Storyboard: The infinite sadness of Aunt May

For the five people who don't know the reference, Aunt May is the mother figure in Spider-Man's life. She provides him with several important functions, such as being frail, threatening death, and getting kidnapped whenever his motivation for fighting crime starts to flag. She also dated Doctor Octopus, but that was just strange. The point is that she represents one of the most important part of any character's storyline -- the people you associate with other than heavily armed mercenaries (or the local equivalent) who just provide mundane functions in your life.

This doesn't just cover your ailing kidnap-bait aunt. It covers your childhood friend who decided to go into real estate instead of demon-slaying, your mother and father who still want to make sure you're wearing a coat when you abscond to the frozen wastes to slay a dragon, and the one-eyed bandit whom you've sworn to kill at the first opportunity. They're all massively important to your character's identity, but they suffer a very big problem in an MMO roleplaying environment. Even by the rather liquid standards of MMOs, these characters aren't real.
Obviously, "real" has a sort of strange property in a make-believe online world generally filled to the brim with wizards, spaceships, or both. In the interests of keeping things down to a manageable level of necessary oddity, we're going to define "real" for the purposes of this discussion as "easily visible and possible to interact with in-game." Your character is real. The seventeen things your character accidentally hit with an area spell are real. Your guildmates are real.

Nine times out of ten, your background NPCs are not real. That cute Ritualist you're courting can't come with you to meet your mother, which is only balanced out by her not being able to introduce you to her parents either.

The usual response to this dilemma is to create a character who doesn't have a single person in his or her life not visible on-screen. This is accomplished by killing the character's parents and assuming that everyone can suspend disbelief enough so that any and all childhood friends were also killed, hopefully via natural disaster. You still wind up with a shockingly impressive track record wherein everyone close to you has died for one reason or another, leaving you a complete cipher with no real history.

"The characters in the past are just that. They're important because they shaped the present, but they're not the center of the universe any longer."

As my tone might indicate, I'm not a big fan. The problem with trying to excise characters from your backstory is that it makes the whole thing feel more fake, far more than details like being able to fly faster than sound by yourself. I don't know why we're wired that way, but we are. And yet leaving all these characters alive and in place causes problems as well, because no one else can ever interact with these important elements of your non-adventuring life.

So, then. Here are three potential approaches that can help you keep the benefits of having backstory NPCs without all of the drawbacks.

Offscreen wife, or the Norm method
Cheers and Frasier get surprisingly little flak for having used what amounts to the exact same joke in two different series. In both shows, one of the main male characters has a wife who is mentioned explicitly time and again. Both characters talk extensively about their wives, to the point that the audience is intimately familiar with said wives. And outside of non-speaking obscured silhouettes or the like, neither wife is ever actually seen over the course of the show. Every single aspect of the character is an informed characteristic.

I mentioned using this to an extent with one of my characters in City of Heroes, and it provides for a nice slice of what the character is doing during off-camera time. The downside is that it does eventually get to the point of absurdity -- it's very difficult to play a wholly absent character for much drama when great pains are taken to never display said character. Keep it down to the occasional mention, and it creates a sense that your character is doing something with people even when not logged in.

Not from around these parts, or the Souji Seta method
There are times when all you can do about your old friends is tell stories about them, and more often than not it doesn't involve all of them dying. Going away to college, to a new school, to a new job, or anywhere that it's sufficiently inconvenient to visit on a regular basis does the trick. It's not as if you didn't have a life before now, just that you can't really just walk down the block and introduce everyone to the gang.

Obviously, this sort of setup works best in a game at or below 21st-century levels of technology. You can't really get away with saying that your family is too far away in Star Trek Online, where warp drives make journeys to almost any inhabited planet fairly simple. But even then, if your parents and friends were off on a far-flung frontier world and your missions tend to bring you elsewhere, it's not beyond the realm of plausibility that you might not jaunt off to see them very often.

Everyone's significant, or the Sunstorm method
It's not hard to introduce your family and friends to your adventuring companions, but... well, they've got their own stuff to do. Your oldest friend works as a reagent vendor up north, your parents are both tradeskill apprentices out in a captial city, and your sister is a city guard in Outland. So you don't get together a whole lot. If you really want to introduce them, though...

The fact of the matter is that there are a huge number of NPCs essentially "on the job" all across the game world, many of whom just don't happen to be tremendously talkative. This works best for one-offs or minor characters, since it might seem odd to have your supposed old friends standing mutely by as events unfold in front of them. But pointing and saying the vendor is your old friend from school does help anchor both the vendor and the character as real people, and gives you some connection to the overall game world. And if you reveal that a boss in a dungeon was the one who killed your father, well, you've got built-in motivation.

Importance and backstory NPCs
As a final word for this week's column, I'd like to address the obvious point that all three of these methods do, in some way, marginalize the folks from your backstory and keep them from being main figures in your character's current life. This is true, and it's also very intentional.

Your backstory NPCs already have their place of prominence, and that was back in the day. Right now? They should not be the most important people in your character's life. That should be the people your character is currently adventuring with, fighting with or against, flirting with, and so forth. Otherwise you have a character being choked to death by a more convoluted past than present, which becomes more important than anything happening right this instant.

The characters in the past are just that. They're important because they shaped the present, but they're not the center of the universe any longer.

Next week, we're going to take a look at a subject very near and dear to my heart -- unless a better topic falls into my lap again, of course. Until then, questions, suggestions, and comments may be sent to the usual spot at Eliot at Massively dot com, or you can just leave them in the comment field.