Kieron Gillen, author of DIE the comic and the RPG, has a fantastic blog post about why people who try to play Han Solo in TTRPGs usually suck. His point is that it’s not impossible to play the guy who doesn’t want to be on the adventure, but it does require a very different, less self-centred approach that is somewhat at odds with the energy of the character himself (and with what most people who want to play that kind of don’t-wanna-be-here loner want, but that’s a separate issue).
His very excellent point is that a Han Solo character works by turning his stubbornness or selfishness or unwillingness not into a moment to drag the spotlight to himself, but to cast it on another character. Make another character seem clever by tricking him into coming along (which is to say, the player lets him be tricked); make another character seem righteous by making him unable to resist their call to action. The character’s selfishness isn’t a means for the player to be selfish, but instead to use that trait as a platform to lift others.
Someone in the comments shared the Nordic LARP term “play to lift” to describe this dynamic, and I immediately had to go read more about it.
That second post, by Susanne Vejdamo, provided a framework that is super relevant to some games I’ve been in recently, and the type of people that I tend to play with. That is, people with a bit of theatre kid in their soul. People who, as that blog post puts it, like to play to lose. They want the drama of bad things happening to their characters, and in a few recent games, I have experienced such players getting so wrapped up in the pleasure of bringing the world crashing down on their character’s head, it becomes as self-centred as the players who refuse to let their characters do anything but win. Instead of Han Solo who won’t go on the adventure, it’s Charlie Brown who can’t succeed at anything no matter how the other characters might try to help, support, or intervene.
Vejdamo’s post proposes that playing to lose and playing to lift work best when paired: the players collaborate to give each other wins and losses as the drama demands and the other seems to desire, with the ultimate goal being a shared one of telling the most interesting possible story. The example she gives is of a character who is meant to be charismatic giving a big speech: the audience must be playing to lift, reinforcing the sense of that character’s oratory skill by cheering and applauding. However, if they sense or know that, actually, this player is trying to play to lose, the lift would be to boo them.
As a rule, I think basically everyone (myself included) could stand to pay more attention to other characters and other players, to be more attentive to what they want and how to provide it. I like Gillan’s framing because it’s more specific, and a bit more pointed: if you want to be a selfish character, you need to be a correspondingly generous player. And I think there’s a play to lose variant, too: if you want to cause maximum drama and make a character who can’t catch a break, the things that go wrong for them should be creating opportunities for someone else to do something right, good, or otherwise in their interests or to their benefit.
I think that’s the way to break out of the potential selfishness spiral that can result from playing to lose, as you heap fun-to-deal with consequences onto yourself that either don’t involve anyone else, or force the people who want to support this character, or just generally succeed in the circumstances at hand, into situations where they have very few options about how to behave—the parallel to the character who refuses to go on the adventure, and forces everyone to stand around persuading them.
I also think it’s a framework that’s likelier to actually be taken up by the people who need it. I think, perhaps ungenerously, that most people who are poorly playing a Han Solo type do it because they enjoy the attention, whereas I think most players who are playing to lose do just want to tell a good story, and maybe need only a small nudge to find more collaborative ways to do it.