Character Creation Challenge, Day 7: Soap: The Game of Soap Opera Mayhem

Soap requires no gamemaster and no dice. Its mechanics rely almost entirely on player narration and the movement of Plot Tokens. Players take turns narrating events and speaking their characters’ dialogue, attempting to work key concepts into the story (for Plot Tokens) and root out their fellow player characters’ darkest secrets. They can also compete to edit each other’s words by bidding Plot Tokens for control of the narration.

Unlike so many other games we’ve covered in this series Soap’s character creation starts with a Name.  But how do I know what to call my character when I don’t know anything about them? 

 

Well, daytime drama thrives on types. One thing we can do is go back to the Quickstart section and look at the archetypes it makes available. This section offers the Hunk, the Bitch, the Loser, the Arch-Villain, the Sweet Girl, the Mother, the Kid, and the Dilettante. Do I want to play a heel or a face character? Rich or poor? Shaker or shaken? I kind of want to play a comic-relief schemer along the lines of Santa Barbara’s Gina or Days of Our Lives’ Eugene and Calliope. Self-interested, but not quite evil, and prone to tripping over their own ill-laid plans. Let's call her Cornelia Vane.

 

All right, now to determine Cornelia’s Traits. These are the most important aspects of the character as expressed in a few short sentences, with the key adjectives and nouns underlined. Cornelia is scheming, greedy and self-centered. She’s probably got a couple of ex-husbands and tries but fails to live on the alimony from the most recent; let’s boil that down to “twice-divorced." She’s definitely good-looking--not the top-tier kind of pretty that characterizes heroines and archvillainesses, but pretty enough to have been a successful gold-digger. She’s clever but short-sighted. Now, I only get to underline the five most important ones as Traits. “Scheming” is definitely one; “twice-divorced” seems like it should factor heavily into soap-opera plotting. “Good-looking” gives us a physical characterization to work with, but that's true of almost every soap opera character and anyhow I’m not sure how important it is. That leaves three to choose from among “greedy,” “self-centered,” “clever,” and “short-sighted.” There’s a lot of overlap between “clever” and “scheming,” though not entirely; likewise between “greedy” and “self-centered.” I’ll emphasize “greedy,” “clever” and “short-sighted.” When these aspects come up in connection with Cornelia during the game’s narration or dialogue, I’ll get Plot Tokens out of it.

 

Third, we define the character’s Relationships. There should be one friendly and one unfriendly relationship between you and two of your fellow player characters. This would ordinarily require other players whose characters Cornelia would relate to, so we’ll have to fake that. We’ll go with an unfriendly ex-husband and a friendly co-conspirator. I should probably name these people: the ex is business tycoon Mason Carpenter, and the partner in crime is ambitious yet bumbling lawyer Damian Tripp.

 

Fourth, Cornelia needs a Goal. Even though she’s a comic-relief villain and not an archvillain, I’m not afraid to shoot high. She wants to wrest control of Carpenter Industries away from her ex-husband, and she’ll attempt to do it with a never-ending series of far-fetched plots hatched in collaboration with Damian.

 

Fifth, Cornelia needs a Secret. Like her Traits, this is initially expressed as a sentence or three, and five key elements are selected for emphasis. Debt or larceny seems like a promising avenue—she’s the extravagant type—and larceny is more shameful than mere debt, though maybe we can have both. Let’s say she stole trade secrets from her first husband’s business in order to pay off a loan shark, who now has blackmail leverage over her. I’ll stress “stole,” “trade secrets,” “first husband,” “loan shark,” and “blackmail.” If in the course of play I can work some of these words or phrases into my narration or dialogue, I can earn more Plot Tokens by letting the other players know that I dropped some clues (without revealing what precisely the clues were). If my Secret ever comes out, however, that's the signal for my character to die, so there's a definite risk involved.

 

Penultimately, Cornelia must choose a home set, a location where she is always the most important character, and where she will be at an advantage in bidding contests over narration. As a scheming divorcée with no job, her actual home seems like an obvious choice, but it’s not really public enough to generate a lot of traffic. Instead, let’s say she owns a restaurant (or at least is the public partner of the restaurant’s ownership) and that’s where she holds court. She’s just the type to give it a pretentiously dumb French name, so let’s call it Chez Brasserie.

Finally, each character starts the game with two Plot Tokens so we can have bidding contests without waiting for anyone to earn them. We’ll track those using physical tokens, so we don’t need to note them on the character sheet. Since that’s the last step, we can sum Cornelia up here:

 

Cornelia Vane

Sex: F

Age: 38

Appearance: Blonde, pretty in a secondary-comic-character sort of way

Background and Traits. Twice-divorced, Cornelia is a scheming, self-centered gold-digger. She’s clever but short-sighted, and the plots she hatches with lawyer Damian Tripp are usually foiled by her ill-controlled greed.

Secret: Cornelia stole trade secrets from her first husband’s business in order to pay off a loan shark, who now holds blackmail leverage over her.

Goal: Take control of Carpenter Industries from her ex-husband

Relationships: 

Friendly: Damian Tripp, ambitious-yet-bumbling lawyer

Unfriendly: Mason Carpenter, most recent ex-husband and business tycoon

Home Set: her restaurant Chez Brasserie