How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs

Re:How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs by StavrosK on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:03PM (#23313590)

I haven't read many other books on the topic, but the Fate Core guide book[0] is an amazing resource for this (and Fate is a great system in itself). It really goes into a bunch of detail about how to make the game fun for your players, e.g. it mentions that dying makes players feel bad, but the bigger problem is that death is boring, and it's much better to put your player in a situation where they have to be creative to escape.

[0]: Available under pay-what-you-like here: https://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/

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Re:How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs by smogcutter on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @04:10PM (#23315854)

I love the philosophy behind Fate, but in practice the mechanics left me cold. Writing good character aspects is trickier than it should be: there’s a sweet spot of specific enough to be limited and actionable, but broad enough to be useful in practice, and it’s hard to hit.

Then the game can be so interpretive and improvisational that it actually comes out the other side as less immersive than a crunchier game like D&D. Players spend less time role-playing and more time talmudically studying their character sheets for ways they can apply their aspects to a given situation.

In contrast, I’m a big fan of old(ish) school Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium, not the d20 version). The mechanics are concrete, straightforward, and get the hell out of the way when you don’t need them. Character sheets embed a lot of info about who a character is without turning into a script for role-playing.

Obviously mileage will vary. Some groups will really grok Fate and love it; mine didn’t. Regardless of whether you even wind up playing the game, it’s a good read for any DM just for its take on things.

Edit to add: I’ve also used Fate’s character creation system to help make characters for short stories, and it worked really well. I’d never do that with something like a D&D character sheet.

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Re:How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs by pspeter3 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:40PM (#23317275)

Yeah, I think of FATE as the assembly language of RPGs. You can use it to build any experience you want but it's hard to setup on the first try. It definitely works better for short stories.

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Re:How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs by cpeterso on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:20PM (#23313825)

Another good resource is Graham Walmsley's "Play Unsafe: How to work less, player harder and add stories to your game". It's a short book about applying techniques from improv acting to your role-playing games to support player creativity and participation.

http://theunstore.com/index.php/unstore/game/49

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-play-unsaf...

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