RPG characters have unconscious biases too
Every Saturday afternoon, I have a virtual RPG group. It's just four of us these days, playing D&D5e in post apocalyptic San Francisco (although there will be and are currently more apocalyptic events, so that's not quite accurate). I mention it occasionally, but I wanted to talk a little bit about some stuff that's come up in our game lately. Specifically, I want to talk about our characters' internal, unconscious biases.
Unconscious bias comes up a lot in the real world, and gets talked about in terms of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other forms of discrimination. It's a sensitive topic, and one that impacts everyone. Every person has some internal biases that shape how they see the world and interact with it. Even our RPG characters.
My d&d group created this world we play in a while ago, and we have a lot of detailed world building. But even though all the players know the "truth" of the game world, our characters don't. Specifically, they don't know everything about magic.
In our world, there are three types of casters, who all ultimately get their magic from the Plane of Magic, though through different intermediaries. Primal casters (bards, druids, rangers) get magic from the world around them, divine casters (clerics and paladins) get magic from their gods, and arcane casters (wizards, sorcerers, and artificers) are further divided. Wizards strengthen their soul's direct connection to the Plane of Magic and use that to cast, while sorcerers have a connection to one of the planes (specifically, the elemental planes or something similar) that "flavors" their connection, serves as an intermediary, and gives them the game feature of a sorcerous origin. As far as anyone knows, there's only one artificer (he's a PC, though not mine): his crowning work -- and the reason he's fleeing the government -- was a serum, the Sorcerer Serum, which created an entirely new connection, almost a miniature plane, for him to use. In short, he turned himself into a sorcerer and challenged pretty much every scientific truth that people knew of.
Obviously, this is a Big Deal in the game world. He's fleeing multiple people who want the serum, including the government. However, my character doesn't see it as an achievement or a scientific advance on epic scales. She sees it as a perversion of nature and a disgrace to both the nature of souls and to sorcerers.
I play a shadow sorcerer, a paranoid charlatan, a master of magical disguise, a charismatic young woman with many layers and more fake identities than living family members. Her name is Fiametta Contadine, and if you don't get the reference, she's also gone by Gianetta, Tessa, Giulia, Vittoria, and Casilda (and Aline, but that's a different operetta). She's seen a lot, done a lot, and likes to argue with the artificer about the most trivial things. She learns best by doing and named her shadow hound Penumbra. Her closest relationship is with John Wellington Wells, her fellow former member of the sorcerous underground; he's like a mixture of an odd uncle and a younger brother, with a few dashes of it's-complicated added. And she considers messing with souls and sorcery as a defiance of the natural order. That’s her largest internal bias.
It started, most likely, with insecurity. She isn't sure where her magic comes from. Shadow sorcerers aren't connected to the elemental planes the way other sorcerers are. At best, she's a sort of anti-fire, but that isn't the best description and it's sort of uncomfortable for her to think about. So Fia can’t be sure where her magic comes from.
Now, John Wells is a masterful sorcerer with a lot of power. But he's also had nearly every kind of cybernetic or magical enhancement possible (usually those come from the aftermath of annoying somebody else. He does that a lot.), and he is definitely a bit unnatural, as sorcerers come. For heavens sake, his character sheet is literally just "He's freaking John Wells. Accept it."!
So why is Fia not okay with the artificer, but she's okay with the equally nature-defying John Wells?
That's where her unconscious bias is. To her, sorcery is natural and comes from a natural source. She accepts that. Altering a sorcerer changes the connection, but it still leaves them a sorcerer. She’s fine with that. For her, it follows that sorcery that comes from an unnatural source is strange and unnatural and wrong. I don't have that bias, because I don't have magic and I didn't grow up trying to repress several feet of shadow around me whenever I got upset and I'm not Fia. But I notice that my character has this bias.
Fia has a habit of arguing with the artificer. Our group has fun with that, but last week it had consequences that made Fia think about her beliefs a bit. The artificer's mother is a sorcerer and was at our safe house after we busted her out from an unfriendly dragon crime lord. She had a crown put on her as a curse to keep her from casting, as part of the fallout from getting her. And the artificer wanted to study it, even though it could have hurt her if he wasn’t careful. His mom wanted him to think about the consequences and not go deep into things he shouldn’t get involved in.
Fia and the other PC, a rogue, agreed. But the artificer didn’t. In fact, he argued that he’d already gone in too deep when he made the serum that turned him into a sorcerer. So his mom asked him if he knew where she got her power from. Her point was that he needed to think first and care about others more.
Fia took this as an invitation to remark on his power being the reason he shouldn’t get involved with magic of that sort. He’d already created perversions of nature, and wasn’t that enough?
Out of character, we paused to check in. Everyone wanted to see where this was going and was okay with the argument maybe getting heated. We knew there was a chance that one of us could say something in character that could hurt people’s feelings, and, frankly, we wanted to see how far they could push each other before the rogue shoved them in a dueling room and left them to blast each other.
So they argued. And eventually the artificer tossed out the idea that Fia just doesn’t want to accept that sorcery can be replicated. I checked with the group, then narrated Fia storming off to her room so she doesn’t have to respond.
In the game, Fia did her usual routine for when she just can’t cope: she turned off the lights, stopped suppressing the shadows around her, and curled into a ball on the floor while refusing to let anyone into the room.
Out of the game, we giggled that Fia threw a tantrum because she lost an argument. Then I realized that her basic assumptions of the world are being questioned. She cannot believe fully that sorcery can only be pure and natural, given what she’s experienced, and still keep her budding friendship with the artificer.
In short, she will have to confront that bias and realize, or at least move towards acknowledging the fact, that maybe sorcerers can be created without being some kind of horrific mixture of magic and science that defies the order of things.
I think this example shows one way unconscious bias can be played realistically without being hurtful. Fia’s belief at the start of all this comes from her history, like everyone else’s beliefs do. I checked in with the group to see if they were okay with her making things worse, so that everyone was on the same page and understood that even though my character held this belief, I didn’t and I wanted people to challenge her on it. Then Fia’s actions had consequences: she worsened her relationship with the party and was proven wrong publicly. Because of that, she has to rethink her assumptions and change her behavior. And then she has to figure out what to do next to mend her relationships.
She hasn’t immediately accepted a new truth. There’s been prior incidents like this and there will be more in future. But she’s slowly changing and growing. And that’s all any of us on this planet can do: learn and grow.
I didn’t pick an example showing a real world unconscious bias. I don’t think I could handle it here in a way that would be honest but also respectful of others. Things that show up in the real world are tricky because they have a huge potential to harm others. It’s important to acknowledge our own biases and overcome them, in the real world and in games.
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