Followup about characters and roles

Any superhero

Later: Other thoughts

Thinking about it, and possibly this is too much about fiction and not about roleplaying, every character fulfils at least one role:

• plot, where they provide a necessary service, item, or obstacle
• setting, where they reinforce some aspect of the environment; this tends to be more about your choice of characters — you choose to use a cowboy to emphasize that the adventure takes place in rural Texas, or a hipster to display that we're in the trendy subcultures of New York
• emotional, where they draw out some emotional aspect of the character or conflict — someone who will be directly affected by the villain's evil plan, for example
• pacing, which is closely related to "emotional," above, but I admit that sometimes I have put in a character who will just be funny or tear-jerking or whatever just to change the mood at the table and speed things up or slow things down

(I've also thrown characters in because I've just had too much fun roleplaying them, like a certain character's mother kept showing up. Sometimes it pays off; she turned out to have had a dalliance with the Joker, and the hero turned out to be the Joker's kid, but it came from me having fun having her complain about his (at that point unnamed) father.)

Every character has this mechanical function, which is a union of one or more of those roles, often summarized with a job title, and a relationship to each character. Sometimes the relationship is really nebulous: "person in the crowd" or "bystander." Sometimes it's stronger and should inform the PC's actions: "love interest" or "arch-foe" or "guy who thinks he's the arch-foe but he really isn't."

Maybe you can more quickly define characters by specifying the mechanical role and the relationship. If you say a character is a "tech guru" and "friend" you've just opened up two sets of possibilities: One is that there's a place to go for plot coupons ("Where are we going to find a chronosynclastic infundibulator?" "Jeanine might have one!"), and the other is that range of story possibilities opened by the friend role: hostage, used as leverage by villains, possible betrayal for good or bad reasons, the friend comes to them because of blackmail (I'm sure it's deepfake ransomware), and so on.

I'll have to think about that one some more to see if it's a useful distinction or not. (I frequently make distinctions that aren't actually useful at the table.)