Setting Up Character Turns
Clifford Irving’s attempt to sell a faked Howard Hughes autobiography while the man was still alive was the kind of improbably nutso move you couldn’t credibly pull off in a work of fiction. In the movie account of the incident, even with the real-life angle to justify it, the script spends its entire first act setting up the decision. It carefully lays out the series of pressures that lead Irving to attempt his colossally risky scheme. This follows a basic storytelling principle-the more an action strains credibility, the harder you have to work to make it seem likely and relatable.
Roleplaying characters tend more than their counterparts in other narrative media to make choices that seem abrupt, arbitrary, or just plain crazy. Part of this can be chalked up to the fun of playing unhinged or impulsive characters. They shake things up, make things happen, and in general appeal to the player type referred to in the 4E DMG as the instigator.
That said, the extreme actions of otherwise sane or justified characters often come off as jarring in a roleplaying context due to a lack of adequate groundwork. GMs find it easier to lay pipe for coming events than players do. It’s hard for players to find opportunities to execute the slowly escalating stages of a dramatic character turn.
A GM might encourage this by allowing players to incorporate character transformations into the game. The player tells the GM how the character might slowly evolve over the course of many sessions, laying out the chain of motivating events required to get her there. Depending on where the dials are set on the game’s balance of narrative power between players and GMs, the GM might facilitate this as written, or attempt to surprise the player by getting her character where she wants to go in an unexpected way.
It might help when creating a character to first imagine her as she’ll seem after the turn. Then work backwards to introduce her in a previous state. A PC envisioned as a hardened killer might begin play as an idealistic pacifist. The next three to five sessions might each include a scene intended to slowly nudge her into her final state. Thus the arc that might normally be consigned to a backstory description (“Chandra stopped being a pacifist the day the Lupine Order razed her village”) is realized onstage, during play.