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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8146523" data-attributes="member: 85555">I am not 100% sure I am understanding everything you say here. I also haven't been following Lanefan's points as closely so I am not sure how close or far apart our thinking is on this front. But reading through this a couple of times, I will say I believe my approach is not this "mathematical".  I run NPCs mostly by feel (which I will address at the end of this response after laying some groundwork about my actual style of play). A lot of these discussions are very theoretical, and cover a wide range of styles.  And in this thread I have been defending a few different styles of play. Presently the style I employ most often is one of two approaches. One I call a drama sandbox. So it isn't that I am averse to drama at all, I am just saying it doesn't have to be the governing priority or rationale behind choices you make as a GM (and it is entirely possible to run a game with no consideration towards drama or narrative). In this Drama and Sandbox approach the GM is trying to maximize player freedom without fetishizing it so much he or she avoids dramatic elements (this is something I was referring to when I talked about how our own rhetoric and gaming style discourse can box us in and make us more 'extreme' in our approach to play. Drama and sandbox was an attempt to escape that and reconcile my desire for an open world that feels real, and a need to have some amount of drama. The other is more of a monster of the week, one shot adventure approach (usually as a series of linked 1-10 one shots)----which usually has a pretty clear premise (you are investigating the disappearance of an official at the Four Seasons Tea House. But within that premise, the players can do what they want. But I have also been defending a style of play that eschews drama entirely and focuses on producing a living world. See my description of drama and sandbox below to understand how I approach campaigns, but  in terms of running NPCs...I am not running a series of mental computations when I play them. I am trying to inhabit the NPCs, understand their motives and goals, and basically channel them. I am not an 'actor' as a GM. My delivery is actually really dry. But what I mean is you get to know the character and understand what makes them tick, and when the players do something it starts to become clear to you how this character would act and respond. This isn't intended to simulate a living human being. And to your point about pre-judging people, or making snap judgements about people, in real life I agree. Real human beings are incredibly complex. Still as complex as they are, I can at least mentally wrap my head around the question "What would my dad do in this situation" and come up with an answer that is satisfying to me (it might not be predictive, but it is believable). But I also do treat real life and imaginary life differently. I am not worried about prejudging an NPC because the NPC doesn't actually exists. That said, I do like to understand my NPCs and feel I do a good job of undertstanding things from their point of view. Even my most over the top, evil villains, usually have some other motivation or drive that makes them relatable to the players. It would take an extended conversation, a real conversation not one where we are trying to outdo each other rhetorically, to really give you a full take on how I run a game, how I play NPCs, and what my overarching goals are. To clarify what Drama and Sandbox means to me, I am pasting a section from one of my rulebooks, which is the advice I have pretty much followed myself for several years now (this is from my wuxia game so everything here is oriented towards the wuxia genre). I am quite sure this is a style of play that will have little appeal to some of the posters in this thread. But  I can say that it is table tested and has worked better for me as a GM than just about any other approach. At the time I wrote this I was running three campaigns which were all quite lengthy (one of them I posted 80+ sessions of on my blog). Because I was running so many regular games, I really had to abandon anything that didn't work at the table even if it was something I was intellectually attached to. This description is just one part of the GM section, so there is a lot more in there about things like fate (which is also an important principle I tend to run games by) and grudges---which were a very important fuel for this type of campaign:</blockquote>

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