Tying your Players’ Characters Together: How Pre-establishing Relational Connections Can Open Up Player Interactions and Create a More Vibrant Campaign

This article was written by a good friend of mine, we’ll call him DadIsBadAtGames (his handle). He’s doing me a solid since I have to take the break while moving. Enjoy!

Howdy fellow delvers of the deep dungeons. To help out my beloved Daily DM I will be pitch-hitting today to share some info on a concept I have not only fallen in love with but that has also VASTLY improved the quality of my games. My name is DadisBadatGames (feel free to shorten to Dad, Games, Bad at Games, really you can call me whatever you’d like, just don’t call me late for dinner) and I have been an on and off player of various tabletop RPGs for nearly 30 years.

You and I may just be kicking off our relationship but let’s talk about why predetermining some relationships for your characters will improve your game, how you go about creating them and finally how to encourage your players to embrace these connections as they drop themselves into whatever world you will be sharing together. 

1. “Sucking at something is kinda the first step to becoming sorta good at something.” – Jake the Dog

I want to present to you a novel concept…ready? Your player’s characters SHOULD interact, develop and evolve their relationships…I know! REVOLUTIONARY! But what I’d really like to focus on is how encouraging and assisting your players in developing the bones of these relationships BEFORE the adventure begins can benefit their ability to roleplay and ultimately benefit the overall quality of the cooperative story you will be telling together over the course of your campaign.

First off, what are the problems we are trying to solve or how are we hoping to improve our next campaign?

Problem 1 – Experienced or more outgoing players who are not cognisant of the other characters at the table, have a tendency to steamroll new or more introverted players.

Problem 2 – Players who may be quiet, less experienced, introverted or just haven’t figured out how to “climb into their character’s heads” struggle to feel incorporated into the story flow.

Problem 3 – A lack of robust character interaction and building of relationships leads to players losing interest or never getting “bought in” to the world in the first place.

Depending on your circumstances you may be playing with the same group of guys and gals you’ve been with since the good ol’ days in your parent’s basement (heck, you might still be down there, who am I to judge?). On the other hand you may be playing with perfect strangers brought together at a local game shop or by the wonderful services that are becoming more and more popular on the interwebz. Regardless, whether they are your long time friends or you don’t know them from Balki and Cousin Larry, I think we can all agree that the life blood of a successful campaign is the interactions between the player characters with teamwork and communication being the hallmarks of a “FUN” table.

Players who are able to put themselves into the shoes of their characters and make decisions because it is what the character would do (and not because they will get the best chance for success from their dice rolls and proficiencies) are the players most DM’s dream of filling their campaign with. Some players are amazing at spinning engaging backstories that weave into the world and make their characters come to life without making them sound like the “Chosen One”. Other players struggle to even give their character an interesting name. While those players may always have to be helped along, one thing we can do to as DM’s to help kickstart their imagination and engagement is spend some time in what most of us have come to know as “Episode Zero” to determine the social and relational threads that tie our characters together and give ALL of our players another way to think about how their character would behave in any given situation.

2. Episode Zero Meet-and-Greet

Sure, you could just have a bunch of randos kickin’ it in a tavern, only to be brought together by a sudden teetotaling Goblin Prohi squad kickin in the door to shut down the evil booze dispensary. In this scenario you are relying on the strength of the story and the challenges and interactions you are spinning for your players to dynamically create relationships (both positive and negative). Ultimately this SHOULD be how the bulk of their relationship stories are written but this can often result in the more “outgoing” players steamrolling the quiet ones, and because your introverts are less likely to speak up, they will naturally find themselves incorporated less often into the overall play.

Instead, consider spending some time in “Episode Zero” specifically focusing on purposefully identifying how each character in the group is tied to the others. Not EVERY character needs to be connected buta good goal is to have each player identify one positive and one negative connection between their character and another character in the party. Those two connections can be with the same target character or could be a positive connection with one and a negative with another. You as the DM just need to guide this process to ensure that all characters are included in the resulting “relationship web” in some form or fashion.  

3. “The players delved too greedily and too deep…” – Saruman

Now, you can ABSOLUTELY go overboard with this concept. Should you write a novel about how two characters attended fantasy middle school together and which class they met in? NO! The trick to this system is in developing the BONES (see what I did there? call back to paragraph two…boom!) of the relationship and let the game play add the meat as the game rolls on. If you overwork your connections (just like overworking your backstory) you actually end up LIMITING where you can go with your character. Keep it vague and simple. If you want a specific hook throw it in but make sure nothing is carved so deep in stone that you lock yourself out of an opportunity to expand on your story in a creative and novel way.

That is why I am so insistent we find the bones. OK Dad, we get it…bones…but what the heck does that mean? Well, my curious friend, the bones of a relationship can be defined by a single sentence (two tops) expressing a positive or negative aspect of two or more character’s relationships. Por Ejemplo…

– A and B are cousins who, following the death of one of their parents, were raised in the same home as siblings.

– B served as A’s mentor during their study at the local arcane college.

– A and B are both petty thieves who were attempting to steal the same object but eventually decided that joining forces made more sense than competing.

– B and A served in the same mercenary unit and are the sole survivors of a failed mission.

– A and B were once romantically involved but it ended…badly.

– B and A are siblings but one was clearly the parental favorite and the rivalry between them is strong.

– A at some point stole a precious item from B.

– B and A are both hard partiers and share a love for debauchery.

– A recently racked up a large gambling debt to B.

– A and B were childhood bullies of C.

– C was hitting on the barmaid in a fashion A didn’t care for.

Notice how some of these are connections that tie characters together from much earlier in their lives and in others the characters are potentially strangers in that tavern until moments before  the goblin dry squad kicked the door down? Heck some connections could even exist despite the characters never having physically met or known one another.

– A was the right hand man of a BBEG that was responsible for wiping out B’s village when they were away on a trip.
– B is the long lost uncle of C.

– A and B share a common commitment to a particular deity.

– B happens to belong to some group that A has an issue with.

– A strongly disagrees with A’s chosen profession.

– B thinks A’s sense of fashion is fabulous.

– C was given a last wish by his mentor to seek out someone B is connected to, though they both do not currently realize it.

This isn’t Star Wars, every character doesn’t have to be related to or tied up in the destiny of another. Simple connections, if kept at the front of mind and referenced during play can help deepen and enrich interactions just as much as finding out you are long lost twins. Plus make sure you keep each other’s races, professions and backstories in mind as you begin to weave your characters together. Nothing to say a Dragonborn and Drow warrior might not be childhood buddies but wouldn’t it make way more sense in most cases to define some specific interactions they might have had as strangers or canonize that your Dragonborn Paladin has a particular distaste for Drow and that colors their interactions?

Revisiting our “Goblin Tavern Raid” start, it would be conceivable that the two didn’t even acknowledge the other until they went back to back, fighting off the goblin onslaught only for the Dragonborn to realize that their impromptu ally was one of those conniving Drow. You can see how this interaction might set up the characters to experience an evolving relationship over time built on a single sentence concept “The Dragonborn Paladin has a deep seated distrust and distaste for Drow” (Where the race of Drawer is chosen specifically to create a connection to another player character). 

Obviously you don’t want your players to be “hating” each other so be sure as a DM to reiterate that this is to add context and color. Ultimately your goal is to figure out how to take this party of disparate beings with different personalities, backstories and goals and work together towards a common goal.

4. “Why, Mr. Anderson?, Why, why?” – Agent Smith

So now you know what I mean by “bones” and have a rough plan for how to establish them. Why the heck did we do that? The goal of this model is to provide each character an additional reference point for how to act as we, the DM, throw new situations and challenges at them. Had we failed to establish these ties each character is going to be relying solely on their class and race, maybe the equipment they spent time picking out, or if they are a tad more experienced maybe they draw from their backgrounds and stories. Now when our party finds itself interacting with a snarky shopkeep or trying to escape from a slowly tightening pit trap they have an additional aspect of their character personality (specifically in regards to their connections to the  other characters around them) to help guide them in determining how he or she would act.

Ultimately, like encouraging your players to write a short, open-ended backstory for their characters, the goal is to flesh them out and help the player to “put themselves in their character’s shoes”. Unlike the backstory though, identifying inter-character relationships will help draw in those players who, through their own timidness, inexperience or discomfort, otherwise might have been content to just sit back and have the story happen to them while more experienced, assertive characters run the show. 

With this web of connections (and a little guidance from you the DM) not only will you greatly increase the opportunity for all players to have a reason to interact but you’ve also helped your players to personally contribute to an even more immersive world that you can all enjoy adventuring through…or get TPK’d by an unexpected Beholder. You do you my fellow DMs.

– “Bye bye! Have fun storming the castle.” – Miracle Max