Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 1,147
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Bob Conley over at http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/ had a looooong blog post today which had a little gem towards the bottom regarding what he thinks about for each NPC that he creates that I wanted to share with folks.
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Coupling these or similar methods for NPC creation with RW (which WOULD create interlinkages)...niiiiiice. |
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#1 |
Junior Member
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: Oregon, USA
Posts: 2
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I agree. I've been trying to do something similar. My biggest problem is pruning out the unneeded or redundant entries for each new NPC. It would be nice if we could set up a template for various categories. So for NPCs, I only want these categories to show up and for locations I only need these categories.
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#2 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 281
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Good find AEIOU. This will definitely percolate through my brain on how to handle NPCs in the future. This really could be a powerfully simple way to template NPCs in Realm Works.
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#3 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Bennekom, Netherlands
Posts: 206
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I only ask myself what motivates the NPC. Knowing their motivations helps in determining their reaction to PC actions. Usually this motivation also gives an idea how they act towards others.
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#4 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Texas
Posts: 707
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#5 |
Member
Join Date: Sep 2013
Location: Limal, Belgium
Posts: 98
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Just by curiosity : could you please put the 7 magic sentences here?
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#6 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Rochester, MN
Posts: 1,517
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Perhaps the magic of internet search could help here? (For me, the first three items of that search included it.)
ObTopic: It's been a long time since I had to flesh out NPCs as long-term characters vs. short-term obstacles. (Convention length events don't need a lot of fleshing out, and my recent campaigns came from published sources.) The two important things for me were "What's (his/her/its) goals?" and "What methods will (he/she/it) use to accomplish them?" Last edited by Parody; February 20th, 2015 at 04:54 AM. |
#7 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 1,147
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The intro to the article starts with a 7-sentence NPC example: "Rand the Elder is a blacksmith who has spent all his life in Arabel. He is a tall man with a heavy black beard. Rand is known for his great strength (16), skill as a blacksmith, and rather dim wit (Int 7). He values his family above all, is honest to a fault, and has a great fondness for music. Uncomfortable and a man of few words with strangers, he is talkative and likes to sing with his close friends. With his shop on the main thoroughfare, he hears many of the tales from outside the city, but often gets the facts mixed up due to his slow wit. He talks in a deep, slow drawl and pulls at his beard when talking to others."
As I've noted in the past, the LWD team has already captured much of this in RW already. What the article sparked in me was "ahhhh, THAT's a way to use the snippets more effectively; THAT's a nice way to lay things out." The explanations and examples in the article helped me wrap my head around entering NPCs. I'd love for the RW manual to flesh out several examples of entries in different genres to help users visualize the potential easier. 1) Occupation and History 2) Physical description 3) Attributes and Skills 4) Values and Motivations 5) Interactions with others 6) Useful knowledge 7) Distinguishing feature |
#8 |
Member
Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 31
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Quote:
Great thread. Going to hunt up that Dragon article and steal ideas from you fine people. |
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#9 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Texas
Posts: 707
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As nimble the halfling rogue would say "steal??? That's such a harsh word. We prefer acquire or re-appropriate." 😃
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#10 |
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