How to include your player characters in your universe ?
Picture this : you have your TTRPG campaign with a solid scenario, remarkable NPCs, recognizable places, relevant sidequests… you start recruiting your players and discuss with them about the PCs they want to play. And then, there comes the doubts… what are these guys doing here ? Why them ? And why in the world would they risk their skins in your story where danger lurks behind every pebble ? (never underestimate the pebble. Never.)
Having dealt with a few players that were keen on asking this kind of questions, I may have a few suggestions on how to best include PCs in your universe and in your scenario.
Just a foreword : I only consider here a situation where the GM has some kind of control over PC backgrounds, and where they are written soon enough before the game. These tips won’t work for characters written by the players alone, imported from another campaign, or made at the last minute with a broken pen and a reused sheet of paper on a corner of the gaming table. Yeah, that’s my first tip : prepare your characters beforehand !
First of all let’s address the simplest question of the list : why would the PCs accept the quest you present them ? In some cases the promise of loot is enough, but you’ll soon find yourself knee deep in the cliché of the company meeting in a tavern to go find the dragon’s treasure. It’s better to rummage through your scenario to find something that might forbid your PCs to refuse the quest, then make it appear on both sides : in the opening scene of your campaign to incorporate this compulsion, and in the characters’ background to make it believable.
Just this once I’ll take as an example the opening of the first campaign of the Tales of the Grey, that will begin its crowdfunding campaign next year (more about this to come later) : before the players start to think about their PCs, the GM warns them that they have incurred a debt towards the previous mayor of the town, Sir Orville Venice. Either they committed a crime that the mayor has concealed, or they asked for something in exchange for a future favor. Either way they never had to repay it so far, and since Sir Venice recently passed away they think they’re off the hook. But then they receive a convocation notice from the notary office in charge of Sir Venice’s will. They are informed that the office holds all documents related to the debt, and they will be handed back at the completion of a task.
As you can see, the addition of the debt is a detail in the PCs’ background, since it doesn’t close any door in regard to what the players might want to do. Moreover, the fact that a choice is left open between a concealed infraction or an exchange of favors does not even force the player into a criminal background. However, the existence of the debt forces them to accept at least the first quest, and includes them in the universe since it creates a link with an existing NPC.
Now that you have this motivation, one point on which I cannot insist enough is the fact that the last draft of the PCs’ backgrounds should always be made by the GM. You must rewrite their propositions, while staying true to the original intention of course. This way you’ll be able to include NPCs, places and lore elements to the background in order to create a familiarity during the game when they are mentioned. My suggestion is, for each PC, to add in their background at least one NPC with an important link to the main scenario, one that has absolutely no such link, and one that you don’t plan to use but can always keep in your sleeves when need arises. This prevents the player from immediately recognizing an important NPC, and thus avoids meta-gaming.
Ultimately the best way to include a PC in the universe of your campaign is through sidequests. If you bind a PC to the core of the main story arc, you might end up with an imbalance between all your PCs around the table (they can’t all be the only Chosen One, that would make a mess). However, if you follow the suggestions of the article “how to make your sidequests relevant”, you’ll have defined the focus of your sidequests, and maybe even made secondary arcs. The idea here is to use the “interaction” and “lore” parts of the focus to bind them to the PC’s background, and to add in the final part of the secondary arc an objective or a past element of your PC. By having several sidequests, or even better several secondary arcs, you can bind them to each of your PCs and have each of them be the main character at different moments of your adventure.
At this point you might ask, since PC creation is the very last step in the campaign preparation, and since the sidequests should already be written at this point, how could you create such a link without it feeling artificial ? To this I will answer first that it is a very good question, congratulations, and then that it is now time to talk about Archetypes.
An Archetype will be a framework for a specific PC. It will contain background elements to include to the character (for example “has made missions for the mob”, “is devoted to this particular deity”, “doesn’t really look like their father”...) that will steer some aspects of the character towards a general direction while still leaving enough freedom to make the PC your player wants (after all it’s not because you’ve made missions for the mob that you are a ruthless thief ; you might also be a caring orphaned big sister doing what she must to feed her little brother and placing stolen goods in crates for a fence). These background elements will of course be those that you’ll use in the sidequests ; you can even combine multiple elements so that the background will be linked to every sidequest in a secondary arc, transforming this arc into a character arc for your PC. In this regard you’ll also add in the Archetype some specific scenes that will happen during these sidequests, and other upstreams in the main storyline so that your player will know these sidequests are tailored for them.
You will obviously not show all of your Archetypes to your players for them to choose (they should not even know that you’re using Archetypes). What I advise you to do is to ask them broadly what kind of character they want to play, and then see what Archetype you have prepared that matches the most. They do not have to agree to it of course, but you can sway them by proposing them a bonus to the character creation, prepared within your Archetype : a specific piece of equipment for example, or in the Scalecat system a unique Advantage. Moreover, at the end of their secondary arc, you can give them a special reward that will add a sense of accomplishment and the feeling of having finished a piece of adventure made specially for them.
I personally always add four or five Archetypes when I write a campaign, before even starting to detail the main story arc. This way I can use conditional writing (see the article “how to avoid railroading in your scenario”) based on the active Archetypes. What about you, do you have any techniques to include your players in your universe ? Do you have any stories of inclusions done right (or gone wrong) ? Let’s discuss it in the comments !