Talking to NPCs

We'll get nowhere if we cannot understand the premise:  

NPCs are living, self-motivated beings with personal agendas, in the pursuit of those agendas full time.  They do not exist to provide players with information, send players on quests, fulfill a role in an adventure or otherwise service the party's existence.

Before comprehending anything in this post, it must be understood that you will not be able to take the information here as a DM and apply it to your game world, because your players will not understand what you're doing, and will not have grasped the premise I've just given.  Likewise, if you are a player in a gameworld, the DM will not grasp what you're doing, because the DM's non-players will not have adopted this premise either.  The only way that anything can be gleaned from what I'm about to write is that both the DM and the Players must, together, be informed and made to comprehend what is proposed as a design principle.

In role-playing games at this time and according to the presuppositions I see in place, even if the DM and players can be induced to sit down and consider the premise above, most likely they still won't get their heads around it, or understand how to employ it.  In short, we're digging out of a very deep hole here.

The Hole

Let's discuss first how NPCs are usually run in a game.

On page 8 of The Keep on the Borderlands module, we are given this description of an NPC, the corporal of the watch:

"He is dressed in plate mail and carries a shield, with sword and dagger at his waist.  The corporal is rather grouchy, with a low charisma, but he admires outspoken, brave fighters and is easily taken in by a pretty girl."

This is not an atypical description of an NPC in an ordinary module, even today (though the company will have left the sexism out).   First, we're told his armor and weapons if the players start a fight.  Then we're told how he's going to approach the players when he's talked to.  Finally, we're told the "key" that's needed to get what's wanted out of the corporal: be brave or be pretty.

It's a game puzzle.  You want information, you have to press this button or that one.  You want to fight, here are the statistics.  We get nothing about who the corporal is, if he likes the job, if he's honest or what his motivations are.  We have limited space and we don't need to know those things, because the purpose of the NPC being here is to provide a game challenge.

Specifically, that game challenge is to "get" something from the corporal: the treasure of his +1 sword if he's beaten in combat, or knowledge about the keep.  Aside from being a threat or a medieval webpage, he's useless.

Every player that approaches the corporal thinks about him in this way.  If the DM were to create more character underlying the corporal's motivation, the players would assume this was a "game puzzle" that needed deciphering.  The more information we add to the corporal, the larger and more complex the game puzzle must be, in the player's imagination.  At no time and in no way will the players jump to the conclusion that quite possibly the corporal might just be "shooting the shit," because he's bored at his job and this is simply who he is.  The players have been TRAINED to deal with every NPC as a puzzle, a thing to be deciphered so the next important part of the adventure, or "story," can be wormed out and everyone can move onto the next puzzle.

Suppose the player, however, decides the corporal is a real person and decides to talk to him.  "How you doing, nice night out, isn't it, shame it wasn't pork for dinner, I was saying to my friends just yesterday that there seem to be a lot more settlers that have moved in than there were last year ..."

Listening to this, answering, the DM will be thinking, "What is the player doing?  Why isn't the player solving the puzzle?  We're just wasting time."  The DM has no conception of deciding if the corporal maybe likes this player, or is interested in unloading a bit about the Keep being something of a rather pleasant posting, or anything that might lead to the player and the corporal becoming acquaintences.  Instead, the DM will keep turning the subject back towards the adventure's agenda, talking about the Caves of Chaos, or gruffly telling the player to "move on, move on," maintaining the 2D illusion that the corporal is meant to present.  There is no pathway of conversation that would lead the corporal to be anything except "spearcarrier 3" in the mental play the DM has concocted.

So the reader can see, there is no easy way out of the hole.  A 3D character encourages the players to distrust immediately, while players approaching the DM's 2D character is a dead-end.  How do we get out?

The DM's Path

Sorry, I have to start with an example.

Westworld is a 1973 science fiction thriller predominantly revolving around two young men, Peter and John, who visit an android-populated theme park based upon three genres, most notably the standard American western, this being the choice of the main characters.  It is really two movies.  The first part is a fun romp in which the visitors explore the options available to them through the theme park.  The second part begins with an unexpected twist that we don't need to talk about, as nothing about the second half of the film is relevant to this post.

Peter and John arrive in the non-Leone "Wild West" and are given their clothes and weapons.  They get a room at the hotel, visit the bar, get pushed around by the sheriff, kill the sheriff (a couple of times), become outlaws, head into the outback and eventually return to town.  Most of the standard tropes (gunfight, bar fight, bank robbery) are incorporated into the story.

The two men are not given an "adventure" to play.  They are released into a pure sandbox and are expected to make their own fun.  This is doable, since the liquor is real, the guns feel real and "emotionally kill" the androids, the old western furnishings, rooms, clothes and sexy girls all provide a treat for the senses.

It is perhaps unknown to many readers, but Westworld was a smash sensation in 1973.  Everyone saw it and everyone and anyone interested in science fiction or fantasy was blown away by it.  The film made a splash equivalent to Star Wars.  Only, it wasn't marketed through toys and the splash didn't last as long.

The notion that Gygax, Arneson and others, playing and publishing D&D in 1974, weren't greatly influenced by the film is laughable.  Michael Crichton, writer and director of the film, the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, the Andromeda Strain and much else taught them how a sandbox worked.  Unfortunately, a sandbox does not make a very good movie, so the sandbox had to be subverted halfway through in order to ensure the rest of the movie followed the writer's rather cliched science fiction agenda.

When there is no adventure, the bartender is just a bartender.  The sheriff is just there to keep the peace or act crookedly if that power has been allowed to corrupt.  When someone throws a punch, a barfight erupts.  When the bank is robbed, the pieces are reset and the bank is there to get robbed again.  Crichton's idea of a sandbox was very, very simplistic, but it was a theme park and the movie was released in 1973.  Note that I've been specific about the western depicted is not Sergio Leone's ultra-violent unforgiving west, but much more the television west of Gunsmoke.  Crichton and his investors wanted to make money; still, the Gunsmoke version was still sufficient to scare people, as the second half of the film is something of a horror.  Imagine if it had been A Fistful of Dollars.  Or Peckinpah's the Wild Bunch.  Much, much more visceral.

When the denizens in your world are there to serve a personal agenda of yours to walk the party through a pre-designated path, there's room to give the androids (NPCs) a personality.  Instead of existing merely as obstacles or enablers, they may be given the opportunity to genuinely care about the well-being of the party.  We're usually able to imagine NPCs deciding "the party must die," but this is only a tiny part of the equation.  The gruff corporal of the watch might imagine, seeing the party retreat once from the Caves of Chaos and yet be willing to go again, that the party could use a little help on their second journey.  "Here, take my second Gareth with you; and take my sword—but bring it back."  Eventually, the whole keep might be concerned and rooting for the party, with dozens of them camped a safe distance from the Caves and yet ready to give aid should the party stumble out of the bushes.  After all, does anyone in the Keep actually like the Caves being there?

Still, that reaction relies on the players TALKING like human beings to the members of the Keep: sharing information, asking and offering help, demonstrating generosity, telling stories, making peace during a barfight instead of joining in, thus gaining the bartender's good will.  In a real bar, broken furniture and bottles spells destitution and poverty; unlike a movie western, there aren't more tables and bottles in the back that can be set up for the next group of patrons who want to fight.  In a real medieval town, the guard don't show up and arrest the rabble, they strip the rabble of wealth and sell them as slaves to the mines.

The DM has to get out of the headspace that the NPCs are set pieces.  This is difficult to explain.  Let's put a pin in it for the present; this isn't something I'm able to outline directly.  It must be reasoned out.

The Players Path

Another example.  My online party lately discovered a wrecked airship on a tundra plateau a couple of days from civilisation.  They killed the giant spider inside it and discovered some barrels of wine and ale that were intact.  The ship looks to have gone down three years ago.  Retreating because of wounds and needing recovery, they returned in order to collect the barrels and return them to town.  In a heavy rainfall, they set up camp, heard a thump in the night and the next morning, found a nearly dead stone giant had collapsed nearby.  They restored the giant to consciousness, learned the giant had been nearly killed fighting a giant cave bear, learned that the cave bear was still alive and "out there" and that the giant had lost his axe somewhere along his way from the hills to where he collapsed near the ship.

The party decided to recover the axe, which they found lying near a tarn; but then they were attacked by a large wolf with either blink or teleport capabilities.  They struck the wolf a blow, the wolf missed and then disappeared.  The party started back towards the camp and now they are being tracked by the wolf.  That's where we paused the campaign.

The party could have killed the giant but they didn't.  If they had killed the giant, they wouldn't have learned about the cave bear.  They didn't have to help the giant, but they did.  The giant told his story and as far as the party knows, this is the giant's reason for being there.  Not to fight the bear or rid the land of the monster (it is a really, really big bear, not a natural one), but specifically to tell the party about it.

Learning about the missing axe, the party bit and went after the axe.  I did not need to ask them.  Upon encountering the wolf, I'm quite sure the party believes the reason I said the axe was missing was so that I could find an excuse to have them attacked by the wolf.  "A" follows "B."  If I had not dropped the fact about the missing axe, and if they had not agreed to get it, there wouldn't have been a wolf encounter, right?  This is clearly me setting up the adventure as a pre-planned story.  Not a sandbox.

Let me explain this again from my point of view.

The party decides to go into a random piece of Norwegian tundra to look around.  Statistically, they could walk across Norwegian tundra for the entire season and see NOTHING.  No one lives there for a reason.  There's no food, no wood, no precious minerals and it is cold and wet.  There's plenty of potential building stone, but this is NORWAY.  All the building stone we could ever want is within a stone's throw, and down here by the water there is food and wood.  We don't climb 3,000 ft. to get building stone.

As a DM, I am not interested in saying, "It is now September.  You've seen nothing.  What would the party like to do now?"  It's boring.  If the party is going to go up there, might just as well have them find something.  They will eventually, statistically; we might as well maintain momentum and have them find it today.

I picked a downed airship (with a hook), a giant (with a hook), a wolf (with a hook) and a bear (with a hook).  The giant knows about the bear but doesn't know about the wolf (that's a party spoiler, but a minor one and it doesn't matter because the giant will know about the wolf if the party gets back).  The giant dropped the axe because he fell off a mountain after a bad fight with a big bear and realistically, we drop things when we're on the edge of death.  The wolf's appearance is NOT random, and is NOT there so I can throw an random encounter, but to set up the hook; but I can't say what that is just now because that would be a bigger spoiler.

Moreover, the party DECIDED to get the axe.  The giant didn't need them to get it.  The party reasoned that if the bear showed up, then it would be a good idea if the giant was armed; but there is an immense air ship right there with hundreds of pieces of wood, any of which would serve as a club.  The giant HAS a weapon.  He just doesn't have his axe.

The party could sit tight, help the giant heal and then have the giant load the barrels onto their wagon.  The giant is clearly civilized and friendly, erudite, and has told them he was asked by the Count of Bergen (the province north of the party) to kill the cave bear, so the party KNOWS the giant has direct relations with humans.  They could simply ask the giant to return with them to town.  There's no adventure here.  There are things laying around in the sandbox and the players are giving them reasons for being what they are.  I'm just making sure they're all included.

All the hooks depend on the various entities (ship, giant, etc.) having agendas and motivations of their own.  The party isn't being asked to fight the cave bear; they weren't asked to get the axe.  If the party left, the giant would heal, find his own axe, meet the wolf, sort that out and then return to hunting the cave bear.  Like Indiana Jones chasing the Ark, without him the Nazis will still find it; and experience the same consequences.  Eventually.  It's just that with Jones' help, they found the Ark sooner and thus melted sooner.  The party is like Jones.  They're not needed; but if they want to join in, there's room.

Problem is, the party automatically creates what it thinks the DM's intentions MUST be ... and then they chase those intentions because they're willing.  Then they argue that the DM led them into the box they're in ... and this is understandable, because 99 times out of 100, that's exactly what the DM does.  Only, I'm not like that.

Recently, I've grasped that when I say the party doesn't want to bite on the proposed adventure, that there is a black-and-white choice being made.  They either can pursue the adventure or they can pursue some other adventure.  That's not really the case.  Parties almost always go for it when the adventure comes up.  The difference is that I don't have a specific route they should take.  How the party manages the wolf, or meets the bear, or befriends the giant, or reveals the mystery behind the ship, might happen in dozens of ways, none of which I have to invent because that's not my problem.  I'm not the solver.  I'm the designer.  I make the pieces, but I don't promise they fit together in any specific pattern.  The players may imagine that's my goal, because they immediately make a connection when I throw out a possible connector (axe missing) ... but that's more a matter of their jumping at the first thing, not an example of them thinking through their options.

It's hard to make the players understand that the giant is telling his story because he's there, and the players are there, and anyone who had nearly died fighting a big bear would tell that story, regardless of agenda.  Wouldn't you?  It's not a set-up.  It's logical.  There's no stumpy DM stepping out from behind a rock and telling the party that now they must get the axe to move onto the next part of the adventure.

That stumpy DM is there, however, because a bad children's TV show put him in the player's heads.  Unfortunately.

I'll leave the reader to think about what's been said so far, while I think about what I want to say next.

This series continues with Help & Problem Solving