One on One play

[Eric]

I've run one on one sessions of RPGs twice, at widely spaced intervals, and I'm getting ready to do it again.  What I find daunting about this style is that the player has really only to stay in their one character.  I keep having to not only shift from personality to pesonality, but also creating those personalities to jump to.  In the last session, I had about six NPCs done up, sufficent, I thought, to cover the ground I wanted to take the PC over.  Of course, five minutes into the game, the player wanted to interact with an npc I hadn't prepared.

I don't like this.  It leaves me stammering and trying to pull back someone from a book or TV show I've liked.  It breaks up the flow of the play and I think it results in all the NPCs being too similar, or at least dull.

The answer that occurs to me is to make 12 NPCs the next time, and if that doesn't work, make 24 the next, but am I missing something simpler?  Something a less time consuming?

Any other ideas or suggestions for one on one play?

Thanks,

-- Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eric,

I have a lot to say about this issue, but first, I have a question. Why does this happen in any special way with one-on-one play? It seems to me not to be restricted or distinctive to that venue - how come, in your experience, the very same thing doesn't happen with, say, four players?

Jesse and I had an extensive dialogue during the course of the Art-Deco Melodrama discussions (linked at the website) about this. He was very uncomfortable at the time with inventing NPCs during play, or rather, leaving their role and connections in the story vague until play itself, whereas I suggested that I did well to vary the degree of prep per NPC a great deal (some got lots, some got little). I described some of my techniques in detail, so that dialogue might be useful to you.

Best,
Ron

[Eric]

My experience with one on one play is not extensive, but I've noticed myself having similar problems with me and two players.  With that few players, there is a feeling of "Okay, entertain us."  I feel that rather than creating together, I'm being asked to preform.  With three players, this almost never happens.  Three gives the players a dynamic, and I do much more adjudicating and far less preforming.

I'd read the art deco posts before, but I had another look at them.  The thing I think I'm asking as being different from what Jesse was asking, I'm not worried about pulling NPC into a set story.  I'm worried about when the player, as happened last time, starts quizzing the main NPC about events and people of the world that haven't been formed.  I'm worried about when the player decides to take a cab ride to the ferry station to check on his contact the boat engine mechanic, when I don't have a taxi driver or a ferry attendent in my head, much less a mechanic.

If you talked about this in the art deco posts, I didn't get to that part in my rereading.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eric,

I did talk about it to a certain extent, when we moved away from the Jungian doctor and started talking about cops being invented out of thin air and so forth.

I suggest that your point about less-than-three players is a good one, and it's one of the reasons that I prefer to have four or five people in a group including myself.

However, I still see the two above issues as different things, and therein may lie the solution. What about the dynamic of the multiple-player group helps specifically with the problem of heretofore-uninvented NPCs (and what they want and do)?

Describe to me at least three examples of this happening: you're playing with three or more players, and an NPC has to get invented and brought into things, and something about the way the group interacts makes this easy, fun, and functional.

What's the "something"?

Best,
Ron

[Maurice Forrester]

A quick thought...  I end up creating NPCs on the fly almost every time I run a game.  Sometimes they're cardboard cutouts and sometimes they turn out to be well developed characters who may become central to the story.  I think one of things that makes a difference is the amount of feedback I get from the group.  Frequently, a player will make an observation which will give me an insight into the NPCs character--either in support of the player's observation or in contradiction to it.  More players mean it's more likely that someone will make a comment I can play off of.  So maybe one solution to the problem is to ask the player what the character's impression of the NPC is and then build from that.  You could do that either before the scene begins or in the middle of the scene.

[greyorm]

I've had trouble with this as well. The thing is, like alot of GMs, you're probably in the trap of making it too much work for yourself. Honestly, the world will not end, your players will not desert you and the "Society For Upholding the Rules of Good Fiction" will not beat down your door and lynch you if your NPCs are imperfect...most importantly, your players will not desert you.

Yeah, they might complain, or jibe you a little, if your NPCs seem a little stiff. But they're there to have fun, too, and if you can't have fun with it, chances are they won't be having as much, either (Players are like kids and dogs, they can sense when you're upset or frustrated).

Something I found works for creating memorable NPCs: let those relationship maps guide the characters, not a laundry-list of details and quirks and speech-patterns.

And try to forget about which NPCs you want to be the stars...let the players decide (after all, they're the stars...who they choose conflicts and relationships with and how those turn out is what is important in the story).

Frex, if your players really like Belkaz, the smooth-voiced manipulator, but absolutely hate your "star villian," Porkos the Mighty, don't force Porkos down their throats.

(and I don't mean "hate" as in "we're gonna get that guy"...or "like" as in "I wanna be his friend"...rather, if the players yawn or their eyes glass over whenever Porkos enters the game, it's time to ditch him)

But most importantly, superceding any other advice I could possibly give is: have fun with it, enjoy yourself, don't try to force it. It ain't work. If it feels like work, you're doing it wrong...you're gaming for fun (or, well, most of us are...if you have a different goal with the hobby, then by all means ignore this).

Actually, this applies to any hobby activity...I recently realized this myself in regards to reading.  I was pouring through novels to get them read, I HAD to read them, you see.  HAD to read all those stories, and I was frustrated because there were so many of them, and more every day...how could I possibly keep up?

I'd forgotten the main reason I read...fun. Enjoyment. Not to read all the stories, not to absorb and enjoy every good book out there. Just to read and enjoy myself.

Forget about trying to enjoy yourself, just do it.  Make it your number one priority.  If you find yourself worrying about something like, "Did I do his voice right?  Damn, does he have a facial tic?" <~!stress~stress!~>, smack yourself and ask, "Is this fun?"  If it isn't, get back to having fun and forget about it.

Might I even suggest a comedy game where you pretty much abandon all rules of necessity? That is, play or do whatever you want right then...goofy, Texan-swearing lawmen in the middle of your fantasy towns, Darth Vader in platearmor serving as the evil villian to be vanquished, etc.  Go nuts.

It's good therapy.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Might I even suggest a comedy game where you pretty much abandon all rules of necessity? That is, play or do whatever you want right then...goofy, Texan-swearing lawmen in the middle of your fantasy towns, Darth Vader in platearmor serving as the evil villian to be vanquished, etc.  Go nuts.

Pardon my one off-topic post, but if you want this sort of game, Chain of Being fits it perfectly.

[Clay]

I wouldn't put a lot of effort into coming up with these lists of "backup" NPCs.  In my current Traveller game, my NPCs consists enitirely of a name, their place in the relationship map, and their motivation.  Mind you, Traveller is a sim game, so when they're doing things skills and attributes are important.

What's really amusing is that my list of NPCs and their plots that I've hatched out tend to stay off screen.  The people who come on screen are the one's that I have to make up on the fly, because the players did something unexpected. So I pull a name out of thin air (the most memorable being Boris Badenoff, a pusher to the rich and famous), figure out how they're tied to the backstory that I spent two weekends concocting, and run with it.  If I need stats or skills, I cook them up on the fly based on this person's general line of business and a quick assesment of what might work for their attributes.

I've found that it works pretty well. The shared creation of the character seems to make them more real, and I'm having a lot more fun playing them than I am with any that I designed on my own.  Just remember to write down what it is that you've created, so you can be consistent from session to session.

What I'm gaining by using this technique (which was pinched wholesale from Sorcerer) is a story line that is driven as much by the players as by me.  They're weaving plots and schemes of their own, and my backstory is busily complicating their lives. I'm also keeping my prep time way down, because they're actually doing a lot of it for me.

[jburneko]

I've been wanting to reply to this thread for a while but words have been failing me lately.  Let's see if I can articulate this.

1) On the issue of why the problem exists with small numbers of players and not so much with larger number of players.  It seems that Eric was largely having problems not so much with details of CHARACTER but with details concerning what that character would know or have access to within the world.  I'm only infering this from his second post where he talks about the PCs probing NPCs for information about parts of the world that have not yet been constructed.

The reason this is more of a problem with a smaller group (for me) than with a larger group is because in the larger group the players tend to pre-empt each other more before the GM can answer.  What happens is that the players will fill in a lot of those gaps for you particularly those with a heavy desire for everything in the game world to "realisitically" hang together.  Such that you get exchanges like this:

Player A: I'm going to the local merchant guild.
GM (Not having really thought much about the economy of the area): Erm... Okay.
Player A: I ask a clerk there what the towns greatest export is.
GM: Erm... A... Eh....
Player B (to Player A, possibily not even aware of the GMs hesitation): We're in the mountains, it would make sense that this is a mining town.  Probably coal or iron.
GM: Yes, the clerk tells you it's a coal mining town (whew!)

The larger the group of people the more likely this pre-empting is to happen the more likely the players are going to unconsciously fill in those areas of the game world that aren't fleshed out yet.

2) In terms of what to do about it, I'm not sure I can help with the "Quizzing" problem as this is one of my larger weaknesses as a GM.  I don't really have a mind for Sociology and so it's difficult for me to extrapolate consequences from large scale Human-Environment interactions.  

In terms of character presentation I've come up with something that really helps.  Pick one thing, and it can litterally be ANYTHING, that the NPC cares about OUTSIDE of his function within the world or the game.  This is a serious case of an ounce of effort going a LONG LONG way.  People tend to think and talk about things in terms of the stuff they care about.  As soon as you have that one thing, producing dialog and character presentation comes MUCH MUCH easier.

Jesse

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Jesse,

Point One of your reply was really interesting.  I'd never thought of that before, but I think it's true.

I'd follow up from our example from the Sorcerer game you ran for us, which was two players and a GM.  Though you did ask for breaks every once in a while, you didn't seem overwhelmed.  I think this is because we had a lot of "out of story" discussion -- but all of it was about the game.  This meant you weren't "on" all the time, and could re-group.  It also meant that all three of us at the table were taking time to process what was going on.

That relieved the "entertain us" problem from the start of the post.

It seems to me that the "entertain us" problem in a one-on-one is going to be really fierce if the player and GM expect the story to "just keep going."  But if there's a bit of chit chat about the game, it'll provide some space for all involved.

However, it just seems strange, in my imagination of it, to have a single player and a GM stepping out of the game to discuss what just happened, what's happening, or what might happen next.  I have no idea why.

Christopher

[Eric]

It is hard in my creaky old age to think of three exact examples of play, but here is what I can pull back:

1) I think that Jesse is describing what happens sometimes.  A player will call for an NPC or a background and the other players will start suggesting things before I have a chance to flounder.  That I think is the happiest and best result, because I'm not bad at editing on the fly ("Yes, he has a beard, no he doesn't talk like John Cleese").  
2) Another thing that happens is that the other players will lose interest in whatever the first player is asking about and will simply move the story along.  Sometimes this happens as a deliberate kindness to me (a player notices I'm struggling and pulls the other player off me), and sometimes out of a simple desire to have my attention ("So, the guy with the gun?  I flip him the bird.  What does he do?").  
3) The third thing that happens is that with more than one character, I am more likely to be able to jump the scene when one character asks to take the action somewhere I'm not ready for.  Even if all the characters are together, I'm more likely to think of a way to distract the characters ("The guy with the gun flips you the bird.") than I seem to be if the play is one on one.  By the time the distraction is played out, I'm likely to have something for the player, or they're likely to have forgotten.

FWIW, I smiled when reading that Ron likes groups of at least four players since it was something he wrote in one of the rule books (maybe the Appendix of S&S?) that got me relax my log held rule of having at least three.

crowquill, greyorm, Clinton, Clay, Jesse, and Christopher: thanks for the ideas.