Image by John Hain from Pixabay. Slight crop by Mike.

Because the last part of the Economics in RPGs Series ran to three parts, I’ve decided to throw in an extra non-series article before continuing with it next week. Fortunately, I had an idea on tap.

The Holistic NPC

“Holistic” essentially means ‘complete’. The term derives from Holism, which is a philosophic notion that focusing on specific aspects of something doesn’t convey a complete understanding of the whole, no matter how perfect the understanding of those aspects – the interconnections between them mean that the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts.

Medically, the term refers to the treatment of a person as a whole, regarding the interplay of conditions, rather than just the symptoms of an illness, specifically incorporating mental and social factors.

So a Holistic NPC is one that is more complete, more rounded, more comprehensive than is normal. Today’s article provides and describes a process for the development of such an NPC.

Clearly this is not something that should be utilized routinely. It promises to be a lot more work and to require a considerably greater effort than most NPCs, and should only be used when that is warranted. My go-to for most NPCs remains the Partial NPC (see Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep).

The good news is that you can feed the results of just about any other NPC-generation process into the Holistic procedure as a starting point.

1. Central Focus

The process starts by defining the central focus of the NPC. This might be a particular ability or professional skillset that is defined by their intended role in an adventure, or within a campaign. It might be a particular personality trait. It might be a particular professional role, or even a specific weakness of personality.

This is the most important element of the character from the point of view of the campaign. It will serve as a focal point around which everything else will revolve. It’s critically important to get it right, and not to choose the first thing that jumps into your head.

I have often found that a singular adjective and a single, specific noun, work best, but that’s not always the case. It’s usually a good starting point, however.

2. Inevitabilities

With almost every central focus, there are traits, skills, and characteristics that come as baggage; these are essential to match the NPC with the assigned role. Sometimes, these are more obvious than at others.

Nuance can be incredibly important in defining something as an inevitable corollary of the central focus. Foe example, if we’re discussing a Priest, “Pious” and “Religious” are not the same thing – one describes a personal philosophy or central belief in a faith, the other refers to the practice of behaviors that are commonly associated with such belief. That practice can be the result of such beliefs, or it can be a cloak, superficial trappings.

3. Manifestations & Consequences

The third step is to take the entirety of the world around the character and contemplate the interactions between that world and that character in three broad areas. The goal is (1) to define the ways in which the focus and the inevitabilities will manifest, and (2) to define the consequences for the character.

Note that so far, what we’re producing is essentially a cardboard cutout of the character defined by the Central Focus. The fact that such variety of focus is possible creates somewhat greater variety of 2-dimensional characters than would otherwise be the case, but be under no illusions – the real effort is still in front of us.

That said, let’s look at those three broad areas.

Background

Background refers to the current status of everything except the character and his family. Everything in the game universe – whether that’s practical and objective, or conceptual, abstract, or subjective.

A “cop” means vastly different things in a street-level superhero campaign, a cosmic thriller, and a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

Before you can place the character, you need to know what these surroundings are, and what they represent within the campaign. What part do they play, and how does this character’s role intersect with them? If there’s anything for which you can honestly say, “It doesn’t”, then that’s an irrelevancy that defines that part of the background as something to ignore so far as this character is concerned. Only relevant background applies, in other words.

Culture

A Culture is not the same thing as a society. Rather, it’s the context within which a society exists. For most characters, there will be a broader culture, and frequently, a number of sub-cultures that are applicable.

What are the expectations of behavior, the general perceptions of such characters, that apply to characters of this particular focus?

Society

Society defines the rules of interaction between individuals – everything from marriage to criminal acts and their punishment.

Again, ignore anything that’s not directly relevant, but annotate this section with anything that does pertain to the character.

Once you have the three broad areas populated with the relevant constituent elements, it’s time to focus on how the character will manifest, and what the consequences will be for the character, for each item listed within each of the three areas.

These are signposts to the character, sometimes useful in and of themselves for defining traits or circumstances, but more important when treated as facets of the whole. The goal is to generate a brief description of that ‘whole’.

An example to get the mental wheels turning over: contemplate an ‘honest cop’ within a society in which the police are generally viewed as lazy and corrupt.

4. History, Family, & Shaping Events

Personality traits don’t emerge from nowhere, career decisions are rarely made flippantly, and it exceptionally rare for someone’s first job to be the same as their current job – even if they still have the same job title.

The goal in this stage of the process is to take every trait, characteristic, and fact determined thus far and trace them back to a causative trigger. There may be a number of steps in between the ultimate cause and the current situation; don’t be satisfied with simple answers. These should be classified into one of three broad phases of life – Childhood & Family; Youth & Education; and Vocation & Career To Date (which includes any vocational training)..

Childhood & Family

Childhood friends, parental figures, other relatives, and family friends, they all normally have some impact on the life of the NPC as a child. Sometimes this impact is a positive one, sometimes it’s negative, and sometimes it’s a mixture of both.

There are two major reactions possible to each: either a guiding force or principle, or rebellion. The greater the negative impacts of alcoholism by a parent, for example, the more powerful a driving force sobriety becomes, for example – that may not mean complete abstinence, it could simply mean a determination to retain self-control.

Youth & Education

Beyond the early formative years, there are the years in which some responsibility are conferred on an individual but they are nevertheless not free to make decisions for themselves in many parts of their life. Western societies tend to label this period as adolescence, and it generally coincides with external role models and life experiences with educators when universal education is a part of the society surrounding the character in their early years.

Fantasy games tend to be set in a more medieval society, in which characters serve as footmen or apprentices. There is frequently an assumption that apprenticing to a trade locks a character into pursuing that trade, or some offshoot of it, and any deviation from that course is traumatic, disruptive, and a personal milestone event.

One of the great takeaways from Magician by Raymond E. Feist was the concept of a pre-apprenticeship, in which youths get shared around as general laborers amongst the different trades so that aptitudes and attitudes can be assessed; those with an affinity for a particular ‘trade’ are then taken on as apprentices within that trade. Each year, any given trade only has so many vacancies to fill, so the naturally gifted tend to get chosen first while the mediocre sweat it out. I’m not suggesting that this system is, or should be, universal; but the need for this (or some equivalent) is so obvious that it should be a central element of the society.

Vocation & Career To Date

What led the character to the profession he or she now holds? What experiences did they have along the way that have shaped their capabilities, attitudes, and reputation? What training did the NPC have, and who delivered it, and how did what the NPC learned shape him or her into the future? What natural gifts did he or she possess that have aided them in this vocation, and what gifts or traits were possessed that occasionally lead them to contemplate some other path in life? Finally, what traits had to be overcome in order to succeed, and how did they learn to do that (if they did).

Once a catalog of formative influences and critical events has been compiled, this step is completed by projecting the character’s life story forward from the critical moment to the present day and the character’s current circumstances.

Some influences play a part in the character’s development and are then superseded by a differing influence, as the character grows as a ‘person’. These mark distinct phases of life for the character, and these are critical in delineating the character’s personal story and their personality. Very few of us do not experience some such moment of transition; some of us are unlucky enough to experience several. The transitions are always moments of great personal growth, and critical to defining the character as they are now.

This approach has the virtue of ensuring consistency within the character’s life story even if the end result appears to be a mass of contradictions.

An Abstract Representation



It can sometimes be helpful to view this stage of the process through a more abstract perspective, so I thought I would offer one as a tool.

The triptych above represents the process as something similar to a spiderweb of straight lines.

Panel 1

The first panel starts with the ‘now’ of the hollow circle (the central focus) at the bottom and traces it back through the character’s past to a critical incident that shaped the character’s decision or destiny to become the central focus. Every time that critical incident caused the character to make a decision, it is represented by a change in direction and a marker that indicates an intermediate stage of development, a personal history milestone.

Panel 2

The second panel starts back at that formative event, and traces other impacts of that and the other secondary milestones. In the process, two personal crisis moments (shown in yellow) are identified, moments when two or more of the character’s values came into conflict.

These are interconnected insofar as the second is a conflict between the consequences of the first and another key aspect of the character’s primary focus. If the character’s path had changed direction at either of these incidents, that’s an example of a “slippery slope” in which an avalanche of past decisions begins to accumulate and will eventually threaten to overwhelm the character.

Note that such an avalanche is not necessarily a negative – it might be a crisis of conscience in which a villain reforms, at least partially. The first crisis might be an act that the NPC was required to perform and that he came to regret; the second is a moment when he second-guessed his duty or task because of the regret. Again, he did whatever it was that he was being paid to do (no change in life-course) but this only compounded the regrets and – no doubt – doubts would begin to emerge as a consequence.

These can be considered secondary elements, subordinate only to the primary focus.

Panel 3

Panel three examines each of the critical moments and whether or not there is a direct consequence of that decision that is unaccounted for. These are often fringe issues to the central focus, and can be considered tertiary to the other manifestations and influences generated in preceding panels.

For the first time, this takes the character beyond the simple cardboard cut-out, exploring the penumbra of the formative decisions of the character’s past and the ramifications of those past decisions on the character’s present.

5. Personal Consequences

Step four defined other aspects of the character’s personality by way of past decisions and formative events. These should all have consequences in one or more areas: Relationships, Financial Status, or Social Status.

What’s more, each of these consequences should also manifest in one or more of the areas of initial development – background, culture, or society.

One of the formative personal events may have led to the character entering an unhappy marriage, for example (a relationship impact) – that could have ramifications on the character’s role within the general campaign background, though that’s relatively unusual; but it is far more likely to have an impact on the character’s role within his culture and society, in the form of obligations and expectations.

Relationships

Relationships include spouses, children, employers, employees, personal contacts, friends, allies, and enemies. Despite the breadth, only those relationships that can be deemed essential to understanding the NPC should be listed, or those which signpost an aspect of the character’s personality or ethos.

These are important because in any investigation of the NPC, these are the indicators that reveal – at least in part – what sort of person the NPC is. Such an investigation might never connect with the events that shaped the character’s thought processes; why they did what they chose to do is not especially relevant, what matters is any impact on future decisions.

Financial

Many decisions will have financial repercussions.

Continuing the unhappy marriage example, it might be that this was necessitated to gain access to a business opportunity. That means that it had a positive effect on the character’s finances as well as the negative effect of sharing any prosperity while the character is married.

Should the marriage strike rocky ground, the financial consequences could be dire economically, or it might be that the character needs to undergo a (presumably bitter) divorce and make a fresh start in order to take advantage of future opportunities. It wouldn’t be the first time that an opportunity steered someone into a personal or professional cull-de-sac.

Social

Many decisions compromise a character’s social engagements, and this is often a factor that is not taken into account when assessing the costs and benefits of a decision. I know one person who got married and was forced to give up RPGs as a result – the wife did not understand them, or what the player got out of them, and made it a choice: her or the games. After a while, she relented to the extent of permitting him to play board games with other people who played RPGs, but he never got back into the hobby, even after they were divorced.

You can never go back again to exactly where you were after events like this, as the example demonstrates. The more traumatic the events, the greater the loss; other social activities tend to expand to fill the resulting free time, and the person undergoes a personal evolution as a result.

The more quickly the reversal takes place, the closer to ‘the way things were’ the character can get. Married in Vegas as the highlight of a drunken weekend? Divorced on the Monday, when you came to your senses? Relatively little impact – unless the new partner makes trouble, of course. Married thirty years earlier? The entanglements ensure that a divorce will be traumatic and expensive.

6. Causes & Contradictions

Step six is to identify and catalog the things that the character believes in, and any contradictions within his persona.

Note that the layout of the graphic emphasizes that these are more removed from the Core Focus of the character concept.

As usual, there are three general subdivisions.

Passions, Addictions, & Interests

What is the character passionate about? What does he do habitually – whether he needs to, or not? What subjects and activities interest him?

These need not have any relationship whatsoever with the central focus of the character. Quite often, the less they relate to that focus, the more noteworthy they are.

I once knew an English major who liked to solve differential equations as a way of ‘loosening up his mind’, distracting himself from the world around him and whatever his personal circumstances were so that he could achieve maximum creativity. He had me write a random equation generator app for his laptop when we were both at University.

My sister loves “True Crime” stories, for no particular reason. They have nothing to do with her career or family. My niece’s favorite color is Purple. No identifiable reason, but it’s a defining characteristic of who she is. My brother and I are both interested in Formula 1, but for very different experiences – I like the tactics and engineering, he likes the excitement and drama. He enjoys going to F1 races as a consequence, while I prefer to watch on television.

Prejudices

Everyone has prejudices, even if they are nothing more than opinions formulated on an encounter with one individual that has been generalized.

Sometimes, these prejudices take the form of a receptiveness, a greater willingness to take a chance that interactions with an individual won’t be a waste of time – My twitter feed shows clear evidence that anyone involved in TTRPGs, Sci-Fi / Fantasy, or Photography / Art is very likely to get a ‘follow’ from me without further inspection; accounts that do not fall into this category are subjected to far more stringent examination.

Another manifestation is a dislike of certain kinds of behavior that the individual considers socially or personally unacceptable – berating a partner in public, for example.

But everyone has prejudices.

Weaknesses & Mistakes

There can be, at first glance, considerable overlap between this section and the other two. ‘Weaknesses’ generally refer to behaviors rather than to “Kryptonites”, if you get what I mean. Someone who can never resist the last slice of cake, or the last little leftover bit of dessert. It’s not an addiction, it’s not something the character obtains deliberately – it’s something that outside circumstances regularly offer them.

‘Mistakes’ also come with a caveat – these don’t include any of the formative events listed in stage 4 of the process, but they do have to be influential on the character or their circumstances. You would have to be a saint not to have made mistakes in the past, whether acknowledged or not.

The other content to be incorporated in this section is anything that stands as an unresolved contradiction to the general nature of the NPC as already described. Someone who is extremely safety-conscious, but loves to drive fast. Someone who is financially fastidious (even miserly) who indulges in collecting something (regardless of cost or monetary worth).

Some people are a bundle of conflicts and contradictions; most are more consistent. But we all have exceptions, hot buttons that override our normal behavior.

7. Ramifications<, Manifestations & Consequences

Of course, everything that got listed in Stage 6 is rooted in the character’s past. So the next logical step is to explore the impact that they have on the character’s present-day personality and circumstances.

The subheadings in this phase map directly onto those from stage 3 – in fact, you can simply expand that section if you want, though I find it more useful to keep them separate, so that stage 3 represents the direct consequences of the Core Focus. If there is ever a contradiction or conflict between two aspects of the character – one in this section and the other in the manifestations / consequences of the core – it’s usually the core that holds sway, perhaps modified slightly.

Just to remind you, those three sub-fields are:

• Background
• Culture
• Society

Their definitions haven’t changed since Stage 3, so I’ll forego repeating them.

8. Correlations: The Origins Of Beliefs

Stage 8 of the process is to take all the entries in the “Causes & Contradictions” category and use them to further populate the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category. What this means will differ depending on the type of content in the “Causes” subcategories.

For “passions” (and “interests”), where did the character first come into contact with the subject? And how did it impact on, and interact with, their other formative events?

A passion for art might have started as a mild interest in drawing, but harsh dictates by a parent who saw it as ‘wasting time’ restricted its expression. What might have been a passing phase or minor sideline grew, through lack of satisfaction, into a more obsessive interest – probably manifesting in a complete different manner to the original, such as being a collector of artworks.

Addictions deal with when the character was first exposed to the substance or practice.

One can argue that Weaknesses were always a part of the character’s makeup, but they have a strong potential to interact with critical decisions, often to the character’s detriment.

Mistakes generally translate into specific incidents in the characters’ past. It’s often not the event of the mistake itself that is significant, however, but the awareness that the character has made a mistake that is important. Nevertheless, it can be useful to incorporate both, with a link connecting the two. Even that impact can be delayed, if the character was not in a phase of life that encouraged or permitted introspection, so there can even be a third step in the causal chain before the original mistake becomes important to the character’s development.

Contradictions can require a deeper consideration – when did they start, when have they contradicted something in the primary makeup, and how was that contradiction resolved without eliminating the contradiction and without it being a formative event critical to the core focus? Sometimes, these answers are easy; sometimes, you will need to look deep into the character’s psychology, and perhaps even conclude that on this subject, they are deluding themselves.

9. Correlations II: Consequences

Of course, once you have new entries in the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category, you need to process these into consequences, in the same way that you did in Stage 4. Since the process is exactly the same, I’ll forego additional details.

10. Interpolations

The interpolations stage is two-fold:

1. Take everything that’s listed in the Personal Consequences space and interpolate connected entries in the Manifestations & Consequences space, and,
2. Take everything that’s listed in either of the Manifestations & Consequences spaces that is not already connected to Personal Consequences and interpolate additional entries in the personal consequences space.

It is these connections that are ultimately the difference between this process and other NPC generation methods. Throughout this procedure, the emphasis has been on how two discrete elements of the emerging character concept interact and relate to each other. Put that together with all the elements of the character, and ensure that the impact on the character is front-and-center, and the end result is a more holistic definition of the character.

In particular, emphasizing the connections ensures that the character is internally consistent, even those elements that are contradictory.

11. Concluding Stage

Of course, it’s not entirely in user-friendly format at this point. You have perhaps a page of conceptual elements, classified and categorized in various subcategories. You’ve ensured that everything correlates and interconnects as it would if you were describing a real person, and documented those correlations and connections in two or three additional pages, also within the same categories and subcategories.

The final step is to take each of these lists and combine them into a brief narrative description. In particular, you want to generate a thumbnail perspective of the character’s past history, of the primary focus and inevitabilities, of the way everything manifests outwardly, and what the personal consequences are for the character.

The result is purely conceptual in nature. It is a road-map to the expression of the character in game mechanics, and – as a general rule of thumb – should override any such mechanics that don’t fit. If the concept demands a character who is a skilled negotiator, with a particular approach to such negotiations that breaks through entrenched positions to get results, and there are no game mechanics for such negotiations, either let the approach always play out in roleplaying terms, or introduce such game mechanics (since it’s clearly a hole in the system).

NEVER let the mechanics restrict or interfere with the character concept that you have so clearly crafted; unless you have been completely myopic and created a Saint or a Devil, your creation will have inbuilt checks and balances, flaws and the potential for misjudgments and errors, and that’s all you need in terms of restriction.

It’s a different story for PCs, where there may need to be game mechanics restrictions as well as conceptual ones; if this process is used for the creation of PCs, the “always play it out” option is off the table, simply because there will always be a gap between the player’s skills and abilities and those of the character that they control.

Postscript: Full-sized Graphic

To fit everything in, this had to be a large graphic (1807 × 1723), and almost 4Mb in size. This in turn made getting everything to be legible when compressed to Campaign Mastery’s display footprint a challenge.

Because the final graphic incorporates everything from all ten stages, I thought it best to overcome the latter problem (as usual) by providing a full-sized version.

Click Here to open it in a new tab, from which it can be downloaded – complete with spelling error!