Running NPCs
Hi all! Hags here. I've been introspecting about how I have run games lately. Here's some stream-of-consciousness thoughts about how I run NPCs. I'm interested if you have any opinions or thoughts. I hope at the very least it makes you think about your own craft. Enjoy.
I've run and played in a bunch of old-school-ish (and some more modern-styled) games where the non-player-characters often exhibited the same few traits:
- taciturn; sullen and dour; uninterested
- largely agreeable to PCs; completely reasonable
- completely unwilling to indulge jokes or more bizarre plans
- lacking in voices or speech quirks or temperaments (this is a big one)
I think this might come partly from being totally out of practice in running games, but a friend suggested it might also partly stem from the format of the game. She proposed that old-school-style refereeing (especially stuff that leans more "blorb" or "simulationist") might encourage GMs to lean into a few behaviours :
- being afraid to make some NPCs more distinctive than others, which in an investigation-themed game especially might "show your hand" and suggest that some elements might be more prepared (and thus more important) than others.
- employing reticence to imply a hidden depth to the character (fine sparingly but not often).
- having NPCs as subtle or overt shepherds to enforce tone or discourage undesired tomfoolery (co-morbid with dourness). Not saying that tone isn't important but I think it might be better to just address issues out-of-character.
For example, I recently ran a module I wrote called Green Hags (watch out I'm about to spoil it). At the end they were ambushed by Mary Robins, one of the two titular Green Hags. She was shooting at them from the trees after they had been led into the woods. She was silent and unemotive until the moment they shot her dead. In retrospect I don't know why the fuck I did that other than just not thinking about it or being too slow to roleplay in the moment.
Mary is an psychotic woman with OCD. I think it's fine for her to have started off silent as she began her ambush, but I think it would have been far more memorable (and even more scary) if she began screaming and ranting, especially after they got her in the arm with a glancing shot. I think it would have lent some real pathos to the scene: being in a life-and-death gunfight with a mentally unwell woman who has essentially turned feral, snarling and swearing and screaming at the player characters.
Looking back, I think I was stuck in a particular mindset of maintaining an "osr philosophy". Mary had ceased to become a person with particular traits and temperaments and had instead become one of the actors in the module. This transformation probably wasn't helped by the fact that I wrote Green Hags in my perception of the Violence house-style: lots of matter of fact descriptions from which a personality can be intuited but little or no up-front descriptions of "how would this person actually act in a given scenario". I think this is a key step that I need to get better at.
I do think I'm already getting better at it somewhat though: in a module I wrote later that month called TROUBLE AT ST MONSTANCE I did actually include concise descriptions of every character consisting of a disposition, a physical trait, and a mannerism. Though I think the single best thing I could do is actually just meditating for an hour prior to running and just considering "ok how would this character actually perform and act".
To conclude I'm going to write down a spirited little mantra for myself:
It's OK for your characters to be simpler, to be shallow but memorable.
They can develop the depth later on when they actually need it.
It's OK for them to have silly little voices and mannerisms and quirks.
Don't get embarrassed about it. No one's going to take the piss. And if they do, why are they at your table?
It's OK for them to be bit parts, especially the NPCs that are actually bit parts.
Why shouldn't your cultists cackle? Why should the initiates not scream when they break morale, and why shouldn't their leader shout "No! Stop Running Away You Peons!" as they do so.
It's OK to lean on archetypes, or simple inversions of archetypes.
Remember Your Stock Characters. Think about Cadarousse from Monte Cristo. Think about the Fat Merchant you always do, with the shop full of choking incense. And so on... You should really write down a list of all the stock characters you can think of for reference.
It's better for the dwarf to be Scottish than to have no accent (but you can probably do better than that... have them be Northern Irish or something... you can do a great ulster accent...)
