Charm Person and Other Enchantments    

Charming and enchantment spells are a key part of the bard class.  I'd like to talk about some of the problems with these abilities, and how they can be used well in a game.  In my past posts, I've talked a bit about enchantment, in combination with the trope of "beautiful woman enchants male protagonist."  There are several places that this ability comes up in the D&D rules, and I'll use Pathfinder to draw attention to some examples.

The Charm cleric domain is the most obviously tropey use of this ability.  It's description in the SRD reads:  "You can baffle and befuddle foes with a touch or a smile, and your beauty and grace are divine."  This is a very gendered description, evocative of many examples in genre literature of a woman's beauty entrancing a man.  Two subdomains of Charm are similarly gendered:  Love and Lust.  One might expect that Lust would be masculine, but the spells that it grants:  touch of idiocy and confusion, speak directly to the stereotype of men who are rendered confused and stupid by predatory, sexual women.

If charm is the feminine use of enchantment, the masculine use is hypnotism.  In the Captivation subdomain, hypnotism replaces charm person, and Entrancing Aura replaces the more feminine power of Charming Smile.  Hypnotists, in genre literature, are almost always men and they do not rely on sexual wiles to entrance people, but rather something akin to science, along with a strength of will that overpowers simple minds.

Throughout the many supplements and manuals of D&D, this gender divide in enchantment is pervasive, tracing back to the rules for Comeliness in First Edition (AD&D) that allowed particularly beautiful women to charm men.

The feminine forms of charm generally have the following qualities:

• They are often tied in some way to the beauty of the charmer, either their physical appearance or the beauty of their voice.
• They are generally persuasive, rather than controlling.  The target of these enchantments is aware of what they are doing, and believes that they are doing it of their own free will.

These include:

• The Charm, Love, and Lust domains.
• The charm subschool of Enchantment.
• Spells such as charm person and suggestion.

The masculine forms of charm generally have the following qualities:

• They are often tied to the strength of will of the charmer, either through holding and maintaining eye contact or through a hypnotic visual or sonic pattern.
• They are generally controlling, rather than persuasive.  The target of these enchantments is unaware of the actions that they are taking, and may not remember taking them.

These include:

• The Captivation domain.
• The compulsion subschool of Enchantment.
• Spells such as hypnosis and hold person.

Monsters that use enchantment are also overwhelmingly female.  More on that in a later post.

I feel that these sorts of rules lead to play and stories that recreate some of the harmful and gendered tropes found in fantasy literature.  Although I haven't gotten up to addressing the spell system, it seemed like a good idea to talk about this here, because bards use these sort of abilities all the time.  One way to break up this gender divide is to focus on tropes for charm that are gender neutral, or to deliberately gender-swap existing tropes.

 

How Do These Abilities Fit in the Story?

The first question that I feel needs to be asked is: how do we anticipate a protagonist, rather than an antagonist, using these abilities?  Here are some examples of ways that charm/compulsion abilities are famously used:

The Jedi Mind Trick:  "These aren't the droids you're looking for."  This is compulsion through mental strength, generally used by the heroes to evade capture.  It only works on the "weak willed."  As a trope, this type of charm is masculine in nature, but we can find examples of it being used by non-male characters (Rey in The Force Awakens, for example).

The Natural Charmer:  This is a subtle power, that may or may not be supernatural. Think Moist von Lipwig from Going Postal.  Generally an unconscious effect, it causes others to like the person more than they usually would.  This is a very widely used trope and is generally gender neutral.

The Seducer/Seductress:  Use of this ability may not be directly sexual in nature, but it is almost always sexually-charged.  Female examples abound, but Black Widow from The Avengers is one who comes to mind.  Although I haven't seen it, Eliot Spencer, from the show Leverage, is a apparently good male example of this (yes, I will see it, I just haven't had time yet!). 

The "Who, Me?" Trick:  Immortalized by Tasslehoff Burrfoot in the Dragonlance series, this protagonist is so clearly good and innocent that they can regularly get away with murder without being questioned.  This trope is usually associated with female characters, particularly young girls.  Gender is so strongly associated with that trope that when I read the books when I was young, I thought that Tasslehoff must be a girl in disguise!  (And, interestingly, it turned out that it was the player of the original character that was female.)

Note that all of these are abilities that mislead a (usually minor) character into doing something that is not harmful for them, but will help the protagonists.  The most problematic is the seducer/seductress, but it is still a good fit for some games, if handled well.  Most of these abilities require the person who is being charmed to understand the language of the charmer, and the charmed person is understood to be a human who normally has free agency.  In comparison, abilities that are more dominating than these are usually only used by antagonists, or, if they are used by the heroes, it is against creatures that are understood to not have free agency.

How Can the Rules Support This Use?

The structure of the rules should meet the following goals:

• Charm spells and abilities should be tools in the same way that a sword is a tool, and should be able to be used in diverse styles.
• Characters should not be forced to comply with tropes in order to make use of charm spells and abilities.
• Abilities should be written from the perspective of the protagonists' use first, and the NPCs' use second.  Evil uses of charm abilities should be expressed as evil.

The four examples of charm types in the section above are generally used by very different characters.  You wouldn't necessarily expect the same sort of person to use more than one of these.  And yet the same character who makes use of charm-type abilities (a bard or an enchanter, for example), is likely to have access to all four, even when three of them aren't a great fit.  So another way that the rules can help is to be agnostic as to which flavor of charm ability is being used.  A spell such as charm person will have a different flavor depending on how the player wants to roleplay their use of the spell.

Finally, the rules can help is to set forth specific categories of actions that a charmer can persuade their target to do.  The trick here is to set limits that aid in story, while still allowing the players to be creative.  In addition, setting forth such categories can keep these abilities from being abused, in the sense that they can easily be used for rape or torture if no such limits are set.  The Pathfinder rules already take steps in both of these directions.  The command spell now includes a list of things that can be ordered.  And the charm person spell will not allow the target to do something obviously self-harmful, and requires an additional die roll if it is the sort of thing they would not normally do.  I believe the former goes a bit too far, while the latter does not quite go far enough, but together they encompass a range of restriction that does the job.  More details when we get to spells and magic!

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Talking about Character Class    

Let's take a break from heritage and race for a bit, and talk about class.  Class is another word that has a very different meaning in D&D than it typically does in the real world!  (It is hard for me to imagine being someone who has never been exposed to roleplaying games, but I can only wonder what such a person might think about our fantasy game where "race" and "class" are the way you describe your character.)  Character class serves the purpose of giving each character a specific set of skills and a role on the team.  Some versions of D&D, notably Fourth Edition, focus more on the role that your character serves from a tactics point of view.  Some versions are more concerned with the skills that your character has, such as fighting, spellcasting, healing, and finding traps.  Almost all fantasy RPGs attempt to "balance" classes, so let's first talk about what that means.

Balance is an elusive concept.  We can talk about mathematical balance:  If you and I have identical characters, but your character has much higher bonuses on their die rolls than I do, then you might say that our characters are imbalanced.  Of course, in all the systems that have individual random ability score generation, this is likely to be the case.  We can talk about balance in terms of challenge.  One of the guiding principles of D&D is that adventures should be dangerous and challenging, but that the players should often succeed in their goals.  Creating and maintaining that level of challenge, over the course of an epic tale, is probably the cornerstone of D&D's game design.  If I have a 4th level character for whom 4th level adventures are no longer challenging at all, then that character is not well-balanced.  Lastly, we can talk about balance in terms of "spotlight" time.  In early editions of D&D, my 1st level magic user had one spell.  When I cast it, I was (briefly) a rock star.  Once it was cast, however, it was gone for the day.  I was pretty much useless for the rest of the adventure.  In the meantime, the fighters and thieves were still busy doing things, since their abilities could be reused as often as they'd like.  That's one way to measure a "spotlight" time imbalance.

However, the way that it often gets measured is:  can my fighter beat up your wizard?  To me, this is the least interesting way of talking about character balance.  It requires a game designer to ignore what actually will happen in a typical fantasy game (the players working together to defeat a common foe), and design for a scenario that does nothing to contribute to the story (two players, on a desolate plain, a short distance apart, try to kill each other with all of the resources they have).

Instead, my rules of character balance are:

• Does every character have a variety of interesting choices to make during the course of a typical adventure?
• Are characters different enough that each has a relatively unique role to play, or are they interchangeable?
• Will a team of characters of a given level be challenged, but often successful, in a typical adventure of that same level?

Lessons Learned from Skills & Powers

Player's Option:  Skills & Powers was a rules supplement for Second Edition D&D.  It appeared about halfway between the release dates of Second Edition (in 1989) and Third Edition (in 2000).  The changes to the rules were fairly simple, but so impactful that it was almost like a "2.5 Edition" for D&D.  Second Edition had allowed for very little customization of character classes.  You could take a kit, which gave you a few bonuses and maybe a special ability.  Kits were directly tied to particular classes.  So you randomly rolled ability scores, chose a race, a class, and a kit, and that was pretty much it.  Skills & Powers not only introduced a point-buy system for ability scores, it also allowed you to use the same sort of system to custom build races and classes.  Finally, it allowed you to customize ability scores so that you could tailor the bonuses to optimize your character.  For example, you could lower the "Endurance" part of your Strength score (carrying heavy things over long distances), in order to increase the "Muscle" part of your Strength score (bonuses to hit and damage with weapons).  You could reduce bonuses that were hardly ever used in the game (such as System Shock), and increase bonuses that were used constantly (such as Hit Points).

Some players loved Skills & Powers.  It let them build and customize their characters outside of the rigid class system.  Some players felt that Skills & Powers was too unbalanced.  It allowed players to make characters who were significantly stronger than the original Second Edition system had allowed.  D&D Third Edition attempted to strike a balance between rigid classes and unlimited character customization, while still maintaining "balance" between the classes.  What I will try to do, in the next few posts, is set out a way to be even more flexible, without drowning the player in class archetypes and options.

 

A Note About Balance and Player Restraint

One issue that often arises when we talk about system balance is: do we really need system balance at all, so long as we have "good" players?  This approach says that our problems with game balance are due to a certain kind of player, a "munchkin," who "min-maxes" the system in order to optimize their character.  They are "roll-players" and not "role-players" because they are only interested in dice rolling and combat and winning and magic items, and are not interested in making a story and an interesting character.  They are the "Mary Sue" of their fantasy game, good at everything, with no real flaws, other than perhaps a tendency to be a loner and not work well with others (Charisma is their dump stat).  And they don't need to work well with others, because they can already do everything themselves.  What we need, it is argued, are"good" players who are going to make characters that are interesting first, and competent second.  Who realize that the system can be abused, and choose not to abuse it.

I have always been adamantly opposed to this type of thinking.  First of all, it is often used as an excuse for poor game design.  And second, it demonizes people who want to play the dice rolling game that underlies the storytelling game, by telling them that they cannot do both.  If they are interested in optimizing game mechanics, they must not be interested in the story or in roleplaying or in teamwork. 

On the other side of things, there are people who revel in the "munchkin" label, who enjoy being "better" at the game than anyone else, and who place no value on whether the other players are having fun or whether an interesting story is being told.  This, to me, is just as bad.  It devalues people who enjoy story and roleplaying, telling them that they are avoiding the complex rules system because they are not capable of understanding it.  Again, it places a false dichotomy between story and game.

It will not come as a huge surprise that these differing points of view are often described as gendered.  I cannot count the number of people I have spoken with who believe that women like story and roleplaying, but don't like math and combat.  Whereas men like competition and rules mechanics, but aren't as good at emotionally evocative storytelling.  This is all bullshit gender essentialism.  And, just as it supports a view of gender that is binary and inflexible, it also supports a view of gaming that is binary and inflexible.  You can have both good storytelling and good system mechanics.  Well written game design requires it.

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Nature as Identity    

There are a lot of ways to define it, but in this post I'm using the word "identity" to mean the sum of all the things that you were born with that help define who you are.  Players often prefer to play characters who share their own identity (their own gender and sexuality, for example), but may also want to roleplay characters with identities that are different from theirs.  Because identities are things we have in the real world, how a fantasy roleplaying game treats different identities can be very important.  By making a judgment about an identity within the fiction of the game world, or within the rules of the game, we are also judging players who have that identity and potentially making them feel unwelcome at the table.

I'll use gender identity as an example.  In the old days of early Dungeons & Dragons, gender was a limiting factor for adventurers.  If you were female, you had handicaps (in physical strength, for example), as compared to male characters, which were the assumed default.  The rules tell players of the game: "In the fantasy stories we want to tell, gender matters, and women are weaker than men, and are only rarely fighting adventurers."  At some point in time, the story goals changed.  Writers of Dungeons & Dragons wrote rules for "comeliness," for example, that allowed particularly beautiful women to magically charm male characters.  These rules tell players of the game:  "In the fantasy stories we want to tell, gender matters, and women have advantages based on their appearance, and those advantages relate to their sexual power over men."  Regardless of how you think about these rules, which are clearly sexist, you can see the effect that fantasy stories have:  those two genres of fantasy ("male-dominated fantasy world with few women of power" and "fantasy world where women's power is based primarily on their sexuality and attractiveness to men") are very well-represented, and the gender rules were created in order to tell stories that fit neatly into those genres.

In most modern fantasy games, there are no (or very few) rules about gender.  This tends to tell the players of the game:  "In the fantasy stories we want to tell, gender does not matter."  The presence of gendered characters in the source material and art, and how they are presented, is the only guide that the players have as to what sort of stories might be told in the game.  Personally, I like this approach.  But as a writer, I want to be very aware that the absence of rules makes the fiction and detail that I add to characters that much more important.

Certain facets of identity are probably easier to handle in this way than others.  Gender can be made visible through writing and art, as can many aspects of physical appearance, such as skin color.  Other, facets of identity may need direct support in the rules.  For example, how do the rules of a fantasy game support a story about a character with a disability?  These are harder questions that may be best approached with several different solutions that players can choose from.  The important goals for me are:  don't write a set of rules that excludes a real life identity from the story, and don't let the absence of rules make a real life identity invisible.

Nurture as Heritage

Heritage, as I'm using the word in this post, is everything about how a person was raised, what they were taught, who their family is, and the events of their childhood.  I feel that these things are integral to storytelling in a fantasy roleplaying game.  I may not know everything about every character's past, but for a character not to have a past at all makes them appear flat and uninteresting.  So much of storytelling is about human interaction, and so much of human interaction is based on differences and similarities in how we were brought up.  Heritage is rich with possibilities for story.

In my house rules, heritage takes the place of race.  "Human," by contrast, is something that describes your identity.  There are no explicit rules for it.  I don't draw a line between humans over here and elves over there.  But there are rules for heritage, which grants skills and abilities just as race does in Pathfinder.  I try to avoid having heritage affect attributes (such as Strength and Intelligence), for a few reasons.  First, those things seem more tied to identity than heritage (to me).  Second, the practical effect of racial bonuses and penalties to attributes is fairly small in the Pathfinder rules.  Most bonuses total out to an overall +2, which, when you can choose where to place your ability scores, is of little effect other than a small increase in the starting cap.  Class is a much higher predictor of any given attribute than race is, as players will tend to maximize the attributes that they need for their class's abilities.  And by the time a character is level 8, they will likely have been able to compensate for any gain or loss of an attribute due to their starting choices.

Let's look at elves to see what an example heritage might look like:

Elven Heritage Traits

• Languages:  Common and Elven
• Nocturnal:  low-light vision
• Wilderness Dwellers:  +2 Perception, +2 Knowledge (nature)
• Arcane Magic Users:  +2 Spellcraft

Now, my elves may not be the same as your elves, which is fine.  There are a lot of different stories about elves!  But each of these things tells something about how a character with elven heritage grew up.  They probably lived in the wilds, far from cities.  They had to be relatively self-sufficient, but probably had to also trade to get things they needed.  Thus, they know the Common trading tongue, but at home they probably only spoke Elven.  They were not farmers, but rather hunters and gatherers, venturing out at night and resting during the day.  They were taught from an early age to be watchful for predators and recognize poisonous plants.  This potentially harsh life was made easier by the benefit of magic: at least one person in the family was probably an arcane spellcaster, if not more than one.  The words of magic would have been a familiar sound to this character as they grew up.  Even if they did not study magic themselves, they are familiar with how it works.

Imagine this character in a bustling city marketplace, during the day!  Their heritage gives the player an idea of how they might roleplay the character and what they might do in the story.

Magical Birthrights

Because this is a fantasy roleplaying game, we need to look more closely at the circumstances of our character's birth.  What if they are a fairy princess?  What if they are a seventh son of a seventh son?  What if they have bat wings?  What if they are a giant?  All of these things make for great fantasy stories, and so we should think about how to support them with the rules of the game.

Here are the ground rules I use for this broad category, which I've called birthrights.  First, birthrights are not heritage.  If your character were snatched from the cradle as a child and raised by wolves, they would still retain the same birthright, but they would likely have an entirely different heritage.  (Yes, "raised by wolves" is a heritage that I will cover in a future post.)  But second, birthrights are not identity.  It is true that a character born with a birthright cannot change it, but birthrights should be seen as a gift and a responsibility.  One that a character has not earned, despite the name, but one which they must live up to in some way.  Some birthrights might even be the result of a curse (although they are all advantageous for an adventurer.)  Third, birthrights are magical or supernatural in some way.

Not all characters need to have birthrights.  And for those that have them, they may or may not be particularly important to the story.  So the rules for birthrights can be divided up into feats, which can be taken by any character class, but which will have a relatively small effect, and class abilities, which are reserved for certain classes (such as bloodlines for sorcerers), and will have a large effect on what the character is able to do.

Certain birthrights will be suggested as matching up well with certain heritages.  However, a character might have been adopted into a heritage, or have a distinct and unusual birthright for some other reason, so all birthrights should be available regardless of the heritage you choose.  Providing an explanation for these will likely result in some interesting back story for your character!

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