This is a tie-in with my YouTube video on the same subject.
(If you want to see the video but don’t see anything above but an empty space, try clicking here: https://youtu.be/A0Yx6nPOslM.)
For the benefit of anyone who’s interested but doesn’t want to sit though 18 minutes of me blathering on. You too can make a roll-the-dice game for fictional character development. The game has the potential to work for all forms of character-based storytelling in any genre, and writers should be able easily to tailor it to their requirements.
To play the game, you will need:
- A playing surface (in the video I use a large sheet of paper from a sketch pad)
- 21 sticky lables (I use address lables, but you can use post-it notes, pieces of paper with glue on the back, scraps of masking tape, whatever is available)
- a pen and a pad of paper
- a playing piece
- a dice (a die)
- a timer
Preparation
You are going to create four sets of five labels. Think of topics that are relevant to your character – the one you want to develop. My suggestion is to have one set of labels that relate to five Rites of Passage your character is going through/has passed though; one set that relates to Other characters in the story; one set of completely Random subjects. In the video I have a fourth set of Recent or historical events the character might be expected to have an opinon about. You can vary these as much as you choose, both the labels and the categories.
Arrange the labels on the playing board in a rough circle and start with one extra label marked START. Put your playing piece on start.
Procedure
Play goes clockwise.
Throw your dice, move your playing piece to the label indicated. Strike out the label you started on (So you don’t land on it again.) Look at the topic of the label you’ve landed on. Set the timer. Write on that topic for one minute. When the timer rings, stop writing. Cast the dice again, move your playing piece, strike out the label you’ve just written about and repeat the process with the new lable. And so on round the board until you have written on each of the label topics in respect of your character and all are struck out. You will have a few pages of notes.
Take a short break, then revisit your notes. Transfer them – to another sheet of paper or to computer, and make them legible. Complete any sentences that need it.
Leave them again for another 24 hours.
Now work with them in some way. The video suggests reviewing them and expanding them or having your character, in character, write about some of them, whether in a letter to another character, or in letter to you, or in a diary entry, or in a monologue.
Whatever you choose to, the aim is to take what you have written and, within what is appropriate to your character and the story you are trying to tell, expand on what you’ve got out of the game. Take it further. Enter into your character more deeply and in that way expand the character even more.
Good luck!
A note about origins
I don’t imagine I’m the first to present a character development dice game, but as it stands this is my own invention. I grew it out of a conversation prompt exercise I used sometimes when I was teaching English as a Foreign Language. I’m pretty sure I learned the original conversation prompt from one of several Pilgrims teaching material authors I knew in the late 1990s. Sadly I’m not sure who.
