What Tabletop Game Players Taught Me About Writing Characters With Agency

If you can’t tell from the fact that I write and think about systems all day, I am a massive nerd. As such, I play tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons. While I started the hobby as a way to spend time with my older brother and my friends, it turned into one of the best wells of information and experience I’ve had for storytelling.

No lesson has been greater than the effect that having someone else directly controlling a character has in the choices that character makes and the outcomes that happen as a result. I have seen my fellow players go on months-long side quests because of the motivations and interests of those other players.

It makes me think of all the times I’ve seen characters in other narrative media make the wildest leaps in logic to make decisions because the authors didn’t know any other way to keep the story moving forward. If the agency of the characters exists only up until the point you write yourself into a corner, that’s a failing of the writer, simple as that.

But how do we discover these failings most readily in the stories we consume? Many times, it’s through the dialogue characters share with each other.

As a result, I believe there are many lessons, and therefore solutions, to character agency that can be solved by looking to the people who have the most sovereign characters: tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) players.

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Poor dialogue tends to be a sign of deeper issues within a story. I’ve seen plenty of bad stories with consistently poor dialogue, but very few good stories that also had consistently bad dialogue.

Each example of poor dialogue has its reasons for why the words spoken by the characters don’t land. I identify five key issues that lead to dialogue not landing the way authors want it to.

Too many stories have characters that have the same voice, tone, or motivations for their actions. Despite being supposedly different characters, they say and believe and do similar things, leading the story to instead be about a grey blob of sameness, rather than a narrative composed of different types of characters.

While many professionally published pieces of storytelling don’t have this issue, it’s something I see in beginner works. I believe this occurs more for beginners due to the preplanning that goes into creating the things that characters need to prevent them from sounding all the same.

Pre-defined motivations and internal drivers of action, set and established by the author ahead of writing their first draft, usually prevent this issue.

Just like in real life, characters in stories have goals. Things that they want to achieve, whether it be for themselves or for those they care about. These motivations act as the framing for not just why these characters do what they do, but also how their worldview is informed.

After all, someone’s priorities will often show parts of life or others that they don’t value just as much as the parts they do, so long as you look at what gets excluded.

But the assumption in sharing that is that all characters are written in such a way, and we both know that isn’t true. Too often, characters in stories are presented as accessories to another character’s tale rather than as freethinking agent with their own goals and desires.

These desires need to be obvious to the reader via dialogue so the reader can attempt to understand where that given character’s motivations come from.

Every line of dialogue matters to the reader. You can argue this is true of any line in a tale, but it’s especially true for dialogue because of the implicit effects of having a character speak.

As said above, characters speaking represent a chance for the audience to learn about that character. Given how important this is for their characterization, these lines should be important to the narrative and the construction of the perception you want the reader to have of that given character.

So, imagine your reader’s dismay where, after experiencing two or more characters speaking about nothing important, those characters then do nothing with that unimportant dialogue?

In everyday speech, we expect that there will be some idle chatter.

In a story specifically curated for entertainment? People are less tolerant of that.

In everyday conversation, the goal is to be understood by the person you’re speaking to. It doesn’t matter if the conversation consists of idle chatter or technical tutorials. Unless there’s something malicious at play, the express goal of speaking is to communicate your ideas and make them tenable for someone else.

Yet, in many instances in media, I’ve seen dialogue that exists purely to inform the reader, someone not involved in the dialogue in any way other than the meta context of consuming the media.

Too often, I’ve seen dialogue that amounts to a character opening with “As you know…” before proceeding to tell the character things everyone in the scene already knows the listener knows. That dialogue exists to inform the reader, and not to drive the story forward.

It drives me nuts. It’s an insult not just to the character’s intelligence, but also to the reader’s.

Have you watched or read something before with characters speaking, before a pause brings the conversation to a lull, only for someone to make a radical leap in logic that doesn’t make sense? Even worse, did that leap in logic end up being the exact thing that the characters needed to do to move the plot forward?

That’s plot telepathy. Essentially, it’s a narrative decision made by the writer to have their character(s) suddenly know exactly what esoteric thing they need to do to move the plot forward because the writer didn’t want to change their setup to that point to make something more coherent.

It represents a failing on the writer's part when planning their piece and says nothing about the character themselves.

With those dialogue issues identified, it’s worth visiting the behavioral habits of TTRPG players, as I recognize not everyone engages in the hobby. While I believe most folks view the pastime as the adult version of playing pretend with friends, there are social elements to the game that don’t seem obvious from a brief glance inside from someone outside the space.

Players assume the mantle of a singular character, which they craft ahead with some combination of their fellow players and the one running the game. When done well, these characters have a reason for their decisions to engage in something as dangerous as adventuring or whatever other conflict the game designer set up for the players.

These players then chase that goal as far as it will go, adopting new motivations as they spend time in the game world. In other words, they start with their agency and develop it as time goes on.

When presented with the non-player characters (NPCs) of the game world, players will have the opportunity to share their motivations with these individuals and hear, in turn, what the NPCs want.

Almost always, the players will choose their goals and their desired outcomes over the NPCs they meet. The vast majority of the exceptions to this are down to the NPCs wanting something akin to, or exactly like, what one or more of the players want.

In essence, they have a hierarchy of whose desires they hold in high regard, much like people in real life.

Over the course of their adventures, players create shared memories and bond over the encounters and time they have together. This leads to a lot of where the fun is for folks in the hobby: creating stories, inside jokes, and the like.

Over time, these player characters tend to soften toward each other, even if the character starts off antisocial or shy. It’s a natural conclusion to spending long periods of time with someone.

But even NPCs that are mainstays of the story and on the player’s side still tend to be favored for their utility, or what they offer the players. It turns out that, even if you spend a long time around someone, the framing for the relationship matters, too.

Players, like any free-thinking person, come to their own conclusions. It doesn’t outwardly seem to matter if you, as the game designer, set out things to be interpreted in a certain way. Sometimes, someone blurts out an idea that takes hold in the group, and that’s now must, in their minds, the truth.

What the game designer does with this information is irrelevant for our conversation here. Instead, the key takeaway in this lesson is: your players come to conclusions you don’t intend, just like anyone else interpreting what you have to say.

One of the most common reasons people cite as their preference for TTRPGs over video games comes down to player choice. There’s a wide range of things you can attempt to do in these games, just like in real life, that a video game could never code for.

So, a designer has to present a compelling reason why something doesn’t work.

Often, this comes down to rules laid out in the game system. Sometimes, it represents a limitation that exists in the physics or reality of the world you play in.

Either way, there must be a damn good reason why you’d restrict someone’s choices in these games, at least in the mind of most players.

When you come to do something with a group of others for hours each week, eventually there comes a time when someone doesn’t act the way you predict. Someone reveals a master plan they’ve held for months, or asks a question about an obscure rule that you realize could make for a cool moment if you let them bend that rule.

It makes designing for players difficult. You know you can’t always control for player behavior because they will act in ways you don’t expect.

But just because you didn’t expect it doesn’t mean it didn’t make logical sense for them to ask to try.

Taking what’s been learned from poor examples of dialogue, and the realities of players engaging in non-rehearsed speech and behaviors in play, you can therefore map lessons about writing dialogue onto explicit lessons for one’s own writing.

Every major character in your story should be defined before they have a speaking role in your book. Specifically, their motivation(s) need to be explicit and tenable to you as the writer before you begin to write for them.

Thus, like in the player behavior listed above, you can show up to each writing session for that character ready to craft their words.

When your character speaks, whether they realize it or not, they do so in a way that tries to move things in service to their goal(s). Who they choose to speak to, how this character speaks, and why they talk in the first place make for a clearer picture of what this character wants.

That clearer picture gives you, the author, a better shot at making something that sounds like two people speaking, and not exposition dumping for your reader.

There’s a triad of facets to relationships that come out when analyzing dialogue: the emotions, priorities, and transactional value of the relationship implicit to the characters in the scene.

While these facets can change and evolve over a story, understanding where your characters are in how they perceive their conversational partner makes it easier to wordsmith specifically for that scene, as you’ll be encompassing more than just the dialogue, but also the subtext and tone of the conversation.

Contrivance for the sake of itself doesn’t make for interesting tension or drama in dialogue.

Characters should have difficulty understanding each other due to partial information or a lack of clarity on the situation at hand, not because someone decides not to speak when they otherwise would. Likewise, someone speaking up with a wild idea they haven’t earned breaks your reader’s immersion.

Don’t let your perfect knowledge of the story you want to tell trickle down into your characters.

It doesn’t have to be explicit why a character commits to an action, but it should be logical. Do the set-up work necessary for a character to commit to action by making their ethical code or obligations clear.

There shouldn’t be any moments akin to a half-baked Sherlock Holmes deduction sequence in your story. Holmes reached his conclusions via a piecing together of information and evidence he saw in his cases, and the same should be true of the problems your character hopes to solve.

Finally, don’t forget that your writing is an invention of your design. As such, it remains malleable until it reaches its final draft.

You aren’t beholden to a specific outcome or framing for your story unless you choose for it to be so. If you reach a point in your writing where it doesn’t make sense for something to happen, then don’t force it. Change the underpinnings leading to that point so the outcome you need to happen not only occurs, but also makes sense.

If you can’t do that, start over. Find alternate angles. Something that takes longer to craft is better than a mediocre completion that insults your readers.

In service of making all these lessons and behaviors useful as reference, I’ve condensed everything we’ve talked about so far into a single system: the 3A Dialogue Model.

In this model, the goal is to have the tools and checklists you need to keep in mind when writing dialogue for a character expressing high levels of agency. As people in the real world have their goals and ambitions that they strive for, we want to see the same for characters in stories.

It starts by understanding the genesis of the model’s name: the three A’s of Agency, Agenda, and Alignment.

These components of the model reflect the internal-to-external facing parts of the conversation.

A character’s agency represents their ability to act of their own free will. By using their agency, a character is enacting some part of their will. This tends to come from an internal motivation, even if it’s wrapped up in an external locus, i.e., a hero seeking to protect an innocent civilian from harm because they believe that to be just.

Their agenda, then, is the outcome the character wants to get out of an interaction that aligns with the execution of their agency. Unless otherwise stopped, the character with high agency will move forward with their agenda, and all the positive and negative ramifications it would otherwise present.

The alignment, then, is the comparison of the agency and agendas of two or more characters in a scene. If two or more characters in a scene have the same agenda and similar levels of agency, you can see how it’d be easy for those characters to work together, and where the drama can be in the inverse.

To best plan around using this model, I believe there are six steps in total to follow.

Before writing your dialogue, part of your character work should be defining that character’s core motivations, as I mentioned earlier. Use questions like these to help you get there if you need help:

You can take the above one step further by mapping the relationship triad mentioned earlier and writing down how that triad relates to two characters:

Doing so for your character combinations means you understand how these characters relate to each other, the lengths they will go to with one another to get what they want, and where the potential drama lives in the differences in their emotions and priorities.

For each scene that you want to write, you’ll want to refer to your character’s motivations, the mapping you did above, and explain how those social and mental facets relate to the scene they’re in.

It doesn’t need to be extensive. Even one or two quick lines in the margins of your draft or notes can make it obvious how you’re relating your characters to the conversation they’re in.

The goal here is to align everything before you write the dialogue so you don’t end up with flat characters that don’t feel necessary to the scene.

Make it obvious what each character knows in your plotting. Much like the scene-level goals above, having a quick reference about what each character knows about the events of the narrative so far and their place in it gives you a chance to create interesting tension, especially when one character knows more than the other.

Having this list also makes it clear what your characters don’t know, preventing those odd leaps in logic seen in lesser examples of dialogue writing.

Building beats into your dialogue that make it logical when someone changes their mind or agrees to a course of action smooths over any possibilities of mischaracterization.

Part of your scene work will be identifying moments where your character(s) change their minds or do something seemingly off. Don’t just write this, but also justify it in your notes or draft margins. Explain to yourself why this character is making this choice.

Getting explicit about their reasoning keeps the change obvious in your mind, and therefore gives you that clear goal to reach for as you develop the scene.

Go through the above steps for all your scenes, and then bring everything together into one draft. Taking your draft one scene at a time, review how everything flows from not just the narrative that you wrote, but also the notes you took along the way, explaining the choices and actions made by your characters.

Anywhere you find something disjointed, illogical, or sparse is an opportunity to fix things for the next draft. By writing the notes during the scene-level work and not at the overall planning step, you give yourself a chance to see how your writing evolved over the time it took to create the draft, akin to how the game designers in TTRPGs will adjust on the fly and refine as they go.

Too many writers treat first drafts like final drafts, and it never should feel that way.

People read stories for their entertainment, and for the excitement we feel in seeing characters and worlds interact with each other. Characters, regardless of how fantastic their portrayal is, are the reader’s chance to immerse deeper into the story, being much more relatable than the system that is the setting of the story.

This fact is why dialogue is important for good storytelling. Dialogue, conversation, is one of the pinnacle advantages mankind has over other animals because of the level of detail we can achieve in our speech compared to other critters. Characters, as the main providers of dialogue, are your secret to provide context for your world and your story, but only if you treat them with the reverence that position carries.

Don’t let the details they share sit empty or fall disjointed before your reader. Give your characters the level of agency that those of us alive in the real world exercise every day, so that they can better share the things you have to say in your story.