One-Liner NPCs

[GMMichael]

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.

Or, (and I know this wasn't one of your options) you let the players in on it, and create a sort of mini-game: if players know that most NPCs have only one prepared line of dialogue, then they know that they've found a story-relevant NPC when they talk to one that obviously has more than one line prepared.

Having something prepared is a boon for GMs who struggle when they run off-script. Because, well, meeting Steve the Farmer or Conan the Warrior is an equal breach of verisimilitude.

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.)

Sure, sure. It's an opportunity. And it's even something that a lot of players won't notice. But if you have one or more players who do their homework (another GM, perhaps), then inconsistencies are highly disappointing. (Insert link to ENWorld's "what's fun" article).

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.

Not exactly the planning that was causing problems. Part of it is the quantity of the planning. Say a Dragonlance reader decides to DM a Dragonlance campaign. Inconsistencies will come up continuously if one of the players is a more dedicated fan than the DM. The other part is the lack of planning inherent in improv. A GM who does his homework doesn't have to worry about the dialogue of major NPCs because part of that homework is knowing their stories and how those stories tie together. Unscripted NPCs never figured into the story, so it's easy to grind gears when you drop them in.

Obviously, if there is no story, you don't have to worry about inconsistency. But that brings up other problems.

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
. . . 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.

It seems that as your game runs on, "none of it was prepared in advance" becomes "some of it has been prepared in advance." I suspect that as the game history stretches into two or three pages, your unscripted NPCs will become de facto scripted NPCs - as you create the script on the fly by referencing your notes.

 

[MarkB]

Or, (and I know this wasn't one of your options) you let the players in on it, and create a sort of mini-game: if players know that most NPCs have only one prepared line of dialogue, then they know that they've found a story-relevant NPC when they talk to one that obviously has more than one line prepared.

No, that's still option 2, you've just talked your players into becoming complicit with it.

Still, it's a neat idea. Those one-liner NPCs can act as handy signposts, guiding your players back to the rails if they ever inadvertently stray from them.

 

[pemerton]

Having something prepared is a boon for GMs who struggle when they run off-script.

I'm not sure what you mean by "off-script".

In my Traveller game, I have lists of NPCs (although I think they've now mostly all been used) and lists of worlds (although they've nearly all been used as well). But I don't have a script. When I need a world, for whatever reason, I pick one from my list if it will suit the current situation that has generated the need (eg a few sessions ago I needed a nearby world with a naval hospital to fit into the backstory of one of the PCs); if it won't, then I generate one using the world generation rules.

That is a type of preparation. But there is no script - as in, no pre-authored sequence of events that are destined to occur in the game.

It seems that as your game runs on, "none of it was prepared in advance" becomes "some of it has been prepared in advance." I suspect that as the game history stretches into two or three pages, your unscripted NPCs will become de facto scripted NPCs - as you create the script on the fly by referencing your notes.

I didn't say there was no preparation. I'm talking about a lack of pre-scripting.

Here is an example of one of my NPC writeups, written between sessions after the PCs had landed on a world and were heading out to scout out an enemy bioweapons research base:

Prana Sin (Age 22, sister of the PCs' hired pilot Nela Sin, friends with Achilles [another NPC], maintains the cryo systems; would-be doctor, drafted into Byron air force for family-related reasons)

4A98A9 (well-educated) Mid Psg

Commo-1; Mechanical-1; Admin-1; Air/Raft-1​

Those couple of notes (about her connections to family and friends) were enough to support her use when the PCs encountered her after they'd fatally shot Achilles and recognised her likeness to her sister.

if you have one or more players who do their homework (another GM, perhaps), then inconsistencies are highly disappointing.

<snip>

Not exactly the planning that was causing problems. Part of it is the quantity of the planning. Say a Dragonlance reader decides to DM a Dragonlance campaign. Inconsistencies will come up continuously if one of the players is a more dedicated fan than the DM.

But the inconsistencies you are worried about in these cases (to be spotted by players who have "done their homework" because GMs or big fans) are caused by the fact of pre-authorship of the gameworld.

That's not a reason not to improvise. It's a reason not to pre-author!

A GM who does his homework doesn't have to worry about the dialogue of major NPCs because part of that homework is knowing their stories and how those stories tie together. Unscripted NPCs never figured into the story, so it's easy to grind gears when you drop them in.

Obviously, if there is no story, you don't have to worry about inconsistency. But that brings up other problems.

Again, this is all very strange.

Stories have to be written. In the context of RPGing, there are two (perhaps three) authorial candidates: the players; the GM (and the third is a commercial author whose work the GM relies upon).

You seem to approach RPGing with the idea that the GM will author a story in advance of play ("the script") and then play consists of . . . what exactly? The players gradually learning all the stuff the GM wrote as each NPC delivers its single line in turn?

I approach RPGing with the idea that the GM and players will generate a story in the course of actually playing the game. So, for instance, NPCs become part of the fiction because either (i) the referee decides to introduce one into the fiction or (ii) the players make the NPC a relevant part of the fiction.

An example of (i) from our most recent Traveller session: I rolled the encounter dice, got an encounter with 10 bandits, and so told the players that, when they returned to their ship's boat after hanging out in a town for most of the day, they could see a group of thugs hanging about.

An example of (ii) from the previous session: a player declares that his PC is going to hang out at the Travellers' Aid Society hoping to be approached by a patron, and so I rolled the patron encounter dice.

A different sort of example of (ii), where the causal role of the players is more intricately mediated by me as GM: the players declare that they are going to land on a world to try and acquire trinkets and artefacts. This requires me to bring various NPCs (shopkeepers and the like) into play. Then the players - who know that the inhabitants of this world have mixed alien and human ancestry - declare that their PCs look out for distinctive trinkets or artefacts that might be of alien origin. I roll a die, it comes up positive, and so I tell them that yes, their PCs do see such a thing. The PCs then ask the shopkeeper about its origin, which I therefore have to make up. The story the shopkeeper tells is that the artefact belonged to the local bishop, but had been sold some time ago to raise funds for the bishopric. (It was already established that this world is under strict religious rule.) Now the local bishop is another NPC who has been created - by me as referee - in response to the players' play of the game.

There is no script (and so no "off-script"). And nor is the GM "creating a script on the fly". There is a clear story (of xeno-archaelogists arriving on a world, learning that a bishop once owned an alien artefact, meeting with said bishop, and then - when they later return to their ship's boat - finding it surrounded by thugs whom they have to deal with in some fashion). But it wasn't authored in advance; there was no scripting. It was generated by actually playing the game.

(It's very straightforward to play RPGs in this style. I've been doing so since around 1987. Here is a good blog post describing the approach.)

 

[redrick]

When PCs try to ask a random merchant about recent happenings in town, do they get the response, "Favor the bow, eh? I'm a sword man myself."

I'd honestly never even considered pre-writing dialog for my NPCs. I didn't know it was a thing people do and I haven't ever seen it in a published adventure.

But, and maybe I said this upthread, I do think there is a valuable nugget here, which is to put a limit on how much time an NPC will spend with player characters. When player characters get into a conversation with an NPC, enter that conversation assuming that the NPC is trying to end it. Players will have to work to keep the person interested in talking to them. This could keep both the DM and the players from prattling on endlessly.

Variant: The NPC isn't trying to get out of the conversation, they are just trying to take the conversation to nonsense Crazy-Town. I think this would cover most of my interactions with strangers. Either a person has something else they really need to be doing right now, or they have nothing else they need to be doing because they are a crazy person who talks to strangers on the subway and racist alien conspiracies are coming out in in 3..2..1..

Maybe not a necessary consideration for all DMs, but I know I sometimes suffer from excessive NPC banter.

 

[GMMichael]

I'm not sure what you mean by "off-script".

In a word: improvisation.

Again, this is all very strange.

Stories have to be written. In the context of RPGing, there are two (perhaps three) authorial candidates: the players; the GM (and the third is a commercial author whose work the GM relies upon).

You seem to approach RPGing with the idea that the GM will author a story in advance of play ("the script") and then play consists of . . . what exactly? . . .(It's very straightforward to play RPGs in this style. I've been doing so since around 1987.

Off-script would apply specifically to anything not contained in the work of the aforementioned commercial author.

Personally, I like a game that falls between spontaneous and fully-scripted/commercial. I've been assuming as much in this thread, in the hopes that most readers fall between the poles.

When I write story in advance, play consists of PCs discovering the elements I've written, and then deciding what to do with those elements. Sometimes they follow the carrot, sometimes they don't. When they don't, they're still having a good time because they're pursuing their interests instead of feeling like their stuck on the rails. However, the juicier storyline would have been down the tracks.

One-liner NPCs, as noted by MarkB, are one way to keep them on the tracks.

When PCs try to ask a random merchant about recent happenings in town, do they get the response, "Favor the bow, eh? I'm a sword man myself."

I'd honestly never even considered pre-writing dialog for my NPCs. I didn't know it was a thing people do and I haven't ever seen it in a published adventure. . . .
Maybe not a necessary consideration for all DMs, but I know I sometimes suffer from excessive NPC banter.

"Lightly armored means light on your feet. Smart."

I would use a line related to the NPC or PCs. But a pitfall behind interesting and applicable one-liners is that they can actually lead to conversation. An NPC with zero lines is the most likely to keep PCs on track.

You've never seen a text-box for an NPC? Or a list of general knowledge that townsfolk know? I generally breathe easier when I see these included in...the pre-gen adventures that I never run. (But I do steal the good bits for my games).

One way to smooth the transition away from a one-liner NPC would be to switch from direct to indirect quotation:

GM: "Favor the bow, eh? I'm a sword man, myself." The guard then begins telling you about his long history of using swords instead of bows.

 

[Kobold Boots]

General ideas around NPC's

First - The one-liner NPC won't generally stand up to most players who go out of their way to interact with NPCs. This is just my experience. If you've got players who explore the world, they're doing it because their default preferred play-style is sandbox.

Next - If you don't have those types of players they generally won't look to be interacting with folks outside of the game path. There's obviously a middle ground that will adore the one-liner guys but I've not had a group that's ever been middle ground.

I used to struggle with winging a game session around random NPC interactions, but I've stolen a few things from the LARP playbook to make my games better.

1. The box of random plot
2. Allowing players at the table to play NPCs from time to time.

Box of Random Plot - Write down 20 random plots and put em in a card box or in a file on your laptop etc. They can be mundane or interesting.. whatever. The key here is that you either want it to be simple stuff they can do near immediately to get a minor reward, or something so big that they can't handle it now but get back to it later. Add to the plot card a male and female name so it's useable based on what you told the player the person was and a general attitude or emotion so you can guide the interaction off the cuff.

Players running NPCs - I've always had at least one player at the table that's been likely to run off with the story. In many cases I've had up to half of the table like that, simply because at one point the majority of my players were also larpers and the performances at the table would run away with our game time. If your players are down with it and you can advise them that time spent on one player or subgroup of them will eventually come around to the rest.. keep your players active by having them drive the story.

First option is just good planning. Second option won't work with every group but if you find yourself with the right group of folks, the stories really take off.

Of course, serious social contracts up front so people know what the hell is going on.

KB

 

[pemerton]

I do think there is a valuable nugget here, which is to put a limit on how much time an NPC will spend with player characters. When player characters get into a conversation with an NPC, enter that conversation assuming that the NPC is trying to end it. Players will have to work to keep the person interested in talking to them. This could keep both the DM and the players from prattling on endlessly.

Variant: The NPC isn't trying to get out of the conversation, they are just trying to take the conversation to nonsense Crazy-Town. I think this would cover most of my interactions with strangers. Either a person has something else they really need to be doing right now, or they have nothing else they need to be doing because they are a crazy person who talks to strangers on the subway

This seems to assume that most interactions with NPCs are with strangers who have other business to be about unless they are subway-riding crazy people.

But in my games, most interaction with NPCs does not fall into that sort of category. The PCs are not pumping strangers for information. They're meeting with people to try and get things done. (Which is also closer to real life, I think.)

 

[pemerton]

Off-script would apply specifically to anything not contained in the work of the aforementioned commercial author.

Personally, I like a game that falls between spontaneous and fully-scripted/commercial.

<snip>

When I write story in advance, play consists of PCs discovering the elements I've written, and then deciding what to do with those elements. Sometimes they follow the carrot, sometimes they don't. When they don't, they're still having a good time because they're pursuing their interests instead of feeling like their stuck on the rails. However, the juicier storyline would have been down the tracks.

One-liner NPCs, as noted by MarkB, are one way to keep them on the tracks.

<snip>

a pitfall behind interesting and applicable one-liners is that they can actually lead to conversation. An NPC with zero lines is the most likely to keep PCs on track.

This is very very different from how I approach GMing. It seems very close to a "choose your own adventure" book. Which does have one-line NPCs.

 

[redrick]

This seems to assume that most interactions with NPCs are with strangers who have other business to be about unless they are subway-riding crazy people.

But in my games, most interaction with NPCs does not fall into that sort of category. The PCs are not pumping strangers for information. They're meeting with people to try and get things done. (Which is also closer to real life, I think.)

The point is not to put an arbitrary sand-timer on every interaction scene. I see it more as just a helpful reminder not to get into an interaction scene without an exit strategy. In the case of a "get things done" business meeting, that exit strategy might look very different from information gathering. (This is what PCs are usually talking to strangers for — trying to gather information.)

Maybe this is just my table, but we have both players and DMs (we rotate) who can sometimes get a little carried away bantering with NPCs. The way these scenes usually get resolved is either the DM decides, "ok, they've learned/done everything they need to do in this scene, so I'm going to end it," or the players decide, "ok, whatever, this is boring, the plot lies thataway, so let's get out of here." Which is to say, the dialog is always allowed to overstay its welcome and the ending feels a little forced and plot-driven. So the thought is, instead of entering every dialog like a video game dialog, where the NPC will stand around dutifully answering PC questions until they exhaust the available information or the player finally gives up and gets bored, enter every dialog with a low-grade time pressure where it is understood that the NPC does not have all day and if the PCs spend all of their time trying to get a few extra GP for their quest, they won't have time to ask the NPC some of the other questions they wanted to ask. This allows the final, "Ok, conversation is over," to feel more organic than DM fiat.

Of course, if NPC/PC interactions are running smoothly, ending when they feel like they should end, and not hogging an inordinate amount of table time, there's no problem and no need for a corrective.

In my own day-to-day professional interactions, while conversations last longer than my conversations with strangers, we are still all trying to communicate whatever needs to be communicated and then get off the phone or out of the room and back to whatever we need to be doing.

 

[pemerton]

The point is not to put an arbitrary sand-timer on every interaction scene. I see it more as just a helpful reminder not to get into an interaction scene without an exit strategy.

<snip>

Maybe this is just my table, but we have both players and DMs (we rotate) who can sometimes get a little carried away bantering with NPCs. The way these scenes usually get resolved is either the DM decides, "ok, they've learned/done everything they need to do in this scene, so I'm going to end it," or the players decide, "ok, whatever, this is boring, the plot lies thataway, so let's get out of here." Which is to say, the dialog is always allowed to overstay its welcome and the ending feels a little forced and plot-driven. So the thought is, instead of entering every dialog like a video game dialog, where the NPC will stand around dutifully answering PC questions until they exhaust the available information or the player finally gives up and gets bored, enter every dialog with a low-grade time pressure where it is understood that the NPC does not have all day and if the PCs spend all of their time trying to get a few extra GP for their quest, they won't have time to ask the NPC some of the other questions they wanted to ask.

To me, this seemed to raise bigger issues about the GM's job in managing pacing and action at the table.

I've always found that to be a hard discussion to have on ENworld, because many posters here seem to have assumptions/preferences almost the opposite of mine. I think that keeping things focused on the action - including by having NPCs walk away, or say "Hey, what's that?!" as some dramatic event suddenly begins to unfold, or whatever - is crucial to GMing; and that when the GM instead holds back on "the action" until the players have picked up on all the breadcrumbs the GM has laid for his/her pre-authored "plot", that is railroading.

But many ENworlders characterise scene-framing/"go to the action" techniques as railroading, while taking GM-authored plot to be the norm (witness this thread!). If you take that second sort of approach, then talking about how to manage scenes as part of a bigger discussion about pacing becomes hard to do.