Stereotypes

In any historical RPG, stereotypes are very valuable resources. They are also, in any game that isn’t based on pulp fiction, dangerous. You need to strike a balance.

One of the problems with role-playing in an historical era is that, unlike your characters, you do not naturally make snap judgements or quick decisions that fit neatly into the game world. When you meet another character, your impressions are based almost exclusively on speech, apart from some visual descriptive material provided by the Host. Thus for example it would be essentially impossible to run a straight Sherlock Holmes game, because Holmes works largely by sight: he looks at things, observes, and draws inferences. Before a client has spoken, Holmes already knows a great deal about him or her, and he often “breaks the ice” by demonstrating his prowess. This cannot be done effectively in an RPG, since no Host can provide all the relevant details, and were you to try to do so, the players would soon be asleep.

So what you have to provide instead are stereotypes, i.e. stock characters. The PCs need to encounter some of the standards early and often, so that when they meet them in the future, they think, “Oh, one of those people, I know what they’re like.” You also need to build off of what the players already expect, what they know or think they know. The great trick, of course, is guessing what it is that they know.

One way to solve this problem, at least as a start, is to provide a “required reading” list. Keep it short, and include as many good movies as possible — you don’t want it to seem more like work than it has to. But this will only go so far.

You need to develop a repertoire of stock characters, and make the players play them. Often. How difficult is a Cockney thug? A society snob? An orange-seller? An elegant man-about-town? Not very, and if you provide some assistance (basic descriptions, comments on ways of talking or acting, etc.), you will quickly get the players to generate these stereotypes themselves. Yes, this means that you need to provide little write-ups on NPCs you hand out.

Rotate these characters around. If one player turns out to be phenomenally good at a certain type of character, by all means have that player play that type more often, but don’t limit your players unnecessarily. If a player does not have to live with a character, and thus has no great emotion invested in him, then you will be surprised at what the player can do. This happens, we think, because you drop out all thoughts (however submerged) of “winning,” of doing well by and for _the character, and leave behind only the desire to have fun and to do well _through the character.

In short, hand out NPCs as often as possible. Besides, it takes a lot of the strain off your acting abilities, and gives you time to think about what’s next.

As soon as the players seem at all comfortable with the basic stereotypes, start confusing matters. Throw them people who are not as they seem, who are fakes, frauds, hypocrites, or diamonds in the rough. First of all, try throwing them some historical figures (always more complex than stereotypes). Consider Rev. Barnardo, for example, who devoted his life to rescuing the lost boys of Whitechapel and the East End, but came from a professional background. Meeting him in his usual context, players too comfortable with stereotypes are likely to sneer a bit, to assume that a rather poor clergyman living in squalor must be a nobody. So make him the saintly (if hardly perfect) man he was, and shame them.

Try also handing out NPCs with a bit of background history, perhaps with some more complex goals. You may want to give these out before the session, so that the players have a second to think, but if your players are quick on their feet it may be just as well not to give them that time.

You want to build confidence and comfort, but you want that to play off against ever-increasing personal depth and complexity. You can be sure that the PCs will be a bit more complex and deep than the average person they meet. If the NPCs get interesting, the PCs will move with them. And the more interesting the PCs get, the happier people get with playing them, with discovering their intricacies.

There will be times when you feel inclined to run a pulp-style adventure. That’s fine, so long as the pulp feel doesn’t take over the game. As always, you can run the game as you like, but we think you’ll find that the mechanics and the materials best support a somewhat more serious, grittier game. We find that pulp is more fun when you have a little more support from the combat system, for one thing, and also when magic is at least semi-predictable. If you shift a Shadows in the Fog game into straight pulp, we think you’re likely to be disappointed; at the very least, you’re going to need to hand out a lot of cards all the time. So run the odd pulpy one-shot, and keep the main focus a little more serious and disturbing. We’re not going for ultimate horror here, but this version of Jack the Ripper is realistic in one sense at least: those murders are just plain ugly. We’ve included a big dossier, with the coroner’s reports, and if you keep in mind the fact that this was actually done to real women, the nastiness of the game world will come naturally.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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