Player Types

This post is a part of my upcoming “Game Master Workshops”. it’s rather long (5 pages in all) so I’ll post it in chunks over the next few days…

Here’s a chunk to get you started.

Players : Their Types and what they’re looking for.

Players don’t realise it, but they very often have a “type” of Player they belong to. Each “type” is looking for a different form of role-playing experience. Many Players don’t even know their type, but a good GM can spot a Players “type” and enhance their enjoyment by tweaking his scenario to supply the role-playing situations that they crave.

The Actor
The Actor is the base type of Player, and most people start here and accessorize with various degrees of the types below. This Player is interested in improvisation and acting out the role of a character in an immersive game, writing “their part” in the collaborative work of the Game World they choose to play in. They work out their characters role, spending equal amounts of time starring and in the background, chatting when it’s called for, fighting when it’s called for, and doing whatever seems appropriate for their character. But every Actor’s personality is also made up of varying degrees of one or more of the following Player types…

The Buddy
This Player is involved in the campaign primarily because his friends are. He’d probably rather be at a movie or watching a ballgame, but so long as everyone else is playing he’ll go along for the ride. He usually won’t be deeply involved or interested in the campaign, and wouldn’t cry if it eventually closed down. The GM has two options dealing with the Player. First, he can ignore the Player – the Buddy’s not contributing much to the campaign, after all. This might be the GM’s only option, especially if the Player really has no interest in role-playing. A more rewarding course is to draw the Player (sometimes against his better judgement) into the campaign. Lurking inside every Buddy is another type of Player trying to get out. If you can find whatever the Buddy enjoys and give this to him, he will likely become more interested in your campaign, and might even become a campaign stalwart.

The Builder
This Player is into creating, building, describing, and otherwise adding long-lasting things to the Game World. He wants his character to have an impact on the world – to build institutions, to clean up a city, to change things, to leave a legacy of some sort behind, be it an organization or an object. If your campaign is absolutely static (if Players cannot introduce new technologies, make the campaign setting a better place to live, or substantively change anything though their efforts), the Builder just won’t be happy. He must have some lasting success or he will end up frustrated.

Aknowledgement :

All credit for this section goes to Aaron Allston and his seminal Strikeforce supplement for the Champions RPG that contained the initial version at the base of this section. It is, alas, no longer in print yet still lives on due to the fond memories of many Champions players past and present. These pearls of wisdom have been reconstructed from memory and some of the versions available on the Internet.