Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs

Image by FreeImages.com/Henry Gretzinger
I’m interrupting the flow of things with this two-part article, which is being written while I’m away from my usual resources. Technically, I’m supposed to be on Holidays, but in reality the vagaries of transport requirements have taken me away from those resources sooner than I wanted; the consequence is that I might not have time to prepare the next (and concluding) part of the tavern generator. So I’ve put that on hold for a week while I’m away, and instead have written this “quick” and “short” two-part article.
One of the challenges of GMing an RPG is operating many different characters in close succession, or even at the same time. This is a difficult art to master, and one that even experienced GMs struggle with on occasion. There are any number of tricks and techniques that can be used to ease this burden. Presenting some of these – my favorite techniques for doing so – is the purpose of this article.
Technique# 1: Know The Character
Before you can start, you need to know what you’re getting yourself into. That means knowing the personality of the NPC, his ambitions, his motivations, his likes and dislikes, and the things that make him overreact or even go completely spare.
These are vital facts because they give you cues to action and reaction, enabling snap decisions (or dithering as may be appropriate to the character). This capability essentially means that there are many decisions that the character can make that you don’t even have to think about – a godsend, because it permits you to invest more of your attention elsewhere.
Accessibility
While a deep understanding of the character is essential, it is absolutely critical that the information is concise and well-indexed. You can’t rely on memory – there are far too many distractions and events demanding your attention as GM for that – and you don’t have the time for studied and polished subtlety and nuance.
Superficiality is a far lighter burden than poor access to the information that you do have, as is easily demonstrated: Consider an NPC with a 7 page psychological profile. Even with section titles, such as I am using for this article, that’s still a huge amount to read and assimilate when the NPC turns up in the middle of the day’s play. This hypothetical NPC has an exquisitely deep character, but you can’t take the time to read through it to extract the content that you need to know in order to play the character. A much shallower presentation – a single paragraph of 8-10 lines, with the key words standing out in some way, permits the GM to read the material in advance and remind himself of it simply by glancing at those key words. The difference is between a functional level of characterization and (effectively) nothing at all.
Content and structure
It’s always tempting to achieve a deep understanding of the character, and that’s an approach that I whole-heartedly support – up to a point. But that deep analysis should always be used purely as a starting point for the generation of a synopsis or summary that contains nothing but what you absolutely have to know in order to run the character, shorn of any justification, explanation, or context. The fewer the barriers placed between you and getting into character, the better.
When I write, as I have explained previously, I generate a list of subjects or thoughts which are then sequenced in a way that permits a reasonable flow of “conversation” before being expanded – sometimes into a single paragraph, sometimes into a whole section of material. This expanded form, after a little editing, is what gets published in these articles.
I use the same technique to generate and understand the PCs and NPCs that I create. But I carefully retain the original list, because it provides a starting point for the next phase of character generation – the creation of the synopsis that I described at the start. In fact, I will reorder the content of the fuller explanations in order to make the synopsis more digestible, even if that sacrifices the neat “narrative flow” within the more expansive character writeup. After all, I’m not creating the character to be read like a biography, I’m creating it to be played.
In other words, the structure of the content should always be that which best facilitates the end-purpose – even if that means the content is slightly compromised in a literary sense.
The Difference between GMing and Playing
I always advise players to make all character decisions in character, to forget questions of what is best in terms of achieving team goals or practicality and – first and foremost – to be their characters as much as possible during play.
It might be going too far to choose “the yellow die” because “my character prefers yellow”, or to only write in green ink because “my character always uses green ink” – or it might be the stroke of genius that permits deep immersion within the character. The most practical and efficient course of action is rarely the most entertaining!
That doesn’t mean that those team goals should be ignored; but it should always be a case of “this is what my character would want to do – how can that bring the team closer to their goals? If it can’t, how would the character prioritize between the two choices, and how much of a compromise is required?”
While this deep immersion would also be the ideal for playing an NPC as the GM, it’s rare that you will have that luxury. Ninety-nine-point-nine times out of 100, it’s simply not possible.
And it’s a dangerous practice to indulge even on that one-in-a-thousandth time – because the next time the NPC appears, it’s most unlikely to be another one-in-one-thousand opportunity. Your comparative performance as the NPC can only suffer, and the discrepancy can be jarring to players, throwing them off their stride. A “feedback loop” sometimes arises in which everyone is off their game for the day – with no-one completely sure of why the magic just isn’t there this time.
As a GM, you have to be able to drop in and out of character at lightning speed, no matter how convoluted the psychology or how alien the perspective might be. This is the standard of ability of the majority of players, not that of the real elite. Being a good player can actually make you a worse GM – and being a good GM rarely helps you to be a great player. The skill-sets might overlap, but they are not the same!
The more concise and accessible the need-to-know facts and characterization prompts are, the more easily you can achieve this dropping-in-and-out of character – or even fake being in-character when your mind is really on the thousand-and-one other things that the GM has to manage.
Implementation advice
It doesn’t really matter how you do it, and there are a myriad of approaches – but do whatever you have to do in order to facilitate this accessibility, and do it in advance. This is just as important an element of game prep as generating the NPC in the first place!
Some methods that I have used, with varying degrees of success, are:
- bolding key words;
- highlighting key words;
- underlining key words;
- index cards containing the keywords;
- primer notes containing the keywords; and,
- hyperlinked pop-up notes.
Nor are these the only ones; and then there are combinations, as well. I’m not going to rank them in effectiveness because what works for me might not work so well for you, and vice-versa.
Technique #2: Find The Uniqueness
Every character will react to every situation slightly differently. In order to make the character stand out from the crowd in the minds of the players, you need to give them a point of distinctive uniqueness. If their reaction to events is going to be the same as that of several others (including, possibly, PCs) you need some distinctly identifiable way of expressing that reaction – unless the character is deliberately intended to mirror and represent the reaction of the faceless masses, with all their contradictions, of course.
Before you can express the uniqueness that makes this NPC distinctive, you need to know what that uniqueness is – that’s only common sense.
This is something entirely distinct from the quick-access personality primers discussed in Technique #1. The character’s “uniqueness” will vary with the situation they are in, their perception and assessment of that situation, their reaction to those perceptions (or to surprise if they were not previously aware of the situation), and the manner in which they express that reaction. None of these cognitive processes define uniqueness; this is a relative quality, one that can only be assessed in terms of this particular situation and the contrasts between the NPC and other characters experiencing the same situation.
But that long line of cognitive responses is very useful to the GM because any one of those processes can be the thing that sets this character’s thought process, and hence reactions, apart. Not to mention speed of response, degree of emphasis, and persistence of response.
That’s seven different variables that the GM can tweak to individualize the character! On top of that, there’s predisposition and state of mind, two more variables to play with.
Critically, several of these processes take place entirely within the character’s head, where the strings being pulled by the GM are hidden from view; all the players are aware of is that the character seems to be an individual. As a result, you can have almost-identical characters in almost-identical situations (or even in the exact same situation) who will react completely differently to that situation – making each unique and distinctive, compared to those around them.
Part of the GM’s “job” – unofficially – is to tweak and manipulate these variables, as subtly as possible, just enough to confer a uniqueness on each of the major NPCs involved.
This not only makes the individuals stand out in the players minds – remember, they don’t get to read the GM’s notes that explain how this NPC is different) and brings the character to life from their point of view.
It doesn’t matter how much of the NPC’s head-space you occupy, or vice-versa; at least, so far as the players are concerned, it doesn’t show. All they can react to is what they can “see” and hear.
Actually, I think it actually matters a great deal – it’s the nine-tenths of the metaphoric iceberg that doesn’t show. This “hidden headspace” – if it remains consistent over multiple events and multiple encounters – slowly becomes recognizable to the players, revealed by the implications of the decisions made and the actions chosen. That sort of long-term payoff is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the very best of GMs – provided they haven’t let the pursuit of it get in the way of anything else they need to do in the meantime.
By making each character unique in the player’s eyes, you give them a metaphoric “hook” to hang that NPC’s personality on. This makes it easier for them to relate their characters to the NPC, making for better roleplaying all round.
Technique #3: Manifesting The Uniqueness
I once explained the above (in more compact form) to another GM, and the reply was that it only worked when the circumstances were right for the character to manifest his distinctiveness. I was somewhat at a loss; he had clearly not understood what I was saying, which was to change the character, or his internal circumstances so that the game situation was the right one to bring out the distinctiveness.
But really, the GM creates the basic plotline; he has no excuse if it doesn’t allow the NPC to be sufficiently memorable. It doesn’t require much change, after all, to completely transform things.
When I dug deeper into the objection, what he was actually saying was that the plot currently went in the direction he wanted it to go, and altering it to elevate an NPC into prominence would threaten to derail his plans. (Yes, he actually used the term “derail”). Again, where do I start? It’s bad enough to railroad the PCs, but even worse to do so with bland characters. This is so far removed from good GMing practices that it beggars belief that this GM was in his third decade behind the screen.
Setting aside the larger problems for the moment, this is still no reason not to make the NPC more distinctive. You have total control over both what the NPCs triggers are and the events that will activate those triggers; all that’s needed is to pick one combination that makes the NPC distinctive and then apply domino theory if you really must tie yourself to a preordained plotline.
Plot as an instrument of characterization
Better practice still, why not use this power to enhance the uniqueness of the character by using it as a springboard into a demonstration of some other aspect of the personality? Use a flaw to bring a positive attribute to the fore, use a positive attribute to get the character in over their head, or to make a mistake with the best of intentions and make the character a more rounded individual.
This is most easily achieved by observing one simple fact: however the character reacts to the situation he finds himself in, as he perceives it, this will create a new situation in which some other character can react. Daisy-chaining one reaction to another in this way is fairly easy simply because the GM has control over the makeup of both the characters in question. This makes it easy for events to spin out of control (from the PCs perspective) or cancel out, or anything in between.
But it works even with established characters; it’s simply a question of working backwards. You want reaction “B” from NPC 2? Then find a trigger within NPC 2 that will lead to that reaction, and then identify any possible combination of circumstances and action by NPC 1 that would lead to his response being that trigger. Extend the technique as far as necessary.
This working backwards is NOT a plot train because it is emergent behavior from the personalities involved – it’s just that they have been cherry-picked and tweaked in such a way that they will advance the plot, and thereby complicate the lives of the PCs. When viewed from this perspective, all plot trains are matters of putting the cart before the horse; they define the plot and insist that the PCs follow it, which means that the NPCs create and enforce the predetermined plot. There is nothing wrong with an inevitability existing in relation to a plot development; the flaw is in trying to force the plot to a particular destination contrary to the characters involved.
You may now be wondering how the PCs figure into all this? They – and through them, the players – create the initial conditions, or the later conditions, through their own reactions. They are still a part of the world that the GM does not control, and if they can find or manufacture the right lever and fulcrum, and something to stand on, they can still move the world. Or get a whole bunch of NPCs to help them do it.
Motivation, circumstantial interpretation, and choice of response – understand those, and allow the characters to manifest them in a manner appropriate to their personalities, and the world is your oyster.
Here’s another way to look at it: you are using the plot to provide the NPC with an opportunity to express his character. Nothing wrong with that.
Technique #4: Plotting to Character
Why stop there? Why not set aside part of the plotline to demonstrate the personality of the antagonist? Once you know what is unique about the character and how to roleplay them, why not design part of the plot simply to give that character room to put on a show of who he is? If the antagonist is a villain, give him the chance to do something villainous – and then either have him not do it (expanding the personality beyond a caricature) or have him do it with relish (playing to the cliche), with good reason (within his personality profile).
In addition, however, there will always be circumstances and combinations of response and triggering circumstance that the GM feels uncomfortable with, or does not think that he can play, or where the NPC’s internal logic seems strained and possibly broken. Things that don’t make sense.
Why not plot to avoid such problems? This involves two steps: Knowing what the trouble-spots are, and avoiding them.
Knowing the trouble-spots
Where trouble will strike is going to be different for every combination of character and GM. There are some aspects of a personality that the GM just doesn’t feel confident in depicting. Anticipating these can only be done by considering the likely situations that the NPC is likely to find themselves in whilst in the presence of a PC – if there’s no PC present, this is fairly easy to hand-wave, which is the best way of avoiding the problems.
Personally, I often have trouble dealing with small talk – it requires too much immersion within the character. If I can arrange things so that there are few other demands on my attention, this can be managed, but the rest of the time, I know it to be a problem.
But I try to anticipate when an NPC is likely to have an extreme reaction that is going to be tricky to play by looking at the events to come, and looking at the personality triggers that I have built into the NPC.
Avoiding the trouble-spots
There are essentially three ways to avoid trouble-spots: change the situation, change the character’s predisposition or interpretation ever so slightly, or change the way that the character will react to something more manageable.
Changing the situation is often either the easiest solution or the most difficult. It depends on whether the situation is a key “domino” in the plot; if you can alter the situation so that it still serves the same plot function, then that’s the easiest solution. If the situation is not amenable to sufficient revision in circumstances, that leaves only the changes to the character and his circumstances.
Changing the way the character usually reacts to situations like the one that is being presented is relatively easy if the character has never appeared in that sort of context before, provided that the alternative is one that is consistent with the character otherwise; however, quite often elements of the NPCs personality have already been established, and so this alternative has to be taken off the menu.
Usually occupying the middle ground in difficulty is altering the mindset of the character so that they react differently, i.e. in a way that the GM will find easier to play. Quite often, the easiest way of doing so is to introduce a preliminary encounter for the NPC that the PCs might never even get to see that puts him into a particular frame of mind or emotional state. These will then alter the way in which he interprets the events-that-cannot-be-changed and hence the way he reacts to the situation. There will be occasions when the other alternatives have been ruled out, and this is therefore the only viable solution; to avoid overuse, I always consider this last, and give priority to either of the other answers if they will solve the problem.
Technique #5: NPC Interactions
The big secret to having two NPCs interact in the game is ensuring that each is distinctive. I’m useless when it comes to doing different voices, so I have had to evolve other techniques. These are mostly based on gestures and physical activity, and making the emotional content different – one character angry, another calm, and so on.
“Physical activity” could be anything from waving hands wildly (a very Italian cliche, but it works) to looking over the top of my glasses to holding one arm tightly to my chest as though it were in a sling. One character might scratch his ear constantly, or stroke the side of his nose.
The most extreme technique was to make two signs, each with the name of an NPC on them, and holding one in each hand, flat to the table; raising one indicated which NPC was speaking. On another occasion, I did something similar without the names using pieces of differently-colored cardboard. These two methods met with mixed success; the players got confused as to which character was represented by which color of cardboard, and at one point in the first conversation I got confused (after being interrupted by a player) and held up the wrong sign, much to the amusement of the players who were present!
Techniques #1 and #2 help immensely, by ensuring that the NPCs have different triggers and hence are experiencing different emotional states at any given point in the conversation that I am roleplaying between them.
Technique #6: NPC Decisions
Just as I mark or indicate key words to synopsize the personality content, I extract and key-word a summary of what matters to the NPC. This enables a quick decision when one is needed. In some cases, I will apply a similar technique to indicate the character’s boundaries, things that they will never do.
If you use highlighting as your methodology, I strongly recommend using different colors for these different types of content. It is essential that you do so with consistency if you follow this advice, however; that means that as soon as you glance at a given NPCs information, your eye will naturally go to the information that you seek.
If you write in the margins, use different colored inks for the same effect. Every brain cell that you can spare from the task of finding and interpreting the information you need is one that can be applied to some other task.
Technique #7: Passing Prominence
Something that few GMs spend enough time thinking about is how the NPC will hand the spotlight back to one or more of the PCs after they have said their bit. There are innumerable ways to end a conversation, but not all of them are equally felicitous in the way they hand the roleplaying baton back to the characters who should actually be the stars of the show.
There are three methods that I employ in particular:
- Ending with a question;
- Ending with a trigger;
- Ending with a name.
Ending with a question is an obvious technique because it prompts the PC to answer the question; it spurs a response from the PC with whom the NPC was speaking.
Ending with a trigger is more difficult, but if you can identify what triggers a PC has, you can play on those to your game’s advantage. This is relatively easy in the Hero System, where psychological limitations and triggers are an inherent component of every character; but it is more challenging in systems like Pathfinder or DnD where these are not explicitly specified, and the PCs personality is whatever the player thinks it is at the time.
Ending with a name is the most difficult technique at all, because it is very hard to actually make the dialogue flow in such a way that the name-drop feels natural and unforced. “Wouldn’t you agree, Damian Selfridge?” simply doesn’t work that well. However, the technique can be far more successful when the NPC isn’t speaking to the PC but is simply being overheard: “We have nothing to fear from the Kredlin-worshipers, Tamar; we have a secret weapon to deploy. His name is Damian Selfridge…”
Even though this statement is not directed to the PC, it naturally throws the spotlight onto him – or, more specifically, his player – for a reaction.
The Exhilaration Of Success
I must end with a slight word of warning: it’s easy to go too far with any of these techniques, especially when flushed with success. A little is far better than a lot. I try never to have more than five key words selected within any given category, and I am very stringent on only having the three categories that have been described in this article at most.
Applied properly, these techniques can greatly improve your representation of NPCs at the gaming table; taken to far, the benefits will be drowned out.
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October 9th, 2015 at 4:08 am
[…] so much easier when you’re dealing with an NPC. You have total control over everything. The character is what you define it to be and the […]
October 14th, 2015 at 9:40 am
[…] Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs […]