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Paper-Rock-Scissors

Creating Characters

 

Paper-rock-scissors is perhaps one of the most renowned games of all time, and definitely useful for solving those conflicts that don’t really matter. But when it comes to what matters, a well written story, can such a crude concept really help?

 

Though the foundations of this classic game are simple, conceptually, it is very clever. To get a closer understanding of what is meant by implementing the concept, take an example from a number of popular MMORPG’s. (This here stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.) When developers design this sort of game, oftentimes to make the game more enjoyable for several players to play at once, three specific functions are established, based on their roles in a combat: a tank, a healer, and a damage-dealer (DPS). The tank protects his friends, the healer maintains the party’s health, and the DPS brings the fight to the opponent. All three are necessary to fill their given function, and none can take the place of another. A large number of games have been developed this way, because the concept really works.

 

This article isn’t focused on game-design, however. We’re concentrating on writing a good story. How can this principle of paper-rock-scissors make your character creation in writing easier? And how can it make your story more compelling?

 

It is noteworthy that many of the roleplaying games on the market have novels related to them. Partly this is because the games make an excellent platform to market the novels. But from a purely creative perspective, it is because the same mechanics that build a solid game format make a novel easier to write and a story more compelling. Each character should have strengths and weaknesses that make him essential to the story being told. In order to cover your bases, consider what sort of story you are planning to tell, and what challenges the characters must overcome. (This is, essentially, your plot.)

 

With these points in mind, make sure that every character has some of the necessary skills to achieve his objective and lacks others. Even when you have a main character, as you should, make sure there is a reason for her to need the other characters. These weaknesses will humanize your character and make her easier to relate to. Therefore, they make the strengths more incredible in comparison. They also make for easy ways to build your plot.

 

If the characters’ strengths complement each other in combat, those scenes will have their opportunity to show your team like a well-oiled machine. However, combat is not the only time in which your team can shine together. Perhaps the characters complement each other socially, or have a different base of knowledge from one another.

 

The CBS action-drama Scorpion demonstrates the ideas of social and knowledge-based paper-rock-scissors quite well, even acknowledging this in the opening credits, where, Walter O’brien, the protagonist, states: “Now I run a team of geniuses, tackling worldwide threats only we can solve. Toby's our behaviorist. Sylvester's a human calculator. Happy, a mechanical prodigy. Agent Cabe Gallo's our government handler. And Paige? Well, Paige isn't like us. She's normal and translates the world for us while we help her understand her genius son.”

 

Here we see a group of really smart characters relying on someone deemed normal to do what they cannot do. She can handle situations where the other characters would become socially awkward. Each character plays to his strengths, but in the more memorable scenes, is forced to confront his or her unique weaknesses. The story is more believable because of it.

 

How can this simple approach improve upon your own fiction? Once we have shown that a specific character is necessary to overcome certain challenges, we can up our game by removing him from the picture. This does not require anything as drastic as a character death, per say. But for any clever reason, perhaps our character is imprisoned, perhaps he is simply somewhere else—perhaps she has been poisoned into a coma—when our other characters must solve the problem without the necessary character, they have their time to shine. Inversely, when your main character needs to contend with his own weaknesses, whatever the reason, the audience will cheer him on. The result is a gripping page-turner.