Consensus & Appreciative Inquiry in Character Creation

Jason

‘ve heard some people spit more than say “consensus.” It comes in a tone usually reserved for curse words considered so coarse even the speaker seems to feel ashamed of himself as he says it. These people usually like to remind us of all the reasons consensus doesn’t work, how much difficulty lies in building it up, and how easily one person can tear it down. These people generally prefer the decisiveness of a single authority.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I despise that attitude, and this doesn’t even provide the right venue to try, so I won’t. But I will say here that consensus will almost always get you a better decision and stronger commitment, though at a price. Namely, it takes longer. It doesn’t involve more difficulty (it involves a lot less, at least in the long term), it doesn’t end up more fragile (it actually ends up much stronger), but it does take longer. You can’t make a snap consensus.

Consensus doesn’t mean compromise or voting, either. On my long list of things to love about Mouse Guard appears a sentence from page 77: “Don’t vote, decide.” How many times have you taken part in a vote and felt bitterly angry about how it turned out? Voting does that; it rewards the majority and punishes the minority, it alienates and polarizes in the long term.

You haven’t reached a consensus until you have something that everyone can agree to. No one feels alienated or disenfranchised at the end of that process. It does take time, however. It means peeling back to what everyone really wants, which may differ markedly from what everyone says they want, especially at the beginning.

I think you really need to look for consensus in character creation. Compromises will come back to haunt you later on. This campaign has highlighted that.

After last Friday’s game, Giuli said she wanted to drop out of Sigmund’s patrol, our face-to-face group. I asked her why; she said she had trouble keeping the two stories separate. Now, before Luna, Giuli had a different character in Content Not Found: sharpwind’s patrol, a grandmotherly herbalist and healer. Ivy in Sigmund’s Patrol she modeled more on Dr. Cox from the TV show Scrubs, but she also specialized in Healer. In both cases, Giuli had focused on making a Healer and an herbalist. Two patrols in the same setting promised enough confusion, sure, but two nearly identical characters didn’t help that at all.

I caught that early on, and convinced her to change her character in one of them. She came up with Luna. We started by trying to get at something she cared about to build the character around. Both she and I have a lot of concerns about the environment and overpopulation. Giuli combines that with an incredible level of compassion, and that creates a conflict for her. Overpopulation threatens grim futures, but a gulf separates the intellectual understanding of our ecological position, and the personal reaction to that. So, knowing that I planned to take this campaign into questions of predation, Giuli built that into her character. Her Belief, “The needs of mousekind must be balanced with the needs of the Black Forest,” sets up many situations where she might know that she needs to let this individual mouse die; but her Instinct, “Always help a mouse in trouble,” plants the struggle with her personal reaction. Since then, Giuli’s had a lot more fun in the Skype game playing Luna; she’s found more in the character of interest to her, and more that she can roleplay with.

I asked Giuli why she’d made two healers, and she said that the group needed one. In a game like D&D, that might hold true, but not in Mouse Guard —and she’d begun to learn that, and it made her feel a little useless. Rather than making the character she really wanted in either patrol, she’d compromised, and made the character she thought we needed. She ended up wrong, dissatisfied, and thinking of dropping out of the game.

We tried some appreciative inquiry . Cooperrider, who coined the term, and Whitney define appreciative inquiry as “the cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them.” We started by asking some questions about when Giuli felt really comfortable roleplaying, when she’d really enjoyed it and when she’d felt like she’d really gotten something from it. At first, she said she could only enjoy comic games. She cited a comic game of Primetime Adventures we played at Dreamation in February, run by Jeff Collyer called “Bleeding Hearts,” an over-the-top medical soap opera set in a hospital in a fictional country with a recent revolution. Giuli played the star of that episode, the former lover of a dead soldier posing as a nurse to find her lover’s killer. (I happened to play her lover’s killer, a young doctor cum revolutionary.) As luck would have it, Jeff recorded the session for the actual play podcast, Virtual Play so you can actually listen to Giuli’s performance—what she considers one of her best ever—in episode 37

But pressing her, we came up with another character, one she’d played for a New Year’s Eve one-shot of Werewolf: The Forsaken. I ran the Manitou Springs adventure and Giuli played Nadine. You certainly couldn’t call that game comic, but we noticed that in both cases, the character had an accent. So Giuli agreed that she didn’t need a comic game, she just needed some quirk about the character to latch onto.

With that discovery, we set about creating a new character for Sigmund’s patrol. This time, she wanted to deal with something more personal: her difficulty in social situations. So, she used the Scientist skill to make a shy, geeky mouse named Content Not Found: tinble. She finished with an excitement for the character I’ve rarely seen in her, so I feel pretty good about this. I told her that if she still couldn’t tell the two storylines apart, she could drop one of them; but, I suspected it had more to do with a character she had no attachment to. With one patrol where she plays a character she cares about, and one where the character has little to define her, you can easily keep forgetting which one you want to play right now. I think Tinble will fix that.

Giuli has gone through four characters already, but I think we’ve reached a good point with both patrols. Still, it reminds me of how much we could have saved if we hadn’t compromised from the beginning. Every extra person involved increases the difficulty of reaching consensus exponentially. Consensus gave way to dictatorship and democracy for precisely that reason when human populations became so dense after the Agricultural Revolution. But for small groups, consensus will always give you a better solution, and sometimes, it will give you the only good solution. For a campaign you plan to spend any amount of time with, you owe it to yourself and everyone else at the table not to compromise at the beginning. Character creation really needs consensus; you need to find characters individually, and a group template , that everyone likes.