. If you want examples of stories solely focused on character evolution, I would suggest two very nice stories that revolve around that are "Spirited Away" by Hayao Miyazaki, or "Les Aimants" by Yves Pelletier. I believe it is not possible to watch those movies and not get the point I'm trying to make.

Why everybody slept with everybody.

Exhaustion and overtime work killed my creative juices for the last 2 months, so I took that time to read and watch good fiction instead.

Watching "A Game of Thrones" made me realize an unrealistic component of most good fiction: characters, even ones living halfway across the world, tend to have way more back-story to their relationship than they should realistically have. 

I wasn't doing that at all before, and I now realize that I was wrong. 

This back-story provides an essential part of the fiction you are writing: it makes the characters love or hate each other with unbridled passion. Spectators (and actors, for LARPs/Interactive Theater) will mostly care about characters if the characters themselves are passionate about each other. 

So, if you write a story about 2 war leaders trying to decimate each other's peoples, don't just make them hate each other because they're racist. Have the first protagonist's sister married to the other in the past, and then executed for adultery.

If you want protagonists to bond, they could discover they're brothers and sisters (like Kira and Cagalli from Gundam Seed) or fall in love with relatives (Harry Potter and Ginny, Ron and Hermione). Or maybe the grandfather of one of them had enslaved the other's grandmother, and although that is officially water under the bridge, the 2 protagonists will have a tension that will never let loose, and explode whenever you, as a writer, need it to.

Soaps have run on this stuff for decades, and Opera for centuries. 

If you need convincing, I offer this challenge: read Frank Herbert's Dune, then read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Notice how dry Asimov's writing is. It is purely intellectual, it is ripe with the ideas of a genius, it is prophetic in many ways (e.g. miniaturization), it is a masterpiece, yet it is extremely hard to give a damn about any of it. Characters don't really care about anyone, so we, as readers, don't either.

How to make your participants care about your event

If you are a writer for a LARP or Interactive Theatre, you have probably tried dozens of different scenarios to try and reach your players, and get them interested in your plots. Some have failed, while others have succeeded. You might not have realized why yet.

Here is a wake-up call.

People care about people. They will also care about characters. Plots, concepts, organizations, objects and just about everything else only exist to serve the characters. Do not waste your time creating evil organizations; spend your time creating characters who run evil organizations. If you want to showcase a concept, do it as a relation to a character, and not in a vacuum.

A Stargate matters because it affects the life of O’Neil and Carter, not the other way around. Beating back evil organizations matter  because those organizations are run by, and affect very real characters in your setting. Gear matters because it enhances characters. Abilities work in the same way.

The reason behind this is very simple:

As a race, humans have survived only because we care about people more than we do about things and concepts. If trees had mattered to us more than people, all humans who experienced winters would have died off. If animals had mattered more to us than humans, our ancestors would have starved to death millennia ago.

We are genetically programmed to care about people. Everything that matters does so solely in that it affects people.

If you want your participants to care, base your events around characters, whether those portrayed by the participants themselves, those portrayed by your actors or, hopefully, both.