#RPGaDay2021 Day 6: Flavor

Hello everybody! It's Flavor Friday here at #RPGaDay2021! Yeah, we want that flavor, we don't want no bland RPing up in here...  Just how do we season the dish of our RPing though? I'm not sure I fully know, but there are some principles and approaches I try to use.

Back on Day 4, talking about weapons, I touched on a way I try to make a character flavorful. I imagine my character as a cool looking action figure or toy, or try to come up with a pitch for a character where the pitch is catchy enough you might want to read a comic book about the character. Basically, aiming for something that feels iconic. I definitely do not always succeed at this. I've played some bland, generic characters in my day, sadly. I'm trying to think though, what's worked for me in the past?

1. Think in big, obvious, strong concepts, with maybe one or two twists. A friend of mine has a roleplaying system he cooked up and has used variations on for a few years now, and I remember in one variation character creation was more or less to just list 3 concepts. I remember I chose "Circus Performer", "Vampire Hunter", "Charlatan". Man, that felt like 3 solid concepts that offered a lot of fun potential blended together. The same GM often has sessions involving NPCs that are basically invented on the spot by players and played by players to provide opposition to the PCs that are "on stage", and creating these NPCs on the spot is a fun exercise in choosing some big, obvious hooky ways to differentiate folks. This lowly pirate crewman has a thousand yard stare and plays a jaw harp. Why not? What's his deal? Choosing big, maybe kinda silly obvious hooky things may strike some as somehow less sophisticated or serious, but I find that it tends to make characters interesting off the bat, then you can flesh out the character beyond caricature as play proceeds, always having that initial hook to fall back on.
2. Have a character with a strong, particular world-view or logic, perhaps that clashes a bit with others, based on the character's culture, etc. Explore the implications of that logic and have fun interactions over the differences between characters in this regard. I've personally had a decent amount of success with this in fantasy games and religious belief. For example, in Mythras I played a Sorcerer from a land where he believed in the power of "The God Within" interacting with PCs of mostly a Viking-like people with gods of their own. He had his own view about these gods, what they were, and what he thought of those who worshipped them. I managed to come up with a couple catch-phrases that encapsulated his feelings. I gave him a voice. The idea here is to flesh out a personality, so it's important not to turn these character world-views into just being a way to conflict with others, the goal is just introduce flavor to the character. I remember a couple other D&D characters I've played along these lines as well, Gwendy Nuggle (The Nuggle, a mythical creature, taken as a scary mysterious guardian of her people, a whole invented pantheon with a cow and bull involved, a whole lil philosophy) and Galenos of Pherae (a Paladin reskinned as Greek Demi-god/mythic hero, used Greek mythology to flavor and limit how and why he did what he did). So often you'll see religion in D&D played pretty bland, just a couple clichés and some zeal. To craft a point of view, a logic about how the world works, and have a character really take it to heart adds tons of flavor. It's so easy for people to just stick with their own personal point of view, or not go all in on the fiction and just blandly make reference to things that are really quite unique and interesting about the fictional places they are roleplaying in. On the GM side, this also works well with villains. What does this character believe and why? The answers can lead to interesting places.
3. Somewhat like in case two, in a supers RPG, consider the logic of the character's powers. Coming up with an internal logic to how super powers function, and being able to extrapolate further possibilities or limitations is a fun bit of world-building and can make the use of powers more flavorful than just "I can blast people, so I use my blast." Beyond supers, the broader idea is to take elements of the fiction and really think about the logic of them, and what it would mean for your role-playing if you took them seriously, and sometimes engaged with them. Just overall, a character should feel like more than a collection of abilities, there should be some logic to them, some connecting vibe that ties them together.
4. Likewise, use the setting. We're all familiar with the adventurer. It's some individual who gets up to adventure. They don't know much of anybody outside of the other PCs, and they probably don't have a family. One way to make both characters and settings more flavorful is to actually connect them. Make your character part of the setting, embed them, at least a bit, in community or relationships that make them more than "wandering loner who is good at what they do." Or, if you don't want the character to have deep ties to the setting, at least consider from the character's point of view why that is the case and what that means. A flavorful character has that flavor revealed in interactions, and relationships and the character's place in the setting all help set the stage for that expression. Consider using them!
5. Roleplay! In front of the people! Probably the easiest way to have a bland, boring character is to not roleplay, to avoid opportunities to go in-character and resolve things in-character as much as is reasonably possible. If you like to plan characters' actions with other players out-of-character, or like to direct your character's actions in a distant 3rd person way whenever possible, maybe stuff is happening, but stripped of any flavor it might otherwise have. For me, players in RPGs are interesting when they are directing their character on-stage in an interesting way. Stats on a character sheet and the execution of mechanics don't provide much in the way of flavor. Related to this... you may have interesting in-character motivations, but unless the other players are able to see those motivations realized "on the stage", they are interesting only to you, and maybe the GM. Relatedly, quotable moments never happen if you don't speak. Yeah, more than anything, roleplay!

Oh yeah. Those are the main ways coming to mind for me at the moment on how to inject some flavor into RPGing. This is all from the "interesting characters" point of view. More could be said about rules and how a game's rules themselves could be used to create flavor, but that is beyond me right now. Maybe later?

Let's see what I cook up for the rest of #RPGaDay2021...