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Title: Proto-NPC's to NPC's before play Post by: Vaxalon on January 24, 2006, 01:22:40 PM I realized, in a thread over on Vincent's blog, that I had mistaken my own way of doing NPC's for the book way.
My bad. That being said, I'd like to speak about my way... a somewhat more traditional way of making NPC's. When I'm making up a town (just like when the players are making up PC's) there are certain things I want to say. Certain things I want to come up. One of the places I can give that some authority is in the traits and relationships that the NPC's have. So rather than leaving all my NPC's traits and relationships blank, I write a few things down. "Comfortable with money." "Roaring." I don't fill in ALL of the blanks most of the time, but I do occasionally. I do this for two reasons. For one thing, when I'm GMing, I'm paying a lot of attention to the cool ideas that the players are having, and less to the cool ideas that I had when I made up the NPC in the first place... ideas I don't want to leave behind because I forgot. For another, there's a lot of 'handling time' in thinking up traits and relationships on the fly, time I'd rather spend playing. Quite frankly, I have a lot more time available to me in front of the computer than I do in front of the players. Anything I can do ahead seems to be worthwhile. Am I missing something? Am I missing out on something? Maybe what I could do instead, is write up a thumbnail sketch of the NPC's, with all my little ideas about what they're like, ahead of time, but not assign their attributes until game time. Then, if play warrants it, I can just drop the text into a blank trait and go. That seems pretty much tantamount to what I'm already doing, though. Title: Re: Proto-NPC's to NPC's before play Post by: lumpley on January 24, 2006, 04:52:15 PM As long as you're scrupulous about not letting your pre-made NPCs predispose you to any particular conflicts or outcomes, I'm sure it doesn't matter.
The existing rules fulfill a couple of design goals that making NPCs in advance wouldn't have, but that's neither here nor there. -Vincent Title: Re: Proto-NPC's to NPC's before play Post by: Arturo G. on January 26, 2006, 09:35:03 AM Hi, Fred! We were discussing about this in the thread: [DitV] Assigning traits to NPCs on the fly (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18325.0) People came up with some ideas I think were pretty interesting, although I have not yet try them. Arturo |