One of the more difficult things for the gamemaster is creating and fleshing out interesting characters for the players to interact with. There are a few ways to make your job easier. First, recognize that not everyone the player means needs to be heavily fleshed out. Think about an average day for you: chances are most of the people you meet don’t give you a whole CV and sense of their motivations in life. The guy waiting on you at the bar, or ringing you up at the store is polite or not, friendly or not…you’re interaction with them occurs in a matter of minutes and is done. Similarly, most of the interactions of your character with folks are going to be cursory.
Think of the NPCs in movie terms — there’s the extras that fill the scene, there’s the walk-on speaking role (“What can I get for you, stranger?”), there’s the bit player (the background character that pretty much does one thing for your characters), and the supporting. Your players are the main cast.
Extras — these guys are just set dressing. Describe in thumbnail terms these folks — “There’s a crowd of shoppers in the mall, mostly teens jabbering on their cell phones or to each other…” or “As you enter engineering, you have to dodge a bunch of red shirts carrying parts and tools…” or “The street’s full of tourists walking to the beach or sitting about the cafes that line the esplanade. A few police are directing traffic or loafing about flirting with the ladies..” Unless the players take notice of something and inquire, leave at that. If they inquire, you can expand a bit on the description but unless they engage directly with a character, they’re just extras.
If they do engage with an extra, they are a walk-on speaking role. This is the shopgirl, the barmaid that you flirt with but don’t really get to know, the guy that helps Scotty and McCoy stop Kirk from going into the radiation-filled chamber in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but usually its the guy that directs you to the bit player or supporting cast. they might have a name, if they turn up a few times, a basic description (red haired kid in Colonial deckhand coveralls…you think her name is Callie or something like that.) At most they have a hook — a name, a job, some vocal or visual cue that makes them more than an extra. (Bicycle girl in the first episode of The Walking Dead would even count for this.)
Bit players, like the walk-on, are pretty one-dimensional, but if they catch the players attention, they might get called on to aid in the mission more (rising to supporting cast.) These are guys like the coroner your detective has to interact with, but whom really don’t know that much about other than his/her name, a basic personality (moody, cheerful, stand-offish, etc.) to help the PCs interact with them, and maybe a basic set of stats that might come into play. They don’t know more than a few tidbits about them (single or married…maybe you know the spouses name at best; they’re into cats or dogs from a photo on the desk, or something like that.) Keep it simple, but these are the NPCs, I find, that people latch onto and start wanting more from…that’s when you need to start building more onto them on the fly. Take notes on what you did with the characters so you can start building them up to…
Supporting cast: these are the NPCs you need to put some work into and cover everything from recurring NPCs (say, that cop in the stationhouse that you always tell to get you the file on whatever) to major henchmen and villains. For the lower end, say your favored mook, you’ll want a real basic idea of what their physical and mental abilities are, their big skills. Some very basic background and character elements. (Singh is a Sikh that deserted from the British Army in India and came to Shanghai where he is now your favored bad ass. He wears the turban, bangle, and carries the knife of a Sikh, and has almost no sense of humor that can be detected. Women love him.) For the more important supporting cast, say the captain of your starship, you have the name and stats written up like a PC (build to the ideal of the character, don’t bother with creation points unless you like to build characters…like I do), basic background that people would know, and a more fleshed out personality.
Important to note is that your major villains don’t always need a big background — you might know that Hanoi shan was a native colonial administrator for the French in Indochina, and that he was suspected of collaborating with anti-colonial forces; that he likes to use poisons to kill his enemies and has female assassins; that he is super-intelligent and well-educated. With that you can already build a good picture of the character without having to know what his relationship with his mother was (unless that becomes an important aspect of the storyline.) However, you’ll want a full writeup of your major villains, and probably their top henchman, as well. (Think James Bond movies for this — the big baddie rarely gets into it directly with Bond, but his steel-toothed henchman, or femme fatale will…you should have an idea of what they can do in a fight or action sequence.
Only put the level of detail and work into the NPCs that you have to, but be prepared to add more on as you go; you never know when the character is going to decide that cabana girl is the one for him.
This month’s RPG Blog Carnival focuses on our favorite characters current or past. Having been gaming for three decades, I’ve got a lot to choose from, all the more so because I’ve found myself in the GM seat for much of that — there are a host of NPCs that I loved bringing to life. I suppose the best place to start is the beginning…
The first character memorable enough to stick with me to today would have been a old Dungeons & Dragons character, Ian Antae — an half-elf warrior that was a master at manipulating people. There were the usual number of dungeon crawls that, honestly, just blend together to my mind (and is one of the reasons I don’t tend to run fantasy settings), but it was the last year or so of that campaign, where we finally added a story arc involving the “ultimate evil sorcerer” (we were in high school, so stow it!) that absolutely wasn’t cribbed from every other fantasy book cribbed from The Lord of the Rings. For me, the defining moment was after the death of half the characters, Antae kicking open a door to face the bad guy, only to find himself faced with dozens of evil critters waiting to use him as a pin cushion. More surprising was that they won out over the bad guys. After the death of the game world’s “devil/Sauron/whatever” we closed the D&D books and decided we really weren’t going to top it and turned to TOp Secret and later James Bond: 007 RPG.
I had a good MI6 agent that I enjoyed playing during this period, my first female character — Charmine McGovern. I played her for a good six years, and found it a good role playing exercise. It’s hard to get characters of the opposite sex right, but it’s doable. The trick is not to automatically make your female character a 1) lesbian, 2) sex addict, 3) just my bad-ass male character with tits. Women can be tough and competent, just like a male character, but there are certain biological truths that might not be reflected in the mechanics of the system — they don’t have the muscle mass of a man and in a fight, this can be a serious problem; they react to emotional queues differently from men, no matter how they might impact them. Since then, I’ve found I like playing women from time to time; they’re a challenge to get right and having had women in my gaming groups for the last 20 years consistently, I’ve had to get them right, or suffer the slings and arrows of ridicule for not doing so.
One of the characters from the late ’80s I absolutely loved was Athena — a genetically-engineered superhero for a DC Heroes campaign. She was child-like but incredibly smart and powerful in the beginning, finally maturing into a warrior-heroine that was very similar to her mythic namesake. She was probably the most “stereotypical” of my characters, build off the Jungian Greek god archetypes.
The next memorable character was Brigadier Douglas August-Haide (later resurrected in another campaign as Graham McDougal) — essentially an older version of James Bond: he’s slower, in chronic pain from years of hard living, and on the edge of retirement. He’s been stuffing away money from ill-gotten gains taken from bad guys over the years and is quite wealthy; he’s constantly dodging internal reviews from SIS. I got to do a Sean Connery impression. My PS90 carbine is named for him (Graham), as he was using the P90 and FN57 pistol long before Stargate SG-1 started using them. In the end, he died of a heart attack in the shower, after decades of having people try to kill him.
My favorite character around the turn of the century was an NPC in our Star Trek camapign — a sentient starship named Athena. She pulled some of the character bits I liked from the superheroine of days past, but became a unique critter. She was an Akira-class vessel, a warship, and one of the first ships to “wake” to sentiency. She was incredibly protective of her crew, a brilliant tactician who would eventually captain herself. To win against a massive Borg invasion, she seeded her “mind-state” to hundreds of starships, waking them. This allowed them to use their computational firepower, as much as their weaponry, to hack and destroy the Borg by releasing the biological elements of the Borg ships. Eventually, she was able to convince the Borg than biological-machine intelligence could work together without coercion, destroying the Borg philosophy. You could make a case, though, that the Borg won because eventually Starfleet personnel were cybernetically linked to their starships, but without the massively invasive surgeries and only if the crew wanted to be uplinked.
Of late, we’ve had so many good characters it’s hard to choose from. Our Hollow Earth Expeidtion campaign has a female “Short Round”, Shanghai Sally, that has been amusing for the wife; being small, weak, and a girl in 1930s Shanghai, she’s had to be clever about how to best use her. She’s brought out some incredibly amusing lines from the other characters, the best probably being “I have a prepubescent girl and I know how to use her….no, not like that!” Jack MacMahon, our “brick” is a impulsive, book smart common-sense stupid character with a weakness for the ladies and a penchant for doing the dumbest thing you can in a situation. He’s like Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China, but a better dresser.
Our Supernatural game gave us Jerry Neimann — quite possibly the most devastating caricature of the gaming geek ever. He’s tall, fat, balding redhead who works computer security, is a ghost hunter, and quickly became so amusing that he derails the game from time to time…and no one minds. His player pulls together a bunch of people he’s known to give us a fantastic, and while stereotypical, a completely believable characters.
Overall, the last 30 years of gaming has provided me and the players with dozens of memorable characters, of which these were only the highlights. Some became so real to us that we would gossip about them, just like real people… It’s made for a very full life.
The Black Campbell 