One-Liner NPCs

DMMike said:

What if I put it like this: realistically, a dozen people have knowledge about one clue that's necessary for the detective to put together two clues that will eventually lead him to the killer.

GMs don't have time for that. One NPC is going to reveal one clue, another will reveal the other clue, and a third NPC will help the PCs put the two clues together (because you know they're going to need it). Then the chase scene ensues.

If you don't write out lines of dialogue, then your primary NPCs have significant notes that reveal what they know, with whom they interact, and what their routines and inventory look like.

If you don't have lines of dialogue written out, or significant notes on what the NPC knows, then you're just winging it - which can lead to serious inconsistencies, player confusion, and - get ready for it - non-immersive play.

The concept is that there are NPCs who require detail, but most really don't, and shouldn't be expected to.

Click to expand...

Ok, I think we have a very different approach to how we prep and run NPCs. I've never written dialog for NPCs — though I do sometimes talk to them in my head the day of a session — and I worry very little about their inventory and routines unless I am running a detailed investigative adventure focused on prying secrets out of NPCs to solve a mystery. My last Cthulhu adventure, for instance, had a half dozen bullet points each for a half dozen NPCs, but that's because everyone was a suspect and everyone had a secret, and I wanted to leave physical and verbal clues that could help the characters (and the players) put everything together. Even then, I am always determining, on the spot, exactly what NPCs know and don't know, and how they are going to respond to PCs.

Instead, I put my energy into being clear in the notes about the facts of the adventure. What happened when and where and who the main actors were. If it's an investigative adventure, I might break this information down into "Clues" that the PCs will need to collect in order to make sense of things, just so that I can be sure that there are ample opportunities for the PCs to collect them, either by seeding them into an adventure ahead of time or by improvising on the fly. Once I know those details, it's not hard to make a judgment call about what the innkeeper does or doesn't know.

That being said, I do think there is benefit in keeping NPCs busy and terse most of the time. While I love NPC interaction, both as a DM and a player, I'll be the first to admit that NPC banter can sometimes dominate our play time, leaving little time for exploration and murder-hoboing. So it would be a good reminder for me to assume that my NPCs usually have something they'd rather be doing than talking to the PCs and make them generally in a hurry to end the interaction.

But, as for who the players actually talk to, anyone is fair game. I don't have to worry about giving my townspeople a pay bump because they delivered a line on-camera. If the players want to canvas the houses near where the murder happened, they're gonna find somebody home and that person is gonna get a name and they will probably have some sort of information. But, ok, they probably shouldn't invite the characters in for tea and tell them their hastily constructed life story. My bad.

redrick said:

That being said, I do think there is benefit in keeping NPCs busy and terse most of the time. While I love NPC interaction, both as a DM and a player, I'll be the first to admit that NPC banter can sometimes dominate our play time, leaving little time for exploration and murder-hoboing. So it would be a good reminder for me to assume that my NPCs usually have something they'd rather be doing than talking to the PCs and make them generally in a hurry to end the interaction.

Click to expand...

This is our concern, Dude.

Can you make an interesting encounter out of a random NPC interaction? Yes. Does it serve the story that you spent all weekend (or all week) working on? Probably not.

So there's a line we draw between wide-open-sandbox and carefully-crafted-railroad. This point gets a lot of attention. What gets less attention: the role of NPCs and player expectations of NPCs in pushing the game toward either extreme.

DMMike said:

This is our concern, Dude.

Can you make an interesting encounter out of a random NPC interaction? Yes. Does it serve the story that you spent all weekend (or all week) working on? Probably not.

Click to expand...

The game isn't meant to serve the story. The story is meant to serve the game. That's true regardless of your position on the railroad-vs-sandbox spectrum.

If it's fun and interesting, the game is going well. If it's driving the plot along, that's a bonus.

I agree with this poll. I think having great NPCs is almost as crucial as having great villains.

DMMike said:

Can you make an interesting encounter out of a random NPC interaction? Yes. Does it serve the story that you spent all weekend (or all week) working on? Probably not.

Click to expand...

DMMike said:

If you don't write out lines of dialogue, then your primary NPCs have significant notes that reveal what they know, with whom they interact, and what their routines and inventory look like.

If you don't have lines of dialogue written out, or significant notes on what the NPC knows, then you're just winging it - which can lead to serious inconsistencies, player confusion, and - get ready for it - non-immersive play.

Click to expand...

You are marking very specific assumptions here about how to approach RPGing: the GM writes a story, and scripts NPCs as part of it, and the players . . . do something, it's not entirely clear to me what that is - perhaps provide colour as the story unfolds?

I'm currently GMing a Classic Traveller game which has been focused on conspiracy/mystery-type stuff. (The PCs are caught up in some sort of black-ops bioweapons conspiracy, involving a world with a deadly virus possibly of alien origin.) None of it has been prepared in advance, and NPC motivations and activities are made up by me as needed, when the players meet them, or seek out patrons (rolled on the random patron table), etc.

So far no inconsistencies or confusion have arisen.

pemerton said:

You are marking very specific assumptions here about how to approach RPGing: the GM writes a story, and scripts NPCs as part of it, and the players . . . do something, it's not entirely clear to me what that is - perhaps provide colour as the story unfolds?

I'm currently GMing a Classic Traveller game which has been focused on conspiracy/mystery-type stuff. (The PCs are caught up in some sort of black-ops bioweapons conspiracy, involving a world with a deadly virus possibly of alien origin.) None of it has been prepared in advance, and NPC motivations and activities are made up by me as needed, when the players meet them, or seek out patrons (rolled on the random patron table), etc.

So far no inconsistencies or confusion have arisen.

Click to expand...

This varies greatly from DM to DM. If you keep good notes on what you wing, you'll be good as if you had made notes to begin with. If every session you come ready to make thinga up on the fly, without any sort of guide or reference from previous seat-of-pants flying, you are more likely to contradict yourself.

Planning is no immunity to inconsistency, but it certainly helps. Even if your planning is as concrete as planning to write down what you make up.

pemerton said:

You are marking very specific assumptions here about how to approach RPGing: the GM writes a story, and scripts NPCs as part of it, and the players . . . do something, it's not entirely clear to me what that is - perhaps provide colour as the story unfolds?

I'm currently GMing a Classic Traveller game which has been focused on conspiracy/mystery-type stuff. (The PCs are caught up in some sort of black-ops bioweapons conspiracy, involving a world with a deadly virus possibly of alien origin.) None of it has been prepared in advance, and NPC motivations and activities are made up by me as needed, when the players meet them, or seek out patrons (rolled on the random patron table), etc.

Click to expand...

It's interesting: zero planning can actually work very well for your genre. If you've seen any string of Alias episodes by JJ Abrams, you'd know that impossible situations regularly come up, and have even more impossible explanations.

That being said, lack of planning can pretty easily lead to story inconsistencies. For example, I'm running a Skyrim game right now, and I could go into great (unplanned) detail in a random NPC encounter when the PCs meet a guardsman who is from Rorikstead and remembers the procession of Emperor Titus Mede II through his town, celebrating the signing of the White-Gold Concordat. While a PC might have notes in her character concept that she also grew up in Rorikstead, and has always wanted to meet the emperor because she's an imperial and aspiring politician. And the lore of the game says that Skyrim was immediately at odds with the emperor because he agreed to outlaw Talos worship - a favorite among Nords (Skyrim citizens).

So, if the emperor was in Rorikstead, why didn't the PC get to see him? And how was he able to have a parade in the middle of the province, when Skyrim is going into civil war because of the treaty he signed? Cue JJ Abrams, or a little pre-planning.

pemerton said:

So far no inconsistencies or confusion have arisen.

Click to expand...

Then more power to you

DMMike said:

It's interesting: zero planning can actually work very well for your genre. If you've seen any string of Alias episodes by JJ Abrams, you'd know that impossible situations regularly come up, and have even more impossible explanations.

That being said, lack of planning can pretty easily lead to story inconsistencies. For example, I'm running a Skyrim game right now, and I could go into great (unplanned) detail in a random NPC encounter when the PCs meet a guardsman who is from Rorikstead and remembers the procession of Emperor Titus Mede II through his town, celebrating the signing of the White-Gold Concordat. While a PC might have notes in her character concept that she also grew up in Rorikstead, and has always wanted to meet the emperor because she's an imperial and aspiring politician. And the lore of the game says that Skyrim was immediately at odds with the emperor because he agreed to outlaw Talos worship - a favorite among Nords (Skyrim citizens).

So, if the emperor was in Rorikstead, why didn't the PC get to see him? And how was he able to have a parade in the middle of the province, when Skyrim is going into civil war because of the treaty he signed? Cue JJ Abrams, or a little pre-planning.

Click to expand...

So, what, either you pre-plan the entire backstory of every single minor NPC the players may ever decide to strike up a conversation with, or you have them all clam up the moment they've said their one arrow-to-the-knee line and refuse to speak to them again? The former seems like a great deal of work that will go to waste, and the latter a greater breach of veresimilitude than a minor historical inconsistency.

DMMike said:

It's interesting: zero planning can actually work very well for your genre. If you've seen any string of Alias episodes by JJ Abrams, you'd know that impossible situations regularly come up, and have even more impossible explanations.

That being said, lack of planning can pretty easily lead to story inconsistencies. For example, I'm running a Skyrim game right now, and I could go into great (unplanned) detail in a random NPC encounter when the PCs meet a guardsman who is from Rorikstead and remembers the procession of Emperor Titus Mede II through his town, celebrating the signing of the White-Gold Concordat. While a PC might have notes in her character concept that she also grew up in Rorikstead, and has always wanted to meet the emperor because she's an imperial and aspiring politician. And the lore of the game says that Skyrim was immediately at odds with the emperor because he agreed to outlaw Talos worship - a favorite among Nords (Skyrim citizens).

So, if the emperor was in Rorikstead, why didn't the PC get to see him? And how was he able to have a parade in the middle of the province, when Skyrim is going into civil war because of the treaty he signed? Cue JJ Abrams, or a little pre-planning.


Then more power to you

Click to expand...

or, quite realistically with no call to JJA needed, the player(s) realize the guard is full of crap, talking out of their class, confused or just embellishing to impress some strangers who they may have an eye for.

When the five players sitting around the table cannot all agree on what they had for supper the previous session... the kind of thing you describe is not anything desrving of JJA. its actually a fun little thing (or maybe a *useful* little thing.)

in fact, if in the character write-ups i had been given as DM i saw thew grew up here, wanted to meet there... this would be the exact kind of thing that i would throw in to give that bit of player designed backstory a call-back with a dollop of screen time.

DMMike said:

It's interesting: zero planning can actually work very well for your genre. If you've seen any string of Alias episodes by JJ Abrams, you'd know that impossible situations regularly come up, and have even more impossible explanations.

Click to expand...

I don't the show, and don't know what genre you have in mind. The Traveller game I'm running is pretty straightforward moderately non-gonzo sci fi.

DMMike said:

lack of planning can pretty easily lead to story inconsistencies.

<snip>

I could go into great (unplanned) detail in a random NPC encounter when the PCs meet a guardsman who is from Rorikstead and remembers the procession of Emperor Titus Mede II through his town, celebrating the signing of the White-Gold Concordat. While a PC might have notes in her character concept that she also grew up in Rorikstead, and has always wanted to meet the emperor because she's an imperial and aspiring politician. And the lore of the game says that Skyrim was immediately at odds with the emperor because he agreed to outlaw Talos worship - a favorite among Nords (Skyrim citizens).

So, if the emperor was in Rorikstead, why didn't the PC get to see him? And how was he able to have a parade in the middle of the province, when Skyrim is going into civil war because of the treaty he signed? Cue JJ Abrams, or a little pre-planning.

Click to expand...

Two things.

One, it is the planning that is causing the inconsistency - ie you already have all this pre-planned "lore of the game" that the GM is not on top of; and you also have this player-authored backstory that the GM is not on top of.

So what your example shows is that if the GM commits to the (ingame) truth of a whole lot of stuff that s/he is not across, then s/he might carelessly contradict it. Which seems obvious but irrelevant to the merits of improvisation.

In my Traveller game, before the fourth session I made a list of all the backstory that had been established over the prior three sessions:

pemerton said:

[sblock]I wrote up a list of established facts - that is, information that had emerged over the course of the first three sessions and so was settled truth for the campaign:

* Lt Li (the PCs' original patron, who got them involved in her bioweapons operation) had a team on Ardour-3 (the starting world for the campaign) who had flown hi-tech medical equipment to Byron (the world the PCs currently are on);

* Those NPCs lost their spaceship to the PC noble Vincenzo in a gambling game (hence Vincenzo started the game with a Type Y starship);

* Hence Li had to recruit the PCs - including one whom she knew from his time in the service, the naval enlistee Roland - to fly a further load of equipment to Byron;

* Li had recruited a bunch of NPCs (whom the PCs captured and interrogated in the previous session) at the naval base on Shelley, a world in the general vicinity of Byron;

* The PC Alissa had been in the naval hospital on Shelley (forcibly mustered out of the Marines due to failing her first term survival check by 1), but had then - about the same time that Li was travelling to Ardour-3 to meet the other PCs in the first session - found herself in a cold sleep berth in a warehouse in Byron, infected with the Enlil virus (before being found and cured by the other PCs in a previous session);

* Li was the one who had brought Alissa in a cold sleep berth from Shelley to Byron, and the other NPCs on Byron didn't know that Alissa was infected with the virus (this came out under interrogation of said NPCs);

* The operation on Byron involved experimenting on bodies (both live and dead) acquired by some NPC rogues (who were among the NPCs the PCs captured), using samples that had been brought from Enlil (the world where the virus is endemic) to Byron by another team headed by the retired merchant first officer Leila Lo (who, we had decided last session, had a backstory with Tony, a PC retired merchant third officer), and with hi-tech medical gear integrated into the cold sleep berths;

* Materials had also been taken by Leila's team from Byron to a Scout base on the world of Olyx;

* The Byron-based group (ie the NPCs the PCs had captured and interrogated) had decided to break away from Li's operation and try to set up their own independent bioweapons franchise, which was why they had taken the hi-tech gear the PCs had flown to Byron to the out-of-dome decommissioned army outpost that the PCs had assaulted in the previous session.​

That's a reasonable amount of backstory for three sessions of play (at least it feels to me like it is), but it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, like What is Li's agenda? Who is she working for? How did Alissa get infected on Shelley? Etc?

Second, therefore, I wrote a list of possibilities/conjectures, reflecting both player speculation from the previous session and some of my own ideas:

* Alissa has expertise of 4 in cutlass, whereas the ambitious Lt Li has only expertise 2 - maybe they were fencing rivals, and Li infected Alissa both to (i) get an experimental subject and (ii) get rid of an unwanted rival! She could have done that, and taken Alissa to Byron, right before she then flew on to Ardour-3 and recruited the PCs;

* How did Alissa escape from the warehouse on Byron? Most likely just carelessness and/or malfunction, with the cold sleep unit having stopped working (perhaps damaged by the corrosive atmosphere of the world);

* Is Li working for (some branch of) the Imperium? Or is one of the players correct in speculating that she is running an entirely private operation, with the Scout base on Olyx having become - in effect - her own fiefdom.​

[/sblock]

Click to expand...

There actually was a bit more backstory than that - individual NPC backgrounds were noted with the NPC statblocks - but all-in-all that's not too much to keep track of. Contradiction is not that likely.

Second, if the Emperor travelled through a certain region where a PC who longed to see the Emperor never got the chance to do so, there could be any number of explanations: the PC was on holiday; the PC was sick; the PC got caught in a traffic jam; etc. It doesn't seem that big a deal to me.