31. Character creation: hx

Let’s talk a little more about Hx today, shall we?

I’ve already given my overall reading of Hx in an earlier post. If you’re interested, you can find it in post #24.

So today I want to focus on Hx’s specific role within Character Creation. So open your books to pages 77-78 and let’s get started.

Every player’s character has Hx, history, with every other player’s character. Your Hx with someone says how well you know them. It’s based on specific moments or episodes in your shared past. Your Hx with them, written on your character sheet, says how well you know them; theirs with you, on their sheet, says how well they know you. It doesn’t say how long you’ve known them, how much you like them, how positive your history together has been, or anything else necessarily, just how well you get them.

If Introductions are about the first point in “Why to Play,” then Hx is about the 2nd point: “Because hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together. Lovers, rivals, friends, enemies, blood and sex—that’s the good shit.”

There is nothing vague or amorphous about Hx. The Hx stat rises and falls through specific moments of play that give you insight into other characters or reveals how poorly you really know them. Those specific moments are also the basis of your starting Hx, just as the text above says. Each player will choose a moment (or several moments) that they want to be a part of their character’s past, and then another player will volunteer their character to share that moment. The two players will then work out the details of that moment in a casual conversation. And what does it all start with? A question, of course. But this question (and all the questions orchestrated by the Hx section) is markedly different from the straightforward questions of the Introductions section. These questions are loaded, by which I mean, they posit a bit of fiction within the question that must then be negotiated by the players.

To take the example from the book, one of the gunlugger’s questions is “Which one of you once left me bleeding, and did nothing for me?” Boom. Suddenly someone has left the gunlugger bleeding out.

And what is the MC supposed to do during this part of the game? “MC, your job is just to oversee and give everybody their turn.” But no, that’s a lie. The text corrects itself after the example, prompting the MC to “pay attention as the characters’ Hx are developing, this is great stuff, and jump in with questions and contributions of your own: ‘hey, when Dune left Keeler bleeding, was that the time that [choosing a name at random] Preen attacked the holding, or a different time?” The MC is offering loaded questions as well. In fact, “questions and contributions” is a great definition of a loaded question—it is a question that simultaneously contributes. (As a side note, in this example, the MC is bringing in the third point of “Why to Play”: “Because the characters are together against a horrific world.” The MC’s questions are not clarifying who characters are as they did in “Introductions”; they are instead bringing elements of the world to bear on these historical moments.)

Because the MC’s questions are a standard part of character creations, it seems disingenuous to say that the MC’s job is “just to oversee.” In this same vein, the section ends with this: “And so on, plus you’ll have good material to work with as you launch into the session proper.” That sentences makes it sound like that “good material” is an unintended bonus, when in fact it is one of the core purposes of Hx. I can only imagine that the dismissive tones of “just” and “plus” are intended to prioritize player interaction over the MC’s role in this part of the game. The characters should be doing the bulk of the fiction-building at this point, and the MC should only butt in when she has something meaningful to add to the fiction being built.

All of these loaded questions are fun and seamless, so the players might not even be aware that capital-P-play has begun and the capital-F-fiction is already being spun. The reason it is so easy to launch into the session proper after character creation is because so much work has already been done before the first pair of dice has been cast. By this point in the game, the players have worked out how to interact with each other, how to negotiate the entering of ideas into the fiction, and the specifics of the tone and setting of the game they are playing. It all comes about so organically that the foundations of the fiction have been laid before the players even know how it got there. Here are these hot characters, bound up with one another in a colorful and living world of chaos and danger with everyone eager to see what will befall them. At the beginning of character creation, you have nothing but paper, pencils, a book, and some dice. At the end you are swimming in rich story possibilities and a world ready to explode. That’s the good shit.

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