The Myth and the Mystery

The Myth and the Mystery

Ian Price

I haven’t been roleplaying enough lately. This bothers me, because the last few characters I’ve played have lacked that vital spark that really makes the experience worthwhile. There is no formula for this spark, since it is something unconscious, and perhaps deep enough to be associated with the soul. In good art, the cause and effect of the feeling are indeterminate, indistinguishable, and interchangeable, especially from the artist’s point of view. As roleplayers, we must work on ourselves as both artists and audience, increasing the interdependence of what we do and how it makes us feel.

Kenneth Burke, an esteemed scholar of human communication, said that humans are, among other things, “inventors of the negative.” By defining things, we also define what they are not. In nature, he says, a rock just is; but by naming it “rock,” humans make a distinction from “dirt,” and “tree,” and “sky,” and everything else. Without human perception, these distinctions have no meaning assigned to them. According to Burke, the language we use creates “terministic screens” (that is, screens made by our terms), with which we limit what we can know. “Any reflection of reality is a deflection of another reality.”

Now you’re all probably asking, “What’s this mean to roleplayers?” First, it means what it says, which is really pretty obvious. Second, it also means that making choices and defining our characters limits us. This is one problem I have had with my recent characters. The usual methods for figuring out how to play a character, such as the game statistics and back-story; I found myself coming to too fine a point. There was no room for development, because I had reduced my character to the basics in the very act of trying to flesh her out.

Knowing “everything there is to know” about a character, therefore, is my problem. To generalize: it’s not desirable to know everything about the character you will play. What you should do is find out what there is to learn. Good stories have sub-plots, because life is made up of many narratives. Good characters have rich lives; they don’t have one background story, they have several, a plethora even. The first step to find the spark is not to snuff it out with a narrow definition.

Not destroying something is different from creating it. What, therefore, is this spark we seek to create? It is partly a feeling of satisfaction, though that feeling may be separable from the thing itself. It may also be integral, as our main sign that we have it right; no matter what other criteria we match, without satisfaction they are meaningless. Satisfaction will be our primary benchmark, then.

The spark happens at certain moments more than others. One kind of moment that sees it often is a nexus. Nexuses are where things come together. Two characters get to know each other well. A character discovers a crucial secret about her past. The party finally confronts their worst nemeses. There are two parts to a nexus: the journey, and the destination. The journey is, of course, all the things that lead to the meeting. The destination is the point where the characters actually meet.

A good journey takes time. The beginning and the middle of a story are in here. In developing the right way to write back-story, we find here that the beginning of the story is what is appropriate for these stories, and sometimes part of the middle. Long journeys often have their own nexuses, crossroads where the story takes a turn. Each of these smaller nexuses is characterized by its own lead-in (the character finds a clue on the killer’s body, and pursues it), and its own climax (the clue leads to a dark room in a bar, where the character meets the man who hired his mother’s killer).

At the destination, or climax, there is a point of meeting. This means that the character has something in common with the world, or another character, or the story, or whatever he is meeting. The guy meeting his mother’s killer discovers that they actually had the same mother. The characters who get to know each other now share each others’ stories. The party and their nemeses share an enmity, probably created by a complex web of conflicting interests. Conflict, in itself, requires something in common: caring about the same thing, but desiring different outcomes. In a common example, two combatants both care about the life or death of each other, but each wants a different life and a different death to result.

These elements begin to form the basis of what Carl Jung calls “Archetypes,” and Claude Lévi-Strauss calls “mythemes.” Today, the gestalt understanding of these concepts is that when certain narratives become culturally ingrained, they take on larger than life stature. The original argument for these structures says that there is some element to them which transcends culture; the structure for a heroic story appears in disparate cultures in nearly identical formats, for instance. A hero rises from lowly origins, acquires power somehow which raises him above the original place, and overcomes hardships to achieve some better end. The low origins, the hardships, the power to overcome them, and the better end are common nexuses of the heroic archetype. Many other archetypes exist also, with their own common elements.

For our roleplaying characters, these archetypes can also create new nexuses, where the character’s story touches the archetype’s pattern. Touching on the archetype of a hero, or a damsel in distress, or a dragon-slayer, or a great wizard, and so on is a special way to find the spark. Unlike a climactic point in the story itself, this spark comes from outside the story and touches the characters in it with greatness. Instead of a line between the character and something else in the story, this kind of connection is a triangle: character to story element, and both of them to the archetype. This kind of nexus is more powerful than the other kind, and should be used sparingly. Too many archetypes makes for a messy story.

All this talk of nexuses and archetypes boils down to one principle: myth. Mythic elements — that is, internal and transcendent connections‑make a story stronger, and thus make a character stronger. In order to make these connections, a well-designed character should have what are commonly known as “story hooks.” These are unresolved elements of the character’s narratives, which may or may not be active. Enemies are a narrative element that may be active; the character and/or the enemies may be actively pursuing each other. This kind of story hook is wielded consciously by the player as well as the storyteller, as both try to catch it on something and see where it takes them. They may also be “cold” enemies, who would kill each other if they ever met, but don’t go looking for each other. The latter kind of enemy is a passive story hook. Other story elements that pass the character in the right direction may catch on to it, and lead the character to an interesting meeting. This meeting is the nexus, and all the conflict on a story level takes place in these moments.

So, how else can the spark be found? I ought to present at least two ways, after all, so as not to encourage snuffing it out. The mystery I mention in the title is more than not over-defining the character; it is, in fact, the second way I have found to create that spark. A sense of the mysterious is valuable in roleplaying any character, no matter how straightforward. Your character may have no secrets at all and be honest to a fault, but if there are no mysteries, playing her will be boring.

Mysteries bear definitions poorly, compared to myths. Myths shine out; they have their own structure and their own light. Mysteries are made of darkness, shadow; no substance, and when light is shone on them, they disappear. Examples will be hard to come by, therefore, and will only skirt the edges of the things themselves. Bear with me, dear readers, and try to look into the darkness I hint and nod at, without naming directly.

Characters (like real people) don’t know everything. More importantly, they don’t know everything they want to know. Some of the really important things in this category are mysteries. Mystery is often found in the force that pulls on the story hooks, moving the characters through their myths. The desire to know is more a part of the mystery than the knowledge or lack of it in itself. The orphan wants to know why his mother was killed. The questioner wants to know about the other character. Enemies want to find advantages over each other, and find that elusive satisfaction that waits at the end of their conflict.

At the end of a conflict, before that end is reached, there lies another part of the mystery. Uncertainty. The orphan can’t know what the reasons for his mother’s death will mean to him; will they mean revenge, closure, despair? The questioner can’t know what will be sparked by knowing the other character deeply; what plot hooks between the two may catch, what hooks on one of them that have already been caught up may drag the other along for the ride? The enemies can’t know who will win, or what that victory will cost. Even if circumstances provide a good clue to these resolutions, they remain uncertain to some degree in all cases.

That uncertainty is another bracket around mystery, opposed to desire. The characters desire to know, to pull back the mystery. Uncertainty thwarts them. Between these two brackets, we find the character knowledge axis of mystery. The penumbra, the edge of the shadow, is that which your character doesn’t know but she wants to, and she can. In the center, the true shadow, is what your character can’t know until the climax. This is also the most deeply and hotly desired information. This tension helps create the mystery.

Parallel to the character knowledge axis, let us define a player knowledge axis. This is close, and has the same brackets. Some storytellers try to keep the information in the rulebooks in the uncertain part of this axis, but to do this by preventing the players from reading the books in impractical. It is better to change the rules and setting, occasionally. If everything is changed, why use the books? For some, that is a viable option. For the rest of us, who want to take advantage of printed rules and setting material, occasional changes provide the required uncertainty in a much more efficient fashion. The players should be led to desire to know the conclusion of their characters’ various narratives more hotly than anything in the rulebooks in any case. This is not to say that the player wants the same things as the character all the time. One of the players in a World of Darkness game I’m running now wants his character to die so he can play a ghost, though the character very much doesn’t want that. I’m creating mystery for him by not letting him know when the character will die.

A perpendicular set of parallel axes is needed to balance this analogy, so I will provide them to assist in understanding mystery and how to create it for roleplaying characters. The new pair involves the real time axis and the game time axis. At the two ends of these axes, we find the concepts of pace and scope. Pace is how quickly mysteries are revealed, while scope is the totality there exists to reveal. Balance along these axes depends on the relationship of pace and scope; if there is not a directly proportionate correlation, the mystery will be ruined.

In real time, it’s important to take into account how often the game meets. Some revelations may have to come in between sessions for monthly games, or those even less frequent. Weekly games can probably survive with no outside revelations. Games that meet less than monthly or more than weekly probably have other problems to worry about, such as player disinterest due to forgetfulness or burnout. This is also an aspect of pace; less than once a month is too little exposure to keep up the desire on the player axis, while more than once a week is too much, eating up the scope of any mystery with no time to savor it.

Within the game, how quickly the characters move through their mysteries makes up the other axis. A good story depends on treating each mystery fully, not rushing through too fast, but also not letting it drag. If it drags, the story hooks fall out, and the characters (as well as the players) lose interest. If it rushes, the resolution seems forced, and the characters (and players) may rightly feel that they haven’t reached a real resolution. Pace should be fairly consistent, revealing enough of any given story mystery at once that it takes a similar amount of time to complete each one, regardless of scope. Only between mysteries of very tiny and truly huge scope should there be noticeable differences in the time taken to resolve them.

Mystery, then, is something which takes time to reveal itself. It is something not merely unknown, but uncertain, and it is something about which knowledge and certainty are hotly desired. Mystery fills in the rest of a story where the shining lampposts of myth do not cast their beams. In between each climax, the journey goes through mystery. Stories possessing a sense of this, and characters created with this in mind, are much more likely to be satisfying. Once again, though: satisfaction is the primary benchmark. Mystery and myth are two guidelines that serve books, movies, television, and other forms of drama well, so they should work well in roleplaying just as well. The service is to provide satisfaction. If you aren’t having a problem finding artistic satisfaction with your characters and games, good! You don’t need my ramblings. If you are, then try some things to add myth and mystery. I believe you’ll like what you find.

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