Niche Protection

Originally published May 11, 2012

This week’s podcast concerns character advancement which can be found here. What I want to talk about today is a subject tangentially discussed in the podcast, the idea of preserving a character’s niche. By ‘niche’ I mean the area where a character excels compared to the other characters.

The rationale behind this is very simple; we want to balance the amount of focus each player character (PC) gets during a game session. By ensuring that each character has his or her own niche, it makes it easier to manage that spotlight. If character A is the know-it-all and character B cleans up in combat, we can build an adventure that mixes research and intellectual puzzles with battles with thugs and villains and be sure to satisfy both PCs. By giving time to each character’s niche, we get to focus the game on them in a simple and easy fashion.

Fundamentally this idea is behind class and organization selections in many games. In D&D you have the iconic group of the warrior, the magic user, the thief, and the healer. In many White Wolf games you have several racial groups and political organizations which yield similar results. While more freeform creation systems like GURPS or FATE do away with these categories, you still retain this notion that PCs should specialize. This is often wrapped in the language of having a group able to cover all their bases but fundamentally is about giving everyone their time to shine.

However as brought up in the podcast, there can issues when two character both focus on the same thing. This can come up in character creation as well as later in play.

Character creation is where one most often sees this conflict over niche. For example, two PCs both decide to focus on being occult experts or master swordsmen. There are two basic approaches to dealing with this problem. First you should always discuss character concepts with your fellow players and gamemaster (GM). See if one of the players is willing to alter the focus of their character (or if you are a player, perhaps you can change your focus in some way). Even little changes can make a big difference. In the case of the swordsmen, perhaps one can focus on big swords and massive damage, while the other goes the route of the swashbuckler. Or perhaps one works on using two weapons at once while another portrays herself as a knight adding horse riding and the lance to her character concept. With the occult experts, perhaps one can take the role of the debunker while the other is a credulous parapsychologist. Other alternatives could be conspiracy theorist, UFO researcher, demonologist, or secret Vatican exorcist. While mechanically they might have similar skills, how they use them in play will be very different.

Another idea for dealing with this overlap of abilities is to emphasize the similarities. Perhaps the characters are rivals, each trying to outdo the other with their shared talent. Alternatively they could combine their skills to excel at things no one character could accomplish. Combined with the earlier idea of variations on a theme, this allows each character to be different while at the same time not feeling like a fifth wheel.

But what about the idea of a character choosing their advancements (in terms of levels or XP) in such a way that they overlap another character’s niche? Here many of the same ideas still work. First off, talk to the person and find out why they are moving into that niche. Perhaps they don’t realize that you are covering that area or perhaps it is part of larger change in the concept of the character. Ideally you can find some compromise such that one character is not diminished relative to the rest of the group.

As a player there is a lot you can do to preserve your niche . In many cases you can focus on a skill or aspect of a character, like raising your occult to ever higher levels. In many games however there is a sense of diminishing returns. For example in World of Darkness, skills cap out at 5 dots and the difference between a master (5 dots) and a skilled professional (3 dots) might be seem fairly small. One thing to keep in mind however is that often such systems can and do invoke large penalties for particularly hard tasks. 2 extra dice looks a lot better when faced with a minus 4 dice penalty.

Beyond that however there comes point where you should broaden your own concept. Continuing with the occult expert, as you move to the higher ranges of that skill, you should begin to branch out into related abilities. You might raise your character's Intelligence to indicate the result of all of his studying. Perhaps he gains a library advantage from all the books he has acquired in his research or possesses artifacts that he has investigated. Perhaps the character invests in contacts and allies among the occult underground, people he knows because they come to him to get their difficult questions answered. Even raising other skills can work to expand on the character's master of hidden lore, particularly if you augment them with specialities. For example: Persuasion (bargaining with spirits) or Science (fringe science).

While some of these options don’t directly feed into the character’s skills, they do feed in his niche. They keep the spotlight on the character by making his expertise important to the story. Ultimately that is what niche is about and the idea that there is another character might be almost good at a given task somewhere in the world doesn’t matter if the focus is on your character and what he can do right now.