NPC Overload: Why I Hate Council Meetings

Hello, readers!

This will likely be the last post for this year, and hopefully the new year will be much more active with my musings! Thank you all for reading, commenting over on Google+, and all such things.

Today I'd like to talk about an issue that I have come across once or twice in my earlier career as a Game-Master and have been trying my best to avoid ever-since. Sometimes it's an isolated incident that can be plowed through and hopefully forgotten. Other times, it's a situation that lingers and seems to get worse and worse as time goes on. I'll try to explain the issue below and see if I can brainstorm some ideas to avoid or lessen this problem.

I speak, of course, of NPC overload.

The first four years of gaming that I experienced through High School was dominated by Star Wars games. Our group started with the Revised Core Rulebook, and eventually migrated to Saga after realizing how much better it handled the universe. Edition isn't important, however, especially in regards to this topic. I bring up Star Wars because there was one major element that groups that contained one Jedi or more had to encounter at some point.

Jedi Council meetings.

I mean, you can't just have some semi-important Jedi running around without having to report to a Council eventually, and how many times can you say that most of the delegates are gone? Therefore, the players have to approach the Council and discuss their mission or ask for something, and you as the GM have to play all of them. Needless to say, it can be daunting, even if you have a cheat sheet with the names of various council members and maybe one or two adjectives to describe their personality.

No matter how good your Yoda voice is, you start to sound like you have really severe schizophrenia, and it can be boggling for both you and your players. Let's not even get into what happens when parts of the council start to disagree and you wind up having an argument with yourself while your players stare at you funny.

Unfortunately, this isn't limited to just meetings of a body of delegates. This can happen any time there is more than one important NPC in a scene that requires interaction. Try running the Masters of Evil and suddenly you have to speak for a bunch of villains at once. Or maybe there's an NPC in the party, and they have an important connection to a villain, and you find yourself talking to yourself again while the players sit back and watch.

I call this NPC overload, which can either mean one of two things.

1: You have the party interacting with a large group of different NPCs, or NPCs are interacting with each other for an extended period of time.

2: The actions of NPCs in interactions are so detailed and complicated that it leaves the players out of important events.

Obviously, a good GM should avoid #2 at all costs and try to involved the player's as much as possible, even when two NPCs are spatting or having an argument. Players should always be the focus of events, and if the other characters are getting in the way of that, things need to be rearranged. If you're just going to have a bunch of your characters doing important things, why not write a book instead of running a game?

However, #1 can be an issue for even seasoned GM's at one point or another. What can we do to mitigate this problem, or make it more accessible/enjoyable for all involved?

Here are some suggestions:

1: In a meeting/summit/council type situation where all of the members are pretty much in agreement, simply divide up answers between council members/voices. Maybe the first one on the list answers the first question, or two and three make a point together in response to something a player said. It takes getting used to at first, but this generally helps these difficult events flow, at the very least.

2: If two NPCs are arguing, involve the players between every back and forth. Give them a chance to interject what they think, end the argument, or support one side or another. If you feel like you've been talking to yourself for too long, you probably have been.

3: Limit your active NPCs per scene. Any more than two can get complicated, and three's a crowd. Make sure your players are the center of every scene, even when dealing with very important characters like the main villain or the ruler of the land.

3.5: Don't send a group when one can do the job. (For non-combat, anyway.)

For myself, this issue has mostly been resolved, either by avoidance or using some of the strategies above to make it tolerable. However, since I haven't talked at length with too many game-masters about this side of the hobby, I'm not sure if this is just me, or a further epidemic! Let me know if this comes up in your games, and how you handle it!

Hope you enjoyed this little article on NPC overload. If not, here's a funny picture.

-Wes

Metaplot: Flavorful Setting Dressing or Harbinger of Doom?

Hello, readers!

As you may or may not know, over the last couple of years White Wolf has been working on making 20th anniversary editions of some of their classic lines. Referred to as the old World of Darkness (or Classic), these lines gathered enough of a following in the 90's to sit themselves as probably the second most popular line of roleplaying games after Dungeons and Dragons. Vampire the Masquerade started the charge, and the setting expanded to include werewolves, mages, ghosts, mummies, demons, the Fae...

Yeah, it was a veritable monster mash drenched in grunge, leather, tattoos, and conspiracy.

I was quite a fan of Masquerade, even though I got into the hobby when these books were out of print and the new World of Darkness was just starting. The video game, VtM: Bloodlines, is what really drew me in and I dug up some old books to quench my growing curiosity about this interpretation of the creatures of the night. Thankfully, this pulled me into the Vampire fandom before Twilight came and bred disgust and anger. While I didn't run or play a lot of it, Masquerade always held a special place in my heart, even after Requiem came out.

Why were they changing everything, I wondered? What was wrong with the Camarilla, Anarchs, and Sabbat? Was the Cain legend too definitive for the modern day where we can't be really sure of anything anymore? It seems I was blissfully unaware of one major thing that the World of Darkness lines had that eventually spelled their doom.

Metaplot.

For those of you who don't know, this basically means that, in the established setting, things changed between books as things moved in the fiction. Major NPCs did things, powers came in and out of fashion, Clans joined and left organizations, and every edition or book seemed to scramble things a little and all lead to some sort of end-of-the-world scenario for each line. Of course, this end-of-the-world needed to be spelled out at some point, and in 2004, the meta-plot ended with three novels and books that presented the Storyteller with some ideas on how to map out Gehenna, or the Apocalypse, or whatever flavor of Armageddon your horror monster was facing.

According to those older than I was, this metaplot became incredibly confusing, and if you didn't buy almost every book that came out from White Wolf for your line of choice, it was easy to get lost. Things became more and more ridiculous, and things fell apart until most people were convinced that the metaplot needed to either be ignored or thrown out.

While what happened to White Wolf was likely a result of poor planning and too many chefs in the kitchen, that left me in an interesting place, because the idea of a metaplot was intriguing to me. You mean, a setting can change organically from the powers that be? It was a new and exciting idea to me, that settings can evolve. A familiar sandbox could grow, or have new toys, or at least different toys, maybe even based on input from the community?

That leads me to this question: is metaplot in a setting a bad thing? I don't think that is necessarily so. It is tricky, and has a lot of negative points, but maybe a well-handled meta-plot could even enhance a game line, or give it direction that it was lacking.

Let's bring this to Vampire, since it is the setting I'm most familiar with in the White Wolf scheme of things. Requiem brought with it a setting that erased the definitive nature of the metaplot. No more scheming Elders, no more Cain, no more over-arching Camarilla, no more Gehenna. No one knows how Vampires came to be, but all these organizations have different ideas and methods on how to run things, and they all coexist and battle out for supremacy, city by city. This made the game completely customizable, which is great.

But, something was missing. Comparing the two side-by-side, I feel like I have more of an idea about what sort of game I could run in Masquerade rather than Requiem. Sometimes, there is a thing as too much freedom, and I got that feeling while reading a lot of the other new World of Darkness lines. Take out the Wyrm, and what do Werewolves do? I guess they're just... Spirit police? Don't even get me started on Changeling. I was more Lost than they were when trying to puzzle out what kind of stories you can tell from the base book alone. It was an overwhelming feeling of, "That's great...Then what?"

The White Wolf examples aside, there are a lot of problems inherit with metaplot. While it can add great flavor, it also potentially detracts from changes to the setting that happens organically in game. Oh, your players killed the Prince, who in this new book, leads some sort of revolution? Whoops. Your players took down the Camarilla in Paris? Guess this new thing doesn't make sense now. The setting can never truly take account of your characters because the publishers likely don't know about them, so whether they are major power players or not, things will happen without them to a pre-determined end. That takes a lot of wind out of the players sails, even if the Storyteller edits the new developments to fit your version of the setting. It almost feels like it doesn't matter what you do since the setting moves on and ends without you, potentially.

That argument could be countered by the 'Use what you want' rule that most of these books implied, but the feeling could still remain.

Metaplot is also hard to keep track of. Settings are often broad, and if handled in the White Wolf fashion which slapped something new into almost every book (and there were a lot of them), it is incredibly easy to lose people under the weight of new developments. It does have the benefit of creatively using justifications in the setting to explain new rules in an edition update, but that could be outweighed by the amount of stuff you miss if you just buy a couple supplements and not all of them. Roleplaying books are expensive, even in the advent of Drive-Thru RPG and the like. Does a company really want to force a player to buy everything to see how things progress?

Heh, kinda sounds like comic book series. Not that those settings ever evolve...

Anyway.

Detractors aside, I think a setting could really benefit from some smart ideas regarding this concept. Maybe books that advance the metaplot could be written in a way that emphasizes the players rather than established NPCs? Maybe the creators could regularly poll its community to see what developments they want to see? Maybe some of these books could come with clearly defined options for what happens next, almost like how White Wolf handled the 'End-of-the-world' books?

I don't know, but I think there's untapped potential in an experiment that may have horribly backfired and ruined a line in the past. This is the age of the internet! Companies interact with their communities now more than ever, especially when it comes to role-playing with the advent of small press. Push the boundaries of setting, developers! Don't just define, refine, change!

Okay, that's enough ranting. I hope you enjoyed this article. If not, here's a funny picture.

-Wes

Gaming Update - December 2013

Hey there, readers!

It has been quite some time since I last posted on here, but I'm not dead yet! My blogging senses are tingling, and I'd like to get back into this after my hiatus. So, I thought that before digging into the meat of the things that are spinning around my head concerning the RP hobby, I should let you all know where I stand in the life of a gamer.

Because dividing things up is fun, I'll be breaking this up into little sections! I don't want this post to go on and on, so I'll  be brief.

Games That Have Ended/Have Been Postponed:

Marvel Civil War - Due to a few players having to bow out for various reasons or having spotty schedules, this game has been postponed. We were going to move on to Annihilation instead, but that was soon nixed due to several factors. So, with mixed feelings, this game has ended, and may be picked back up sometime around next Summer, by my estimation, if at all.

Marvel Origins: Avengers - I ended my game after a few sessions for a couple of reasons. The most prominent reason was that my Wednesday nights kept getting busy, so it was hard to maintain a steady rhythm. Secondly, while I think the game was going just fine, I started to get a little burnt out with some of the elements that just weren't working in my mind. One of those big ones was the Hulk, who's player never showed up, but remained a potential 'Instant Win' button that could be pressed, and the players treated him more like a weapon than a character. Another was the abilities of the characters, which was my own fault, really. I felt that the power level was just a touch high from what I had originally envisioned, which made presenting challenging encounters difficult. So, I may pick this up again someday. We'll see.

Games That I Left:

Dresden Files: Detroit - The group that I was playing X-Men with moved onto a game of Dresden Files, based on the FATE system. Things were going rather alright, and I had a character I rather liked. Unfortunately, my Mondays started to get difficult to schedule around, and my enthusiasm for the game faded as a result. Couple that with the fact that I wasn't really feeling the setting, and I decided to leave.

Games That Continue Intermittently:

Teen Titans - Our group managed to finish the first Act after about a year of inconstant schedules and trying to get everyone corralled. All of the players really want the game to continue, and I do too to an extent, but it is a combination of being in the right mood and getting this new act set-up, which I haven't done completely yet. However, I am far from canning this game due to the potential, so it continues on, when I get to it and the players are free!

New Games I'm Playing:

Marvel Tales 1964 - On the newly reformed Margaret Weis forums, a call went out to do a similar mission statement that I had originally discussed on here in the past. Creating a new Marvel universe from starting at the beginning of these character's stories and seeing where they go. However, our GM took a more classic approach, re-adapting existing comics and running them as sessions with the three main groups: Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men, running a different group every week. I'm playing Wasp, Mr. Fantastic, and Jean Grey, respectively. While I may get into more detail later, let's just say that this is probably the most fun I've had in an online RP since my first run of Breakout last year.

X-Force - There is a group on Facebook called 'The Doom Pool', which is for fans of MHRP. The person who runs it was getting rather tired of the lack of games seeking players and decided to start a bit of Breakout with characters from X-Force. Hoping to help him out, I joined as Wolfsbane. The game has been interesting so far, and I find myself reunited with a player from my Marvel Origins game, which is a treat.

Unknown Title of a Pathfinder Game - One of my friends, who plays in a few of my games, is running his own game back at the college I used to attend, and I am able to join them through the magic of the internet and the times I come to visit. This Pathfinder game takes place in a world between worlds, so to speak, where all magic channels through in every universe, and most of it takes place in the sky. I play a feline rogue who is married to her vices, and the other characters are great to interact with. The plot is just getting going, but I am excited to see how things unravel.

New Games I'm Running:

The Barrier Gem Prophecy: Arms Race - Lovingly called 'The Sequel' by my players, this is a sequel to a campaign I ran for a group of fresh-faced college Freshman who had either never played a table-top RPG before or had done so only once or twice. With some wonderful changes like switching from D&D 4 to Pathfinder, we begin the next chapter in the tale of my custom made fantasy world as it deals with the aftermath of the first campaign. We've only done the first session thus-far, but it went incredibly well, and it was great to see old characters brought back and new characters thrown into the mix.

The Near and Present Future:

My GM itch is getting to me, and my mind has been running with ideas. I feel like I'm almost ready to try my hand at running something online again, hopefully with more success than I had previously. What will it be? Who knows! Part of me has really gotten back into Vampire the Masquerade, so that's an option, and I'm always up for Marvel Heroic. *Shrugs!*

So, that's my gaming update! Hope you enjoyed it. If not, here's a funny picture.

-Wes