Game System with Realistc NPCs

[DWeird]

And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

The above is not neccessarily a rhetorical question, but it is one that you have to answer for yourself if you're going to take this road, right? Realism does not equal fun. Unless, you know, it does - but how many people will have read a research treatise on the medieval times as opposed to having read some sort of a fantasy book?

If setting generation is your main problem, why not focus on setting generation? Instead of generating NPCs, generate societies. Randomise certain fields (Economy - Military - Culture, etc.) or the presence of certain groups (Farmers - Assasin's Guild - the Church, etc.) or just the presence of certain problems (Lack of food - crazy weather - malign presence, etc.), or some combination of these. Then peg them to the expected level of town development somehow (number of dice rolled for it, straight modifiers, whatever) and you're gold.

You would have your "town full of interesting people with minor plot items and red herrings" right there on the spot. High ony military, high on farmers, lacking food? Snotty aristocratic landholders are having a problem with their peasants. High on culture, high on church, collapsing buildings? The church keeps burning the local stonemasons as heretics.

Instead of having NPCs, you have representatives of social forces/groups/problems. The "mundane" skills they have do not exist system-wise - they have them 'in the story', but not in the numbers. They compress mp3s by cutting out the parts of a piece that the human ear will never hear. This is pretty much the same principle.

[Daniel B]

I mostly agree with DWeird here, but I think I understand where you're coming from Abby. Having flat, 2D NPCs is functional but it lacks the impression of depth that ought to be given, and that would be given in any other type of entertainment involving presented fiction (e.g. movies, books, etc.).

For the game I'm working on, we're taking a middle-of-the-road approach. All characters have certain levels of depth, with deeper levels taking more time and energy to build. PCs always have the deepest level of depth. A lot of NPCs with the same depth as a PC would take too much time and energy from the GM, and like DWeird, they would be outside the range of the players' experiences, so why bother? Just punishes the GM for no in-game benefit.

Our levels are:
- pure combat: think hack and slash; the PCs don't know his history and don't give a rat's patootie
- pure social: purely functional; do you really care that the bartender had a bad night yesterday?
- combat + minimal social; someone the PCs are wary about - he's just a shoe salesman... OR IS HE?!?!
- Supporting Character; A character that the PCs deal with regularly, someone they may care about (in a good way or bad way)
- Main Character: Virtually a PC, but controlled by the GM

All NPCs in the game start out at one depth and have the capability of growing deeper, as needed.

Dan

[otspiii]

I agree that giving NPCs a bunch of skills that never see any use in play is usually more trouble than its worth, but I think there are a few things you can do make non-combat skills more. . .meaty, I guess.

I think that there are a bunch of reasons combat is considered the baseline RPG activity, but I think some of the reasons aren't always considered and don't really need to be even tied to combat.

Activities like farming or crafting or even in most systems socializing are one-person affairs.  Maybe people can assist the one person to give them a dice bonus, and maybe if the first person fails the party can take turns trying to succeed, but it's nowhere as team-driven as combat.  In combat everyone has a part to play, everyone is always doing something, and there's no one person that the glory automatically falls upon.  I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.  If everyone has different skills and those skills don't have any real cooperation between them the game starts to alienate all but one player at a time.  Combat is nice because the system has ways built in for a spearman and an archer can work together fluidly in ways that a socialite and stonemason just can't.

Combat's also just a lot more sophisticated than non-combat in most games.  Some games fight against this with things like "social combat", but for the most part non-combat activities are either a single roll to determine success/failure or making the same roll over and over again until you've built up enough successes to succeed.  Building up your character to be good at farming is typically just raising your farming skill, then raising whatever attribute farming is tied to, and maybe getting your hands on some boost-granting items.  Combat, on the other hand, usually uses all sorts of stats and skills and takes all sorts of different rolls (initiative, to hit, damage, soak, saving throws, whatever), making it a lot easier to sink your teeth into.  Completely independent of actual game-play events, combat is just a lot more interesting from a mechanical viewpoint.  Being good at non-combat is straightforward and simple.  Being good at combat is complicated and strategic.  Playing a non-combat character can just be boring from a purely mechanical perspective for a lot of people.

Related to the above, the shallow rules of non-combat tend to make non-combat resolution quick and painless, while combat can drag on for hours.  If you neglect your farming ability you might have to sit out for a minute or two while the farmer does his stuff, while if you neglect your combat ability you're sitting on your thumbs for huge tracts of time.  It seems common for GMs to use combat as the pasta of the RPG meal.  Combat fills up the time and adds padding between dramatic non-combat events to keep the pacing from becoming too hectic.  It captures the mood of whatever it was you were doing before the combat at stays to some degree flavored by it, extending the impact of it.

The thing is, none of the three issues above are in any way inherently present in combat or inherently lacking in non-combat.  A good farming system could easily encourage strong teamwork, and could definitely have the same strategic mechanical depth   A game with farming at its core could easily make farming just as interesting and rich as combat is in most systems.  The issue then is, though, that anything but farming is going to be minimized in the same way that farming is minimized in combat-focused games.  If you want to have both farming and, say, diplomacy have the layer of interest and depth that combat usually does you're going to end up with a gigantic and unwieldy rule-set.

Of course, lots of games get around this by just making combat as quick and easy as non-combat, but I don't think that's the type of game you're thinking about here.

[Daniel B]

I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.

Hmm.

GM: "Now, what's everyone doing?"
Player 1: "Okay!  I grab my hammer, I'm going to start putting together the concrete forms."
Player 2: "Sounds good, I'll begin mixing the concrete so it's nice and liquid, ready to be poured."
Player 3: "And I'll start cleaning the trowels so that I can follow behind and make sure it's all smooth and level."

I'm sorry, I hope this doesn't sound overly critical .. I REALLY don't see how most "everyday, workingman" activities can be made fun in an RPG. Surely, if they *could* be made fun, these techniques would have already been adopted in actual workplaces, and everyone would be happy at work instead of turning to RPGs in the first place.

Granted, my above example was facetious. Maybe you could give an example of how you envisage this playing out in a real game??

Dan

[otspiii]

I'm sorry, I hope this doesn't sound overly critical .. I REALLY don't see how most "everyday, workingman" activities can be made fun in an RPG. Surely, if they *could* be made fun, these techniques would have already been adopted in actual workplaces, and everyone would be happy at work instead of turning to RPGs in the first place.

Granted, my above example was facetious. Maybe you could give an example of how you envisage this playing out in a real game??

Hahaha, there are reasons other than the ones I listed why combat tends the be the focus of a game.  It's just more exciting to most people in a primal bloodthirsty sort of way.  That said, there will always be people who like the idea of, say, farming better than combat because it's productive rather than destructive, or because they're tired of combat, or for whatever else reason.  I mean, I could counter your example with asking just how "I hit him with my arrow." "I hit him with my axe." "I hit him with my sword!" sounds exciting.  It's a mix of pre-existing interests and flair of presentation.

A custom-made conflict system would do way more justice to farming, but you can always just imagine that you take a generic combat system and switch things up a bit.  Replace the two orcs and the necromancer with hard ground that needs to be tilled and a cheapskate merchant who buys your crop.  Swords become hoes.  Magic rings become bags of manure.  You have to do 25HP of damage to the ground to properly till it, and it hits your HP back with fatigue and time limitation damage.  Depending on how much damage you do to the merchant vs. how much he does to you in X turns the better or worse price you get.  He has less HP, but you have to hit him with a different skill than the ground and his to-hit is higher.  Crits may trigger story events.  Etc.

Now, the above is a total out-of-my-ass concept that is completely derivative of combat and has no optimization for the topic it covers, but you should be able to get the idea.  Some people won't like it because what it's describing sounds boring to them, but then again some people like Ninja Gaiden, some people like Harvest Moon.  It happens.

[Adarchi]

I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.

Hmm.

GM: "Now, what's everyone doing?"
Player 1: "Okay!  I grab my hammer, I'm going to start putting together the concrete forms."
Player 2: "Sounds good, I'll begin mixing the concrete so it's nice and liquid, ready to be poured."
Player 3: "And I'll start cleaning the trowels so that I can follow behind and make sure it's all smooth and level."

Well said. That sounds just as boring to me as you made it sound. Of course then I started imagining people saying that while trying to make a barricade while zombies are coming after them.... But I digress. My goal isn't to force players into non-combat roles. My goal is to have a system that lets NPCs fit as logically into the world as PCs do.

If there is a PC that has a 96% skill in Archery and the Eagle Eye perk, then I want there to be NPCs that have 96% Bartending skill and the Haggling perk. Of course if a player wants to add some flavor to his character and adds bartending so he can try to subtly booze up the local magistrate and learn some subterfuge, all the better. I may be completely wrong here, but I imagine that a system that that allowed both would inspire more creativity.

[Daniel B]

Adarchi, I agree with you there. If Star Trek NextGen was an RPG .. (it may be already?) .. it would be nice to have a system that allowed "Faceless Transporter Technician #3" to transition smoothly into "Miles O'Brien, brilliant Engineer and Family Man" without rewriting the character from scratch. Difficult to achieve, but a nice idea.

Misha,  I believe it eventually DOES have to come down to a real conflict, though. If you take games like Starcraft or original non-MMO Warcraft, these games involve as much construction and production as they do destruction.. more, in fact. Many MMOs allow characters into trades-type occupations. Now, while these are interesting, they only capture peoples' interests because they're done under threat, or must be accomplished through struggle. On the other hand, simply roleplaying farming seems to me to lack both conflict and struggle. If the character stops farming, nothing happens. (If we start talking about haggling with cheapskate merchants, we're getting into social politics, which involves it's own kinds of conflicts so I could see that becoming interesting. That's really a separate issue from deciding if it is worthwhile to build rules for common occupations into RPG mechanics.)

Daniel

[otspiii]

Daniel, I actually agree with you more than I disagree with you at this point.  I just want to force each line of argument into their logical conclusions.  Also, farming is a somewhat extreme example of what I'm talking about, which may make it the perfect subject matter.  There are lot of non-combat skills that are a lot more prone to struggle and competition than farming that would probably work more easily as the focus of a game, but by taking a somewhat difficult example it brings some clarity to the discussion.

You say that farming wouldn't be fun because nothing happens if you just stop.  How is that different from dungeon crawling?  Also, who says that there's nothing reliant on farming?  Even unspiced if a family stops farming it means they're likely to starve, whereas if a dwarf stops dungeon crawling all he's likely to do is retire wealthy, and any system with a decent set of rules for farming would probably have some sort of setting that would allow for competitive farming. Maybe the two factions in a war are evenly matched and the war's outcome depends on how well fed the two sides are, or maybe there's some arbitrary magical justification, or maybe there's some sort of farming tournament (tournaments don't work well for farming, but they can be used to great effect in things like cooking or art).  Struggle and competition are part of the situation, not the action.  Some actions lend themselves better to struggle and competition than others, but that doesn't disqualify them from being able to do so.

It seems to me like most games have a single core activity (usually combat) that has multiple layers of strategy, and then a bunch of secondary activities that your skill at is just determined by a simple stat.  Core activities are usually the focus of the game (things get weird in games like WoD where if you look at the rules combat is by far the most nuanced part of the game, but in theory it's not supposed to be the focus of the game), while secondary activities may be either just support core activities or may have their own uses in keeping the story moving as a whole.  The thing about these common occupation rules is that in the context people seem to be talking about them here they don't seem like core or secondary activities.  They're activities the PCs will only interact with if they go out of their way to do so, and that probably won't grant any special benefit.  I think having certain NPCs have ratings in those occupations might add to immersion or whatever, but I don't think adding rules for working in those occupations would add anything to the game unless those occupations were somehow linked to the core activity you were hoping to promote.

[Daniel B]

Indeed Masha, we seem to mostly agree

You say that farming wouldn't be fun because nothing happens if you just stop.  How is that different from dungeon crawling?

The gelatinous cube that's quietly been trailing you finally catches up, swallows you, and spits out your bones.  :-D   Of course, the assumption here is that we're talking a fantasy dungeon. In real life, spelunking is dangerous to actually perform but I can't imagine wanting to roleplay it.

Also, who says that there's nothing reliant on farming? Even unspiced if a family stops farming it means they're likely to starve, whereas if a dwarf stops dungeon crawling all he's likely to do is retire wealthy, and any system with a decent set of rules for farming would probably have some sort of setting that would allow for competitive farming.

Human nature. Unless something immediately affects our personal well-being, we tend not to care.. sad but true. (Just look at problems with homelessness and obesity. These problems are not personal and/or not immediate.) By the same token, it's difficult to worry about some imaginary NPCs without some major effort on the GM's part to bring about immersion. Most of the time, when a player controls their character, it's because the benefits feel immediate and personal, even if those benefits are nothing more than winning, or feeling immersed in the character itself. (E.g. my character saved that town of NPCs because it's what he would do)

If we're talking instead about competitive farming, or farming on the scale of kingdoms, this is again a sort of higher level political view of things which really go beyond the farming itself. You wouldn't roleplay each of the 100 farmers of the kingdom, you'd make high-level die-rolls to determine the results for the whole farm or whole kingdom. If that's what you're going for, that sounds absolutely fine to me, because you get back the "blood", so to speak, though no blood is being shed.

It seems to me like most games have a single core activity (usually combat) that has multiple layers of strategy, and then a bunch of secondary activities that your skill at is just determined by a simple stat.  Core activities are usually the focus of the game (things get weird in games like WoD where if you look at the rules combat is by far the most nuanced part of the game, but in theory it's not supposed to be the focus of the game), while secondary activities may be either just support core activities or may have their own uses in keeping the story moving as a whole.  The thing about these common occupation rules is that in the context people seem to be talking about them here they don't seem like core or secondary activities.  They're activities the PCs will only interact with if they go out of their way to do so, and that probably won't grant any special benefit.  I think having certain NPCs have ratings in those occupations might add to immersion or whatever, but I don't think adding rules for working in those occupations would add anything to the game unless those occupations were somehow linked to the core activity you were hoping to promote.

Mostly agree with you here. As you suggest, D&D itself has combat-related stats that take center stage on the character sheet, reward system, and rules. However, combat resolution is also nothing more than a "simple stat", some_value + attribute mod, just like any skill check. They just have a bunch of extras piled on top, such as feats and weapons, but even feats apply to a myriad of skills, not just combat. I concede the point that for the peasant occupations, given that most games don't link them to core mechanics, players don't treat them even on the level of secondary activities.. but isn't that a good thing? This comes back again to roleplaying an individual farmer, just rolling dice with no real conflict.

Oh well .. tell you what, I think I'll wait for your game and duck out of the debate for now. (Don't worry, this isn't intended to put pressure on you; my own game has gone to the back-burners as my team members have gotten busy.)  I'd like to think I'm pretty open-minded, especially when it comes to games, and I'd sincerely LOVE to see what you come up with, when you come to it. Though I still disbelieve, I'd be interested and happy to find myself wrong.

Dan

[Vulpinoid]

And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

Some would say the same about desperate housewives in suburbia...

...and look how long that TV show has lasted.

Maybe a few roleplaying designers need to start thinking way outside the square.

V

[Daniel B]

And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

Some would say the same about desperate housewives in suburbia...

...and look how long that TV show has lasted.

Maybe a few roleplaying designers need to start thinking way outside the square.

V

:-( I really don't mean to be a pest, but I sincerely believe it's important to clarify this point, or otherwise we strive for what we think are the goals we want to reach, but instead find our true goals getting shrouded in irrelevant extraneous details.

Here again, with Desperate Housewives, we have to distinguish between what seems to be happening and what's actually happening. This mirrors the example Otspiii gave, of competing farms or kingdoms. The political maneuverings are related to but outside the realm of the actual activity, and go far beyond it. Desperate Housewives is fun because we DON'T see them doing laundry and cleaning the house, at least not without something else subtle (or not so subtle) going on.

What makes that show brilliant (and I think it is, I loved it before I lost my cable TV), is that the writers sure as heck know how to write good political characters. No one would watch the show if you took that out, I guarantee.

Dan

[Vulpinoid]

:-( I really don't mean to be a pest, but I sincerely believe it's important to clarify this point, or otherwise we strive for what we think are the goals we want to reach, but instead find our true goals getting shrouded in irrelevant extraneous details.

True.

But numerous people throughout this thread keep bringing the subject back to combat, and either how combat is the be-all-and-end-all of roleplaying experience, or how it can be transcended.

I'm just trying to show through this example, how even the most trifling trivialities can be woven into complex narrative and how characters who would be no more than bit parts in most settings can have deeply rick and interesting stories when they become the focus.

A "Desperate Farmers" game could be just as rich an interesting as a dungeon crawling adventure, arguably more so.

Of course even in this setting, you'd have PCs who are more developed and NPCs who are less developed (as an ironic flipside...among the less developed PCs would be wandering adventurers who'd be used as occasional hired muscle).

Which pulls the question back to it's roots...

How do we have a system where NPCs are generated in much the same way as PCs? A system where it doesn't take much to bump up a character from NPC to PC status if that becomes necessary.

I propose that the type of game plays an important role in whether this game can be achieved. If it's a game about spontaneous magic, then a lesser character may be able to suddenly awaken with "the Gift"; if it's a game about supernatural creatures, then the mortal NPC can be infected; in a game with more rigorous training programs like hermetic magic or martial arts, then this becomes less likely.

Political games make it easier because you just expand the number of connections an NPC might have and they suddenly become more important to the setting. Games where character's rely on their own strengths rather than the world around them, require more drastic changes to the character need to be made (which can look "unrealistic" mid-campaign).

Again, just ideas...

V

[Daniel B]

100% agreement from me.. I have nothing further to add. (I especially liked the point of how wandering adventurers would be less developed PCs on "Wisteria Lane c1200")

[Abkajud]

As far as keeping the little people (i.e. farmers) interesting, I think it's important to not really go beyond their depth - if one of the Desperate Housewives got indicted by the DA, it would probably go beyond the scope of the show, and ruin things for a lot of viewers. This is jumping the shark, yes?
Similarly, you could have a situation in which, yes, even with the introduction of supernatural elements or combat, things don't go beyond the village's web of relationships. You could have a tavern brawl, or someone finds a gremlin in the well, or whatever - provided it goes back into exploring the relationships between the villagers, it keeps up the Situation.
It's like how Donjon and the games that inspired it don't really have room for anything other than a) Donjons and b) gearing up for Donjons. You could have some plot involving the mayor being stripped of his office, but if it doesn't tie into a Donjon pretty directly, it's either a throwaway bit of color or it's irrelevant entirely.

I think there's an absolute horde of small-time characters in American entertainment, but the trick is to decide whether they head for the big-time, or they resist that pull the way most good little Hobbits do.
- Abby