What Is a Player Character?

The answer should be straightforward, but there are a few things to unpack.

In a tabletop role-playing game, a player character (PC) is a character run by a player at the table. Often, his character sheet has notes and number values that quantify and establish what a character can do, sometimes how he is likely to react to a situation, and what resources he has at his disposal, expressed as currency and gear.

Seems like a straightforward answer, right? On the surface and strictly at the technical level, it is. But we need to do some unpacking to understand the difference in role between a PC and a non-player character (NPC). PCs should never be bit players, that is, non-player characters.

Think of the movies you used to spend money to see at the theater but now sit at home watching because the cinema experience isn’t as cool as it used to be. You had a handful of characters who drove the story, and then you had a bunch of extras, people who appeared in the background, had no more than a couple lines, and generally did little to push the story unless there was an interaction with a player character that determined the direction of the story. PCs are the stars. NPCs are the extras.

I am going to turn my focus to the Star Trek franchise because the cast of that franchise was an ensemble cast. No one star was supposed to shine brighter than any other cast member. (If you were to talk to William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy, they might tell you they were the stars - and Shatner actually counted lines in the script to make sure he had more than any other cast member.) Other members of the crew whom the main cast passed in the halls on the Enterprise and the red shirts were NPCs. They were background to remind the audience that the main cast had a context with the universe that Gene Roddenberry was building. The nameless crew members are one thing, but I’m going to shift to the red shirts because they are relevant to my point.

The purpose of the red shirt was to demonstrate to the audience the stakes of the episode in some manner. When an away team beamed to a planet’s surface with a lieutenant in a red uniform (in Star Trek: the Original Series, red was security while gold was command - the opposite of the Next Generation because Patrick Stewart looked like crap in gold), you knew that character was going to bite it, and Bones was going to check the prone character’s pulse to look up at Kirk and declare, “He’s dead, Jim.”

When possible, relegate NPC roles strictly to NPCs. Try to avoid using player characters as vehicles for exposition - unless, of course, the player is so dense that he has it coming (as I did recently). It can potentially head off a lot of player-DM trust dynamics down the road. I get that some DMs suffer no fools, but unless you want to recycle players frequently, you might consider some kind of alternative to something that leads the player to conclude that he is just not smart enough to hang with your crew. If the search for new blood appeals to you, though, maybe making the idiot pay for his lack of insight is perfectly appropriate. Your mileage, of course, may vary. Just trying to keep player turnover to a minimum.

There are certain roles that player characters play that NPCs cannot. NPCs have no agency. They serve their purpose and meander off-screen - unless you’re old school and your players recruit hirelings. Even then, hirelings are rarely more than a few statistics and a simple job, like Nodwick, who carries the party’s loot and minds his own business, or the man-at-arms you might hire to supplement your muscle. NPCs theoretically have no agency. They do what they’re told, and that’s pretty much it.

PCs aren’t supplementary muscle. They have agency, and they are as much a part of the cast as the other players at the table. Their decisions should have some impact on success or failure of the party, and their deeds should have some impact on the setting. If your PCs are failing at this consistently, there a number of reasons for this, ranging from the player is an idiot who just isn’t sharp enough to navigate the challenges that matter or the bar is too high, causing the original condition. It is somebody’s fault that certain PCs achieve nothing through 7 levels of play, and it could be a combination of player stupidity and genius-level GM expectation with a bar that is too high for players to reach. If the bar is consistently too high, it’s back to the quest for another player or two because when your players reach that point of futility, they’re going to check out. I’m not part of the trophy generation, and I’m not saying failure should never be a possibility because if it’s not, success has no meaning. But, if failure is a consistent outcome because you are smarter than your players (remember, you set the conditions in your world, so you are automatically smarter than your players), your players who consistently fail will seek out an experience that they have a chance to succeed at, and it might be another table or another activity unrelated to the hobby they invested so much time and money into. And you’ll be hunting for players to replace them before long.

Now, I’m going to talk about the PC used as exposition using Lieutenant Worf from Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation as an example. If it’s been a long time or you’ve never watched that show, find it on a streaming service and watch it. It’s a good show. Throughout that first season, they talked up what a badass Worf was, how strong and highly trained he was in combat, and then every time the crew encountered an alien species in hand-to-hand combat, the alien would kick his ass. The purpose of all this was to communicate to the audience that the alien is a badass, bad enough to kick the ass of the toughest guy on the bridge. Unfortunately, this backfired, at least with me. Until midway through Season 2, I thought Worf was overhyped and brought nothing to his job as a security officer when he replaced Tasha Yar. I viewed him as a paper tiger.

This is an example of using a PC in an expository role, and it closely resembles a technique that a Ravenloft DM I knew in the 90s used a lot, but he used NPCs for this. He described to me that his habit was to introduce an NPC to the party who was the ideal adventurer: smart, agile, strong, and full of stamina. Have him show the players how easily he dispatches opponents when called into battle. Present him as the paragon of heroism. Then, send him as an advanced party on a quest, knowing the party is going to run into him again later. A day or two later, the party comes upon this paragon’s mutilated body with evidence of rending by the beast you want the party to be terrified of. That injects the feeling of dread instantly, and guess what? We didn’t have to sacrifice a PC’s life or the player’s dignity to do it.

So, this is an example of using NPCs for exposition when possible.

So, now that I’ve brought up Yar, this is a good transition to the character’s departure from the series. In the 1980s, when Yar was senselessly murdered by the essence of Evil in the middle of Season 1 of ST:TNG, I thought it was because Denise Crosby thought she’d transition to the silver screen when she co-starred in Pet Sematery. That wasn’t the true story of what happened. Crosby felt as if her character was not given much character development. When she left the show, her role was security, and we heard a lot about how she was a master at countless martial arts forms and was a highly trained warrior, though allegedly not as adept as Worf, and yet she won a couple of battles in her short tenure on the show. One in particular was a personal duel against the queen of some alien race using poisoned gauntlets. She really didn’t have much depth beyond that. She was sort of a feminist ideal possibly at best, as she basically used Data for her personal pleasure in one rather memorable episode. Ironically, Data had more emotional content in what happened off-screen than she had, and I think that was the point. The character was mishandled and not offered much opportunity for meaningful growth.

Players want their characters to grow and flourish, too. And they respond to the world presented to them. If good things occasionally happen to their characters, their outlook will likely be warm, and they’ll appreciate your world. If nothing they do produces a positive outcome, don’t be surprised if the players’ responses are not what you hoped they would grow toward. Not all players buy into your cherished outcomes. On one hand, I invoke “garbage in, garbage out.” If you feed them garbage, your players will grow garbage. If you wanted your player to warm up to the idea of adopting a particular mystical force that keeps busting their chops, they might not warm up to that mystical force. In fact, they will likely avoid it as much as possible. Would you touch a live wire after getting shocked by electricity a couple times?

Not all players are warm to magic, and if a player introduces a character that distrusts it and you want them to trust it, do you think beating them over the head with it is going to get them to trust it?

Players want to interact with the world and grow accordingly, but not all players are on board with adopting the same things you think are cool. Not every player aspires to be Merlin or Gandalf. Some players aspire to be Gawain or Lancelot. I grew up on Conan and Bruce Lee. As a player, I’m just not savvy with the magic. I will find means to grow any way possible short of taking a level in a spellcasting class. I’m just not into thaumaturgy. Encourage growth, but leave that open. Your players aren’t going to grow into your cherished outcome and might not be aspiring to what you want them to. That should be OK.

DMing is a balancing act. I don’t claim to be an expert at it. I have been doing it since 1981 on and off, and I have had whole regions of players tell me in organized play forums I sucked at what I did. Much of what I learned about DMing came from harsh lessons as a plot coordinator for 2a region of the Living Greyhawk campaign. My name is much maligned by players in the US southeast because I did things that I’m pointing out now. I was not fired by anyone in management. They loved me. The player base use my name as a curse word 20 years later because I failed to engender their trust. I was much less a target of hate when I retreated from the game table and stuck to editing scenarios for play at conventions. That’s my comfort zone. The point of it is: don’t my make mistakes as a DM. Invent some of your own.

As you’re developing worlds and challenges for your players, consider whether you want the guy who is a highly-rated chess master and set your bar so high that the dense idiot arrives at the conclusion that he wasn’t meant to succeed in the first place or whether you would be OK with having an idiot at the table who maybe doesn’t pay as much attention to the details that your chessmasters pick up with ease. Not every D&D enthusiast has a genius-level IQ. Some of us are just barely adequate for our daily challenges and are doing good to keep a roof over our head. We would like a little escapism for a few hours a week being PCs with agency and pretend someone thinks we’re cool rather than face the reminder that we’re barely adequate for the intellectual challenges that stump us daily and certainly have no place at the genius DM’s table.