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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8146903" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've got no view on what is "unconscious" vs unreflective vs "best effort" in extrapolating NPC behaviour from a one-line to one-page description.But I have a very strong view, which agrees fully with yours, that this can have no basis in any human ability to actually predict human behaviour. It is essentially aesthetic judgment or extrapolation - a judgement about "what fits" or "given this 1 page description, what comes next?" Your remarks about social history, customs, class, ethnicity and the like are all very apt here. You also mention "detaild history" by which I'm guessing you mean personal biography, and we could add to that the nature of personal convictions, quirks, foibles and weaknesses, passions, friendships, etc.In the real world, George Orwell (not his real name) was (1) born to a middle class family, (2) attended an upper class school on a scholarship, (3) fought in Spain with a Trotskyist (para)military unit, and (4) returned to England where he dobbed in Communists (whom he saw as Stalinists, some of whom were ostensibly his friends) to the British Secret Service.At what point in extrapolating the behaviour of such this person as a NPC would a "logical behaviour" GM make the move from one of my numbered steps to the next? Frankly I think the Classic Traveller Reaction Table, or Gygax's somewhat baroque system for integrating various considerations into the reaction table to produce a randomised loyalty resolution framework, is going to yield results that are as true, or truer, to life, than would one person's "logical extrapolations".</blockquote>

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