Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lwaxy" data-source="post: 7090601" data-attributes="member: 53286">But you can do that without extensive notes, in fact you will have to make up NPCs on the spot a lot anyway. Example from Friday night, player who is playing the inkeeper's  daughter in a village setting asked if there was any strong lad her age she could take with her on an overnight watch, so she would not have to dare do it alone. So I immediately thought of a guy a bit older than her, Martin, tall, bit overweight, very strong and patient and reliable to a fault. I saw his dark blonde hair, his freckles, the mole on his chin and his grey-blue eyes. His earnest smile, always friendly to everyone. People think he is a bit on the dumb side because he is so strong and a bit slow, but he just prefers to think about stuff a lot. He could be a wizard if he would want to. But he's a wheelwright's apprentice in the next village over, and loves doing physical work. While he stayed with her that night to watch why a donkey of the inn behaved super weird (they were suspecting a werechicken ) they fell asleep and the PC's dad caught them in the morning. He thought the wrong thing, the boy could not escape but when the dad saw him I had this moment where it made click and suddenly, the father started laughing, no longer worried about Martin. Because Martin, I now know, is gay, and the dad had seen him with his long time boyfriend in his workplace a few months earlier. The PC does not know, and maybe will never even find out. His stats? Well, I know his INT is 18, his STR is 18, his CHA is 17. his DEX is 11 and his CON is 15. Better stats than most of the PCs. He's a wheelwright expert 2, has as much knowledge about nature and farming as anyone growing up around here (profession farming 8, knowledge nature 3) and basic weapon training as everyone strong enough gets in these parts (fighter 1) Anything else will come to me once it is relevant. I would not even need the existing stats, because I do not need to roll dice for him. If he happens to come across a trail with a PC who can't track, for example, I can judge well enough if he can know the trail of a wild herd from that of the cattle thieves. I judge by what real people might know and see, and then roll only a d20 and add likely extras. The village lives in my head, and I write the relevant information down for my players as it comes up. I made like 10% of the village population into handouts, which means about 50 people, but many only have one sentence, and from that I can expand as needed. That one sentence is enough for the players to get an idea, and for me to bring it all back to mind - the halfling gal tending the poultry for her clan, who has an uncle who now is a ghoul and another who is now a tree after angering a visiting wizard (who in turn is friend to one of the PCs), the stable boy worried about the crazy donkey, the owner of the chicken who thinks it is a cat, scaring the crap out of the old cat one of the PCs has etc. At least in my head, it is all simple, much as if I would really open a window into a real village existing in another universe. I can see the people running around and interacting. The NPCs are dynamic, they develop along with the PCs and they are basically my chars to play, I'm setting a stage for the players which is growing almost on its own. If my village would live mostly on paper I'd be busy looking it up all the time, slowing the game down, too. But that is probably just because of my bad eyes.</blockquote>

Verification