What Pops an NPC?
I am putting together some NPCs for a thing and am having the usual problems: limited space, lots of information to deliver etc, etc.
So I come to you, the sacred few, and subtly, silently, sneakily, I hook up my brain-hose to your skulls.
When you read an NPC - what is it that makes them POP off the page, and you think "Yes I can run this, I know immediately how to do it"?
A few axis of investigation;
- Looks, vividness/simplicity of description.
- How many signifiers is too many?
- Behavioural quirks; too heavy, too loose and vague?
- What's useful for imagining them, for helping players imagine and remember them, and for portraying them, which might be a slightly different axis.
- Motivations, the want/don't want lines. How simple do we want their wants to be? Like specific objects = like "a pie", personal qualities like "to be complimented", very general social motivators like "high position, dominance"? and how quickly do we want these wants and don't wants to be integrated into play?
It depends a lot, doesn't it, on how long we expect that NPC to stick around.
Right now I'm trying to put together a kind of 'night market', or something like a fey market
with lots and lots of potential contacts to create a sense of overflowing possibilities but also many possible sources of information about a complex world to which the PCs are being introduced. But at the same time, I don't have a lot of space to hang about and probably few to none of these people will be sticking around later.
Many should be possible sources of information but I don't want them to be like vending machines, where they give "as you know your father, the king" speeches, neither do I want them to be too hard to deal with, as I want the PCs to be able to soak up a lot of info about the setting, and for people to feel particular, yet not to have any heavy drama this early on.
Its a lot of demands on the idea and then when I come to it I will probably end up just eyeballing it.
NEVERTHELESS.
I am interested in what worked for you, books and adventures you thought were good, blog posts you thought were good, personal experiences etc.
PICTURE!
Got nothing to do with this post, pretty great though!
So I come to you, the sacred few, and subtly, silently, sneakily, I hook up my brain-hose to your skulls.
When you read an NPC - what is it that makes them POP off the page, and you think "Yes I can run this, I know immediately how to do it"?
A few axis of investigation;
- Looks, vividness/simplicity of description.
- How many signifiers is too many?
- Behavioural quirks; too heavy, too loose and vague?
- What's useful for imagining them, for helping players imagine and remember them, and for portraying them, which might be a slightly different axis.
- Motivations, the want/don't want lines. How simple do we want their wants to be? Like specific objects = like "a pie", personal qualities like "to be complimented", very general social motivators like "high position, dominance"? and how quickly do we want these wants and don't wants to be integrated into play?
It depends a lot, doesn't it, on how long we expect that NPC to stick around.
Right now I'm trying to put together a kind of 'night market', or something like a fey market
with lots and lots of potential contacts to create a sense of overflowing possibilities but also many possible sources of information about a complex world to which the PCs are being introduced. But at the same time, I don't have a lot of space to hang about and probably few to none of these people will be sticking around later.
Many should be possible sources of information but I don't want them to be like vending machines, where they give "as you know your father, the king" speeches, neither do I want them to be too hard to deal with, as I want the PCs to be able to soak up a lot of info about the setting, and for people to feel particular, yet not to have any heavy drama this early on.
Its a lot of demands on the idea and then when I come to it I will probably end up just eyeballing it.
NEVERTHELESS.
I am interested in what worked for you, books and adventures you thought were good, blog posts you thought were good, personal experiences etc.
PICTURE!
Got nothing to do with this post, pretty great though!
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