Preparing a Game: NPCs

peaseblossom thought it might be a good idea for me if I fleshed ou my thoughts on how I prepare for a given session. So I figured I’d start with what I do for an NPC.

When I develop an NPC I basically do the following:

• Rationale
  
• Objectives
  
• Activities
  
• Assessment
  
• Voice
  
• Mechanics

Rationale is the why. Why is this person (and I can use the term person very loosely, often applying it to places and even things) important. What impact does this person have on the player(s) and the world.

Objectives is a clear idea of what the person is doing and what they are supposed to do. I’ll often strive to get in the NPCs head and decide what they are doing to impact the setting ad the other actors (PC and NPC) within it.

Activities are the things they are doing or are going to do. I usually start with a few vague statements and the flesh them out from there. These are the things I can do to jump-start a given scene.

Assessment is how will they react to a given situation? What is their personality and what does this mean. I usually place them within the world/setting at this point.

Voice is where I give some stylistic things that I hope will make the NPC stand out as a separate person. As this is my weakest skill as a GM I really ned this to help me make better NPCs. Otherwise they all start sounding the same.

Mechanics, I hate mechanics, I really do but they do help so I give powerlevels or stats or whatever is appropriate. And some more stylistic flourishes for how they’ll use them.

And then every time I use an NPC I update this material with the status of the game. What I prefer to do is do a lot of work on these up front so I can coast by from session to session just make the NPCs more and more realized. What I’m finding in a Long Road to When is that due to its travelogue structure (something I rarely do as a gm) I need to do a lot more of this just to keep up. And since one of my objectives is to get better at NPC voice (and in using erotic content) it requires me to spend a lot more time working on my NPCs, especially voice.

Being the king of process flows, mind maps and concept maps I usually map the NPCs and the world out, but thats a seperate post. What I'm striving to do here is set the nodes.

Preparing a Game: Scene Prep

Often times there are specific scenes I want to start with. Or think will happen. For these I like to define a few things. First I get the target audience (especially easy for a 1:1 game). Target audience is more than the players that will be directly involved. Sometimes there are scenes that are meant to illustrate specific something to folks not in the scene. And so I want to know that out front.

Then I decide on the specific NPCs that are going to be involved in the scene. Remember for me an NPC is person, place or thing that has importance. When I have a specific NPC and I’m being really good about scene building I like to have before me three things: Do, Say, Resources.

Do are those things I want them to do, either before the scene starts or during it. I’ll usually list some expected contingencies.

Say are the key things, in voice, to remember. They might not get said but it helps me a lot.

Resources are the things they can bring to the table. Usually what the player is after, even if they might not be aware of it at the start.

All of this usually goes out the window in the first five minutes, but if I’ve done it I find that I’m better able to imprivse. The more work I do upfront thinking things through the better capable of improvising I become. This is good because that’s where most of a session happens anyway. These scene preps really just exist to up my confidence level going in and make it easier for me to think on my feet. I probably use about 25% of it even slightly as is. Which is why I get lazy and don’t do it, and when I don’t do it my sessions fall flat. The avoidance of prep is one of the problems I was having last fall and I’m trying a lot harder to get back into it.

Thoughts on Changeling

peaseblossom has posted her initial thoughts on Changeling and I’m in total agreement with those. Right now my basic thought is that contracts and pacts and the rest are incredibly well done but the game is way to emo for my sake.

I appreciate the themes of slavery and abuse. I think a lot of interesting stories can come out of this theme. I like that this is a game about reclaiming and building a life - Cool stuff. But I really regret that the game doesn’t explicitly provide guidance for social contact. This is not a game I’d play without explicit agreement for physical, sexual, mental, social and just plain weird abuse tortures. I also don’t like the presentation of abuse as sexy that comes across but my reading is light ad I’ll let peaseblossom discuss this as I am riding her coattails.

One of the many things I’d change is the courts overriding emotion. I like courts (I like layering of pacts and obligations and oaths and contracts and the rest). Right now they are 1 emotion each, each negative (Desire – which is really lust; Wrath; Fear; and, Sorrow). I’d probably make it so each court has three emotions, one of hope, one of despair (the current ones) and one more neutral aimed at community/belonging or some such. That way a greater variety of stories can be told.

I’m intrigued. It doesn’t bode well for my anti-WW image that I’ve been intrigued so by two recent releases (Scion and now Changeling), but I’m sure I can live.