guides

Building NPCs

There is a model of diagramming the world of a game that I call the Starbust – it’s basically elements that could be put together to build a relationship map, but the individual bits can be a lot easier to present rather than doing up a map all at once. At it’s simplest, it’s an element (usually a PC) with the other elements associated with it attached to it. By itself, it’s an easy way to keep track of the cloud of issues that surrounds a given NPC, PC or campaign element. In this context, a connection really just means “A reason this might come up”. Love, hate, sex, blood, money – the reason may matter on a case by case basis, but in general one is as good as another.

Where this gets useful is that when you have a few of these things, you can start sticking them together like some sort of crazy tinkertoy. Now, the obvious way to do this is simple substitution. If Bob likes golf and Dave likes golf, you now have a connection between Bob and Dave. Easy peasy. The weakness of this approach is that there are only so many times I can pull on that particular thread before it becomes predictable – ‘let me guess, we’re golfing again!’. while it absolutely benefits from simplicity, it lacks nuance.

Less obviously, but perhaps more potently is when you establish connections between the outliers. Let’s say for example that Bob still likes golf, but Dave has a different connection: let’s say he’s married to Paula. If I connect Paula to golf (say, she owns the local country club) then I have just made Paula more interesting, and I’ve just made the path from Bob to Dave clear, but a little more nuanced, and practically speaking, easier for me to bring into play. How do I mean? Ok, instead of only having one thread to pull on to get Bob & Dave together, I can pull on either one of their strings and more organically pull in the other. Paula’s havign money problem and the club might be sold. The club is hosting an event and Paula’s running it. A new pro has opened up, and Bob wants his help – if only he had the ear of the club owner!

So, that’s all straightforward enough, but where this ties back into the current line of thinking is with NPCs. While PCs tend to have very organic starbursts, NPCs need to be a little bit simpler, if only for bookkeeping, so I use a simple template when I set one up – a starburst with 4 connections, one to a PC, and the other three to stuff. The link to the PC is usually the most straightforward to account for.

The other three will generally be a thing or an NPC – it doesn’t matter a lot what they are, but what’s important is what their roles are.
he first is something that puts him on the same page with at least one of the same PCs. He values something that the PC values, he’s got a positive connection with one of NPCs connected to a PC, whatever.

The second is a connection that creates tension between the NPC and a player. This doesn’t need to be such a profound difference that it would make them enemies. In fact, antipathy so strong as to make the NPC an enemy should be rare – it is far more useful to have a point of honest, civilized disagreement than a reason to go immediately to the knives.

The third is the one that I’m making sure to add after my recent consideration – something tangential to the PC’s interest, something that explicitly does not tie back into anything else – something that is that NPCs own interest. Practically speaking, this is the thing that the NPC is doing when no-one is watching, and the players may never get full visibility into this.

Now, obviously a more important NPC might have more nodes, while a less important one might have only one or two, but 4 nodes is a good place to start.

Anyway, it’s a simple trick, and one that is probably very familiar to folks who do a lot of relationship mapping, but I find it useful when I need to step back and look at a game and figure out where things happen, and where things need to happen.

Footnote: This is a republished article by Robert Donoghue, printed with his permission from his original post, Building NPCs.

© 2008 The Role Play Academy.