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Living NPCs, Part Twoby Amanda Celly In part one of two, I discussed NPC creation strategies, and ways to bring NPCs more fully to life. Moving onward, in this column we'll tackle strategies for successfully managing NPCs in a long-term game. NPC CreationKeep quick-reference materials set aside. Write down ideas for NPCs if you get them throughout the day. Collect weblinks to sites with interesting names, news stories or character ideas, and either toss them into a blog or a bookmarks folder. When you need them, you'll have them set aside and ready to use at a moment's notice. It takes surprisingly little effort to do this as you idly browse through news sites or pass through your day. The links above were gathered through four minutes of Google searching. (As a side benefit, I often find myself observing people more closely in my daily interactions as a result of wanting to create believable characters and NPCs, thus noticing more about my Real Life). Have stock NPCs pre-made. It's impossible to know every time you're going to have to use an NPC, given that one of the cardinal rule of storytelling is that players will always surprise you. This being the case, create a set of stock NPCs from which you can draw. I don't mean blank stereotypes anyone can pull those out of a hat on a whim. Have one created character for commonly encountered types. Being able to pull out David Lowry (the mid-40's upper-level manager who's just started being blackmailed by his brother-in-law over the fact that he misused travel expenses to book trips to conferences with female employees on whom he had designs though he never got anywhere as a result — and whose hobby is breeding dachshunds), or Lita Riley (the inner-city high-school student who hopes to get a photojournalism scholarship, only allows her parents and her boyfriend to call her by her full name Rosalita and, lastly, who's struggling with being half-Cuban, half-Irish Catholic, identifying herself vehemently with what she perceives as her only heritage (Cuban) as a result) and move on without missing too much of a beat will give your players consistent quality while keeping up with their doubtless rapidly shifting plans. Both of these fill stereotype slots — White Middle Manager and Inner City Girl With Dreams — but in gaining a few important details, they become more alive. Since you've already got these characters made, you can bring them out at a moment's notice, seamlessly integrating them and making even off-the-cuff storytelling sessions that much more vibrant. Once you use one of those NPCs, you can make them recur as much as you'd like, but make sure to have another one on hand, in case you need something different. If Lita shows up in one scene and a week later you need to run another Inner City Girl, you don't necessarily want to have to either use the same NPC or pull something out of your ear on the spot. NPC RecurrenceMost important to a cohesive worldview for your players, however, are the aspects of recurrence and consistency. If there's tension in one scene between two NPCs, don't just let it go away in the next scene. Generally speaking, to create the illusion of a coherent world, your NPCs need to act and react much like PCs would to situations, and they need to continue to exist once they walk off-camera. Exceptions exist, of course, for things like plot, but much like in a movie, when someone drastically and inexplicably breaks character for the sake of the plot, those looking on (in this case, your players) are often left muttering, That was stupid. It made no sense. Additionally, Out-of-Sight Syndrome, or a lack of recurrence, quickly robs an NPC and, indeed, an entire world of any other vitality with which it may have been injected by your fabulous innovations and creative twists. If every NPC disappears completely after Their Scene and never resurfaces again unless sought out by the characters, the world you've created quickly loses much of its animation. NPC TrackingThat being said: how do you most effectively track NPCs for long-term use, and with minimum code? Consistency is often the first thing lost when multiple staffers/storytellers enter the picture, and stability in this sort of situation is ideal. It's impossible for NPC tracking to be completely seamless, but, as in all staff situations, communication is key. Since an off-game database is not always accessible to staffers at best and a Herculean undertaking at worst, a short series of bulletin boards seems to work best and require the least amount of specialized code. Recurring NPCs (complete with a brief description, stats, and roleplaying instructions/behavioral idiosyncrasies) should be posted to one board, as well as stat templates for such staples as beat cop, EMT, etc. A second board, serving as a general storytelling board, will likely also contain blurbs on situations which do not require NPCs. For ease of sorting, it might be possible to use a technique for subject lines such as placing the post number of any NPCs used in the title. For example: if Lita Riley, as above, is a witness to a convenience store robbery perpetrated by a PC, and her post number on the NPC board is #8, the post title might read:
If Generic Beat Cop Template (#17) rides shotgun with a cop PC to question Lita afterward, the next post title might read:
The staffer in the latter ST would then have all the information necessary to run the second ST at the drop of a hat, and could toss all kinds of details onto the Generic Cop Template, leaving that information in the second post. If a third staffer later on wants to use Lita Riley in another scene, finding all the online information about her is as easy as skimming down the list. Admittedly, this system can be a little cumbersome to begin with, but as with most organizational systems, it becomes second nature the longer practiced. Most of the places at which I've staffed kept a storytelling board in order to keep things accessible to all staffers and facilitate ease of follow-up storytelling. This simply takes that idea to the next level, by providing at-a-glance cross-referencing. If your staff is amenable as a whole to using some sort of web-based tracking database, or if you have a coder who's got the ability and the time to devote to something like that, it might be more user-friendly in the long run. The last, of course, depends on your coder. However, the technique outlined above is specifically set out because it requires nothing more than a board system, most of which are either already included in a basic codebase or extremely easily installed. (If I can set up a bboard system, anyone can do it. Really.) If your players know that Tara Connelly (the girl whose body their PCs had to bury or burn) liked sushi, but her older brother thought it was a health risk and wouldn't let her eat it, somehow the whole thing becomes a lot more personal, and thus the horror involved becomes a lot more personal. You care more. If you know details like the fact that David Lowry has been frustrated with his work and his inability to track down a woman (even his wife) who'll give him the time of day, then what you're doing begins to really move across the line between being dice-rolling "kill teh m0nstarz!!1" and enters into the realm of telling a cooperative story. Facilitating the long-term tracking of NPCs contributes to the cohesiveness of this story, sustaining the reality you've created by coming up with these living, breathing NPCs in the first place.
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