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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2402641" data-attributes="member: 27012">The complexity is what makes interacting with NPCs less of an issue for many people.  Yes, a pit is a pit and you jump it or you don't but people have very rigid opinions (based on real world experience, guesses, or genre expectations) about how wide of a pit a person should be able to jump or what happens if a person fails to jump a pit of a certain depth.  Most people aren't as certain about how a person might react to a certain line of discussion or a certain request, thus there is a lot more flexibility before the GM's assessment of reality leaves the bounds of any of the players' assessments of reality.When it comes to NPC reactions, I think it's often because there is a wider range of behavior that people allow for in their assessment of reality and because players expect the behavior of people to be based on more unknowns.  But that doesn't mean that players can't and don't call a GM on NPC behavior that seems wrong, either because the PCs know the NPC really well (and the characterization suddenly seems "out of character" -- much as you are more likely to notice a friend acting strangely than a stranger) or because the GM has the NPC react in a way that falls outside of the players' assessments of reality for the expected range of behavior for a person in the same situation as the NPC.  I've seen players question why NPCs won't surrender, for example, or why an NPC had a sudden shift in behavior.Ultimately, GM fiat isn't a problem unless the players notice it.  In my experience, GM biases can be noticed by the players (and can be tested for by clever players) and once they are noticed, they can change the nature of a game.  And the more subjective a GM's calls, the more likely it is that biases will creep in.Is part of the reason why you are most likely to battle with how an NPC might responsd because you don't have rules to deal with character-to-character interactions?My group rarely has shared authorship of NPCs.  In cases where I've created background NPCs and the GM's portrayal didn't fit my expectations, I've tried to roll with it for the sake of game harmony, though I'll rarely create such NPCs for one of the GMs in my group because our assessment of things is inevitably too different for it to work out right.  In the cases where we co-GM (two GMs running one game at the same time) GMs generally own the NPC that they play so that the players don't have to experience a split personality as the NPC gets played differently by each GM.</blockquote>

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