De-Whimsify Yourself

One of the core themes of Nobody Poops on TV that I've really become enamoured with is this idea that you don't want to be too weird.

Everybody edits themselves in real life--they hold back on opinions that might alienate those they care about, they downplay their passions, they play hard-to-get so as to not come off as desperate.

This is true on TV, as well. A character whose personality goes too far to either extreme is not often well-received by audiences.

It's why I'm honestly interested in the concept of an ideal Attribute that isn't about having the most numbers possible, but instead finding a happy medium between "too low" and "too high".

I love Community. Adore it. But it wasn't without its critics, and I think those critics might hold the key of how I can represent this kind of "your character is too weird" gameplay.

I fundamentally disagree with this review by Gabriel Bergmoser, but the great thing about opinions is that they're completely subjective, and what's true for me is not true for Gabriel (and vice-versa). But let's imagine Gabriel as one of the Audience members in Nobody Poops on TV. Why wouldn't he like your character?

Well, lots of reasons!

One of the commenters on that review, a person by the name of MM, brings up some criticisms of Community that could work as examples of personalities that are too extreme (be their values too high or too low):

• Annie was immature and never seemed to grow.
• Britta got dumber over time and loved to disagree people simply for the sake of disagreeing.
• Shirley hid behind her Christianity as an excuse to guilt trip and judge others.
• Jeff's over-confident attitude came off as overly smug.
• Pierce's "old racist" persona was tiring and hard to watch.

Many of these are just....... character flaws, which are good for a well-rounded character to have, but is it possible that they were too flawed? Pierce, for instance, had very few redeeming qualities--though part of that may be related to Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase's well-documented feud. When Chevy was offered more humanising scenes, like one between Abed and Pierce in season 3's Digital Estate Planning, he turned them down.

All Chevy wanted was funny lines, he didn't care about making a well-rounded, relateable character, and audiences noticed.

To give an example of how I might handle extremes of personality, let's look at the personality traits from The Sims 2.

You can be sloppy (the extreme absence of neatness), or you can be neat. But you can never be too neat.

You can be grouchy (the extreme absence of niceness), or you can be nice. But you can never be too nice.

Well, what if you could?

Here's how I imagine personalities looking, using Sims terminology:

If sloppiness is the extreme absence of neatness, what is the extreme presence of neatness? Compulsiveness. The need to clean everything. Always. Everywhere. You don't do dishes, you buy new dishes. You don't just vacuum, you get out a hard brush and scrub the carpet with industrial chemicals.

If shyness is the extreme absence of outgoingness, what is the extreme presence of it? Being too noisy. You talk to EVERYBODY, AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS, and you never just.... shut... up.

Monomania, flippantness, compliance... all examples of personality extremes. In these examples, "neat", "outgoing", "active", "playful" and "nice" are instead the middle ground of these two extremes.

So, how to structure personalities in Nobody Poops on TV in a way that reflects this preference?

The Enneagram of Personality?

Pseudoscientific and unable to be easily measured in a controlled environment, the Enneagram of Personality is not a theory I'm particularly interested in. It's also focused on archetypes, which makes it difficult to quantify, and more akin to a Sims 3 or 4-style trait system. In this theory, you have:

• The reformer
• The helper
• The achiever
• The individualist
• The investigator
• The loyalist
• The enthusiast
• The challenger
• The peacemaker

These are useful archetypes that can explain a character, but not from a game mechanics perspective. You'd use these as a jumping-off point for designing NPC interactions, not as the building blocks for your player character's whole build! How do you "roll for individualist"? What does that even mean?

I don't see it as a useful metric for my game at all. For an NPC personality? Sure. But not for their stats.

What About Myers-Briggs?

A Myers-Briggs personality is self-reported, and so it's not really--in my mind, at least--about what your personality is actually like, it's about how you perceive yourself, which are not always the same thing. To use an extreme example, the BBEG of a D&D campaign probably thinks of themselves as the hero of the story. They're changing the world, and they're doing it for what they consider to be noble reasons. But does that line up with reality? Rarely.

Likewise, how you perceive your personality is not necessarily how you are.

How many absolute arseholes are there who are convinced of their kindness? How many selfish people think that they're helping others? An animal lover who overfeeds their cat and lets them freely wander outside, killing native birds and frogs, or an environmentalist who loves using generative AI and cryptocurrency?

Myers-Briggs bases personalities on eight metrics divided into four pairs: introversion (I) versus extraversion (E), sensing (S) versus intuition (N), thinking (T) versus feeling (F), and judging (J) versus perceiving (P), effectively arranging these paired metrics into a list of your four most preferred.

As you can see, it's a very binary system--you either prefer introversion or you prefer extraversion. It doesn't account for, for example, a person who likes to go out and be around people, but has a limited social battery and no longer wants to be around others after a certain point.

I'm very much an introvert, yet I know from experience that I like being around people! But I also know that I can only take so much. I like working days when there's a coworker I get along with, but on days when they're not there, I am ready to leave from the moment I clock in because the place is simply too loud and too crowded. I love being with my friends, and I'll hang out with them all day, but I have my limits and I won't do it every single day.

Is an introvert somebody who doesn't like being around people at all, or are they extroverted but only in small doses? But isn't that just a conditional extrovert? Then how do you account for total misanthropes who don't want to be around anyone?

You need a spectrum, not a binary.

Finally, The Big Five

First described in 1958 by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, the "Big Five" tries to, as the name suggests, categorise human personalities into five major characteristics:

• Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
• Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
• Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/judgmental)
• Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

The acronyms OCEAN and CANOE are sometimes used to describe this theory, which, unlike the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs, is not a pseudoscience, but is instead critiqued on its limitations. It can be measured, but it's not the be-all end-all of personality frameworks, and that's important to remember. Our understanding of human consciousness is not perfect, and we don't have all the answers. But we have some.

But, while it's constrained by its limits, the Big Five can be measured. Though not as a binary "I am open to experience" vs. "I am not open to experience". Instead, personalities in the Big Five exist on a sliding scale, and that's something very easily translatable into a numerical, RPG system.

This is the system I want to use for my RPG.