Photo credit to @caitmayart for the banner.
Welcome back to my weekly series where I think critically about this week’s episode of Critical Role and see what lessons we can apply to our own D&D games. The last couple weeks I’ve focused on DM skills I’ve noticed Matt doing. This time I’m bringing it back to the players.
When building character backstories, people often talk about their character’s history and motivations. What big, formative moments occurred in their past? What is their purpose now? This information is vital for understanding your character’s overarching personality and how they’ll make big decisions in the game.
But there are lots of great D&D games with characters who have detailed, nuanced goals and personal histories. What really sets the characters of Critical Role apart is how much they feel like real people. They don’t just jump from one plot point to the next. We have whole episodes where the party goes drinking, or tries to make their way into a dirty book shop.
The players didn’t just figure out what their characters want, they figured out what they like.
Jester loves pastries, pulling pranks, and drawing in her sketchbook. Nott likes drinking and stealing trinkets. Beau is always interested by the women they meet. None of these things contribute to the character’s goals and they don’t play a huge role in the bigger scenes of the show. But it gives the players something authentic to do during the downtime.
Instead of fast forwarding through lulls, the characters take a moment to have fun and relax. They have reasons to talk to NPCs even if they don’t have information or a mission. Jester just wants to see if they like pastries.
In my games, we tend to elide the scenes where the party members get to know each other. You rarely hear the kind of chit-chat that is so normal in everyday conversation. Where are you from? What do you like to do? How’s your day going? There’s this unspoken agreement that we all know what we’re here for, so let’s skip to the part where we start fighting the monsters.
Something that Liam does particularly well is proactively getting to know the other characters. He doesn’t wait for some event to make the backstory relevant. Whenever Caleb is on watch with someone, or Matt is describing travel from one place to another, Liam takes a moment to ask another player some tidbit about their life.
These moments aren’t long, but they give the characters a chance to grow closer and build trust. Asking about someone’s history gives them a chance to share the work they put into creating their backstory.
If you ask about something they haven’t thought of, you’ve just helped them identify and flesh out another area of their character. They can make something up on the spot or give a noncommittal answer and flesh it out later. These new details continue to make the character more solid and easier to role play.
Another thing that all of the players are good at is accepting vague or glib answers. Sometimes, you ask for information that the other player was hoping to save for a big reveal. Maybe they don’t know the answer and they want time to think about it. Or maybe they just thought of a cool one liner. We tend to press for more information or we get suspicious if someone gives a non committal answer. But the Mighty Nein all tend to let things slide if the other player doesn’t give in after 1 or 2 questions.
Oftentimes, our characters end up feeling like vehicles to push the plot forward or to get us to the next dramatic event. This week’s episode showed a lot of ways that we can make our characters feel more real.
I think these tips do more than just enrich the scenes between the action. They give us hooks to explore our characters more deeply. During the shenanigans that we get up to, or the small-talk that we create, we end up connecting with our characters and understanding them better for the bigger moments.
