(Image: FreeImages.com / Crevecoeur Julien)

Bringing characters to life in a story or an RPG is always a challenge. Keeping characters consistent from one appearance to the next is also a constant challenge. There are a couple of tricks that I have found to help meet these challenges; and the technique that I use to satisfy the first of these needs is, in part, dependent on the technique that I use to satisfy the second. They are really two parts of one whole solution.

Bringing Casual NPCs to Life

The first part of the answer is fairly basic: everyone needs to be doing something. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a man walking down a street or a receptionist in an office or the major villain with his grand scheme to take over the world (or some small part of it); these characters should never simply be static, frozen in place until a PC talks to them.

In the case of the Major Villain, this is fairly obvious and oft-repeated advice. Not often enough is this advice generalized to include lesser encounters. Every character needs to be doing something when they are encountered – even those who are simply waiting around need to be waiting for something.

A man in the street is going from place A to place B? You need to know what those places are so that you can make informed decisions about what the character looks like, their emotional state, their personality and the way it expresses itself, and how they will react to the PC. The man might be a guard at a bank and on his way to his place of employment – he will be in his uniform, and anxious not to be delayed. He might be a businessman on his way home after a hard day’s work, tired and irritable, and ever-so-slightly disheveled. He might be on his way to continue an illicit affair, and be furtive and trying not to be easily recognized. Or, coming from such a assignation, he might be ebullient, not as disheveled as he should be, and perhaps with a trace of perfume or lipstick that he missed when cleaning himself up afterwards.

Incorporating little hints as to what the character has been doing, or is about to do, into their appearance and demeanor brings them to life as more than simply the part of the plot that they are intended to provide.

Compare these two versions of the same scene:

1. PC enters a shop. There is a clerk behind a counter. The PC states his requirements. The Clerk quotes a price. The PC agrees to the price and pays the clerk, then asks how soon his order will be ready. The clerk tells him to come back at the same time tomorrow. The PC leaves.
2. PC enters a shop. There is a clerk behind the counter filling in the crossword of the daily newspaper who was looking rather bored until he heard the bell from the shop door. In one practiced motion, the newspaper is swept aside and the pen placed behind the clerk’s left ear as he straightens to greet the customer. The PC states his requirements. The Clerk quotes a price, but – afraid that he might lose the business – then offers a small discount, and suggests an upgrade to a slightly fancier product on which he can offer a more substantial discount. The PC agrees to the offer and pays the clerk, then asks how soon his order will be ready. The clerk tells him that it would normally take a couple of days, but business is light at the moment, so if the customer will return at the same time tomorrow, his order will be ready for him. The PC nods, and leaves.

The only difference between those two scenes is that the Clerk was bored and filling time. It’s also clear that the clerk is either the owner, or on sales commission, or is fearful of losing his job if he can’t drum up more business. Everything else stems from the implication that business is currently slow. But what a difference that small change makes! Suddenly, this faceless clerk has personality, there’s some interaction in the scene, and he feels real to the reader – or to the player.

Consistency and Depth

The second half of the technique is equally simple, and just as powerful: Every character needs to have a reason to be doing whatever it is that they are doing in the way that they are doing it. He needs a “small motive”.

Take our clerk – why was he filling out the newspaper’s crossword instead of working? Is it that he’s lazy. or bored, does he do crosswords for mental stimulation, or is work slow? Perhaps there’s a rival that has recently started up and is taking a substantial part of the market share, or perhaps the store’s produce has simply gone out of style. Or perhaps business is just slow at the moment – these things happen.

Most of the time, this won’t have effects as blatant and overt as in the example offered above. Instead, they will simply give context to the actions of the NPC – context that can serve as a guide to the behavior of the character and his situation on subsequent encounters, and that can help steer you if an encounter doesn’t go according to plan.

Transition: Bonus

As a bonus, this information can give the GM clues about how the NPC will transition his attention from whatever he was doing to the PCs, and offer insights as to his reaction. It’s that “small motive” again; an NPC who is filling out the newspaper crossword because he’s lazy would have a completely different reaction to potential customers demanding his attention to one who was doing so merely because business had been slow, lately. The first would be indifferent or casual at best, while the latter is likely to be so eager to cooperate that the PCs might grow suspicious if the players are sufficiently paranoid.

Assigning Small Motives

It doesn’t take much time or effort to come up with a small motive, at least at first. Enjoy this period, it won’t last.

The problem is that repetitiveness, cliché, and stereotype are less than a hands-breadth away. Because this technique is all about the mundane, small encounters that are frequent events in any campaign, you need a LOT of small motives over time, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep them distinctive.

Worse still, without a lot of additional prep or bookkeeping, there’s no way to track the small motives that you are using as a way of guarding against repetitiveness. Pattern and habit can sneak up on you.

To get around this problem, I use a 3d6 solution and assign small motives to fit a random result. The randomness is my protection against the trap of all my clerks fitting one small set of stereotypes. NB: for this process to work, the d6s should be different colors.

The first d6: Intensity Of Focus

The first die gives me the intensity with which the NPC is focused on whatever he is doing. The higher the result, the less of his attention is available for the PCs. On results 1-3, the NPC can set aside whatever he was doing when sufficiently motivated to do so; on results 4-6, he will still be distracted to at least some extent.

The 2nd d6: Desire Of Focus

The second die gives me an indication of how much the NPC wants to be doing whatever he is currently doing, as opposed to doing whatever the PCs want the NPC to do. The higher the score, the less cooperative the character’s attitude to customers or demands in general. An NPC who has been laid off and is working his final day on the job might care more about the help wanted section than dealing with whoever walks through the door. An NPC who has his mind on a domestic situation that he is dreading but which has to be dealt with at the end of the working day, on the other hand, is likely to do his best to procrastinate while at the same time seeming very cooperative.

The 3rd d6: Attitude

The third d6 is used to give an indication of the NPCs overall attitude in general. The higher the result, the more positive it is. Values of 1 and 6 are so extreme that they represent characters with a potentially unbalanced view of the world, negative and positive respectively. Values 2-5 are more reasonable, more balanced.

What comes first: the What or the Why?

As a general rule, small motives get assigned using this system in one of two ways:

• Motive first, Focus second – I generally use the first two die results to zone in on a possible motive first, and then use the combination of that motive and the third die roll to decide what it is that the character is actually doing.
• Simultaneous Solution – Sometimes (never often enough!) though, a flash of inspiration will give both what the NPC is doing and why as a matched couple. It’s these results that you have to be exceptionally wary of, because this is when the forces of cliché and habit are at their strongest; but, so long as the solution matches the die roll, you are usually pretty bomb-proof.

Nuances

It’s also possible to build additional nuances into the die roll structure. An even number might mean that the NPC will follow the rules (including the unwritten ones such as dealing with customers in the order they arrive and not playing favorites), while an odd number denotes someone who is more of a rebel. There are no rules to this, you can make them up as you see fit and change them regularly. That yields an additional protection against habitual patterns of NPC personas, simply by changing the playing field every now and then.

A little anarchy is good for variety and bad for predictability – and in this context, that’s a good thing!

Small Motives yield Big Rewards

Whether you implement the 3d6s technique or not, the basic technique of making sure every NPC is (1) doing something and (2) has a reason for doing it offers profound benefits to GMs for relatively little effort. Add it to your repertoire immediately, if it’s not there already!

But be warned: once they get a taste for how much your NPC encounters will come to life using this technique, your players will never let you go back.