NPCs in Character Driven Play No matter what system you’re playing, NPCs make things come to life. Some of my favorite advice for creating NPCs comes from Dogs in the Vineyard, which encourages you to create passionate NPCs [via some specific prompts and guidelines], then encourages you to...
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Last week I shared a technique that’s been around for a while; much of it was borrowed fro Chris Chinn’s blog and old RPG.net articles. Building a conflict web is a way to quickly interrelate people, and have them react to each other’s fortunes and misfortunes in life...
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Places are cool, but it’s people who make a world. Welcome to the next installment of Deep as a Puddle: streaming NPCs. Or at least creating several interlinked puddles. Whatever the analogy, we’re making groups of NPCs, while still trying to keep them interesting, with individual...
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It’s Characters All The Way Down From both sides of the screen, characters are key. As a player, your character is how you explore the world: she’s the lens you view the world through, he’s the tool you use to interact with other characters, plots, scenery, and everything else in...
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Characters and Depth No matter what game you play, a constant is characters. Players have characters that they can lavish attention and development on, while the GM often has numerous characters, great and small, to juggle. Whether you’re new to roleplaying, an experienced GM creating a...
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No, you’re not all gnomes named Myers Briggs… Myers Briggs is a classification system that’s popular in high school sociology classes and business books. Quizzes to determine your personality type were also frequently passed around in email from my friends and relatives; this...
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One of the things that brings characters to life is a realistic culture that they’re embedded in. There are many ways to create vibrant cultures; if you are playing in a pre-existing setting, many of the cultures will be defined in the rulebook or supplements. Unfortunately, players often...
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Asking questions is a great way to get to the bottom of things. It is one reason that three year-olds master “why?”– keep asking and you’ll slowly unravel deeper and deeper explanations for events. Or you’ll drive your parents crazy– really it’s win/win...
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Tarot readings are an inspirational technique for developing characters. Inspirational techniques are great when an NPC needs more personality, but you don’t have enough of a handle on the character to know what the right answer to a question would be. They are also good when you are in a...
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When was the last time your players actually talked to an NPC? Was it a rewarding conversation, or was the NPC made out of cardboard? Or, on the flip side, have you been yearning to have a session where the players do something other than kill people, but the numbers are the only part of the...
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