Yesterday on Twitter, I shared a random tip for world-builders: “Create setting-specific roles for characters – psychic fighter pilots, oracles of flame, NSA hacker/assassins.”
I’ll admit I was specifically thinking about roleplaying games when I wrote this. I’d argue that one of the biggest appeals of playing RPGs is trying out new roles and exploring new ways to interact with the fictional world. Different settings give you different roles to play, such as an Elf Thief in D&D, a Dwarf Rigger in Shadowrun, or a Wookiee freighter captain in Star Wars.
If my new world doesn’t provide new roles to play, I’m not giving you much incentive to come play in my sandbox. “Yes the world has magical flying cities and zombie clown hordes, but the heroes are all the standard fantasy races and classes.” Yawn!
If the characters aren’t that different from other games, how different can the world really be?
(“Different,” by the way, is good because “different” is the reason you invest money and brain space on my world — it offers something that other products don’t.)
While I was thinking about RPGs when I tweeted, this mini-maxim applies to (genre) fiction as well. We’ve got countless books about cops, detectives, doctors, lawyers, and spies. To read something different, about different characters, those characters need to have different roles – boy wizards, perhaps, or psychic waitresses in world like our own but stuffed with sexy vampires.
Could we have a story about a London police detective in the world of Harry Potter? Or an ambulance-chasing lawyer in the True Blood setting? Sure — but if those characters are indistinguishable are from their more mundane counterparts, their stories may not be sufficiently different, and that would be a waste.
Don’t waste the exciting new world you’ve created. Finish the job by creating exciting new roles for its characters to play and your audience to enjoy.
