When I first sat down to write an RPG a few years ago, I had one vision: play the party from Lord of the Rings. That’s it. Get me Gandalf, get me Sam Gamgee, and get me Aragorn all in the same party right at the start. High-level characters and low-level characters. Old and young. Heroes and normal folk. Batman and Robin. Dynamism.
Most role-playing games tend to purge differences in the name of fairness and balance. Players expect to be roughly equal in importance, power, usefulness, and spotlight. It is, after all, a game, not a book. No one wants to be the hobbits throwing stones that simply bounce off a troll’s hide.
But paraphrasing director Brad Bird who wrote through Dash from The Incredibles:
“If everyone is special, then no one is.”
Ingredients in meals are wildly different from one another. But together they create something much richer than if everything were just different-colored potatoes.
Get me dynamism or its all just potatoes, I say.
In Weakness, We Shine
Weaknesses are rad.
I think this became clearest to me while playing Rimworld. My friend Matt and I could not approach the game more differently.
Matt protected his colonists carefully. I signed mine up for disaster duty on a daily basis.
But it worked. Both of us played the game and had a great time. Regardless of play style, it was the characters themselves that made it interesting for both of us.
Rimworld characters have clear strengths and clear weaknesses. Some are awful at combat. Some are emotionally unstable. Some are heavily dependent on others. Some are brilliant in one area and nearly useless everywhere else.
Those relationships are dynamic and interesting in a way heroic fantasy often is not. It’s a different way to play, and feels more alive to me.
High-Level D&D Is Already Multi-Character
Grumbok, my cussing runt of a goblin, helped me understand the fascinating secret of high-level D&D: it’s multi-character play for pretty much everyone.
By the end of our 20-level campaign my artificer controlled:
- himself
- a Steel Defender
- a small copter sidekick
- and multiple divided copies of himself created through a powerful artifact.
Sometimes as many as 10 tokens on the battlefield at once for just me to control. It was nuts.
Not to mention our entire party had similar expansion.
- mounts
- crew members
- allied NPCs
- adopted characters
- family members turned sidekicks
- hirelings
Campaign role-playing naturally evolves toward multi-character play because you meet and fall in love with characters all along the way.
It was the desire to play more characters that fascinated me.
So why do games hide such relationships in the mid- to late- game, rather than just giving it to people at the start?
People to Save
Probably my favorite part of multi-character role-playing is that it creates people you genuinely need to protect right from the first session.
There is something emotionally different about a battle where the stakes are not merely abstract heroism. If you don’t kill this ugly monkey of a goblin, it’s going to eat your wife, child, student, sibling, or friend. So… yeah.
Perhaps that intensity is too much for some groups. But some of the most emotionally powerful role-playing moments I’ve experienced came from desperately trying to save people. Whether you win or lose… you’re a hero for trying.
People to Lose
There is also something powerful about what happens after loss.
In many traditional role-playing games, when a hero dies, the party simply continues forward. A new character — typically the same power level, just a different flavor of potato — takes their place.
But in Wistblade, high-level and low-level characters coexist from day one. Heroes and workers coexist from day one. Old and young coexist from day one. Characters are good at some things, but not everything.
So when someone dies, the loss is keen.
We lost our doctor.
Our blacksmith.
Our knight.
No one simply “takes their place.”
The House must carry on. Their passing isn’t the end of the tale. It’s just part of it, usually, a heroic part.
If you lose a brother because of a string of horrible dice rolls in the first session, you don’t forget that you buried your brother that day. You barely even knew who he was yet — but your surviving character did.
And from that point on, how you play the survivors becomes shaped largely by the one who was lost.
The death of a hero or innocent is no longer merely a mechanical inconvenience.
It becomes the story’s soul.
In my opinion, the Lord of the Rings works so entirely because it has people to save and people to lose integrated into the party from the start.
It’s not about heroes.
It’s about fellowship.