Image by FreeImages.com / Gratsiela Toneva

I had a lot of trouble finishing this article – my laptop has started powering down of its own accord without warning, then immediately booting up again. Sometimes, it will run without a problem for hours, on other occasions it will function for only seconds. What it means is that the laptop rebooted multiple times during the writing of the article, disrupting trains of thought and momentum in the writing process. So if the concluding sections seem a little less coherent or more scattershod than is usual, that’s the reason.

We all lose touch with people from time to time; they fall out of our lives with a randomness possible only to the intersection of two chaotic situations. I had a dream last night in which I went on a random train journey, got off at a random stop, and accidentally reconnected with a couple of such people, who by sheer coincidence (and the logic of dreams) just happened to be at that location at that time.

When I awoke, of course, the dream (and that was just the start of it) made little rational sense in any real-world way. And yet, there is an incident that occurred a few years after I first moved to Sydney that I will never forget.

A lesson in the improbable

I come from a small country town, population 2700 at the time.

I was in a city of population 1.625 million.

Going to a store that I had never visited before, on my day off work, I was crossing the main street of the city at a busy intersection, in rush hour. Roughly 1000 other people were cross the street at that exact moment at that exact intersection.

And I ran into someone that I knew from my high school, the class which had been one or two years more senior to mine.

We barely had time to exchange pleasantries, but – what are the odds? I was in a class of 4 my senior year, his was a class of about 10 in their senior year. There would have been no more than 20 people of my generation I would recognize from that time period, and only three or four of them at most would have moved to the city. Four people in 1.625 million? That’s less than 0.00025% chance. Assuming a generous 6 chances of meeting someone specific per day, you would have to wait almost 93 years for there to be better than a 50-50 chance of it having happened.

Another

It was a number of years later. The city had grown in population to about 3.5 million. I was walking down the same street at a different intersection at an even busier time of day. There were easily 3000 people on that particular side of that city block, probably many more. And who should I bump into than one of my old school teachers, someone that I had known for at least 5 years, who was leading a school group from my old home town.

Again, there were probably no more than 20 people who would fall into that classification in all of Australia. The odds were therefore even longer.

Here’s where it gets interesting: This was the third time in a decade that the same thing had happened to me – different teachers, every time. On one occasion, there were two of them. That’s 20% of the teachers that I knew from my high school!

And still another

Fast-forward another 15 years. Central railway station is one of the largest in the public transport network, used by 11.35 million people a week – that’s about 1.6 million a day. Even assuming that half these trips are the same people coming and going, that’s still half the entire population of the city from 25 years earlier. Let’s further assume that only 75% of these are during the peak hour – I think it would be closer to 90%, but this will do: roughly 608,000 passengers per peak hour.

During my time in the city, I had worked for about half-a-dozen businesses or government bodies of various size. So it was greatly surprising when, waiting for my train to arrive, I found on the platform (waiting for a different train) one of my ex-bosses – who was now working for a completely different business, located in a completely different part of the city.

My employment at the time was a 10-month contract; I used that railway station twice a working day throughout that period. That’s about 600 trips. The chance that I would meet an ex-boss on one of them is about 0.1% by my rough estimation. And yet, I beat the odds.

The Moral:

Improbable connections happen. The odds of this event were ridiculously low. But it happened.

Lives are chaotic and unpredictable, and someone from the past can reappear without warning, blown in by those winds of chaos, and sometimes blown out again just as quickly. Soap operas use this coming-and-going all the time.

And that got me to thinking, when I awoke, that this was a tool that could be used by GMs to provide a set of connections between the PCs in their games and the rest of the game world, and used to trigger desired changes in NPC statuses, emotional states, and conditions.

And so, I devised a game technique to do just that.

The Technique

The GM may want to do this for major NPCs, but can wait until he is sure that he wants a specific character to change, then use this as a guideline. No, this is for the players to fill out about their characters, and then turn the results over to the GM for his use in populating the experiences that the characters will have in the future.

The process, from the player’s perspective, is quite straightforward:

List 3 people with whom the subject PC has lost contact.

For each:

1. How long ago did your character lose contact?
2. What was their basic personality?
3. What was the relationship like?
4. List 1-3 anecdotes of interaction between your character and the NPC from when they knew each other.
5. What were the circumstances of separation?
6. How has the subject PC’s life changed since they last interacted with the lost contact?
7. How have those changes to the subject PC’s life changed his personality since they last interacted with the lost contact?
8. What does the subject PC/NPC think of the NPC now, in hindsight?

This provides ammunition that the GM can use in various ways, because there is one key variable left under his control: How the lost contact’s life has changed in the intervening period, and what has that done to his or her personality.

In reality, three is a barely adequate simulation of reality – there should be a dozen or more for every period of the character’s conscious life – but three is enough, if, each time one gets used, the player creates a replacement.

Applications

At first, I thought that the GM would need to guide the players, suggesting one or more of the above and getting the players to complete the rest. But I’ve since thought some more about it, and realized that any answer can be manipulated by the GM to achieve his goals. This section will show you how.

But first:

Why it works

There is a notable difference between these “lost contacts” and any other NPC. These have been created by the player to be part of his character’s past. That might seem like a little thing – after all, a GM could easily create an NPC of his own that is exactly what he needs, and simply tell the PC “this is someone from your past”.

It doesn’t exactly work out that way.

The difference is that the player is invested in his character, and therefore also in the background of that character, and by getting the player to add this specific information to that background, you are also getting the player invested in the relationship between the PC and the NPC – and that is what you are manipulating, and by extension, how you are manipulating the character from the outside.

If the GM does the work and simply introduces the character as “someone the PC knows from their past”, there is none of that investment, and therefore the player is free to keep his character at arms’ length from whatever manipulation the GM performs. If they go along with something, it’s because they can, not because the internal logic of the character demands it of them.

That also leaves them free to resist it if they so choose, rather than buying into the drama of the situation that the GM creates. And that devalues the utility of the whole concept.

Application: Trouble for a PC

When caught between a rock and a hard place, all characters are capable of putting their own self-interests ahead of those of their friends, no matter how virtuous. “My daughter has a life-threatening condition. They came to me and offered me a cure – what could I do?”

Or perhaps the NPC has gotten in over their heads and come to the PC for help (they need a reasonable expectation that the PC will be able to solve the problem).

Then there is the fall from grace (or worse, the fall from someplace far more remote than a state of grace!).

Heck, simply showing up to visit can be enough to set off fireworks for the right NPC-PC relationship – if the PC’s current partner is the jealous type.

Lastly, there are some people with whom things always seem to start innocent and then get completely out of hand as catastrophe piles on cataclysm.

There are so many different kinds of trouble and ways to get the PC involved in such trouble that this is practically a no-brain-cells-required default for what can be done with characters from the past. Unfortunately, that also makes this usage a little predictable, even soap-opera in some cases.

Application: A victim of fate

Greater benefit can sometimes derive by simply having the NPC be a complicating factor for a while.

Imagine the following: You’re from a small country town, but have moved to the big city. A friend (but not a close friend) from your high school days lobs up on your doorstep with a completely legitimate reason for being in town. They expect you to show them the sights, maybe even let them stay at your place for a couple of days, and maybe to help solve whatever problem brought them here in the first place with your urban-fu.

Now imagine the same situation – when you’re Superman, with a secret identity to protect.

But that’s nothing compared to the problems that the NPC can bring with them, if they have been a victim of fate in the intervening years. We all know stories (and can invent more) of people who failed to live up to their potential – in the most clichéd form, could not handle the pressure of expectations – and dropped, or crashed, out. Similarly, we all know people who seemingly have it all, only for their lives to unravel at the seams. I can’t help remembering the classic episode of the Simpsons in which Homer meets his brother.

That’s because these events rarely happen in isolation; there is usually “splash” on those around them. And that “splash” can be a vehicle for all sorts of character-driven plotlines – from the PC helping the NPC get back on his feet to the NPC getting the PC caught in the middle of something he normally wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Application: A good/bad influence

Some people are a good or bad influence over others. Completely without malice, bad influences get others into trouble by getting them to do things that seem just a bit of harmless fun at the time. Good influences, on the other hand, can make characters holier-than-thou and excessively zealous in upholding the law, or some principle. That usually comes right before a fall of some kind; not only is it hard to live up to such lofty standards day in and day out, not only do standards of morality vary from person to person when you get down to the very fine details, not only will the PC have past acts that by the new moral standards are unacceptable, but excessive zeal and black-and-white morality is not in itself a good thing when taken too far.

Application: A trigger for change

This is perhaps the loftiest application of the technique, in which the PCs character is forever changed by the experience they have in the company of the NPC who has (temporarily) re-entered their life. There are three basic ways this can happen: They can awaken the PC to the trend their life is following, often by providing an object lesson; they can force the PC into some sort of act of redemption for the past; or they can so radically transform the circumstances of the PCs present that his future suddenly assumes a completely different shape. There are less common examples as well, but these are the three big ones: an object lesson, a reformer, or a wrecking ball.

Application: An unexpected opportunity

Sometimes, the NPC is a victim, or wants/needs to victimize the PC. This usually takes the form of one or both being offered “an unexpected opportunity” that they cannot refuse, only to learn that there’s more involved than they bargained for. This uses the presence of the NPC as a catalyst and delivery vehicle for the opportunity itself. When the player has some change in their PC’s life or circumstances that they want to achieve, this is often the easiest way to do so, and sometimes, the only reasonable way.

Application: Confronting the past

One of the major benefits of this technique is that it makes the character’s past relevant to his modern-day existence to an extent that is possible in few other ways. In particular, when a PC has experienced some sort of personal transformation in between the two parts of his existence – past vs present – this provides a means of bridging the gap between what was and what is, and of illustrating the price of that transformation.

Application: You’ve come a long way, baby

Most lives transform a little at a time, punctuated by occasional periods of catastrophic change. As these transformative events accumulate, we become someone different in both personality and circumstances, but it’s only when we look back on our situations as they were on some past date and compare with the way things are now, that the extent of the changes that we have undergone really confront us.

The return of someone from a PCs past offers just such a milestone for comparison. This is particularly useful if the point of comparison is between the character as he is, mid-campaign, and how he was at the start of the campaign. This self-discovery can be a cause for celebration, or a cause for angst, or even both, as the character discovers that he has lost part of himself that he liked, and that was to be central to his life – from the point of view of what the player expected.

Expectations vs Actuality – that’s the motif at the heart of this application of the technique.

Application: In need of rescue

Of course, one of the most basic applications is simply as a springboard into some sort of action sequence or adventure. And the simplest of those is when an old friend needs rescuing – and that is then how they reenter the PC’s life, with a bang!

Application: The morality test

Of course, the ultimate application is forcing the character into a difficult moral position – “betray a friend or let him get away with X” is about the simplest of the ways that this approach can be used. Many more sophisticated approaches are possible.

Application In Practice

The whole reason that this technique works is because both the NPC and the PC treat each as though they are still the people they were, even though the world has changed around them, and changed them as a result. This forces them to confront the changes that the campaign has wrought on both them and their circumstances. As a tool for bringing the campaign into focus while making a character’s history relevant, this is hard to top.