Delivering On Homo Fictitious

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

So, way back in article five of this author focused play series I put forward the theory that your character isn’t a normal person. They may have no superpowers. They may appear to have no supreme level skills. None of that matters. Your character could literally be the cleaner who witnesses a murder. 

They’re still not a normal person.

They are a member of homo fictitious and are a breed apart from us folk who live in the normal world. Realising that and delivering on it is one of the main ways your game can feel more like fiction than a series of haphazard events more associated with our real, mundane lives.

How Is Homo Fictitious Different?

In other forms of fiction, be it a film, TV show or novel Homo Fictitious has numerous characteristics. They aren’t randomly confused, distracted and overburdened with life’s events. They are focused and intentional. The aforementioned cleaner exists to expose the guilty party and help the lawyers prosecute the case no matter what challenges it brings to them. They are designed to tell that story, and despite just being a cleaner they end up rising above it all and being surprisingly competent at doing it no matter what their ultimate fate for walking that road.

They are Homo Fictitious. They’re better than us.

Let’s take a more action example, Ethan Hunt or James Bond. They’re bold, they are confident, they always have a bold plan that may face opposition, they may even fail at times, but their bold plan always could have worked and never results in stupid, comedy or random dead ends.

They are Homo Fictitious, they’re better than us.

Obviously, Homo Fictitious gets away with this because they have one single benefit: all their actions and words are orchestrated by the writer (and if film or TV one could also say the actor, director, cinematographer and whatever else). In short, they’re directed and have the power of thought, time and editing.

You have none of these advantages in a role-playing game, so you seek other tools instead.

The Key Principals

I’m going to go through the principals the table needs to work with to allow the characters in your TTRPG to be their glorious Homo Fictitious selves. These principles are: –

• It’s the character who is Homo Fictitious
• Play to the premise
• The characters define reality
• The Stakes Are The Thing
• Characters solve problems
• Players make decisions

We’ll deal with each one in turn. Remember, at all times, even if sometimes my writing skills may let me down, this is the job of everyone at the table as it all feeds into How The Players ‘Plot’ and How The GM ‘Plots’.

I’ll warn you now, you may not agree with some of these principles. You may fundamentally disagree, but in doing so you move your game away from facilitating it being a game with intentional fiction as an outcome and instead move to the fiction being something constructed as an afterthought (or to primarily being a GM construct, which is another issue).

That’s fine, but you want the choice itself to be intentional not a point of frustration.

It’s The Character Who Is Homo Fictitious

Well, duh, haven’t we established that already? Yes, but it’s worth calling out again as the key principle to always remember. Why? Because it defines everything that follows.

Joshua Thorne, ex-M16 agent is the suave and preternaturally skilled spy, not mild-mannered John who works as a lecturer by day. Kellestra is the mage with the intelligence stat of 22 on a 3 – 18 range, the eidetic memory feat and crazy skills in the arcane and history not Kate who works as a network technician.

While John and Kate are imaginative, intelligent and fascinating people they are normal people and not Homo Fictitious, and in the case of the two examples we’ve used they don’t have the preternatural skills or prodigious intelligence of their characters. When you think of it this way why would you have John and Kate try and solve the same challenges as Joshua and Kellestra? It seems a set-up to cause frustration or a comedy of errors or a disconnect at best? And you’d be right.

Remember this, always. When you expect John and Kate to be Joshua and Kellestra,respectively, you’re going to fail.

Play To The Premise

The focus Homo Fictitious has is born from the fact they have a premise that defines why they exist. It’s the only reason they exist. They’re not musical instruments that exist in perpetuity with regular riffs you can play. They have a premise for which they are seeking answers and when they have them the character is done (or they generate a new Premise, but that’s sort of out of the scope of this article).

Play to that premise all the time. I’m not suggesting every interaction has to address it, but a lot of interactions should be shaped by it and the player, the GM and other players can all do this.

Let’s use an example we’ve used before, my character from a Dungeons and Dragons game set during the mythical age of the Elven people. As you can see from his premise he was seeking to reclaim his position as the rightful ruler of the Sea Elf nation, was questioning if he’d be a good leader and if his need to reclaim his right would put at risk a larger war.

You factor this into everything and everyone should help in this. Some of this will be direct. Some of it will be indirect. It will shape choices. It will shape the content of scenes. 

Consider an indirect scene, maybe there is a young Priestess of the Drow nation speculating on whether to overthrow her Queen – this isn’t just a scene about that, it’s truly a scene about how this priestesses plight parallels the characters and how that reflects and shapes his choices as they interact. The young priestess should be interesting, but if she isn’t an antagonist she’s really there to provide a reflection to the protagonist’s premise.

That’s what is important as the characters interact with people, places, ideas and institutions. You can probably also see how other players can create scenes with each other about these things. Everyone, but specifically the GM, should use all these things to challenge, interrogate and question the player characters to reflect and progress the premise.

Premise is one massive signal! 

The Characters Define Reality

This is going to put some people really on edge. They value the idea of the ‘open, moving and independent of the character’s world’, they use words like verisimilitude as if it’s the most valuable thing in the world.

If you want to deliver on Homo Fictitious you have to accept that all these things are secondary to the fact the characters define reality and everything exists to serve them. That’s not to say everything falls away in front of them and they get an easy life, bringing valid antagonism is important, but even that serves the characters.

I mean, everything. 

NPCs can have their own personalities and aims but they also exist to highlight and allow the Homo Fictitious protagonists to realise the story in their premise (as shown in the Play To The Premise example). Even the more nebulous things like places, institutions and ideas should be defined by how your protagonists exist in relation to them and how that allows them to complete their story inherent in their premise.

You design everything around facilitating the characters being Homo Fictitious and everything in significant or small ways, via direct or indirect paths, to bring them closer to understanding and reaching a conclusion on their premise.

I’ll give another example, in our Werewolf: Accelerated campaign one of the characters was literally making a play for the leadership of his Werewolf tribe against the majority. He literally had to overthrow their patron spirit, Fenris himself (think a big white wolf like the one in Thor: Ragnarok). At play was the future of the whole Werewolf nation. So I seeded the sessions with raw, emotional, operatic like scenes as that was the crazy that was going on. People spoke about myth, legend, living up to one’s ancestry and literally crying out in rage at events – tragic, melodrama, emotionally honest and raw positions. Viking music played in the background.

It played into the characters’ story and the opera of events. I think it worked. I’d also add that the character sent that signal in session four, it emerged from the campaign, it concluded in sessions six and seven to conclude season one. Signals, begetting signals and then define the reality to support the execution.

The characters defined reality and tone, mood, characters and events were really wrapped around the characters while still providing valid antagonism.

The Stakes Are The Thing

It’s hard to deliver on Homo Fictitious if your characters keep making all those stupid errors that those fictional characters in books and stuff don’t make? Even if your character has a 90% chance of success, at some point that 10% is going to make him fail at something stupid.

Risk is good. You don’t want to remove risk and the randomness of the dice. So you set what is at stake when you roll the dice and make conscious decisions over what risks are important. Risks that can exist while maintaining Homo Fictitious and this has very little to do with the quality of the risk.

What often true when you do this is: –

1. What’s at stake is rarely the mechanical task being performed
2. Sometimes nothing is at stake so you assume success

These combined things mean characters just get to succeed more because it really doesn’t matter and when they do fail they fail at what matters. I could dive into this quite deeply, but we’ve got an article already with numerous examples. You should check it out.

Characters Solves Problems

The biggest way to bring the characters operating at the Homo Fictitious level to a grinding halt is to expect John and Kate to solve problems as if they are the super-spy with the preternatural social and infiltration skills and the mage with the brainpower of Einstein.

Personally, I move very quickly to getting frustrated to the point of being annoyed if it continues in a persistent way. Whatever my delusions of grandeur I don’t have preternatural intelligence.

The characters abilities on the character sheet are powerful. I don’t mean they are powerful in terms of super-powers. I mean they are the mechanism by which so much is enabled at the TTRPG table that devaluing them by having Kate and John solve problems rather than use the character also makes the game itself more difficult.

What’s on the character sheet are also signals. If a player has a high infiltration skill he wants to break into secure locations!

One of the core features of How The GM Plots and the fact you don’t really need to heavily structurally plot is based on the whole principle that characters find their way to the next interesting situation by what’s on the character sheet.

In a way, using the abilities on the character sheet is what emulates a lot of what the writer brings to the page in terms of physical plot structure and pace. The content of the character sheet truly transforms when you see it this way rather than just a list of abilities or ways to do purely mechanical things.

The Ethan Hunt Dilemma

I’d go even further and say the abilities on a character sheet define and shape reality. When asked how Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible can come up with those hair raising infiltrations the answer people will give will be well, he’s benefiting from it being a written medium again. He can do it because the writer says so.

Is that true? Or can he do it because it’s not actually important how he gets into the building as long as it’s exciting, and in Ethan Hunt style, always involves an aerial infiltration from above? Because that’s easy to emulate at your TTRPG table, whatever crazy infiltration the player says will work is how it’s going to go. If the player isn’t sure, let him roll his high Infiltration skill and the rest of the people at the table can help him out with the crazy answer. What if he fails the roll? Remember the stakes are the thing. A failure could just set a higher opposition or some other challenge, not that his crazy plan isn’t a viable one.

You see, how John says Joshua gets into the building isn’t important only what opposition he faces and, more importantly, what decisions he faces when he gets to the next key situation. This also has the advantage the GM hasn’t had to think it all up in advance.

Players Make Decisions

So, if the solving of problems is significantly weighted to the tools the character has on the character sheet what does the player actually do? The player makes decisions.

Why? Because John and Kate can’t truly be the super-spy and the prodigiously intelligent mage in terms of solving problems but they can certainly put themselves in the minds of these individuals to make decisions in line with who they are, how they relate to institutions, people and ideas and what the premise is inherent in their story is.

So, the characters allow everyone to get the character to a place, be it physical, social or mental with the right amount of information, but possibly just enough information, to make fateful, important and consequential decisions.

Because John and Kate can do that and they drive the story forward.

System Does Matter

Can you do all this no matter what system you are running? I would say yes, as it is largely one of philosophy rather than rules. The risk is some rules will support you, some will just not get in the way and some will positively resist you.

I like the Fate rules. My current campaign as I write this is a Fate: Accelerated version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. It supports all this stuff big time. It has no direct rules for premise, but like other systems of its type, it has analogues that flag a character’s reason for existing. In every way, it paints characters that are proactive, competent and dramatic at the rules level and since it’s fiction first all the setting of stakes, abstraction so the players can define reality, and all that stuff exists.

There are also systems like Gumshoe (which is used for a number of games) that doubles down at a system level of skills being ways to transition characters to the next important thing as discovering clues should not be a challenge (a character thing), but acting on information should be (players making decisions).

To use an opposite example. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t halt you in your tracks, we even use a character example from a Dungeons and Dragons campaign across this author focused play series. It doesn’t really pro-actively help though, in truth it either doesn’t get in the way or you have to be careful how you use the rules. As an example, setting stakes is absolutely critical due to the crazy statistics of the D20 and a player can’t moderate the result either.

So, without taking a specific system and picking it apart on how to use it to deliver on all this, it’s worth being wary of how your system works and what that means for how you approach these principles and use the system to support it.

And, Finally…

This has been an attempt to provide some guiding principles of how to deliver on your player character being a member of Homo Fictitious. Hopefully it’s been useful. I’m always trying to find a good balance between guiding ideas and driving down a hole of crazy and deep examples that don’t let people see the big picture.

Hopefully, I’ve found a balance, but I’m willing to jump into any of these in more detail if people are interested.