The Art of NPCs

After two weeks of hearing me editorializing, you are probably wondering when I would get around to giving out some hard, cold help to gamemasters out there. Well, this is the start of that trend, hopefully, but don’t be surprised if you see more editorials coming in the future.

For me, the most enjoyable, and important, aspect of being a gamemaster is my Non-Player Characters. Taking the aspect of one of my non-player characters and having that person or persons interact with the players is fun. The better gamemasters out there, that I have seen, all make their NPCs three-dimensional.

So, how does one do that? It is a matter of giving a piece of paper emotions, primarily. The technique I tend to use involves a chart of personality ‘quirks’, shall we say. If I am working up a character before my game, which I would suggest MOST gamemasters should do, I make a couple of rolls on a little table I use to give me two different traits to describe the character. Assuming no contradiction, I then attempt to mold the character’s personality around those two aspects.

Here is an example. I want to make a dwarven fixer. I pull out my charts (I will state here I use the personality charts out of Central Casting: Heroes of Today for this, but you can make up your own charts). Then, I roll randomly and determine the fixer is greedy, but also a spendthrift. On the phone, both of these aspects are going to be hard to communicate, but when a player makes a call to the fixer, now they won’t be able to get much done without giving him a slice of the action (greed). However, if they do meet the fixer in person, they’re going to be meeting him in some fancy club, with expensive drinks. Girls will be all around him, as he tosses 250 nuyen tips to the waitress for every 5 nuyen drink he orders. He’ll be dressed more like a pimp than a fixer as well, with all sorts of gold. I gave the guy a mohawk, named him after Mr. T’s character in A-Team, B.A., and he was the fixer for the last campaign I ran in Las Vegas.

A gamemaster friend of mine works in the opposite direction, and that works just as well and is actually probably easier for someone who has a hard time taking things off of charts and putting meat into it. What he does is he thinks of a character in a movie, say Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. He then gives that character a different profession and then molds the NPC around that archetype. (In this case, it was a rigger.)

Here is where some problems with NPC creation come into play. First and foremost, only give statistics to those NPCs who are going to be adversaries to the players. I have seen a number of gamemasters get bogged down worrying about how much intelligence the party’s fixer has. It takes valuable time away from personality development, as well as developing any sort of ongoing plotline for the players.

Second, (here goes rant mode again) concerns the use of NPCs within the party. Unless direly needed, or with a lack of players, the maximum amount of NPCs I have running around on a consistent basis with the party is ZERO. Zilch. Nada. This may upset some gamemasters, but including NPCs into a Shadowrunning group takes away control from the players. When control is taken away, the game ceases to be motivated by the players and becomes a controlled environment. It is no longer a game, it is a book that the players are being led around by the nose through. I’ve had it happen before as a player, by one of my good friends none the less, and it was extremely frustrating to myself and other players in the game. Yes, the game died out.

Third, recurring villains. This is my current problem, actually, and one I admit I am still trying to solve. See, you probably have a few players like I have to deal with on a consistent basis. Once you set up a recurring villain, these sorts of players are like pit bulls with an attitude problem. They will not rest until that villain is put down, period. This kills any chance of foreshadowing, a technique which I recommend for long-term campaigns. My personal preference, and what I recommend to most gamemasters, is to use the foreshadowing character as a plot device with no statistics, until such a point where the players can get a crack at him and then give him statistics. This goes back to my philosophy above about personality development being more important than statistics. Unfortunately, Digger is a pit bull. So is another player in my group, and right now it is frustrating me to no end that I cannot foreshadow anything.

Lastly, long-term NPCs do need to be developed outside of contacts, but contacts are the MOST important long-term NPCs the players are going to deal with during a campaign. When I make characters to play, I always write a 4-line statement on how I met/got that contact. Encourage your players to do the same. It will give you a basis on how to create that NPC as a three-dimensional person, rather than getting the following:

GM: What are you going to do? Player: I am calling my contact, the street doc, and then getting healed. GM (trying to act the part): Hello? Player: I am telling him I am hurt, and will be there in 10 minutes.

Instead, you will start getting this:

GM: What are you going to do?

Player: I am calling Psycho Sid, my street doc contact, to get healed.

GM: Hello?

Player: Sid, my man, this is Rigger.

GM: Hey Rigger, what’s happenin?

Etc.

The latter is what all gamemasters should strive for with NPC interaction. That’s what makes things enjoyable on both sides—you aren’t playing the game, then, you are living it more in a sense. It becomes more real, than just shuffling some dice and papers.