I was asked to discuss the kind of prep I do and had some thoughts on the prior thread about NPC's which I wanted to mention.

I thought I had of a PDF to link of an adventure I did some time back or Con-X but I appear to have lost the file.  It was not radically different from existing scenarios or modules, although I do do a few things differently.  All the physical locations were listed separately and did not appear in the main text, amid the plot or action, as they often do, and which I dislike.  I can't necessarily predict how the players will approach a location, so I need to know about it whatever approach they try, as a quite distinct track for their reasons for doing so. 

More generally, the approach that has worked best for the longest periods of sustained play is essentially a mission-based framework, on the understanding that "mission" refers to quite a wide range of activities that may not be formal missions.  In fact I have found it very hard to work with strongly mission-framed settings, a difficulty I don't entirely understand.  But anyway, the essence of this prep is what the task of the day is and what requirements there are for its performance. This is usually not stat-heavy, in that usually I will know a system well enough not to need to record these values, and the reasons for choosing them will be situation driven.  Its more figuring out that situation, how, as it were, to hit one ball with the cue such that the rest of the balls fall in the pockets.

Its also about having Enough stuff to do and interact with, so one might say, its about building an obstacle course.  It is pretty boring to solve all your problems the same way, and so having different types of challenges, or at least ones which differ in significant detail, is the spice of life.  I also look for opportunities for characters to demonstrate their specialties or things that have "tourist" value for the setting.

So what I aim for is, I guess, several interesting problems in several interesting places.  The purpose of "plot" is to link them together in a naturalistic manner, integrated with elements of setting exposition.  Its not that hard to do for a single character, but multiple characters make it much more complicated.  Motivations sufficient for one might exclude others and so forth, and many motivations might work once or only temporarily and have the long term effect of fragmentation, and so this is the hard part.

In terms of places, I will try to take play to interesting locations in the setting if possible, and think about these both in terms of what they actually are and how they will be first encountered, the literal first sight I describe to the players.  Again this is something I do not like to improvise; it works better if I have such a piece of exposition prepared.  When players wander off the beaten path it gets bland and dull quite rapidly.  When improvising I often resort to what is typical, but what is typical is typically repetitive.

Anyway, as you can see I have not mentioned NPC's yet, which is why they are in the title.  I think that may be a significant difference here between what Sydney and others describe as their use of NPC's.  I will very seldom have an NPC (other than crowds and extras) on stage for a significant amount of time,  and have never used a character who was like a member of the party (and don't approve of the idea either).  I do not play NPC's much like I play characters myself, although the actual physical portrayal is much the same.  If I am playing such a major NPC, that will be all that I am doing at that time, and interacting with that NPC is what is Happening Now, but this will not usually comprise a large portion of actual play time. NPC's are a role, a costume and some lines, usually aimed at a specific effect.  "Mingling" with NPC's is not really what the characters are there to do.  NPC's certainly have lives of their own and motivations, but those are reverse engineered from their function, and playing NPC's is not for me the point, or even particularly interesting.  They will have their own back-stories, but those back-stories will not contain elements like being religiously conflicted unless this is relevant to the action; that is they do not have such things in their own right, but in service of the game.

Unless play is About interacting with NPC's, such as conducting shuttle diplomacy or police interviews, interacting with NPC's is not usually a primary element of play.  Nor do I find it particularly entertaining to do, in and of itself.  Hence the absence of any pseudo-PC characters, I feel no particular need to have a character of my own in play.  Sometimes such characters can be used as conduits for information and missions and so forth but I found it was easier to structure the party so as to have that single point of contact instead of using an NPC; I also find this engages the players more and puts them in the driving seat.

So for all these reasons preparation is not primarily about NPC's either.  I choose NPC's to portray based on whether a scene would be interesting or important or momentous to the characters, and will concentrate on that portrayal for that scene.  You could say that I prepare conversations rather than NPC's as such, although thats probably a little extreme.  I generally dislike playing NPC's for an extended period of time as IME the characterisation gets weaker and weaker over time.  I regard players inability to remember an NPC identity as a clear danger sign and so would much rather deliver a short and impactful performance that leaves 'em wanting more than have an NPC's mannerisms decay into the commonalities of my own voice, body language, and thought patterns.

So I hope that explains what you wanted to know, but if not feel free to ask for clarification.

When you're not roleplaying a character, what are you doing instead?

I ask what probably sounds like a stupid question because in games I've played in, basically since college, the majority of of the GM's time is spent roleplaying a character in interaction with the players' characters: Even if it's a fight scene, characters are usually talking too. The only other GM activities I can think of are describing the environment and running combat with nameless mooks or monsters who don't talk while they fight.

Its also about having Enough stuff to do and interact with, so one might say, its about building an obstacle course.

When you're not roleplaying a character, what are you doing instead?

I ask what probably sounds like a stupid question because in games I've played in, basically since college, the majority of of the GM's time is spent roleplaying a character in interaction with the players' characters: Even if it's a fight scene, characters are usually talking too. The only other GM activities I can think of are describing the environment and running combat with nameless mooks or monsters who don't talk while they fight.

I think this sentence is probably the key to what you do, but I'm not really getting it. What kind of obstacles? What kinds of "stuff" to interact with -- presumably not interacting with GM characters socially, because you said that's not the point of your games.

Can I clarify a few things? Am I right in thinking that:

Gareth:

• Your missions/adventures/sessions are primarily linear affairs, and you think of them as a series of events or encounters
• You use make heavily use of pre-written descriptions (i.e. you may your own "boxed text")
• Your NPCs are primarily events that happen ("David threatens the king"), rather than characters that have goals and an ongoing state ("David wants be named heir and is currently recruiting people to lead a revolution")

Sydney:

• None of the above apply to the way you normally play

rob

Rob, you're characterizing me correctly. Let me add one thing to the list for Gareth that I think is true and would like him to confirm:

* The players' interactions with the GM primarily concern physical actions the player-characters take, either towards inanimate obstacles or towards animate opponents (mooks, monsters, etc.) with which they do not interact socially in any way.

Rob, yes but I quibble slightly with the wording.

  * Your missions/adventures/sessions are primarily linear affairs, and you think of them as a series of events or encounters

    * You use make heavily use of pre-written descriptions (i.e. you may your own "boxed text")

    * Your NPCs are primarily events that happen ("David threatens the king"), rather than characters that have goals and an ongoing state ("David wants be named heir and is currently recruiting people to lead a revolution")

* The players' interactions with the GM primarily concern physical actions the player-characters take, either towards inanimate obstacles or towards animate opponents (mooks, monsters, etc.) with which they do not interact socially in any way.

Hi Gareth,

What are you looking for out of this thread? In http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24175.msg236313#msg236313 you were complaining about trouble sustaining campaigns because of prep-related problems. If you're interested in scratching out some ideas for getting around that, it would help I think if you answered the questions I asked in this post: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24175.msg236392#msg236392

Looking at your posts above, I can see how you're setting yourself up for very heavy prep, and little opportunity for players to contribute to the game (other than by tackling the challenges you present them with). I can remember using that style in the past - it was hard work and required pretty obedient players.

I'm a little bemused by the "NPCs don't exist" comment... do they exist less than anything else in the game world?

rob

I'm particularly struck by this observation of Gareth's in the parent thread:

contracycle wrote: left to their own devices the players do not seek out high adventure or dramatic experience, they make mundane arrangements and solve mundane problems.

I'm tentatively looking at the thread from a certain perspective, which may not be the right one. And for players in that perspective, it wouldn't be make sense to go tearing off into the world to do interesting stuff. Unless there happens to be...let's call it a 'finishing line' built into where you go, then there is no 'finishing line' there of course. That means you can only lose by going there. That's it. So you don't go there.

Play which pivots on the uncertainty of a characters choices is quite a different kettle of fish. The player can head out any old where and still be fairly uncertain of what his character will do when push comes to shove. While play that pivots on whether you can pass the finish line requires a finish line to be there before you go at all. Unless you just want the GM or yourself to decide this (ugh). 'Before you go there' is a relative term - the player could indicate he's going somewhere, the GM stalls him a bit with various techniques while he thinks up a finish line, then yah, the player goes there. However, the sort of thing you can think up in that time is unlikely to meet the average difficulty you intended the campaign to challenge with, thus making it less of an object of pride to complete. That's quite an issue, where the initiator of the campaign is laying down a challenge, but the mechanics and tools used eat away at it.

Finally, 'players contributing to the game', which some take so much for granted, kills the usual pivotal sources of uncertainty for this play. There's not much to guessing which cup the peas under, when the player himself was shuffling the cups, if you get my analogy.

That's another perspective to view this under along with the rest.

Rob wrote:
What are you looking for out of this thread?

Looking at your posts above, I can see how you're setting yourself up for very heavy prep, and little opportunity for players to contribute to the game (other than by tackling the challenges you present them with). I can remember using that style in the past - it was hard work and required pretty obedient players.

I'm a little bemused by the "NPCs don't exist" comment... do they exist less than anything else in the game world?

Proper version:

Rob wrote:
What are you looking for out of this thread?

In http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24175.msg236313#msg236313 you were complaining about trouble sustaining campaigns because of prep-related problems. If you're interested in scratching out some ideas for getting around that, it would help I think if you answered the questions I asked in this post: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24175.msg236392#msg236392

What does "never go anywhere" involve in practice, though? For example, how did the Celtic game come to an end? Did you pull the plug or did your players demand it?

Am I right in thinking that you've got an established player group (who are the ones that are tired of this)?

Were there NPCs in the setting who might have caused trouble for the PCs? Or at least provide trouble that the PCs might have become involved in?

For example, in the wake of the bandit attacks one of the older NPC warriors might have challenged the chieftan (or whatever) for leadership of the tribe, forcing the PCs to take sides. This the kind of thing I'm trying to do in my games, have NPCs do things that put the PCs in difficult situations (if not always successfully - I'll try to find time to post an AP of my last TSOY session).

Looking at your posts above, I can see how you're setting yourself up for very heavy prep, and little opportunity for players to contribute to the game (other than by tackling the challenges you present them with). I can remember using that style in the past - it was hard work and required pretty obedient players.

I'm a little bemused by the "NPCs don't exist" comment... do they exist less than anything else in the game world?

Because in my experience, players tend to dive screaming like Stukas towards doing interesting stuff, either plotting and intriguing to gain power in the game-world or, in more Forge-y games, gleefully tying their characters' lives in soap-operatic knots. My last few sessions of our Burning Empires  repacked as The Shadows of Yesterday game, I've had Ron Edwards-style "bangs" prepared and rarely get to use all of them because the players make so much trouble for themselves, on purpose, that most of my job as GM is reactive.

If I were GM'ing and players started doing stuff that bored me, personally, I'd try to nudge them with "yeah, okay, you do that. It works. Now what?" Let them make, say, one roll for the two weeks of ditch-digging that determines how big a positive modifier (or whatever) they get for the gunfight.

And if they don't want to skip over the boring stuff, that might mean it's not boring to them.

Yes agreed.  But thats precisely how you can end up with players being active and interactive, but going nowhere, even in a world that is detailed, and populated by NPC's.  And hence the reasons for producing motivations, events and NPC's that can kick the action into a higher gear.

That is, if you let the players just do stuff that they find interesting, no story or larger sequence of actions may emerge? If that's what you're saying, I'd agree; but I also would argue that your style's much more about enjoying the details of being in the imagined world than about The Plot or Drama. And when it works, it really, really works (viz. your old Actual Play thread at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20798.msg216136#msg216136). Maybe you need to embrace the strengths of what you're already doing and not worry about producing effects that your technique isn't suited for.

Callan wrote:
Finally, 'players contributing to the game', which some take so much for granted, kills the usual pivotal sources of uncertainty for this play.

Hi Gareth, all

Sorry for the confusion - I know I asked for the you to post about the style, but I was asking about games that had gone badly (e.g. the Celtic game), whereas your first post in this thread sounds like you're describing a method that works well for you (e.g. the bank job session). Obviously, your most recent reply has addressed this.

My interest? I'm looking to work out some solutions to the problems you described. I can relate to your "start a campaign, it fizzles out...", and that was partly why I didn't game for several years. In the past I've used a prep style quite similar to the one you described in this thread. My feeling is that, for me, that prep style (and overconcern for consistency of minor details) was a big part of my problem. I'm trying to move to a different style of play and prep, but it sounds like you've had problems with this new style in the past and I'm keen to learn from your experience.

"obedient" was a poor choice of word. What I was trying to get at is that the style of play (as a player rather than GM) that goes with a linear, reactive mission game is quite distinct from that that sits well with an open-ended "make your own trouble" game. If your players expected (or wanted) a linear, mission-based game, it may not have been easy for them to switch modes. They may not have wanted to. Though I guess you're well aware of all this.

Leaving aside the players you've introduced to rolegaming yourself, what kind of game (in terms of prep style etc) is popular with your highschool crowd and the games club? Are linear plots the norm? I know a lot of people seem to like them (although, as you've guessed, I don't understand the appeal --- notwithstanding that this was what I'd always put my players through a few years back).

contracycle wrote:
I cannot abdicate my responsibility for the NPC's action to something that doesn't really exist.

Rob wrote:

Callan wrote:
Finally, 'players contributing to the game', which some take so much for granted, kills the usual pivotal sources of uncertainty for this play.

"contribute" was a bad choice of word on my part. I should have said something like "be proactive and choose their own direction". I.e. I didn't mean "Let's make there be cave in that hill", I meant "Let's see if there are any caves up in those hills near the town".

Rob wrote:
"obedient" was a poor choice of word. What I was trying to get at is that the style of play (as a player rather than GM) that goes with a linear, reactive mission game is quite distinct from that that sits well with an open-ended "make your own trouble" game. If your players expected (or wanted) a linear, mission-based game, it may not have been easy for them to switch modes. They may not have wanted to. Though I guess you're well aware of all this.

Leaving aside the players you've introduced to rolegaming yourself, what kind of game (in terms of prep style etc) is popular with your highschool crowd and the games club? Are linear plots the norm? I know a lot of people seem to like them (although, as you've guessed, I don't understand the appeal --- notwithstanding that this was what I'd always put my players through a few years back).

Agreed. But presumably you do imagine that the characters are real so as to exploit your intuitive knowledge of how humans behave and interact? For example, while prepping do you do thought experiments along the lines of "If David were real, what might he do?". The benefit of thinking of NPCs as having goals, needs and desires is that it helps to stimulate your mind to come up with interesting stuff.

Obviously, everything remains centered on the PCs - NPC's offscreen lives are only interesting insofar as they affect the PCs pretty directly. But you use your mental model of those offscreen lives to as an aid to generating interesting NPC behaviour (I'm guessing that you treat this behaviour as 'real', in the sense that it's enacted by you at the table). And, of course, this goes through a filter of "is this interesting/realistic/dramatically appropriate" before your bring it into play.

Am I disagreeing with you here? I don't think the above has anything to do with the problems you're reporting, which are more specifically to do with generating interesting stuff in real time, right?

Yes.  I increasingly think that part of the problem is not having a stopping point, not having a clear end in sight.  The mage game mentioned above, by the GM with his bag of prep, staggered on for quite a while in a fairly purposeless way, eventually going through a full rotation of characters through death and retirement.  The question of "what are we doing and why" became more and more acute, and the game did not so much end as disperse.  Allegedly, this game did indeed have some kind of plot but was actually executed in quite a responsive, improvisational way interspersed with events according to some sort of schedule. 

contracycle wrote: ....this direction absolved me of a great deal of worry about incidental detail; because I knew full well, for example, that the PC's would never return to the location in which they started, I could be very free with detail without any fear of any of it coming back to haunt me.  Similarly, NPC's were brought on for a specific function and would likely never be seen again once that function was fulfilled; they were disposable rather than something requiring care and maintenance....

FredGarber wrote:
I've played in a Mage game like that, and I liked it.  And the point of the game was that each session, every character had to ask themselves "What are we doing, and why?"  Our game was about Pride: Self-Worth vs. Hubris.  The "plot" of "There's a Techno-Nephandi who wants to undermine the magical fountainheads of the world in order to bring the Elder Gods back and destroy the world," was merely a backdrop for how our characters reacted to the day to day stresses of having Cosmic Power at your fingertips. Do you use it to do the laundry?  And it was interesting for Players who brought in new PCs to hear the "tales" of their old PCs, and how the survivors (mis)interpreted motives and opinions.

I like your "guests at the party" analogy, and I would say, though, that rather than an SIS where the players OBSERVE the NPCs as [the NPCs] go about [the NPCs'] interesting lives, that there be a party in a very small apartment, where they players are often jostled by the NPCs as everyone goes about their interesting lives, and there's not enough beer to go around, and some of the NPCs want to get involved in the interesting lives of the PCs, and there's the one seriously hot girl and someone has the Xbox up on the Plasma TV.  That sort of SIS solves the "guests at the party" situation for me.

But I think you need to state, at the outset, that you are creating a game where there is an endpoint in sight.  It's a valid style of play.  To create an analogy, you want to make a Movie, not a TV Series.  If there's enough interest in the movie, you'll make a sequel. If there's really enough interest, you'll maybe make a franchise.  You're not interested in making a show that will remain on the air forever.

So, game on, and do you mind if I borrow the image of a "vertical extraction of a mammoth" for my own use? :)

Sydney wrote:
Gareth, a technique question: How much detail are you describing your locations and NPCs in that you are worring about it "coming back to haunt me"? If I describe a room, or even a person, I do it in very broad brushstrokes: The Duke is lying under the bedsheet, his scarred, muscular chest bare, the sheet strangely flat where his legs should be, with his artificial limbs lying discarded by the side of the bed (to take a quick example from an actual Burning Empires session I ran). From reading novels and my own abortive attempts at writing fiction, and from doing a huge amount of writing as a journalist, I find that if you put more than, oh, four details into a description, the reader/listener overloads and doesn't remember any of it anyway; whereas if you concentrate on two or three salient details and repeat one or two of them every time you reintroduce a location or character, it's much easier not only for you to remember but for your audience as well.

Four facts -- or even better, probably, three -- is a pretty handy rule. I'm glad if it helps you, just as I'm appreciative of your putting so much effort and patience into helping us understand your play style.

contracycle wrote: The concern I referred to is rather players calling up details I thought were inconsequential.  So maybe I gave name to a a security guard, and the players remember that name and I don't. 

"So the security guard guy -- um -- Jason -- says..."
"No, no, you said he was Michael West."
"Oh. Oh yeah. So West says...

Well, the prep as such and the description I give are two separate things, one being objectively true and the other being subjectively true.

Sydney wrote:
I see that it's a little hiccup in play, but not such a bad one that I'd want to avoid giving the guard a name, or avoid ever bringing him back into the story at all, just to avoid the risk of this kind of exchange.

Aha. What you said is genuinely enlightening. It confirms one thing I thought but, more importantly, brings up something I hadn't really been considering.

1. What I'd suspected already

Based on your very cool "Raid on the Bank Nationale" actual play post and on this passage (emphasis mine) --

contracycle wrote: the prep as such and the description I give are two separate things, one being objectively true and the other being subjectively true....many of my games have implicitly contained the goal of the players sort of internalising the setting via osmosis; I am not keen on expecting players to process a lot of data up front.  And this has meant trying to maintain a persistent setting with internal consistency.

contracycle wrote: it is like having a stage set fall down during a show.  It shouldn't have happened and you should have made sure it wouldn't happen. I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance...

I don't want to just make a functional box, I want to make a beautiful one.

.... I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance, and no performer should find themselves obliged to apologise to their audience.  If the show isn't ready you should not be performing before the public at all.

Hi everyone,

What a great thread. Gareth, I've been looking forward to learning more about your play-experience for a while, and when it started up, I decided to shut up and read and not jump into it.

However, Sydney, I do have a little concern with your last post, because it's not clear to me that Gareth ever really asked for advice. Furthermore, if he did, then "just relax" is singularly bad advice in any context; my automatic reaction, at least, is to freeze and tense up. I suggest making it clear that such things as forgetting the guard's name is no big deal to you in your games, but that you can't fairly act as a judge on whether they are bad for Gareth in his games. And if they are, whether they (1) so bad (for him) that pushing himself to perform ever-more-excellently is the only option, or (2) actually not so bad as he thought, now that he's written it down.

Oh yeah - Gareth, I confess I'm not getting the most clear picture of just what it is you say and do as a GM. I gather that you don't dominate the verbal interactions, but I also gather that you do most of the scene-framing and descriptions of what player-characters see. Can you give me a representative example, or paraphrase, of what you might say to them in a particular instance?

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
Sydney, I do have a little concern with your last post, because it's not clear to me that Gareth ever really asked for advice....

I have been trying to think how to respond without actually writing a novel or similar.  So with that in mind, I will try to give a kind of paraphrased  account of the way a game played out.  This was heavily framed, to the extent that I created the character sheets and the situation, which is that the characters are FBI agents investigating a murder.

So the initial scene set, once the character sheets have been fleshed out into characters, was the stock interview with their superior giving them the outline of the problem and a clue to work on, with a little local colour such as the busy-ness of the office.  Once the players are settled I kick off with a statement about where they are, in this case in their bosses office, and I give a description,something like: "You walk into the office.  It is spare and elegant blah blah.  The chief is trim and balding blah blah; he glances up for some papers and says "Pull up a chair".  So this is all carried out in in-character dialog, with everyone acting their parts.  This goes on for only a few minutes and the characters are sent off to investigate.

They players then engage each other in a curious manner that drifts in and out of first person depending on habit, preference and experience.  Loosely speaking the tone is more inflected when in character, and more neutral when not.  I act as knowledge bank during this time, answering questions about the world and what characters (as opposed players) might know about such things. So in practice the way that works, is that if a player looks at me, the issue is about the world, and if they look at another player, they are in direct dialog.  I also listen to their plans and start to anticipate and compensate for them; sometimes I prompt or suggest things that might occur to residents of the gameworld, as it were.

Once the players have agreed amongst themselves some sort of Plan which they can now implement, or at least some sort of potentially fruitful act, the dialog will wrap up and they will start putting direct questions or propositions to me.  I try to look for or prompt a specific "go" decision for the plan because sometimes this is a bit vague when some of the plan is conditional. 

So in this case the players had a clue which was a very expensive engagement ring found on the body.  The ring carried a makers mark from a jeweler in the area, which is why they had the case.  So the plan they come up with, somewhat unnecessarily IMO (one of the players being an old and paranoid hand), was to pose as an engaged couple and inveigle their way into the jewelers trust, and then try to fish for  information out about the ring they were interested in.

So entering action, I set the scene again, describing their immediate arrival outside the building in which the jewelers was located (the jewelers a was a prepared location with one fully developed NPC, the master jeweler, and a verbal rather than graphic description of the layout etc).  Again this is little more than the building is made of such a material, how big it is, notable features etc.  The players briefly organise the last elements of their story and announce that they go in.  We play out their interaction with the receptionist, they get shown into the display room.  Again I give a brief location description, and details of the items on display.  The players set about pretending to be members of the wealthy set, and discuss with the jeweler the kind of thing that they are after, allegedly having seen something similar at a social event.  I guess this interaction, description and dialog, must have taken roughly half an hour, maybe more, pretty close to real time.  The players speak to each other OOC and IC easily more than to me; I only speak in response to queries or as an NPC or narrating the outcome of actions.

In this case the IC conversation was quite easy to turn towards my prepared clue, the photographic catalogue.  This contained the bespoke, rather than off-the-shelf, work of the jeweler and thus contained the names of the people who commissioned them.  So now the players had the name of the fiancee of the woman whose death they were investigating.

Having attained their goal, and accumulated some further information about precisely when the work was commissioned, the players go back into discussion mode.  They discuss amongst themselves how to approach the fiancee, given the sensitivity of the situation.  They do a trawl of engagement announcements to put a name to the body, which was handled in abstraction. The find out where she worked, and dig up some history on the company.  Conspiracy X has explicit powers for doing this sort of thing and so all they had to do was invoke their abilities. Similarly the search of the police databases that gives them an address.  This was probably another half hour.

So the players decide that their strategy will be to investigate the dead womens house first, and then go to interview the fiancee.  But I don't think we need to go further; this was roughly the first quarter of the game, which was a one-session event.  That is the basic dynamic of play, the alternation between planning phases and action phases.  In planning phases, I pretty much leave the players to themselves.  IME players are usually quite happy to spend time in inter-character discussion, and so how much play time overall is spent in planning can vary quite a lot.  If they are decisive and have a clear idea of what they are doing, it can be pretty short; if they are indecisive or not under pressure, they may waffle about for quite a while and I may have to chivvy them along.  In action phases I speak more, but still largely in response to player initiated queries or description of results.  How much I speak will largely be determined by the complexity of the information the players are asking for, or how much stuff is caused to happen or otherwise going on.  It's possible for an innocent question to trigger a digression on geopolitics or theology or similar but its fairly rare as an event.

So, does this help?

Gareth,

contracycle wrote:
I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance, and no performer should find themselves obliged to apologise to their audience.  If the show isn't ready you should not be performing before the public at all.  Admittedly some of those rules arise from theatre being a business rather than a hobby, but IMO its still possible to take a craftsman's pride in your work and try to keep to those rules.

Gareth, I want to second Rob's thanks. I think your description of your interactions around the table confirm my initial guess that it's problem-solving, rather than roleplaying social interactions, that occupy most of your group's energy -- and if you're solving problems, you want a solidly believable world of puzzle pieces to manipulate, so that fits with your apparent "creative agenda" very well.

Yes I think thats fair enough.  Interesting things to do in interesting places, with a little bit of danger, a little bit of drama thrown in.

But as I mentioned originally, what struck me of others accounts were the use of NPC's and the degree of the presence. So if you related some of your approach to NPC's that might suggest ideas of how I could use them. Things like, when you decide to bring them on, what you bring them on for, etc.

Gareth, I'm going to repost from Story Games the description of how I came up with the major NPCs for the most successful game I've ever run to date:

Tony, in the Shadow of Yesterday "Battlestar Galactica in a Dungeon" game we played with Eric and Jen, I deliberately created all the (significant) NPCs after the player-characters were created and in direct response to things the players seemed to be calling for. Thus:

Jen had explicitly said she'd wanted more doomed romance for her character in our last campaign. So I made sure at three different NPCs were desperately attracted to Jen's character, Khaidu. Jen also had her character start as an exile from his barbarian tribe who was an outsider among the other PC's people.
Eric had created a character, Brother Vedis, whose story was all about finding out the mysterious and probably appalling secrets of the magical chalice of which he was the last surviving guardian. So I made sure that two NPCs cared intensely about the chalice. (And a third, the crazed sorcerer guy, had some background on why Vedis's religion was more sinister than he thought, but that never came up much).
You'd created a character, Yoshi, who was all about struggling with the appalling repression -- and internalized self-repression -- of women in the fictional culture. And she had a thing for Khaidu, of course. So besides the NPCs you specifically implied in your character generation (Yoshi's judgmental father and her mentor/seducer), I created characters who mirrored Yoshi's issues of power, powerlessness, family, and love.

Thus I created the characters who became major figures in the story:

Kaina: Yoshi's long-lost sister, a female paladin full of repression and self-denial, instantly crushing on Khaidu even as she wishes he were "civilized." She eventually became a huge deal, immensely intertangled with Jen's Khaidu and effectively "my character" in the story. (Hits Yoshi & Khaidu).

Khan: The freakin' giant tiger of death, Khaidu's rival as an embodiment of aggressive, virile nature, and connected to the Chalice and Yoshi's family history. (Hits Khaidu, and secondarily Vedis & Yoshi).

Archduke Corion and Baron Ran: Corion, the sort-of-rightful claimant to the throne, seeking Vedis' chalice to break the spell that kept him an aged man in a ten-year-old body, with utter contempt for the barbarian Khaidu, and demanding Yoshi's allegiance through his hold over her father, the Baron Ran (whom I'm not listing separately as he was very much your creation and doesn't fit into a discussion of my NPC-creating-method). (Hits Vedis, and secondarily Khaidu & Yoshi).

Arianwe: The witch-queen, powerful and cruel, Yoshi's grandmother -- eternally youthful thanks to hideous magics -- seeking Khaidu's male energy to perpetuate her immortality and wanting her hands on the Chalice for the same unholy purpose. The arch-villainness of the piece. (Hits all three PCs).

There were also two NPCs I created who pretty much fizzled:
Death-Her-Gift: A barbarian princess, a powerful, self-assured woman (in contrast to Yoshi), who was attracted to Khaidu and wanted him to rejoin the tribes. Jen thoroughly rejected this option, and since there was no dilemma or internal tension to exploit, I huffled this NPC off-stage. (Hits Khaidu, not very hard, and secondarily Yoshi).
Talin: Arianwe's son, driven mad by her mistreatment and his own demoniac sorcery, worshipping the dark form of the same deity as Brother Vedis, although I never made that anywhere near clear enough. Everyone thought he was an amusingly grotesque minor villain, but no one really engaged with him. (Sort of hits Vedis, and that's it).

Almost every session of play ended up centering on an encounter with one of these major NPCs and the player-characters' reactions to them.

The only procedure I can distill from what I did was:
1) Each antagonist hits on a protagonist's capital-i Issue, either by mirror-imaging the protagonist's problem or by directly posing a challenge to the character in that area.
2) Each (successful) antagonist hits at least two protagonists' Issues and, ideally, all three.
3) Each antagonist wants something from the protagonists (the great advice from Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard).

I am mostly interested in things such as sessions centering on an encounter with one of these NPC's.  Similarly I understand you created three potential love interests, but I am interested in how they were introduced into play.  For example were they all known to exist by the player prior to play?  Or did you actively introduce these characters in the course of play, and if so, simultaneously or alternately, what were the other players doing etc.

Gareth, good questions. To answer the simpler one first:

There were two major NPCs that were created by the players -- specifically by one player, Tony ("Yoshi"), whose character backstory called for a harsh, distant father and a charming, unscrupulous mentor/seducer. That said, I took those two characters and refined them and played them as my own. Similarly, the central magical MacGuffin of play, the Chalice, was invented by another player, Eric, although he gave me lots of room to invent its true backstory and significance.

Otherwise, all the NPCs were ones I came up with on my own, without knowledge of the players: The first time the players learned about a particular NPC was when their PCs first met or heard about that NPC. This is actually unusual for my group, where we usually thrash out major antagonists and so on collaboratively in the first session; but for this game, with its themes of mystery and rediscovering lost secrets of the past, it fit well.

I created all the major NPCs after our first session of play. What I did was have everyone read a couple pages of setting-and-situation intro, then make up characters collaboratively, and then run a brief game in which all the PCs they had just created were running madly away from the invading Horde to get into the (dubious) safety of the ruined city. I ended that session on them entering the darkened gates.

Then I went home and madly brainstormed appropriate things to be waiting inside. Between that introductory session and the second session, when the PCs actually entered the city, I came up with all six of the NPCs listed in my prior post (although I didn't stat them all up immediately) -- and placed each of them in a different location in the city. I had some control over the order the players would encounter them in, because I put Kaina (for example) in command of another band of refugees just inside the gates, while I put Arianwe and Talin significantly further away; but then again, I thought that Prince Corion's creepy haunted palace would scare them into bypassing it, and they marched right into it at the end of the third session.

Because of the rhythm we deliberately developed during play, at the end of each session I pretty much knew where the player-characters were headed for the next session, so I could prep any additional details I needed of the major NPC located there. Usually, the player-characters arrived at a given location all together -- though sometimes they "split the party," which wasn't too hard to deal with, as I just cross-cut every few minutes between what different players were doing.

Introducing an NPC simply became part of running the location, with minions or magic often guiding the player-characters to the encounter. Usually, the players did not know who the NPC would be -- although by the time they physically got to Arianwe, they had encountered her in visions and, in one case, been possessed by her as a result of a very unwise magical confrontation -- and, conversely, I had no idea of whether the players would want to kill that NPC, collaborate with him/her, or some mix of the two. That's where playing the NPC as "my character" came in. The structure of the game required me to improvise the whole encounter, but it also allowed me to focus on one major NPC at a time.

Hi Sidney,

I stopped posting to the prep and NPC's thread because it appeared to have been reduced to just the two of us, which seemed pointless.  I had hoping tyo start a broader discussion.  However I still don't really understand what you were doing from the description given.

There were two major NPCs that were created by the players -- specifically by one player, Tony ("Yoshi"), whose character backstory called for a harsh, distant father and a charming, unscrupulous mentor/seducer. That said, I took those two characters and refined them and played them as my own. Similarly, the central magical MacGuffin of play, the Chalice, was invented by another player, Eric, although he gave me lots of room to invent its true backstory and significance.

I created all the major NPCs after our first session of play. What I did was have everyone read a couple pages of setting-and-situation intro, then make up characters collaboratively, and then run a brief game in which all the PCs they had just created were running madly away from the invading Horde to get into the (dubious) safety of the ruined city. I ended that session on them entering the darkened gates.

Then I went home and madly brainstormed appropriate things to be waiting inside. Between that introductory session and the second session, when the PCs actually entered the city, I came up with all six of the NPCs listed in my prior post (although I didn't stat them all up immediately) -- and placed each of them in a different location in the city. I had some control over the order the players would encounter them in, because I put Kaina (for example) in command of another band of refugees just inside the gates, while I put Arianwe and Talin significantly further away; but then again, I thought that Prince Corion's creepy haunted palace would scare them into bypassing it, and they marched right into it at the end of the third session.

Introducing an NPC simply became part of running the location, with minions or magic often guiding the player-characters to the encounter. Usually, the players did not know who the NPC would be -- although by the time they physically got to Arianwe, they had encountered her in visions and, in one case, been possessed by her as a result of a very unwise magical confrontation -- and, conversely, I had no idea of whether the players would want to kill that NPC, collaborate with him/her, or some mix of the two. That's where playing the NPC as "my character" came in. The structure of the game required me to improvise the whole encounter, but it also allowed me to focus on one major NPC at a time.

Well, that was meant to be a PM, but seeing there is nothing I can do about that slip of the finger it might as well stay.

I have no problems posting back and forth between the two of us rather than private messaging. I figure someone, somewhere will benefit from our conversation on this topic being concluded in public.

I'm going to tresspass mildly on forum etiquette and do a point-by-point reply:

1.
On "identifying" vs. "creating" an NPC:

The two NPCs that came from the backstory Tony made up for his character (Yoshi) he had described as her authoritarian, rejecting father, a nobleman, and her mentor-turned seducer, a priest of the dominant (and very male-dominated) cult of the setting. I gave them names, stat blocks, and backstory, so the creation was very much a joint effort, with me elaborating on Tony's initial idea.

But I'll still stick to the word "creating" rather than "identifying" for both Tony's role in the process and mine, for two intertwined reasons.

First off, there's clearly a difference in our attitudes towards the reality of the game-world here. "Identifying an NPC" implies some kind of independent existence to the character -- that he or she alreay existed and was simply discovered, or at least had to be there and was extrapolated. That's a central conceit for a certain style of play which prioritizes the imagined reality over all else (it's the "constructive denial" central to "Simulationism," I think), and I think it's essential for your style of play, but it's not for our group. We're very open about "hey, I want to make this thing up!" "Cool! And it should have this detail!" "Yeah!" Our comfort level with this style of play is high because we see the imagined reality not as an end-in-itself but as a means to an end, specifically as a set of tools for putting pressure on our characters to force hard, interesting choices ("narrativist" or "thematic" play).

Second, I want to give the player (Tony in this case) full credit for being the person who actually made up the character in the first place. I just refined and elaborated his initial idea.

2.
Major vs. minor non-protagonist characters

So the first session could be conceived as a period of joint creation plus a brief amount of play, is that fair?  And all NPC's in it were minor....

What to you is the difference between a major and minor NPC?

if you only designed the NPC's after each session of play, then where the locations pre-designed? 

What I am not getting here is why the players are doing this [i.e. going from place to place in the city -- SF].  Is this something you have added to an existing play agenda, such that they had to go those places anyway for other reasons?  Or are the other players simply tagging along?  Or is it just the one player doing this, and if so, what are the others doing while this is happening?...And is what the characters are Doing being driven by these locations, or some private agenda, or by visiting the NPC's?

Moderator point: there is nothing wrong with an organized, point-by-point post. In fact, that's what's encouraged. What's discouraged is quoting someone else's post line by line and responding to each one as an independent, picked-apart thing. That almost always leads to vicious and anti-intellectual posting. You haven't done that or anything faintly resembling it, so you are miles and miles away from anything violating my content standards.

Sydney, please, persist in organizing your posts into meaningful points. That's a good thing.

Best, Ron

Sydney wrote:
First off, there's clearly a difference in our attitudes towards the reality of the game-world here. "Identifying an NPC" implies some kind of independent existence to the character -- that he or she alreay existed and was simply discovered, or at least had to be there and was extrapolated. That's a central conceit for a certain style of play which prioritizes the imagined reality over all else (it's the "constructive denial" central to "Simulationism," I think), and I think it's essential for your style of play, but it's not for our group. We're very open about "hey, I want to make this thing up!" "Cool! And it should have this detail!" "Yeah!" Our comfort level with this style of play is high because we see the imagined reality not as an end-in-itself but as a means to an end, specifically as a set of tools for putting pressure on our characters to force hard, interesting choices ("narrativist" or "thematic" play).

A major NPC, by contrast, is built to provide continued pressure to at least one protagonist on some critical issue identified (explicitly or implicitly) as interesting and important by that protagonist's player. A major NPC is one I intend to reintroduce, though they may get shuffled offstage if the players aren't interested. These are the characters I tend to play as "my PC," with long-term goals and motivations of their own.

By the third session, when they actually went inside the haunted palace, they were off any kind of railroad tracks and operating with zero guidance or nudging from me. Well, except for one case where one of my continuing NPCs, Kaina, had a strong opinion about where to go -- but she lost the argument, which really became less about "where should we go" and much more about "will Jen's character Khaidu accept the leadership of the refugees or refuse it and defer to Kaina?"

Which brings me to the essential point, that all this stuff about "where do we go, how do we survive" was the bones of the story -- the "A-plot," in TV terms -- but the real meat of it, the heart and blood and muscle of it, was the interactions of the players' characters and those NPCs they found most engaging -- the "B-plot." If you've seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you've seen this pattern a hundred times: Sure, the A-plot is "how do we defeat the monsters and save the world," but the B-plot is "how do we deal with our lives as ordinary teenagers under extraordinary stress," and the A-plot exists only to provide structure and pressure for the B-plot.

Here, I think, we come to the critical difference between my style of play and yours. For my group, problem-solving is very much secondary. What matters is not how the protagonists solve problems, but how the protagonists change who they are as a result of the decisions they make. I think this is one indicator (among many other equally valid ones) of "simulationist" versus "narrativist" play.

Ron wrote: Moderator point: there is nothing wrong with an organized, point-by-point post. In fact, that's what's encouraged. What's discouraged is quoting someone else's post line by line and responding to each one as an independent, picked-apart thing.

contracycle wrote: the distinction I am drawing here is between saying "there is a ships captain" and actually detailing that ships captain. Could you, for example, decide that despite the player declaring the NPC to have motivation X, wearing your GM hat you decide this is in fact a cunning ruse and the NPC is really motivated by Y?  Who holds the real authorial power over this character?

Gareth wrote:

Sydney wrote: A major NPC is one ... I tend to play as "my PC," with long-term goals and motivations of their own.

Everything about this strikes me as wrong, intuitively.  If I were invited to participate in a game in which I thought this was likely to occur, I would probably refuse; it strikes me too much as being a game as platform for the GM and their personal interests. So, what do you think this adds to the games, what use do you find this has?...Do you consciously sit and speculate on what issue is driving a player, and custom-build an NPC that is in some way relevant to that issue?  How often do you guess right, or do you just ask the player? How do you deal with multiple players having multiple issues, do you design them an NPC each?  Do you actively intervene in order to bring these querants on stage, as it were?

thought Buffy was unwatchable shite full of implausible characters and implausible dialogue, and that the main reason for this was the emphasis on the B plot.  That is, it was really a teen highshool soap opera with rubber masks. ... I also was not much moved by the "I am your father, Luke" moment either.  I never could see how that changed anything.

Postscript:

That said, I should emphasize that there are techniques I've discussed that you could use for your own purposes. For example, you could probably adapt the basic concept of "major NPC" as someone who wants something from the player-characters and keeps pressuring them to get it. There's no reason why the things-the-major-NPCs-want have to be personal, emotional, and soap operatic instead of, say, political. If my players had created different protagonists, I'd have created very different antagonists for them -- and in fact, with Eric's Brother Vedis, whose main "issue" was his possession of a mysterious magic Chalice, what I did to pressure him was give different NPCs incompatible desires for what they wanted him to do with the Chalice.

The core of this trick is that the major NPCs don't care about things that are outside of the player-characters' immediate possesion. If the Dark Lord wants to conquer the kingdom, that's because the PCs not merely live in the kingdom, but are the ruling lords thereof; if the Dark Lord wants to destroy the magical macguffin, the PCs aren't merely questing to protect it, they actively depend on it for their own survival.

An NPC with those sorts of properties would usually fall into the category "villain", but I may be able to think of other ways to use them.