Matrix Games are about human stories. As such they conform to the basic conventions of story telling. The first of which is that stories are about a cast of characters. Plays start out with a list of who the characters are and a brief description of each. Who the characters are and how they are related to one another suggests a lot of possible actions. Good characters go a long way towards making a good story. So in effect characters are a part of the matrix of the game. The information about them not only suggests ideas for action but also tells a lot about the world they are in. They are just another part of the cloud of information that makes up the total matrix of the game. Role play games have long used characters to pull stories together. Unfortunately the ways they use them are not so useful for stories other than hack and slash ones. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons established a format for describing characters that became universal - a bell curve number for statistics that might have application in combat and magic casting. So players know who is strong, smart, pretty and healthy, but they don't know anything about the character personally. Traveller added the idea of skills, that flesh out what a person knows a bit more. But people are not just an accumulation of skills. It would be like saying that Napoleon is best described by looking at how short he was! Superhero games added the notion that a person should have a creation story (a cliche' from comic books) but allowed the player to make it up completely. Now, twenty-five years down the road, these role play conventions have blended together in a not so satisfying soup. There is another school of role playing, completely separate from the commercial hobby. Role playing started out as an adjunct to miniature wargames. This continues on a small scale to this day. Though I've never played in any of their games, Ned Zuparko and Paddy Griffith used role play in games they did in the 80's. Howard Whitehouse picked up on this idea and heavily incorporated it into his classic game "Science vs Pluck: or too much for the Mahdi!" Howard starts his games by giving players short write ups of their character's history and personality. They are always short and pithy and invariably funny. Unlike Fantasy RPGs, these descriptions are just cram packed with information. They hint at the psychological, moral and political drives of the person which can not help but provide information for a wide variety of story types. The only area they fall flat on is to help resolve combat. So characters can be described by numbers or words. Clearly a Matrix Gamer would find words the preferable approach! So my Matrix Games use character cards that are very much like Howard's. CHARACTER CARD INCLUDE 1. A picture of the character. 2. The character's name. 3. Three word descriptions of the character's age, wealth, and political power. 4. Possibly some word descriptions of statuses the character has. 5. And a paragraph long description of the character's personality. At this point, Matrix Game characters diverge from the miniatures style of role playing. Since older styles of character description suffer from being static. Once written, only the referee has the power to change them - something he can not do without the approval of the player. A tug of war which tends to lead to no change (or a run away in one direction or another). Matrix Games allow changes to be made through arguments (so that the players power to create is moderated by the referee's power to rule on argument strength). Each turn the player make an argument, some small part of a character's card can be changed. Over time it is possible to completely rewrite a person's history! I know this sounds unrealistic, "people don't do that in reality" we think. In fact though they do. Consider the musical career of Frank Sinatra or Madonna. These people completely reinvented themselves repeatedly. All of us do it to a greater or a lesser extent. When we get married, change jobs/religions/homes, when we reinterpret our pasts to fit new circumstances we are rewriting ourselves. Why do people do this? To prepare for the future, a constantly changing future. Character descriptions in a subtle way influence the referee's rulings on player s arguments. If an argument goes against what a character believes then it is less likely to happen. In psychology they call this "cognitive dissonance". It can also be seen as stress. Given a big enough stress, people break down and develop mental illnesses. People are rational to the extent that they will avoid overt cognitive dissonance. So an argument forcing Ghandi to shoot an attacker is stupid due to the dissonance with his beliefs. To be able to do that one would first need to slowly change the Mahatma's character to the worse. Given time it could be done, much like army basic training prepares new soldiers to kill in combat. Some players may not like the characters they are given. Rather than try to force them to play the character as written (an impossible task) Matrix Games can allow players to just make up the personality of the character. This falls back on the commercial RPG idea of allowing players to make up their character's history. Players can go even further by literally making up characters in arguments. Players can introduce as many new characters as they like as the game is being played. These character's do not have character cards, but they can develop them by having elements added to them by future arguments. New characters are thus the ever present wild card that prevent MGs from ever being the same twice. WOMEN IN MATRIX GAMES Traditional wargames and RPGs have not appealed to many women. Why? Well one reason is that there are no female characters involved in the games. What few women are present are rated as being weaker and generally not fun to play. Matrix Games are not wholly focused on combat so the physical differences between men and women do not have to mean as much. Many MG stories are actually more about the relationships between the characters than who is biggest. In this realm women frequently have advantages over men! So suddenly there is a reason to include all the people left out of other games: women, children and the elderly. Matrix Games look a lot more like movies and stories when "weak" characters outnumber strong ones by two to one. This makes "strong, silent men" stand out more and shows how lots of weak people can defeat a few strong people when pushed too far. I use the terms weak and strong but in fact they are misnomers. A person's strength varies due to the situation they are in, not from inherent "statistics". So Shirley Temple might be able to stop an entire battle with her smile to the eternal frustration of the warmongers. So don't be afraid to include non-traditional people in your scenarios. They may be more fun than you imagine. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #3 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com