Showcasing NPCs for players.

[sirogit]

Ran into a little spat with a player, talking about my TSOY game, Khalien Moons:

Me: Using a relationship map.
Him: Cool. Could you tell me what's on it, so I could make sure I'm going along with your story?
Me: WHAT?!? MY Story!?! DON'T every say that name in my house!
Him: Well, I'd want something to base my character on, something that's connected with what's going on.
Me: Oh, well any NPC you give me, I can totally slot into the relationship map with my mad relationship map slotting skills.
Him: You don't sem to understand. I am really not good at making up NPCs. That's why I pretend to like railroading.
Me: OH. Neither am I. That's why I pretend to be Narrativist.*
Him: ...
Me: ...

So, my basic plan is:
Come up with short descriptions of NPCs. Include their current famlial/sex situation and what conflicts they're in. Size it so that it fits with a picture on a fourth of a sheet of paper.

If people need some NPCs, they're there in the hat.

At the end of that, I'll take what NPCs gave me, and NPCs people(Including me) were in love with from the hat, and throw the rest away, possibly to be reused in a game about vampire gunslingers but with fangs and derbys in that incarnation.**

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Here's my issues with the method:
A) Would this reveal alot about what's happening in the game, if a player was to look throgh all the entries? Is there any reason to believe that would nessecarily be a bad thing?

B) I have a preference for players to come up with NPCs, because I want them to be really involved with them.  To be honest, I also have a preference for players making NPCs because it isn't a strength of mine. As it is similarly not a strength of this player, I plan to just accomadate him and make the NPCs because someone has to, and none of the other players are very active on NPCs. Afterwards I would put a lot of pressure to make sure the NPCs he connected to were very near to his heart. Is this a reasonable compromise, or am I asking nicely for something that I am unlikely to receive nicely?

C) Are there other things people have done in addition to this method that they'd recomend?

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* A joke.
** Not a joke.

[Bill Cook]

Disclaimer: I haven't played TSOY.

Here's the way I look at it. The advantage of R-maps is that they allow you to prep while insuring retention of potential as play progresses. However, as with event sequences or plot trees, R-maps require that the GM get things rolling and give the occasional kick when they start to wind down. If you want to distribute the task of driving play, you've got to reveal NPC motivation. How else can players devize and people thematically relevant situations?

I know with Sorcerer, the R-map is hidden inside an impenetrable black box. With Universalis, you can buy relationships openly.

Regarding NPC creation, I've found that the ones that arrive unforced are the best. Playing RPG's shouldn't be like filling out tax forms. So, I guess, check your group for inspiration. To say that making NPC's is "not a strength" is like saying you have no interest in doing it. In that case, definitely don't.

A good way to cast a campaign is to visualize the PC's route of play. Nothing exhaustive, just the highlights. Is he a bank robber? He'll have a fence. What about his crew? He'll need a mechanically inclined fellow to crack the vaults. Planning a big caper? Some detective is probably peering over a case file, trying to divine his next move.

You want your NPC's to be fat with interactive quality. Make sure they are motivationally charged. One approach is to bring them to a point of need and name the PC as their pain or hope for relief. For example, expanding on the safe-cracking cohort above: Joe (the NPC) lost his stash at the tables in Vegas and needs this next heist to keep casino thugs from taking the balance out of his ass. He's so desperate, he's willing to waylay Chris (the PC) and make payment with the full take.

[Doctor Xero]

Me: Using a relationship map.
Him: Cool. Could you tell me what's on it, so I could make sure I'm going along with your story?
Me: WHAT?!? MY Story!?! DON'T every say that name in my house!
Him: Well, I'd want something to base my character on, something that's connected with what's going on.

Personally, I see that kind of game master response to a sincere desire by a player to embed himself within the campaign as being no less unkind than would be a blanket condemnation of narrativism.  I know I would enjoy having him as a fellow player due to his interest in being connected.  I would also be irked by a game master who rejected my efforts at interactive cooperation.

In games I have game mastered, I usually have some lightly sketched NPCs available.  Then I work with the player to have the NPCs he/she wants fit with his/her player-character.  Or I create the relationship map after I have the players' NPCs instead of before.

In games I have played, I admire the game masters who can do similarly.  Too many expect me to create NPCs for them without my knowing which ones might be within the game master's range of performance.  I would rather be connected to an NPC I know my game master can do well than connected to an NPC I created but the game master can not act out or work with.

Even worse are cardboard NPCs, of course,  Or cardboard PCs which are unconnected to the campaign.

Doctor Xero

[sirogit]

Doctor Xero:

There seems to be a fair bit of miscommunication between us in my first post. Let me try to clear that up:

The conversation I printed was very close to our conversation. He and I both agree that we use a touch of dishonesty with appeals to the type of games that we do to cover up the fact that we don't like to make up NPCs/conflict from scratch, and prefer to riff off other people, including filling up the deeper details about characters in relationship maps.

[M. J. Young]

This is a very lateral reply to your concerns. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but I've got a technique I use for devising non-player characters that works well for me. I'll add my disclaimer: I don't know TSOY, at this point can't even figure out whether it stands for To Smash Our Yams or The Sun Over Yorktown or what. (Takes a while for me to learn new alphabet soup, sorry.)

A couple years ago in http://www.gamingoutpost.com/GL/index.cfm?action=ShowProduct&CategoryID=54411&ProductID=65188&publisherid=54849">Game Ideas Unlimited: Clones I outlined a simple way to produce non-player characters: steal them. Take a character you know, and plop him into the scenario.

I'm serious about this. I've used members of my extended family, college friends I haven't seen in years, characters from movies, and a lot of other people I know to some degree as characters in my game world. Take someone who seems like he would fit the position, tweak him a bit to match the role, and introduce him. Often I don't even change the names. One of my cousins became the first mate on a tall ship in a post-apocalyptic once. The lighting technician from a band I ran twenty years ago appeared as a technician in another game. Using their real names in play means I have a built-in mnemonic for who this person is. It also means that when I want to play the character "right", I just have to think of what Ron or Ralph or Steven Segall would actually do in this situation.

File off the serial numbers if it helps, but grab characters from wherever you find them and put them to work playing roles in your world. Probably when you play your NPCs you do some of that anyway. If you do it consciously, you'll be able to make the difference between this woman who is like your mother and that woman who is like your best friend's mother all the easier and more clearly.

--M. J. Young