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

My Favorite NPC - Balthazar

Hey, readers!

So, I'm a part of an organization now called the Role-Playing Blog Alliance which is sort of a centralized hub for blogs about the hobby which gives you free advertising and stuff. It's pretty cool. One of the things I noticed on there was something called a 'Blog Carnival' where a blog puts up a topic and everyone that wants to makes a post about that topic.

In the interest of ranting about random topics, as I thoroughly enjoy doing, I decided to throw my hat into the ring!

This month's topic is 'My Favorite NPC.' Now, as someone with near Perma-GM syndrome, this is kind of tricky, because I haven't really played in games long enough to find an NPC that I really, truly enjoyed interacting with. Not to say that there haven't been some great ones, but none that I would elevate to the status of 'My Favorite'.

Of course, I could just be a derp and maybe this topic also includes NPC's you've created and ran, but I digress.

I'm going to cheat a little.

The first D&D campaign that I ran in college was a real treat to run, and at some point I'll probably elaborate more on it, but there came a time where I really wanted to play. So, a friend of mine said that she wouldn't mind running the game for a while and we changed guard. The NPC I am going to describe first showed up during the segment where I was playing, but I decided to bring him back and make him an important part of the plot when I got back in the GM chair after my character's touching death via sacrifice.

Without further ado, let me introduce you all to...

Balthazar

Origin:

Balthazar's origin came at a time where a lot of my player's wanted a nemesis of some kind. My friend Harry, who was playing a Samurai, wanted to have an Oni that killed his mother involved in the plot somewhere, so I allowed that for a bit. Then, my friend Jean, who was playing a Revenant Assassin in service to the Raven Queen, wanted a nemesis of his own. I didn't get a lot of details other than a name, and that he was a former Assassin of the Raven Queen who left the order.

My friend Ellen took the game over for a bit while her character was trapped in a pocket dimension. Fun, right? Well, anyway, she first introduced the character as someone who was working with a mysterious figure known as 'The Occultist' who worked for the bad guys. He didn't have a lot of depth, just a bad-ass Eladrin assassin leading a twisted family of monstrous freaks. We didn't see too much of him.

When I got the reins back, I decided that Jean's nemesis didn't get enough screen time, so the wheels in my head started to turn, and I planted him at a most inopportune moment as a sort of off-the-cuff, unplanned way to prevent my party from doing something nearly suicidal. They were about to go kill a dragon on top of a mountain, who had a macguffin and was also the creator of the Dragonborn in my world. Only one problem, though. If a Dragonborn is hit by this dragon's fire, they turn into ash instantly, since that was the fire that created them. We had two Dragonborn in the party, too, so this was potentially going to be a disaster.

So, there to warn them about the dragon's fire and tell them that there's a way to make the fight much easier was Balthazar. Now, I'm an impressionist, so I enjoy doing cool, strange voices for my NPCs/characters. Somehow or other, by fate or chance, the more I talked as Balthazar, the more he started to sound like a certain celebrity. Not a particularly famous celebrity, mind you, but one that is close to my heart.

John de Lancie.

(I actually met him and shook his hand!!)

And, thus, Balthazar was born.

Appearance:

So, Balthazar is an Eladrin in a world where most of the Eladrin were corrupted into Orcs for messing with the Gods and the ones that remained had some weird sort of destiny. As such, he looks like an elf pretty much, tall and lanky with the pointed ears. Except, I picture him as a little taller and lankier than most, almost skeletal in his appearance but he tries to hide that with his clothing and mannerisms. Long silvery hair cascades down his features, very fine with an almost glittering quality to it. Since Eladrin are practically immortal, or else incredibly long lived, he still has a youthful face, but his piercing blue eyes carry the weight of a thousand years.

Personality:

This is where Balthazar becomes fun. Since the voice started to sound like John de Lancie, I decided to go full-out impressionist and mimic his voice, which lends itself obviously to the 'Q'-like mannerisms. In almost an instant, this originally rather flat NPC became someone the party loved to hate. He always had a snide comment, a taunting air of superiority with a twinge of boredom because, after living so long, he has experienced almost everything. Balthazar is a man looking for his destiny that was apparently promised to him by the Gods, and his search has brought him into almost every profession and walk of life to no avail. He possesses an Ecclestiastian mentality that everything is meaningless in the view of mortality and death, and there is nothing he loves more than tearing down the hopes and beliefs of those around him, playing Devil's Advocate to every position because he knows better. In fact one of his most memorable quotes was the following:

"I love destroying religion. That's why I pick on the little one." - Balthazar, in regards to a young cleric in the party.

Oh, and he's kinda flamboyant, but that goes with the voice.

Why He's My Favorite:

In all of my years of GM'ing, I have never had an NPC that engaged the party to the level that Balthazar has. Come to think of it, in all my years of acting, this is the character that I'm most comfortable improving, and almost everything he said was gold. For this reason, the players kept him around in the party because he always had a secret, always had something to say, and kept the advantage as long as he could. We would have conversations that lasted for a half hour, debating things, talking about the past, the future, all of it a duel of wits which Balthazar almost always won. All off the cuff.

Come to find out, he's also the son of the main bad-guy, and that father and son team had enough persuasive power and were in such an opportune position that almost half the party joined their cult in order to get the last macguffin. Yeah, that's right. This NPC was so powerful by personality and presence alone that he could get half the party to join the cult that was hounding them the entire campaign.

Of course, he betrayed the party when the time was right, but that backfired. His father was killed, and he was left for dead in this huge pool at the bottom of an ancient, extra-dimensional plumbing system that was designed to feed blood to a vampiric dragon.

Yeah, you wish your campaign was that awesome.

And, even after all he had done, all of the snide comments and backstabbing and arrogance, they let him live.  For a party whose strategy was kill everything in sight, this is pretty significant.

These are the reasons why Balthazar is my favorite NPC ever. Yes, I ran him and played him, but it wasn't the cool factor or even my contributions that made him the best. It was the level that he affected the party, changed the way they viewed the story and the game. He made the game awesome, and you can't deny that kind of power that I have yet to see recreated.

That's my story! Hope you enjoyed it. If not, here's a funny picture.

-Wes