The Magic Number

In any kind of media, there is something about a large cast of unique characters coming together. Whether it is the main crew from Star Trek, the characters from LOST, or the heroes who fight with Commander Sheppard in the Mass Effect trilogy, the media format, television, film, video games or literature, doesn’t seem to matter.

Large groups allow for a diverse set of individual characters that often break traditional character molding in order to differentiate them from the others. This gives viewers/readers/players a chance to develop favorites within the chosen media.

But in order to create a large cast a few rules have to be followed from a writing standpoint.

1. Each character must be given the limelight to allow the audience to view the world from their perspective and generate sympathy.


2. All characters must interact with one another; have relationships, conflicts, and experience with each of the others.

Because of these rules, a large group is very difficult to create within a short time period, like films. Oceans 11, is one of the few films that is able to pull off a large cast of uniquely varied individuals, who are memorable. But looking back on films like Inception, which requires a “team” of people to successful accomplish their given objective, you can see that their large group was scaled back to about four or five individuals, compared to nine that seems to be the magic number.

TF2, has nine playable characters, Firefly, has a crew of nine aboard the Serenity, LOST has a core cast of around nine that fluctuates between seasons adding and subtracting minor characters, Mass Effect has a core unit of characters that spanned all three games and like Lost added and subtracted minor characters between 2 and 3.

So why is nine the magic number?

The one thing all of these media have in common is they all stem from writing. They all began as something on paper before Patrick Steward forever became synonymously known as Captain Picard. Except for TF2, the lone odd ball, whose characters are more driven by physical appearance/animation word and snippets of dialog, but that is beside the point.

Building all of those connections is a monstrously huge task and nine seems to be the limit of how many major characters can be part of a single event, while each getting their own unique action and dialog. Most episodes or chapters actually break the larger group down into fragments of two or three characters in order to better showcase individual relationships between characters. The award winning Game of Thrones book series, now a television show, never has its wide range of cast ever been in one place at one time.

So that is what I have been thinking about as I prototype this adventure game that I have been working on and off with for a while now. At the moment I am trying to figure out my classes, which would then evolve into a cast of unique characters. But we will see as things progress forward.