Storyboard: The only way out is the way through

I had originally planned to use this week's column to talk about the ways you can develop a roleplaying storyline outside of sitting in your city of choice and chatting, but sometimes plans work out differently. In fact, that was exactly what inspired me to change topics -- sitting and chatting with the head of my linkshell in Final Fantasy XIV about how he'd realized after the fact that the character he created was unintentionally alienating him from RP and that he'd placed a distance between his character and the other members of the shell that wasn't doing him any favors.

We chatted about what he could do with the character to try to salvage him to avoid scrapping the character and starting over with a concept better-suited to what he wanted to do. But he's not alone in that position -- what if your character isn't working out after all, but for whatever reason it's not easy to just scrap the character and start over? I've talked a lot about how to prevent your character from going off the rails, but how do you get back on the rails when a restart isn't a good option?

The soft retcon

Doing a full retcon of your character backstory is usually an extreme move, but this isn't quite that extensive. You aren't changing the entirety of your character's history, or even the majority of it. Instead, you're quietly altering a few things in the background, things it's quite possible no one would even notice unless you pointed them out.

Now, generally speaking, retcons are a pretty terrible idea in fiction and a worse idea in RP. That's why we're calling this a soft retcon, because the changes you're making are subtle and often inivisible. More often than not, we're talking about a character that has failed to ever successfully engage in a storyline or interactions with other players, so the retcon you're working isn't going to have a detrimental impact on others. Instead, it lets you change just a few details and start moving the character along a more entertaining path.

By way of example, let's assume your character is a soft-spoken type whose few interactions have generally been fairly grumpy ones. This was, at the time, because you were trying to play her as rather socially inept, not realizing that you were successfully portraying her as someone to be avoided at all costs. But you work in a slight retcon, and you have her start talking to people, because it seems her real motivation was that she owed someone money. Someone she was scared would harm her, someone against whom she needs protection...

It's not a perfect patch, but if you like the character's playstyle well enough, it can help take a less-entertaining individual and bring him or her back into the limelight. And the only price it carries is that it's still a retcon and requires a certain amount of breaking backstory.

The noodle incident

The past doesn't hold all the answers, of course -- and sometimes changing a character's backstory won't make the game more interesting to play right now. That's when something needs to happen, some momentous event in the character's life. Some big whizz-bang event you'd been saving for later on, an event that requires the attention of everyone and anyone the character might work with.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is going to require some work and good faith on the part of your fellow players. After all, this time what you're doing is immediately involving them. Specifically, you're jumping straight into the second reel and expecting them to just follow along, sorting out the issues of why anyone ought to care along the way. So people have to trust you twice over, believing that your character really can be interesting after all and that the event you're running right now is going to engage everyone.

On the plus side, this is the sort of thing that, when pulled off successfully, becomes impossible to forget. Sure, until the whole mafia time-traveler stuff, your character was always a wallflower, but one story turned him into an important part of guild history with a whole lot of interesting character hooks. It also gives you a chance to develop away the less amusing parts of a character in short order. In essence, your character's backstory is becoming an active part of a current story, and that keeps everyone engaged and invested from that point forward.

To pull this off, you do need to have some sort of big event in mind, some sort of crisis that would legitimately require everyone's attention. It doesn't have to be combat-heavy, naturally -- but it does need to be run as an event in which everyone can take part and enjoy the story being crafted. A legal battle for parental custody might be a big deal to your character, but most players probably don't want to sit through several fake courtroom scenes.

The act

Not everyone can pull off a huge crossover event without it feeling forced, and not every character backstory shift can create compelling storylines in the right now. Sometimes, the best answer is to to simply ditch pretense for a moment, say that you really want to make this character work, and hash out with a couple of players how you can start getting the character involved in more of the day-to-day roleplaying that you want to enjoy.

Yes, this runs the most risk of not actually changing what makes the character uninteresting in the first place. But it's also eminently possible that the problem isn't the character himself so much as it is his improperly designed environment, that if you just nudge things gently the situation becomes far more compelling. More than anything, just telling people you need to set up some events to let the character stretch his legs means you can decide whether the character is so broken that no amount of fixing will help.

There are no perfect solutions. But there are options to be explored when facing a situation like this, places where you don't want to continue with a character and can't just clear the slate and start over altogether. It's worth at least taking a peek.

Every week, of course, I let you know that you can send me feedback via the comment field or eliot@massively.com, and this week is no exception. Next week I think we're going to dip back into the archetype pool, since the first installment had a positive reception -- and what do you say to making the next installment a little further from any trace of noble self-sacrifice?

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.