Teaching Character Development in Your School Gaming Club
Character development is a crucial part of any tabletop roleplaying game (RPG). For students, it provides an opportunity to explore different personalities, emotions, and experiences. As an educator running a school gaming club, teaching character development can enhance students' engagement with the game and encourage personal growth. By helping students create dynamic, evolving characters, you’ll guide them through a process that fosters creativity, emotional intelligence, and storytelling skills.
This blog post will provide you with practical steps and strategies for teaching character development in your school gaming club.
Why Character Development Matters
Character development goes beyond basic character creation; it’s about how a character evolves over the course of the game. This process can teach students important life skills and provide a deeper, more immersive gaming experience. Here’s why it’s valuable:
Promotes Empathy: By developing characters with complex emotions, motivations, and backgrounds, students learn to understand perspectives different from their own.
Encourages Growth: Character development encourages players to think about how their characters change in response to events, challenges, and relationships within the game world.
Enhances Storytelling: A well-developed character makes the game’s narrative more engaging and impactful, drawing players further into the world.
Fosters Emotional Intelligence: As characters encounter conflicts, triumphs, and failures, students practice managing emotions and considering consequences.
Steps for Teaching Character Development
1. Help Students Define Their Character’s Personality and Motivations
The first step in character development is ensuring students have a solid understanding of their character’s personality, goals, and motivations. This foundational work will guide the character’s growth throughout the game.
Ask Key Questions: Have students answer questions about their characters, such as: What motivates them? What are their fears? What do they value most? These questions help students dive deeper into their character’s mindset.
Encourage Unique Traits: Guide students in creating characters with distinct traits, quirks, or flaws. This makes characters more interesting and allows for growth as they work through their weaknesses or develop new strengths.
Set Short-Term and Long-Term Goals: Help students define both short-term and long-term goals for their characters. These goals will give players something to strive for and provide direction for their development throughout the campaign.
Questions to Explore:
What are your character’s dreams or goals?
What are their biggest fears or insecurities?
What drives their decisions and actions?
2. Teach Students to Evolve Their Characters Over Time
Character development is an ongoing process, not something that happens all at once. Teach students how to develop their characters gradually as they experience new challenges, successes, and setbacks within the game.
React to In-Game Events: Encourage students to let their characters grow and change based on the events of the game. Did their character fail in a mission? Maybe they become more cautious or determined. Did they form a close bond with another player’s character? Perhaps they become more trusting or protective.
Embrace Change: Remind students that characters don’t need to stay the same from start to finish. Just like real people, characters should change in response to the game world. This could mean developing new skills, changing opinions, or even shifting personality traits.
Track Development: Encourage students to keep a character journal or log that tracks how their character evolves over time. They can write about key moments, decisions, and personal growth, which will help them reflect on how far their character has come.
Development Tips:
Use each game session as an opportunity for characters to learn something new or change in some way.
Encourage players to be open to their characters changing direction as the story progresses.
Have students reflect on how their character has grown over the course of the campaign.
3. Encourage Emotional Depth
A well-developed character has emotional depth, meaning they react realistically to situations, experience complex emotions, and have personal challenges. Teaching students to create characters with emotional depth will help them engage more fully with the game.
Explore Emotional Reactions: Encourage students to think about how their character reacts emotionally to events in the game. Do they get frustrated when they fail? Do they feel protective of a friend who is in danger? Help students explore a range of emotions through their characters.
Develop Relationships: In RPGs, characters often form relationships with other player characters or non-player characters (NPCs). These relationships can be a significant source of emotional depth. Encourage students to build strong, complex relationships that evolve over time.
Face Personal Challenges: Have students identify personal challenges or internal conflicts that their character might face. Maybe their character is struggling with guilt, jealousy, or the fear of failure. Exploring these challenges makes the character more dynamic and relatable.
Emotional Development Tips:
Encourage students to explore how their character feels about key events in the story.
Guide students to develop meaningful relationships between their character and others in the game.
Help students identify personal challenges or internal conflicts for their characters to overcome.
4. Teach Conflict and Resolution
Conflict is central to character development in RPGs, and it drives the narrative forward. Whether it’s a physical battle or an internal struggle, conflict gives characters the opportunity to grow. Teaching students how to navigate conflict within the game will help their characters evolve.
External Conflict: External conflicts—such as battles, competitions, or rivalries—force characters to adapt and overcome obstacles. Encourage students to think about how their character’s experiences with external conflict shape their development.
Internal Conflict: Internal conflict involves a character’s personal struggles, such as dealing with self-doubt, moral dilemmas, or fear. Teach students how internal conflicts can lead to deep, meaningful character growth.
Conflict Resolution: Emphasize the importance of resolving conflicts in a way that promotes development. How does a character grow from their conflicts? Do they become wiser, stronger, or more cautious? Teach students to reflect on the outcomes of conflict and how it changes their characters.
Conflict Exploration Tips:
Encourage students to engage with both external and internal conflicts in the game.
Guide students to explore how their character resolves personal challenges.
Reflect on how conflicts and their resolutions impact the character’s long-term development.
5. Provide Opportunities for Reflection and Growth
A key part of character development is giving students the time and space to reflect on their character’s journey. Reflection helps students understand how their character has evolved and consider how they might continue to grow in future sessions.
End-of-Session Reflection: At the end of each game session, give students time to reflect on their character’s development. What did their character learn? How did they change? What are they working toward next?
Character Journals: Encourage students to keep a character journal where they document key events, emotions, and moments of growth. This can be an informal log or a creative writing exercise where students narrate their character’s experiences.
Goal Setting: Periodically, have students reassess their character’s goals and motivations. As their character grows, their goals might change. Encourage students to set new goals that align with their character’s current development.
Reflection Prompts:
What did your character learn during this session?
How has your character’s outlook changed since the start of the campaign?
What challenges do they still need to overcome, and how are they preparing for them?
6. Support Creative Freedom
While it’s important to provide guidance, allow students the freedom to develop their characters in their own unique way. Some students may prefer to focus on emotional depth, while others might want to explore action and adventure. Encourage all forms of creative expression in character development.
Respect Different Play Styles: Some students may enjoy detailed backstories and complex emotional development, while others prefer action-oriented character growth. Respect these differences and allow students to develop their characters in ways that resonate with them.
Encourage Exploration: Provide opportunities for students to explore different aspects of their characters in a variety of game scenarios. For example, combat-focused players can explore how their characters deal with failure or betrayal, while story-driven players can engage with moments of intense action.
Promote Flexibility: Remind students that character development doesn’t have to follow a predetermined path. If a player’s character takes an unexpected turn or faces new challenges, encourage them to embrace the change and continue exploring new facets of their character.
Creative Freedom Tips:
Encourage students to take ownership of their character’s development and make it their own.
Provide diverse scenarios that allow for a range of character growth opportunities.
Promote flexibility by allowing characters to evolve in unexpected or surprising ways.
Conclusion
Teaching character development in your school gaming club opens up a world of creativity, storytelling, and personal growth for students. By guiding them through the process of defining their characters’ personalities, motivations, and emotional depth, you help them create characters that are rich, dynamic, and meaningful.
Through ongoing reflection, navigating conflict, and embracing change, students will develop characters that evolve alongside the story. As an educator, you’ll play a vital role in helping them explore new identities, face personal challenges, and build empathy—all while having fun in the immersive world of tabletop roleplaying games.
