Wrestling for TTRPGs 101: Faces, Heels, and Other Body Parts

Intro:

Pro Wrestling is hard as hell. It's an art of dramatic acrobats, obnoxious athletes, and daredevils coming together to fight over vintage designer belts. Good versus Evil, Big Man versus the Little Guy, and a demonic zombie versus an arrogant leather-bound playboy in an alligator cowboy hat; all the major stories of mankind are represented and played out for your enjoyment in that ring! Additionally, pro-wrestling is an art form that primarily uses fantastical combat as not only a thing that cements story-beats, but IS the story-beat. What I mean by this is that combat in Pro-Wrestling is the pen ultimate way the story is advanced and the personalities of characters are fully realized. The characters, tropes, and stories that have played out in rings all over the world are something your home games should pull from. It is extreme theater, and overlooking how something so tied to extravagant combat and what are essentially magical artifacts (championship belts) means you are limiting the stories and details of art you can pull from for your table. Surprising your fellow TTRPG enthusiasts with something out-of-the-box cool is one of the best parts of playing. Pro-Wrestling is full of surprises.

Now, in order to get started thinking about how Pro-Wrestling can improve your experience, let's go over some definitions so you know what people are talking about.

Some definitions:

• Face: Portrayed as the good guy who has the support of the crowd.

• Faces' keep the crowd on their side by having the crowd be invested in their character's success or just by doing what they want. Best case, those 2 things line up. You can get crowd buy-in by doing a lot of things. For example: looking cool, acting cool, smacking people in satisfying ways, expressing enthusiasm for the crowd, and having your storylines be paced in a way the crowd likes.

• Heel: Portrayed as the Bad Guy that has the explicit disdain, referred to as 'heat', of the crowd.

• Heels' get the hate and boos from the crowd by doing a lot of things that seem really fun. Things like berating the crowd, cheating to win, screwing with the heroes, and generally being a special kind of dirtbag that you enjoy booing. fear can also play a role here, more on that later ;)

Who Is Your Crowd?:

The goal of these roles--and of course, there can be more nuance, but let's stick to the basics for now--is to get a reaction from the crowd. Now, TTRPGS offers a wonderful thing where one can view the crowd as their table and a fictional public they create with the DM. Townspeople, guards, deities, villains, rivals, and magic shop owner conventions are all publics you can engage with in TTRPGS and can all react differently! This is excellent for building out a character, it gives them dimension if various groups of people will have different reactions to them. Plus, if you understand what kind of vibe you want your character to have with your table, viewing them as a crowd you have to get behind you is a fun way to play and entertain your friends when your character is in the spotlight.

What this means is your goodie-goodie paladin may not only be disliked by villains but also by people who think they're being fake and they're not so morally upright. Your shadowy rogue could actually be beloved by every group of goths and edgy 12-year-olds they encounter, because they're so cool. So, as you and your adventuring party build up a name, different people can have favorites and you guys can build upon what your natural interactions with the world will be. Honestly, your adventuring party is basically a traveling band of rockstars/prizefighters/mercenaries. You're already off the wall weird and a caricature of what a normal person is no matter what world you guys are playing in, if the campaign goes long enough. The way you use these interactions, like a paladin rubbing every man in uniform the wrong way because they make the normal guards look bad, or because your wizard is being ogled by every npc with classics and nasal blockage, is going to build up a reputation or 'gimmick' for you and your party.

Embrace it.

Even in gritty and dark settings, weirdos still put on bat costumes and open a can of whoop-ass on wannabe thugs in makeup. Everything is not that serious, but that does not mean the stakes are low. That is a wonderful lesson from pro wrestling, a thing's appearance does not need to dictate its meaning. What this means for any character concept is, you have to think about what you want them to feel and look like to not only your table, but to the different npcs. Don't try to game this out for every possible group, just the ones you care about. This can easily be done by just adding a line or two to a character description.

Answer these two questions.

• What do you want your character to feel like to your party initially?

• Then, how do you want to communicate that you are special and worth paying attention to?

These questions, if you ask them periodically to yourself, will end up leading to more interactions of meaning with your party and npcs. These questions are pertinent for pro wrestling, which are implicitly dealt with in good character work in TTRPG.

By making them explicitly dealt with and pulling from pro-wrestling where these kinds of questions are dealt with in over-the-top ways in quite a similar way as in TTRPGS, you will learn how to make your weird high-fantasy seriously immersive and your grave fear-inducing settings easier to humanize and care about. Both of these, are excellent for GMs to use to harm your character later because we must remember an integral part of TTRPGs is consensually making something meaningful with friends for one of them to use to induce pain.

Sounds a lot like a wrestling match doesn't it :)