Some time ago I wrote about trying to wear NPCs as hats.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m more of a method actor (assuming you can call what I do acting at all), so switching around between NPCs has always been a challenge for me.\u00c2\u00a0 In a previous post I discussed my plan to treat NPCs as caricatures, defining their outward traits first, never worrying about their inner psychology.<\/p>\n
I’d link to that earlier post, but the method sucked and the beginning of the game sucked because of it.<\/p>\n
Basically I gave each NPC an index card.\u00c2\u00a0 This part of the technique is fine.\u00c2\u00a0 It was utterly necessary for tracking plots in my Game of Thrones campaign a couple years ago.<\/p>\n
The new part is that I wrote down 3 parts of each NPC’s appearance and 3 mannerisms on every single card.\u00c2\u00a0 My goal was to act like the NPC and show of a prop belonging to the NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 I figured the guy with the cigar and the halfing with the bobcat would each be more memorable than going by names for each NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted the character’s behaviors to trigger my PCs’ memory about the NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 And I wanted the behaviors to jumpstart my personification of the NPC.<\/p>\n
But it was too much.\u00c2\u00a0 In the first session I introduced the players to Lucien’s adventures.\u00c2\u00a0 Lucien’s introduction went fine, although the players interpreted him to be just a little more of a dumbass than I’d intended.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem was the five or six investors.\u00c2\u00a0 Each with three appearance traits and three mannerisms.\u00c2\u00a0 Distributing thirty unique qualities to a group of NPCs was overwhelming.\u00c2\u00a0 There was no way the players could remember all that.\u00c2\u00a0 Why did I think this was a good idea again?<\/p>\n
Not only was it overwhelming, it was also ridiculous.\u00c2\u00a0 In the process of writing up all those NPCs (plus all the ones the players didn’t meet) I got bored of traits like talkative, stern, and slow.\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone had weird, over the top traits, designed to make them stand out.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of giving the players a bunch of people to work for, I’d surrounded them with circus clowns.\u00c2\u00a0 Ugh.<\/p>\n
This problem was also compounded by the fact that the group traveled.\u00c2\u00a0 More on that later.\u00c2\u00a0 But the long story short is that these traits were ideas that were supposed to pay off in the long run when the players returned to a familiar NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 They didn’t return to NPCs.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead they went to new towns and demanded more NPCs.\u00c2\u00a0 This method might have worked in a stationary game, but it didn’t scale one bit when the players moved around.<\/p>\n
Now, the answer to all this came pretty easily.\u00c2\u00a0 I think the method could have been successful if I hadn’t frontloaded it.\u00c2\u00a0 Why start with three personality traits and three appearance characteristics?\u00c2\u00a0 They were mostly arbitrary anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 In retrospect I would have been better off with just one thing per NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 But each time the\u00c2\u00a0 players met an NPC, he’d gain another trait.\u00c2\u00a0 I think that would have worked out better.<\/p>\n
But even that was too formal.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes I just want to talk to the players.\u00c2\u00a0 Worrying about what the NPC’s new mannerism is going to be is a distraction.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m okay with a big, bogged down system for combat, but not for chatting with an innkeeper.<\/p>\n
Anyway, around this point I scrapped the whole NPC traits thing.\u00c2\u00a0 I think it’s a noble goal to strive to improve my GMing deficiencies.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s nobler still to run a good game.\u00c2\u00a0 I was spending time focusing on my weakest point.\u00c2\u00a0 The game was sucking and focusing on my weakness wasn’t improving things.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead I did a 180 and figured out how to use method acting to my advantage.<\/p>\n
When I’ve played a character for a long time, I’ve always found it easy to slip back into that character.\u00c2\u00a0 This is why I’m in favor of recycling PCs as NPCs.\u00c2\u00a0 For little to no effort, I can have a strong NPC with personality and background.\u00c2\u00a0 I should probably refrain from using an NPC who has partied with the other players at the table, but I play at so many tables with so many groups that I’ve always got a few characters nobody has seen before.\u00c2\u00a0 Not reusing them would be wasteful.<\/p>\n
Basically I decided to write each session around one NPC at a time.\u00c2\u00a0 Others could show up, but I’d only introduce one per session.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like how Lost did flashbacks for each character on the show.\u00c2\u00a0 Not ‘kind of,’ but ‘exactly’.\u00c2\u00a0 For me, in the two weeks leading up to each game, that NPC was my character.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought of that character as my own PC.\u00c2\u00a0 I got into his head and fleshed him out.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes even going so far as to practice conversations.<\/p>\n
This worked.\u00c2\u00a0 It absolutely gave me stronger NPCs.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, stronger NPC.\u00c2\u00a0 The rest were still bland.\u00c2\u00a0 But after a couple months I built up a lot more functional NPCs.\u00c2\u00a0 And after spending a few weeks focusing on each of them individually, I had a much easier time recalling an NPC when it was time for him to make an appearance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some time ago I wrote about trying to wear NPCs as hats.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m more of a method actor (assuming you can call what I do acting at all), so switching around between NPCs has always been a challenge for me.\u00c2\u00a0 In a previous post I discussed my plan to treat NPCs as caricatures, defining their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,8,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dnd4e","category-observations","category-organization-gm","category-self-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}