Be A Fan Of The Characters

Understanding the Apocalypse World principle

One of the GM principles in the game Apocalypse World is to be a fan of the characters. When I first read this principle, I was like “yeah, sure, be a fan of the characters”—it felt like a platitude. If I weren’t a fan of the characters, I wouldn’t be spending a bunch of my free time running a game for them.

But as I’ve run more games, I’ve realized the wisdom of this advice.

“Be a fan of the characters” doesn’t mean liking the characters. It means literally being a fan of the characters. Be the sort of person who would reblog gifsets of the character’s face on Tumblr with five hundred words of meta about the meaning of their microexpressions.

The thing about this kind of fan is that they give their favorite characters a hard time.

To quote my DMs with a friend of mine:

[character] is extremely good. LOOK at him. I LOVE him. he's so SAD and AWKWARD and EARNEST and he deserves to SUFFER

Let’s be real here: you want Will Graham to pet a dog, but what you really want is for Hannibal to gaslight him, frame him for murder, and erotically feed him an ear.

This is an important framing for the GM, because part of the GM’s job is to give the characters a hard time. Very few games are about a five-year-old girl having a pleasant first day at school. You might assume that being a fan of the characters means letting the characters have everything they want and get a crowning moment of awesome every session, but that’s really not the case.

But it’s also important that the fan doesn’t like every possible way their characters can suffer. Most ways a character can suffer can be interesting for the right audience given the right approach, but if you think about it, most fans aren’t interested in most possible ways a character can suffer.

Some of them are obvious: a lot of people don’t want to read about rape or abuse or incest or genocide. But it gets deeper than that. A story about Steve Rogers dealing with traffic making him late for a movie might be interesting: superheroes having normal lives is a beloved genre. But if your story is about Steve Rogers helping Bucky recover from his HYDRA-related trauma, an extensive Traffic Makes Him Late For A Movie sequence is just going to be frustrating.

Fans want their favorites to suffer in ways that reveal character, that are appropriate for the genre and theme of the story, and that make sense instead of being a trauma conga line (or, worse, a Mild Annoyance Conga Line). They want their favorites to suffer in ways they find emotionally appealing and satisfying, based on their own preferences. And they want their favorites to suffer in ways that make them cool, whether that means heroically escaping from the villain or enduring under tremendous suffering or spending the entire climax of the adventure in a dead faint.¹

As a GM, it’s easy to assume that if you’re giving a character a hard time you’re doing your job. But in my experience it’s very easy to make characters suffer in ways that aren’t character-revealing or genre-appropriate or cool—they’re just frustrating.

You want to communicate with the player about what they find appealing about their character and what kinds of failure they want them to endure. And then when a character fails a dice roll, you want to ask yourself not just what’s appropriate for the adventure but what’s appropriate for the character. Is this a story where a failure to pick a lock means you just can’t get it because you’re not good enough, or one where you’re a genius lockpick but the kind of lock is one you’ve never seen before because the villain is Just That Prepared, or one where you succeed at picking the lock but drop your lockpicking kit on your foot and swear loudly and alert a guard?

When you prepare your next session and its dilemma or conflict or impossible situation or even combat, think about what a fan would do. If you were going to write fanfiction about these characters, what would be the most interesting suffering to make them endure—the kind that shows the most about who they are as people, the kind that fits best with the kind of story you’re telling, the kind that presents the most interesting opportunities for this specific character to be heroic and badass or to tragically fail? Try it out and see if it strengthens your game.

1. Call of Cthulhu appeals to a unique kind of player.