Creating detailed characters for a Good Society one-shot

In my last post, I talked about what I will do differently when I run Good Society as a one-shot next, and I created a playset based on the character sheets, desires and relationships.

It didn’t change the game, but put everything onto a single sheet of A4 for easier reading – apart from the relationship cards, which would still be exchanged during setup.

But why not go further?

Making it more trad

Why, in a convention one-shot of Good Society, should I expect players to create their characters at all? 

After all, I didn’t roll up characters for the other games at Furnace—Traveller, 7th Sea and Cepheus Universal. I was given a character with names and backgrounds complete.

Yes, they were all trad games and have a different playstyle from Good Society. But I think there’s an advantage in giving players fully developed characters rather than expecting them to come up with something coherent in under 30 minutes.

Going awry

I find it easy to go awry when collaboratively creating characters for story games like Good Society (or Hillfolk or Fiasco). It’s particularly easy if you aren’t experienced at the game. And I’m not – I like to play and run a good range of games, but as a result, I’m not an expert at any of them.

As a result, I find it’s a big ask to facilitate the creation of a coherent set of characters in under 30 minutes for a convention game. (Vee Hendro allows 22 minutes in her video on running Good Society at conventions. But she wrote the game.)

Too eager to please

And because I’m bad at saying “no” to player suggestions, characters can sometimes end up a little “off”. And as a result, we can end up with ideas that don’t feel very Jane Austen-y. 

Now, that usually doesn’t matter. We still have great games, but the purist in me wants to play a Jane Austen-y game (even if we are ignoring the more awful views of that time).

I’m sure that’s my lack of experience, along with not wanting to upset anyone.

Luckily, this didn’t happen at Furnace this year, but I can think of games of Hillfolk where player choices (and my lack of pushback) meant we stuttered in places.

Making it more freeform-y

So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve taken the Wealth and Fortune playset (page 196) and fleshed out the characters and relationships.

I’ve given the characters names and genders. I’ve not touched the connections – we can still do that as part of setup at the start of play.

The character sheets look much more like freeform characters now. Mostly backstory, with just a little room for mechanics. The character sheets are also clearer and simpler, as I cut plenty of text that, once I’d made a decision, wasn’t needed. I can’t say I’m displeased with this.

Harder than I expected

But it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was a lot harder than I expected.

In Jane Austen-land, women don’t have as many rights as men. They rarely own property, and in the stories, the female characters’ fate is often entirely in the hands of menfolk. (Now I know in a game things can be different, but I’m aiming for a traditional Jane Austen vibe. It’ll go crazy enough as soon as players are involved—I don’t want it to start crazy.)

I started with the five-player set: Heir, Cornerstone, Dependant, Tutor, and the New Arrival. (I ignored the suggested spare character.)

Traditionally, the Heir ought to be male and the Tutor female. The others were less clear-cut, but the relationships (in love, cousins, previous romance, patron and so on) made it harder to create coherent backstories than I expected.

For example, the Tutor has a patron, but that is unlikely to be the Cornerstone or the Dependent (who both have money problems, so are unlikely to be able to sponsor her) or the New Arrival (unless the Tutor is also a new arrival, but that has complications elsewhere), which leaves the Heir as the Tutor’s patron.

(That assumes I stick to standard Jane Austen heterosexual genre tropes. I don’t have to, of course, but as I’ve said, I want to create Austen-compatible characters.)

I wanted roughly equal male/female characters, and played around with combinations for a while until I realised I needed a relationship map. So I created one:

I found this really helpful – I referred to it constantly. The spurs to unnamed characters (eg to the unnamed uncles) are for minor characters. We will add those by hand at the table.

(In a regular game of Good Society, where you have a full session zero to thrash this sort of thing out, I don’t think it’s a problem. But in a convention one-shot, time is pressing.)

Changes for four players

Changing to four players should be easy, right? Just drop a female character (so we have two male and two female characters) and shuffle the relationships to fill the gaps.

But it wasn’t that easy. If I dropped the New Arrival and reshuffled the relationships, that would make the Heir and Cornerstone (both males) old flames. That’s fine for a queer-game, but it doesn’t work for my Austen-compatible game.

(And if I drop the Tutor, then the Dependent and the Heir become cousins, which changes the dynamic of the inheritance desire. And dropping the Dependent means the Tutor and the Cornerstone are publicly engaged, which would need explaining, given that Cornerstone’s family has money problems and the Tutor is a, well, tutor.)

So I dropped the New Arrival and looked for a completely different relationship (rivals).

Here’s the four-player relationship map:

One-shot backstory madness

Thinking all this through has revealed how hard it is to create a coherent backstory in under 30 minutes for a one-shot. 

I found it interesting that a notionally very flexible playset turned out to be actually fairly restrictive in trying to get it to make sense.

Anyway, now I have a set of characters I’m happy with, and I’ve uploaded them here if you want to see what I’ve done.

Is this an improvement?

Well, that’s a good question, and I don’t have enough experience to tell at this stage.

Am I taking too much away from the players? I’m not touching their connections, so they will have some input. But is that enough? I won’t know until I try it.

And will players mind? I doubt it – pregens are common in convention games.

(I can apply the same logic to Hillfolk. Creating characters is fun, but there’s rarely enough time at con game to do it justice, and if the players aren’t firing on all cylinders, the result can be a little weak. So maybe I should create the characters myself and then concentrate on play?)

What have I learned?

I like ttrpgs where the players drive action. I want to see dramatic scenes where players are trying to outwit and complicate their fellow players. So games like Good Society and Hillfolk.

However, a weakness of storygames like these is that creating characters in a rush can be unsatisfying.

The games are supremely flexible, and with enough time, you can really dive into the relationships and background and create solid characters. But at a convention, I don’t have time. As much fun as character creation in these games is, there’s a lot to be said for creating a solid set of characters for players just to pick up and play.

But of course, I’ve yet to try it…

(And if you want to try them yourself, you can download them here.)