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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5091041" data-attributes="member: 4937">As Old Ben would say, "You have taken your first steps into a larger world."  Or more seriously, its sounds like you've been on this path for a while and have just begun to realize how important it is to maintain that 1st person to 1st person perspective between the NPC and the PC, or between the PC and the environment he interacts with.Just being aware of it is a big first step.  And also, at times its unavoidable.  Weem is correct to point out that sometimes narration is the clearest approach to the problem of communication.  Doing as weem did in his sample and finishing a description with strong first person speech is a good practice.  I mean really, the whole art of DMing is encouraging the players to interact with your environment, so your question is really the heart of it and at some level too broad to answer.Encounters with multiple NPC's force you to be specific about who is acting.  I've found multiple NPC encounters are very challenging to run in a satisfying way.  1) Avoid them.  Keep in mind the problems that you'll run into with the PC's interacting with multiple NPC's simultaneously.  You risk breaking emmersion and you also risk problems with NPC to NPC interaction or multiple DM actions per one PC action, all of which can result in putting one or more of your players unwillingly into the role of audience.  For this reason, try to avoid scripting multiple NPC scenes unless you really need to.2) If you can, bring in a DM's assistant.  One of the best solutions if you can manage it if you are going to run a complex RP with multiple NPC's that is absolutely necessary is to draft a temporary helper to run one or more NPC's.  This can be a fellow DM, a player whose character is out of the scene, or a loyal family member who you can conscript into the role ("Honey, can I ask for a favor...").  3) Make sure the participants have very clear voices (deep vs. falsetto, gruff vs. educated, accented vs. 'normal', etc.) and that the number of participants is smaller than your vocal range.  I envy the DM's who have great voice control.  I can manage maybe 5 or 6 characters, but I've known some that could have handled dozens.I haven't ran a game in 4 years.  One thing I find though is that reading fairy tales to two of my reasons for not having a game in 4 years is very good practice for this aspect of running a game.  Bouncing in and out of my 'narrator voice', and the voices of the prince, princes, beast, witch, fairy, etc. is good vocal practice.  If you don't have darlings to read to, I suggest doing as the medievals did and do all your reading out loud for a while, even if you are just mouthing the words.</blockquote>

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