Distillations Of Personality is an unfinished series at Campaign Mastery about the tips and tricks that I use for designing NPCs in my campaigns. As originally conceived, and as it will be executed, this article was not part of the 3-part series. So don’t bother searching for parts 2 and 3 – they haven’t been published yet! In a (perhaps in vain) hope of minimizing confusion, I’m describing this as a series “extra”, and not as a part of the series.

Personality means different things to different characters. In some cases, it refers to motivations, and why they are doing whatever it is that they are doing that brings them into an interaction mode with one or more PCs. In others, it may refer to a morality, to things that the character will or will not do. In still other cases, the personality exists to do nothing more than give the NPC some life and color when conversing with a PC.

You can easily spend multiple pages outlining a personality and analyzing how it will express itself in the course of play. Certainly, any even moderately complex personality will require an essay of such length to convey to the GM everything he needs to know to play that personality as a typically rounded, consistent, and coherent, individual – consistent and coherent with respect to the personality, that is, it doesn’t say anything about the characters sanity!

If you slavishly follow the advice that has been presented within the rest of the Crafting Of Personality series, the end result will very much resemble that multi-page essay.

There are two problems with this.

1. Most GMs don’t have time to waste on unnecessary material.
2. Even if you had time to create it, most GMs don’t have the time available at the gaming table to read and assimilate it.

That’s why so much of the design process that I employ is oriented around brief, bullet-point-like, notes. They are faster to generate, and designed to help you hone in on the personality of the NPC, enabling you to extract out the elements that are actually relevant to the personality. You then develop those into a small paragraph, an excerpt from the still-unwritten multi-page essay that would result without that discrimination.

The “Crafting Of Personality” series is so busy telling you how to generate the notes and convert them into functional personality profiles that it doesn’t go into this aspect of the process – and this is potentially the most significant of the lot!

Today’s article is designed to correct this problem…

The Elements Of Personality

Personalities and their expression can be boiled down to eleven elements. Every character has something to file under each of these headings. It’s important for the GM to understand each of these, their relationships, and how they contribute to the personality, in the abstract; and also to understand how these will manifest within the experienced expression of personality for the PC encountering the character.

The Elements of Personality are 1. Inheritances, 2. Principles & Values, 3. Flaws, 4. Predispositions, 5. Habits, 6. Desires & Needs, 7. Tolerances And The Padded Wall Of Morality, 8. Perceptions, 9. Interpretations, 10. Instincts & Responses, and 11. Other Manifestations – language, articulation, surprise, & attitude.

For a time, I thought the necessity to discuss each would make this article unreasonably long and difficult to write, but then I thought of a way to package a lot of the information as a pair of diagrams:

This shows the constituent elements and their relationships. Unfortunately, it’s right on the edge of being illegible, there’s so much squeezed into such a small space. So you might want to click on it to look over the full-sized image in a new tab. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Let’s take a closer look at the constituent elements, very briefly.

Inheritances

There are two kinds of personality inheritances – behaviors derived from a role model, often a parental figure, and behaviors derived from opposition to flaws perceived in a role model. The rebellion of youth always translates into some personality traits that are deliberately different to those of the role models a character is emulating. You can’t have the one without the other without stifling the rebellious urge, which tends to build up beneath the surface until it explodes anyway – though that may take years. When it does, the usual result is an over-reaction or mid-life crisis.

Principles & Values

While some of these can be learned or obtained from other sources, the majority will be inheritances, either from the parental figures or from third parties within childhood. They help to define the predispositions, tolerances, and intolerances of the character – his or her morality.

Flaws

A ‘Flaw’ in this context is a potential for failure of morality or judgment. Sometimes these derive directly from inheritances, sometimes they emerge from outside sources.

Predispositions

Predispositions are akin to prejudices, but they do not have to carry the negative connotations that the latter implies. They are any default potential behavior. Sometimes, these traits will engage automatically, sometimes they simply incline a character in a particular direction, and are subject to revision if they seem inappropriate.

Habits

Habits can also positives, or regarded as such; they include all rote behaviors. Many habits are flaws that have manifested to such an extent that they are a driver of choices and behaviors. A susceptibility to alcoholism might be a flaw, but if the character never takes a drink, or only drinks on social occasions, the susceptibility never manifests. If the flaw does manifest, it means that the character is drinking more, or more often, than is healthy for them (including socially and/or professionally). Once a habit manifests, it will typically grow in both frequency and severity until it comes to dominate the characters’ life. At some point, the character will become aware of the damage being inflicted upon other areas of their life that they value, and may break the habit – but the flaw is not removed, and thus the habit is lurking, waiting to return.

For example, attending church every Sunday is a Habit. So is buying a lottery ticket every week, or rubbing your earlobes when thinking. As a general rule, none of these is considered socially reprehensible.

Desires & Needs

Principles, Predispositions, and Habits all feed into Desires and Needs. These are markedly different in that they change; once satisfied, they no longer affect the character. Some are recurring, and will return with the passage of time; others are singular demands that will vanish once satisfied, or be replaced with another singular demand. The difference between a Need and a Desire is intensity – a need MUST be fulfilled, a Desire is not so acute – and there are an infinite number of gradations between the two.

Some desires may not be recognized as such, and will have no impact on a character’s behavior until an opportunity arises for fulfillment of the desire. Characters who have never desired wealth can be tempted into larceny by a sufficiently large pay-out, for example, surprising everyone (including themselves).

It has been suggested that there is a hierarchy of needs, which I have employed to define characters in the past, in particular with reference to non-human charactersnon-human characters.

Every trigger will be assessed with respect to the desires and needs that it might satisfy. If there are none, then there will be no behavioral alteration because of the need/desire. If there is one, however, it may push the character toward atypical behavior.

Tolerances And The Padded Wall Of Morality

Preventing such opportunistic behavior are, perhaps, the character’s morals.

Morals are such a complex subject that they really deserve an article of their own. Many people view morals as a code, a set of absolutely black-and-white rules that the character has to follow.

Reality is a lot messier. The hard brick wall of morals is full of cracks – a crack being an “exception” that the character will make, under some circumstances. Covering the surface of this hard wall, and eating into it at times, are softer layers of protection – tolerances and intolerances. These are where many of the cracks derive. For example, a character who is intolerant of Gays may make an exception with respect to several of the moral “rules” that govern his life. Or it may be women in power, or people of color, or any of a dozen other intolerances.

Tolerances are things that the character will put up with, will tolerate. Sometimes, these reinforce the morality wall; sometimes, they encounter a crack that subverts the tolerance. Sometimes they are positive, and sometimes negative.

Intolerances are things that the character will not accept. These can also be positive or negative – a character can be intolerant of injustice or racial prejudice or pink flowers.

Tolerances and Intolerances aren’t black and white, or moral judgments – they simply are. They are, in truth, inheritances manifesting through a character’s principles and values. It’s when there is a conflict between the character’s morals and his tolerances that characters are most vulnerable to internal conflict and creating new “cracks” in their moral code – for example, when a religious code demands tolerance but the character’s experience and upbringing gives them a predisposition toward intolerance.

The final point to note is that cracks in the moral “wall” are not uniform. More fundamental morals, and those stemming from a chronologically earlier stage of life, tend to have more cracks than those moral choices consciously made in adulthood, to the right-hand-side of the “wall”.

People are more at home demanding action of others than they are in taking action themselves, especially if there is any moral uncertainty involved. It’s a lot easier to tell someone else to break the law (or change the law) for you, than it is to break the law yourself, especially when others could sit in judgment over the actions.

Mobs occur when a crowd ‘egg each other on’ sufficiently that they overrule this tendency toward moral caution; a mob can and does engage in behavior that no individual member would dare to engage in (though they may suggest and demand that others engage in it) – looting, violence, misjudgment, vandalism, arson, even lynchings and murder.

Perceptions

Perceptions are how the character sees events within the world (the way the character sees the world itself is a predisposition). Thus, a predisposition may color or distort perceptions. Another way to look at perceptions is to consider them a classification matrix, but this overly-formalizes a more instinctive and unthinking response. Habits, desires, needs, and predispositions all shape how a triggering event will be perceived.

I used to think that they did so purely by providing the context that was used to frame the event, but am no longer so confident of that position. Since they can drive behavioral responses to the trigger with no interpretational analysis at all, any contextual impact is negligible.

It might be more accurate to say that they provide a contextual framework for interpretation, but act directly upon more instinctive forms of behavior. But I have no evidence to cite, so the best answer is to assume that they operate directly to alter the perception of what the trigger is.

For example, an individual may react to someone speaking on the television based on their gender, their race, their apparent education level, their career, their authority level, their physical attractiveness, their apparent prosperity or social class, their past perceptions of the individual on-screen, or what they are actually saying. Or all of them at once – with a different reaction from each aspect.

Interpretations

When a perception is analyzed by the individual to determine a course of action, or simply to work out what is really going on, their intellectual and analytic capabilities are brought to bear on interpreting the perception of the event.

It is worth observing that this is the first element of personality that is directly impacted by intellectual capacity, though there may have been indirect effects on other elements.

Instincts & Responses

An instinct is a reaction without forethought based upon survival needs. If the trigger event threatens the character unexpectedly, they will react instinctively. Forewarning engages the character’s perceptions, and may also lead to an instinctive reaction or a per-determined non-instinctive response. Some habits cause reactions that appear instinctive, as there is little or no thought evident, but they don’t make sense within the narrow definition of ‘instinct’ used, so they have to be something else. Call them “automatic responses” for lack of anything better. Only if the event is filtered through Interpretation will it trigger a reasoned response – subject to all the flaws and potential failures of reasoning, of course!

Other Manifestations – language, articulation, surprise, & attitude

There are a number of other manifestations of these personality elements. There are four of them that I’ve identified, and may well be more. Those four are Language (what the character says), articulation (how clearly they say it), surprise (how they express being startled) and attitude (expressed personality).

Triggering Events

Given the variety of triggering events, and the many different filters that might impact on that event’s interpretation, it’s easy to see how complex a fully-detailed personality profile needs to be. Fortunately, when you get right down to it, you usually only need to consider a broadly-defined or specific subset of these behaviors. What you really want is a guideline and a basis for intelligently amending that guideline if circumstances warrant.

Interaction Mode

The specifics required can be further confined by anticipating the interaction mode that the encounter will occupy, permitting you to keep guidelines outside that range even more general and loose.

There are four basic interaction modes:

• Monologue
• Dialogue
• Emotional Response
• Action

Monologue

When the character is present only to impart information with a minimum of back-and-forth, the goal is to provide them with a notable and noticeable personality. Doing so forces the players to consider the monologue as something other than ex-parte communication direct from the GM, raising uncertainties about its accuracy and reliability, and making the character delivering the monologue seem a part of their world.

Some characters simply speak their mind. The more forthright the mode of delivery, the more likely this is to be the case. At the other end of the spectrum, there are characters who never utter a word without calculating the impact that the word will have, and selecting amongst a broad vocabulary the word that will have just the impact that they desire. The first is a bundle of personality with the occasional factual statement thrown in for seasoning; the latter is almost bereft of personality in many respects, the “person” being subordinated to the “message” and it’s effect.

In the middle, though, there are a whole host of more ordinary folk. The triggering events of significance will be the content of their monologue – some parts may be distasteful, others invoke derision, and so on. For such characters, you need only understand the personality enough to be able to determine how they will feel about the message content.

The next factor in monologues is the breadth of subject matter, which is a function of length of monologue. If the monologue is only long enough for a single announcement, there will only be one emotional response to be conveyed; if the monologue covers a wider range, you may have three or four acute responses and a default mode to consider.

Dialogue

Dialogue comes in two forms: conversation with one or more PCs, and conversation with one or more NPCs that a PC happens to overhear.

That statement brings to mind an utterly irrelevant anecdote that’s too much fun not to share. At one point in my super-spies campaign, Team Neon Phi, Stephen Tunnicliff’s agent planted a bug on a suspected enemy agent. Except that he was forced to rely on a third party to actually plant the device, something he failed to advise the other players of. Well, the intermediary flubbed their die roll, and the bug ended up being planted on a fruiterer. When then players came to listen to their carefully-intercepted intelligence, all they got was a lot of talk about apples, oranges, pears – the apricots are on special – sprinkled with other monetary amounts and miscellaneous topics of gossip. They spent hours trying to figure out the code…

Okay, where was I? Oh yes – “conversation with one or more NPCs that a PC happens to overhear”. Of the two, this is the harder one to achieve successfully. You not only need to give each speaker their own personality and mode of interaction with the others’ personality, you need to make these sufficiently different and distinctive that the players can tell who’s saying what – all while being consistent and achieving clarity of communication. Other than that, it’s easy.

When you actually look into it, though, it’s a problem that differs in degree but not kind from the first variant. So long as you are sure to give enough nuance and differential expressions of character to each participant, it’s just a matter of being able to switch mental gears between the two.

Some contrasting personality profiles are easy to switch between – I call these “complimentary” profiles – while others are more difficult (I call these “contrary” profiles). Unfortunately, my experience tends to suggest that the classification to which any specific combination should belong varies from one GM to another. It’s more psychological than anything else.

I also find that you can cope with “Contrary” profiles if everything is pre-scripted; it’s satisfying any improvisational dialogue that might arise that causes the problem, most of the time. And that has given me a solution – have one or more stock phrases or expressions for each character that you can use to buy time while you make the mental “gear shift” Even if you overuse these, you can tell your players that you’re trying to use it as a verbal shorthand to them to make it easier for them to identify who’s speaking!

With that difficulty out of the way, Dialogue is both harder and easier than monologue. Easier in that less intensity of definition is generally needed; harder in that you have less control over the triggers than is the case in a monologue.

Another trick that helps considerably: a lot of the time, you can simply have the “trigger condition” be the PC in general, permitting a common default personality expression throughout. Throw in one or two exceptions of a broad and general nature – “Stutters when angry or upset”, that sort of thing – and you’re golden.

Emotional Response

Which brings me neatly to Emotional Responses. These occur when one emotion will be triggered within the NPC by the PC, or when the NPC is to trigger a single emotion within the PC (a much harder trick). You can’t sing one note for very long without it becoming excruciating to listen to; so you need ways to nuance and finesse the emotion, different ways of expressing it that you can employ in sequence.

It’s important that the emotion and the way that you express it are rationally connected, make sense. Exotic responses – including clinical and dispassionate ones – often feel forced and unrealistic.

I also try very hard to avoid exhausting my entire repertoire on one occasion. Having several different choices that you haven’t used lately can make the whole job a LOT easier.

Action

The most complex expression of personality is always having the character do something, because any action raises the questions of what the character can and can’t do, will and won’t do, and what exceptions there are to those limits. Before too long, you can find yourself back at the “full profile” situation that we’ve been trying to avoid.

My solution here is to go to the heart of the personality profile – the inheritance and any coloring issues – and improvise everything from that foundation and one or two relevant specifics.

Other Interaction Modes

This isn’t an exclusive list of possible interaction modes, but the others don’t come up very often, or are variations on one of the above. These four make clear the general principles to employ to meet any need, in any event – from the interaction mode, determine what the key aspects of the personality profile are going to be, use any notes you have to determine the relevant traits of this particular character, and improvise anything that falls outside that broad parameter.

For example, a PC might be trying to influence a particular (prejudiced) witness prior to them taking the stand. To that end, the PC arranges to attend a sporting event featuring a team that he or she knows the witness is passionate about, dressed in such a way as to imply that they are also a supporter of the team in question.

That gives us three interaction modes, possibly four:

• Celebrations;
• Despair;
• Camaraderie / Dialogue / Bonding?;
• Witness.

Only the third matches one of the four primary interaction modes in any way, and the circumstances are very different to most dialogue situations – sufficiently so that the GM decides a specific solution is required.

Try these, for example:

• Jumping up and down, hugging everyone around them doing likewise, chanting a player’s nickname, toasting his dear departed father (who used to play for the team), eyes brimming with tears, embarrassment.
• Sitting and glowering silently, looking at his feet (unable to look at the field), downing his beer in one huge gulp, defiant yelling.
• (requires a successful skill check to advance) to next stage: (derisive) “Ah wouldna have picked a toffeenose like you lilywhites tah be a fan o’the Lions. Lancashire-bloody-county seems more your speed.”, looks askance at the PC after a moment of mutual celebration (and hugging), buys a beer for each – “Drink up afore it gets warm! Cheers! GO THE BLOODY LIONS!!”
• If the PC achieved “bonding” with the NPC, the testimony will be colored in the PCs favor. If not, the testimony will be cynical and slanted against the PC, with the occasional caveat.

…with links to two different monologue versions in subsequent paragraphs to pick between. By interspersing modes 1 and 2 plus a default mode (drinking, cheering, and banner-waving) according to the course of the game (decided by die rolls), the PC and NPC have a number of shared experiences that justify the PCs interpersonal skill rolls / CHAR rolls (depending on your game system) to establish a friendly relationship between the two. It’s Show and not Tell.

In broader terms

NPC Personalities only exist as modes of expression, as reactions to events and statements from another character (PC or NPC), as a restriction upon the choices of action, or as a consistent foundation that permits a PC to predict future behavior.

The great virtue of the system extolled in the main part of the Crafting Of Personality series is that it reduces a complex profile into notes while imbuing a character with individuality. With those notes as a basis, it becomes relatively easy to extract only the bits that you need for any given appearance by the NPC in an adventure for development while retaining the consistency that results from a fixed foundation. This system provides the best of both worlds – broadness of scope and focus on the relevant – with minimal overhead and wasted time.