Once again, in an episode of particularly excellent tabletop roleplaying session, I was reminded of two things.

First, characters. Don’t ever resort to mundane characters, be they NPC’s or primary ones. Always incorporate stuff made for legends told later. Always aim for potential towards legends.

Second, as much as you want to design excellent gameplay, don’t let the gameplay break the game flow. Don’t force players to play the game mechanics when there’s a gameplay moment to remember either about to occur, or has already began rolling forward. It’s stretching the concept, but imagine gamemaster snagging character sheets (or availability of inventory menus etc) away from players when something sudden occurs. Things should flow from reflexes at such point. Drop everything and go into instinctive mode.

Sudden occurrence is a funny beast, as it makes us forget stuff we haven’t got programmed down into our spine and forces us to react with what we have at hand, with whatever we can come up with in a few seconds timeframe. If you go “Err……” and bell goes bong, your character very clearly froze because he doesn’t know his strengths yet and is about to get a deserved kicking before he is able to join in the fun accordingly. It’s also a light slap on players cheek – or dare I say learning experience? In situations calling for experience and mastery of character skills, that’s where you measure your character. That’s obvious, and has always been. I’m just advocating it should not happen solely in some damn sheet or a menu we stop to oggle at RIGHT WHEN SHIT SHOULD BE FLYING. Excuse my french. Just take the player further into the game, away from reading numbers and ponderous thoughts when he should be in a hurry and playing by feel. Yes, yes, game mechanics everywhere incorporate initiatives and such derived from your character stats, but what did I just say? What?

No, if you don’t remember a particular trait of your character that would be handy in situation, then your character just isn’t kickass enough to react with it. If your character knows that going for a nightly jog in those black woods full of bloodshot eyes is a good reason to keep a gun in hand, then all the better. He at least has the gun when suddenness jumps up and grabs his face when his player doesn’t expect it. Of course, if he is new to such circumstances, chances are he’ll pull the trigger and shoot in completely wrong direction. End result might as well be a companion character in same party who now carries a character trait called limp, because of a certain instance of a epileptic squirrel accidentally falling on some new guys face. It’s something to laugh about afterwards.

During the time spent with a character, you start remembering stuff he or she is made of. That’s obvious. When the player knows his characters individual traits, weapons, magical items and whatever by second nature, is it wrong if I claim that’s when – and only when – you could call your character experienced. Why not extend that backwards into game mechanics? Measure experience through survived moments of legend. WW2 fighter pilots marked their experience on their planes, didn’t they? They damn well remembered every moment behind each kill mark. Turn your character sheet from an excel sheet into a character memoir worthy of saving. You’re playing story, so you’re part of it and with every influence you force upon game world, you’re also writing it.

When the experience begins to grow measurable, it’s also when you connect with your character and it becomes dear and memorable to you, having gone through quite a bit of legends through mishaps, mistakes, victories and awesome saving throws. Like feminists in sixties called for women to burn their bras, gamers should burn their inventory and action menus or character sheets when they become just a part of game mechanic instead of game itself.  Obviously, all this is as much wrong as it is true, as different people enjoy different games. I firmly believe the wanted mood and atmosphere might have their say on game mechanics as well. If I, lone shepherd helping a stray puppy in woods come across a pack of undead Spetsnatz in the woods, first thing you would see me doing has damn well nothing to do with dices or inventories. I would very much prefer to incorporate such raw instances of reaction in games, seeing what happens after the initial smoke settles and brain is back in gear, even if it results in registering shit in pants and a dead puppy in hand for being handled as a club against improbable enemy.

In the game we played, characters left legends behind and game mechanics never rose to break the flow, even though they carefully churned their cogs and wheels underneath.

Also, the original blog post about communicating game worlds to the player found itself amazingly an alternate home in printed form at Gamesauce magazine, so this kind of works as a live sequel as well. As always, you’re free to disagree, and I hereby encourage you to voice your opinions and thoughts in comments. I’m not writing down the truth, just my view of things as I feel about them right now.

I have this urge to rant about how wrong game developers are with faking humans. I mean that damned AI that’s almost a trope in itself these days. Disregarding the few very good examples out there proving that NPC characters can be done right, I’ll concentrate on the bad shit since it’s much more rewarding to fling around.

So, those rigidly moving robot-like depictions of humanity that developers try to make more human by adding more bones, more polygons, more shaders, more realistically simulated hair blowing in wind and more this and more that. Yet they still keep acting very much unlike human, while looking more and more like human. No, that gets just creepy.

More graphical fidelity you shovel on screen, higher it sets the bar for animation, facial expressions, voice acting, effects and .. well, anything. More it represents reality in our headspace, more we spot the inconsistencies and you can be sure they stand out and break that careful world construct. I’d rather see blocky graphics with fluid likeness of life infused all over than all the graphical provess with limited animation on those photoreal humans. Of course, gamers are used to the videogame looks and accept a certain level of “videogameness” as part of the media, but if you want to push the narrative limits of visual information, you need to have a broad vision to account everything it’s begging to be pushed with. Uncanny valley is most often associated with human realism, but in reality it looms over everything we’re able to associate with any close matches in our own experiences. It could be from our daily lives or from our favourite movies – object of association doesn’t matter. Just the very existence of association matters. If you try to deliver associable visual experience, it damn well should match as a complete package and not just as isolated masterworks of programming that’s easy to present as slides at GDC.

I honestly believe we could get away with less graphical fidelity, and instead the fake humans should pose at least a few common human traits, or flaws if you want to play dirty with words. Human flaw – or what makes us human from outside observers perspective – is how we react, mostly.

Yeah, I’m distilling observable “human” qualities to observed reactions, disregarding polygon counts and texture resolutions and other whizbang trickery engineer-driven development so commonly focuses on. You can have the world-class animation but keeping it alive is the hard part. We bang our toe, we break from being perfect beings (observed as rigidity!) for a split second, reacting with a sound, facial expression, and some gestural motions. We are animals, for a second. We come upon a closed door in unknown hallway and we react by glancing at the door handle, maybe trying if it opens. We are curious monkeys. We don’t just walk against it and tread the ground with futile steps against the collision. If the door doesn’t react back, we disregard the door and focus our attention elsewhere. We don’t have the patience of statues. If the leader of our group isn’t going anywhere, we start looking at some things, fiddling with others. We keep ourselves busy even when we’re idle by definition, by reacting with glances and manipulation of random stuff. We are playful children! Of course, by “we”, I mean a random bunch of AI posse following the leader, i.e. player. Remember, player observes you, the AI, and gets suspicious if you look real but act like a robot with four hinges and a three-line script for brain. Player starts to look at the videogame flaws instead of human flaws.

What’s human, anyways? Scratch that. What’s human in drama? We want to play (and make) games that brings a feeling of something larger we can lodge ourselves comfortably into. It’s a vague term in itself, but sense of drama is what we want to push into the undercurrents of gameplay – the communicable game world player “gets” without having to read it up in the manual. Rules of drama dictate the basics, and few of them could be considered here. Character has a goal, and is driven towards it with a motivation. We don’t have to go to deeper stuff with midpoint-slumps and conflicts with antagonists and so forth, because we’re not dealing with primary characters here. Primary character is the player, and that bastard breaks all our careful rulesets anyways. Player is the uncontrollable variable we hate to incorporate to our games. Anyhow. AI represents the secondary characters, and because gamestudios are so often tech- and sellingpoint/marketablefeature-oriented, AI – as a companion – is in most cases a blind, daft sidekick that stops to loop its idle animation when player stops, and will resume moving when player moves. Unless it gets stuck in obstacle, in which case you’re again playing with videogame flaws, not human flaws. ANYHOW. If you have AI companion throughout the game, or even only during parts of the journey, it should appear to have its own reasons to tag along, its own reasons to be suspicious of you, ambitions to play you for its own goals and even backstab you after calling you dear in the night. All that because that’s human. We’re mentally dirty, incomprehensible beasts with varying views of world and of each other.

Yes, it takes more care, more focus and more work to develop but in the end, wouldn’t it feel more rewarding than just witnessing next-next-generation shader tricks or ten thousand polygons more on-screen?

Which route do you take, technical or human?

It doesn’t take huge elaborate systems to bring a feeling of those things happening around the player, that sense of hidden layer beneath the more readily apparent game surface our player and world is limited to interact on. It’s that layer under game world where player can’t go, from where he should get this feeling of being subject to observation. Perhaps even a feeling of being judged, silently.

It’s in the script, in dialogue, in animation and in the AI system, with some thought to tie everything together.
We observe details consciously, but sums of details we understand subconsciously. Emotion is built from subconscious, no?

Skill Challenges

The Skill Challenge system of 4E is brilliant in the simplicity. In a way, a well-designed skill challenge plays out like a combat encounter – everyone contributing by doing what they’re good at, without the situation sliding into a series of “I’ll do X!” “me too!” “I’ll try as well.” Each skill use moves that situation forwards, telling a part of a story how a goal is eventually reached, making each new use of skill interesting. Each failure has some consequences, but they rarely end up in a dead end (pretty much like combat rarely ends in the game ending). It’s a nice way to incorporate mechanics into roleplaying situations.

You’re tracking a killer in the city – You let the GM know that your character is using Diplomacy to ask around for possible clues. You roll – if you succeed in the roll, you gain info in the course of the scene and things move forward. If you fail, something else happens. Maybe you stir the wrong crowd or interrupt a group of thieves while asking around. Something cool still happens, even if you don’t make progress in the original plan to track the killer. Some other character then might use his Athletics check to frame a scene where he physically chases the man through the streets. Followed by someone tracking him using his appropriate skills. And so on. If your party fails too many times in total before finding the killer, he might have killed again, or prepared for your arrival. Succeed well enough and the heroes catch him off-guard.

Long term goals (A Skill Challenge might take days or week of in game-time), individual smaller scenes happening from player decisions, successes and failures that actually matter. Not just pre-planned encounters where no matter what the players do, things end up the way the plot demands. Or even if they do, there are at least a couple of different variations of how things happen depending on what they PCs do. Importing this into the 3rd edition isn’t any sort of a problem.

Enemies aren’t symmetrical with the PCs

In d20 system (that is, games like Pathfinder or D&D 3rd edition), everything is made using the same model – roughly you use same rules for player characters as you do for a goblin. If the enemy fighter uses a trick in combat, that same trick should be available to an equally tough player character. If he uses a move normally reserved for some other class, like a rogue, then he must have taken a level in rogue, which means he’s not as effective a fighter as he would be if he hadn’t. And so on. In 4E, the player characters are nothing like the rest of the things they come across in their adventures. An Orc from a certain tribe might use some strange combat move that fits the style he’s been described, even if it cannot be achieved by any of the normal combat tricks the players can buy their characters.

So when you come across a drow priestess who looks gleeful when you bring one of her soldiers to a near-death condition and on her next turn, she causes the poor henchman to explode into a million spiders, you accept this power. When the agile blade-master dances around you and counterattacks your counterattacks, it isn’t something you can buy with some feats or power choices. But you accept because it fits the enemy’s style, not wonder what levels of which character class he must have taken to get there.

Looking at the situation another way – the player characters are unique when it comes to levels and things like that. There aren’t any other 3rd Level Bards in the game, sure there might be some other people with similar abilities, but the only ones developing using the level scale are the players’ characters. An NPC’s skillset would be completely different, and expecting anything else would be a grave mistake.

There are also the Minions that are there to give even low-level characters the feeling of being powerful enough to fight a lot of monsters at a time. While I do appreciate the minion mechanic, it’s just not something that I’ll be using in the Pathfinder campaign. Importing the rest into the 3rd edition will be a huge effort, but hopefully pays off when the enemies become increasingly interesting to fight against.

Dynamic combat

The curse of the 3rd edition and variants is the fact that if you stand still and hit the other guy with your sword, you’re getting optimal results. Moving around is bad for your efficiency in battle. In 4E, the thing is to keep moving, gaining advantage from position, shifting, pushing, pulling, sliding your enemies or yourself. Using the terrain to your advantage… Heck, even swinging from one bookshelf to the other using a chandelier. Movement, movement, movement.

And there are these things happening around you – walls moving, rooms filling with water, giant boulders chasing you down narrow corridors. All while there is a countdown going on for a summoning ritual to complete that you have to stop or you’ll be in big trouble. While this all has been possible in 3rd Edition, it really became clear in the Fourth, where a normal combat encounter is really boring if you just keep hitting enemies with your powers.

One of the first awesome things that I realized about this with 4E was the new dragons, who at the moment they’re dropped to 50% hitpoints, roared in fury and hurled flames at the party in retaliation, even when it was not their turn to act. Then I noticed the goblins that move around when an attack missed them, literally ducking away from the blows to another spot. And soon it was apparent that the whole combat situation had moved from “I hit you, you hit me” fest into something where things were happening all the time and everyone was constantly moving. Another great discovery was the concept of marking enemies – you make the enemy want to attack you instead of the weaker, more vulnerable, target. This means that there is a mechanical reason why every enemy doesn’t attack the wizard first.

Transporting this feeling into Pathfinder will be harder, but doable – making the surroundings such that it becomes advantageous to notice what’s available to your use there, and forcing everyone to move around are a good start. And as I’ll be redoing most of the creatures and enemies anyways, I’ll have to add some forced movement into their special actions. Some are simple, like the goblin who moves whenever an attack misses or the ogre whose blows push the characters a couple of squares away from them. Other things will need some serious thought and planning, like marking or reactive powers for some monsters.

Encounters need objectives

Sort of close to the previous two. And really not something that’s anywhere near exclusive to the 4th Edition, but something that got really highlighted by it. Just hitting things with swords is really boring. But if you have to make sure you get past the enemies before the cave collapses, that’s completely another reason to fight them. Or there is a summoning ritual going on that needs to be stopped. Or you have to convince the enemies that you’re really not their enemies before they kill you – all while not damaging them.

Encounters that can be failed even if the player characters don’t end up dead are really that much more fun. They make doing the sword dance worthwhile time after time. Even if you fail, you’ve tried, and maybe have a better motivation to do better next time. It isn’t really much of a game, if the possible results from a fight are: a) players die, game ends or b) players survive, plot continues as the GM plans.

Since this one isn’t really about the system, but the attitude towards Encounter design, it’ll be the easiest to implement into a Pathfinder game. Just takes work to make every moment count.

And to be honest, the real gem of the show are the characters. A true rogues gallery – the Mastermind, the Socialite, the Brawler, the Computer Kid and the Thief. The Mastermind is an old insurance agent, who has moved from “White Knight to Black King”, selects the “jobs” the group performs and cordinates the effort. The Socialite is an old opponent of his, a con-woman extraordinaire who can sell any personality she decides to, to anyone she’s chosen as her mark (except the Mastermind, of course). The Brawler’s true to his description, capable of taking down anyone he comes across in hand-to-hand combat. The Computer Kid hacks cellphones, CIA databases and security systems with no problems at all. And the Thief is held back by no acrobatic feat or a lock that she comes across. A perfectly balanced and diverse group for any sort of a heist. Just like they should be.

But they’re built as flawed, each one. The Mastermind is an alcoholic and hell-bent on the death of his son. The Socialite is in love with the Mastermind and let’s her delusions of being a great actress on stage as well as off it take the better of her if the opportunity arises. The Brawler has a dark past where bad things have happened. The Computer Kid loves things like Star Wars and internet. And the Thief is something of an Aspie. What is done well about these flaws is that they’re not overplayed.

The Mastermind is a functioning alcoholic, and like he says “the trick is not to get hung up on the alcoholic, but to celebrate the functioning part” – it is a flaw very much present, but in the end, it doesn’t make him a trembling mound of flesh, hovering over the latest bottle. His son is the ghost that pushes him forward. The Socialite’s relationship with the Mastermind and her obsession with her acting are things that make her quite sympathetic, distracting from the fact that anyone in her role must be a bit of a sociopath. The Brawler and The Computer Kid neither are socially incompetent, in fact both can be quite the charmers. The Brawler is a very warm character with surprising insight and intellect, the dark past just a thing that comes to haunt him sometimes, but he’s not trapped in it. And the Computer Kid. Well, it’s the age of the geek, baby. The fact you understand Star Wars or World of Warcraft doesn’t mean anymore that you can’t interact with the opposite sex. To be honest, the Computer Kid is probably the best Fast-Talker in the group, which is something the archetype would never normally be associated with. The socially awkward one is the Thief, but instead of a geek she’s displayed as eccentric and childlike, a very likable character. And with her overbearing focus in life being money and thieving instead of something we wouldn’t be interested in hearing about, it’s a very working angle on her.

To put it simply, each of the characters is one step away from being a dull stereotype. The show’s creators have pretty much taken the archetypes and given them an attribute or two that somehow humanizes them, instead building them with some that would make them look even more badass version of their base model. And then they’ve made sure that the quality isn’t too overbearing. And the formula works brilliantly. The characters come off as human. Food for thought for the next time you’re thinking of writing characters.

Basic rules: Random songs from your full playlist to tie to each of the things mentioned, then improvise, forming a character as you go along. Decide the setting and the primary role you want to build the character into before rolling with this thing.

Well, going with Buffy-esque setting, set in Finland. This one will be a “big bad” character.

1. Character gender/sex

Dead Can Dance – Song of the Nile

A very soft song. Feminine in a way. Some serenity to it. I’m thinking a heterosexual woman who has lost her someone and now in stages of mourning.

2. How is he/she physically

(The Real) Tuesday Weld – Waltz for One

Another graceful song, full of elegance and physical frailty. Dancer maybe, ballet or something like that. Not strong either.

3. How is he/she socially

Gogol Bordello – Super Taranta!

Very outgoing, anarchistic, chaotic, energetic. Maybe not that beautiful, but something raw and wild.

4. How is he/she mentally

Placebo – UneedmemorethanIneedU

Bit lost on her own, come to rely on others for answers. Now has her own way and maybe someone has to rely on her… Generally a bit weak willed.

5. How would he/she be described

John Murphy – The Beginning

The sounds in the beginning make me think of someone in the media. Maybe a reporter. Someone who would be good in front of the camera. Then there is chaos, panic. And the end makes me think of far away things, childish things.

6. What’s his/her “edge” (depends on the setting what that means)

Metallica – Carpe Diem Baby

ok… the lyrics scream a “Lost Boys” Vampire to me.

7. What’s his/her motive

The KLF – 3am Eternal

*glares* A song about “the ancients of mu mu”… I refuse to comment on that.

8. Now put it all together while listening to this tune

The Cranberries – Twenty one

There is the a strong contrast between the serene, cold and the passionate, fiery in everything about this character. She’s been something else than she is now. Maybe due a loss. She can’t cope with things. I really like the idea of a media professional, a reporter. Maybe a documentary maker, who stumbled onto something she wasn’t supposed to. Ok, I’m a bit inspired now by the Witch from Left 4 Dead, but maybe she’s seeing the universe in a completely new light. The whole universe.

So…

Tanja is a frail twentyish media student who was filming a documentary about some old iron age grave site with her fiancé when they stumbled upon something that was left on this side of the world from Beyond. Her fiancé got devoured by the fragment, but she survived. Different. Now she’s half-awake, half-aware, walking the line between the real world and the Beyond. Other things from the Beyond are drawn to her, which is the reason she’s a “big bad” for the story. She’s very energetic personality. Charming even. She’s suffered some physical scarring (frostbite-like scarring on her neck and chin) from her encounter, but her force of personality makes up for such minor flaws.

She is something of a “flower person” now, seeming to enjoy her unique perspective on the world in a way that appears almost childlike to an outside viewer, but she will fly into a wild rage if disturbed, full of new claws and fangs and other sharp things of Beyond producing from her flesh. At first, she’ll be easily swayed by the other Beyond entities to do things they want, but will eventually she’ll develop a sense of purpose and try to open up a rift to the Beyond to bring her fiancé back, which is an even worse thing, since it’ll be the end of the world as we know it.

Probably would play the character more to the “childlike harbinger of doom” direction if I were to use her in my campaign. Have her waltz somewhere and disappear, leaving the things that followed her there wreck havoc on things. Also, since she’s quite dualistic character, almost split personality, would probably keep her as a NPC the players can talk to and interact with, until her role in things would be revealed.

The original thought of Lost Boys vampire got tossed aside in the final writeup, more going with the “split sky, part sea, shake world” -direction from the song.

So, there you are with your traditional RPG group, with great ideas about what the campaign will be about – you manage to get the players to do a perfect mix of characters and know how you’ll make the plots personal to the characters. Or the other way around – the players make a great group of characters made with great plot ideas you intermingle with the core thoughts of your campaign. In either case, the Dark Prince and his Troop of interesting NPCs will be essential because one of the characters used to work for him, and the birds are singing as the day is perfect.

And then the character dies. You have spent some 10 game sessions building up things and everything has gone by so well, and now a blank hole is staring at your face. The respectable way is to look at the character sheet, shed a tear and roll another character. If you’re lucky, some of the personalized plots you’ve created are such that they can be salvaged and reused by changing a couple of names and details.

But a lot of things are now lost for good. And if you as a GM had built the game heavily on very personal involvement of the characters, you might be screwed. If you had built the Dark Prince and his Troopers to be the character’s old company, full of his old friends, offing this character turns these NPCs more or less into faceless thugs with maybe some interesting characteristics, but thugs still. The personal attachment is gone.

But hear ye, hear ye. I have seen the light, and I shall preach of the light. In the movie Beerfest, the protagonist group is made of essential individuals, who are personally invested in the plot. In particular, there is a character in the ensemble called Landfill, who is a key part of the team. And he dies in the film.

After his death, there is the typical pause to remember how good man he was, and the characters are at his funeral, wondering what to do. Without Landfill’s unique skills, everything is doomed and a couple of plot points are left dangling.

Insert Gil, a new character to the film, who is the identical twin brother of Landfill. When I mean identical, I am talking how he manages to fill the spot of his now-dead brother. He is described as being the person who taught Landfill everything he knew about beer, and is implied to be as good as, or better than, Landfill in every possible aspect of life. And to top things off, Gil asks to be called Landfill, to honor his brother’s memory. And the movie goes on as if the death had never really happened.

Wait. What?

In Beerfest, the death of the character isn’t essential, which is pretty uncommon thing – normally characters only die, when it is required by the plot to happen. In Beerfest, death just happens. Thus it quite well fits a typical RPG death where the character dies because of the rules of the game, not because of the reasons of the plot. The Risk/Reward thing that’s written in the rules usually require that there is the risk of death for the characters, and it rarely follows the needs of the plot. So, what can we learn from the untimely death of Landfill and how can we abuse it for our own games?

I’m claiming that by taking a look at your plots, you can convert some of them into viral plots that can transcend a single character. Of course, doing it the full Beerfest way and just making a carbon copy of all the plots and abilities on the next characters, will be just silly (Beerfest was a comedy, and comedy is hard). But it doesn’t mean that some of the plots cannot continue living past the character’s lifespan in other people.

One thing this will need is some added transparency between the GM and the players during the game. Once the basics are there – characters are ready and you, as a GM, have an idea where you want to take them, you’ll need to be honest. This means saying to the players that “Ok, looking at your group and your characters. You are all unique snowflakes that are needed to complete the story that will unfold. Should one of you die, these here are the skills, traits and plots that I want to keep in the group. So take a look at them, and think who would work as a backup for them should things go bad.”

And the players should then form minor connections that can serve as full-fledged anchors for the plots should the push come to shove. And if you can’t make the current characters fill the shoes of a dead character, plotwise, make sure their replacement will fill them.

So, best case scenario, when a character dies, his plots will get distributed amongst the other characters, or there will be a pre-visioned Landfill’s brother out there to fill the parts of the position that won’t be distributed amongst the survivors.

This all was done much better in the horror/comedy/monster movie Feast, where the characters are very much nameless stereotypes filling a very specific role in the plot. A role that is exploited very much is that of “The Hero”. In the beginning of the film, The Hero rushes into the bar, explains the situation and how if people listen to him and do as he says, they’ll stay alive. He then immediately gets killed by a monster. After this, The Hero’s wife (now introduced as The Heroine) takes charge and keeps the hope alive amongst the diminishing group of survivors.

When she eventually dies, there is a short transition scene where one of the minor characters of the movie looks at the Heroine’s stuff and finds the conviction she needs to take up the mantle, turning the character into “The Heroine 2″. Bascially, the character had the potential to become the one who keeps the hope alive and takes charge, but doesn’t do it before the need for such a character presents itself. This transition isn’t unbelieveable, and you can imagine the GM telling the players that “Ok, to make this work, there needs to be one character at all times who is willing to take charge. Think in which order this role gets passed on should the current Hero die.”

So, to return to the Dark Prince and his Troop of Named Minions, where the main plot point you want to keep alive might be that character #1 has been a part of the Troop in his past – and thus sees the Troop as something else than just a group of faceless thugs, eventually leading to the question of “are minions evil and is it ok for us to kill them?”. This is such a personal plot that it would normally die along the character, but creating a backup, should things go bad, will be worth it.

A player wants his personal plots to be personal. This means that when you make backups for the plots of the player’s characters, you should make it clear that they are just that, backups. They do not activate until the original character is unable to interact with them. It means that a new character joining the group should have his own personal plots, but the potential to take over the plot of some of the older characters. If in Beerfest, Gil had been previously introduced, he shouldn’t have been a person that didn’t have anything to do with beer. The fact he’s a beer-expert would come to play only when he needs to take the position. Nothing is as annoying to a player to realize that the personal thing he had going for himself was in fact just a huge consipiracy everyone was involved in.

And with character #1 and his backup #2, and their relation with the Dark Prince, One example could be to keep a certain Dark Trooper and #2 apart as long as #1 is alive, because they actually know each other. Should the need to pull #2 as #1s backup arise, just have the Trooper and #2 meet and develope their relationship on a humane level. The players know beforehand that there is a backup to the plot in the meeting, and will keep the characters apart until it is needed.

In summary. When you do a traditional game where your characters’ personal plots are in fact huge parts of the main plot, you should talk with your players and make sure that the vital plots can survive the death of that character. But also to be firm on the fact that the personal plots of the players stay personal as long as the character is alive.