Jan 12 2009
Characters on the Fly
I spent last week talking about ways to make an in-depth, detailed character. But sometimes, that’s not what you need. It’s the middle of session, or you’re in the middle of a scene and can’t take the time to detail extras. You need a character for living scenery, or a list of names and what stands out about them, like a character’s potential tavern-buddies or the other agents in a top-secret organization. And you don’t have time to do all the steps right now.
What do you do?
Figure out the minimum, fill it in, and come back to the rest. That’s the key to speedy character generation.
This method requires one item of prepwork, just to make the rest of the process more straightforward: know your character pool. For any given location or scene, figure out the general class of people you’re likely to see there: commoners? Catty wig people? Lesser small gods? Students? Fully trained secret agents? Dog walkers? If you know ahead of time, you’ll know exactly what to toss into the scene when it’s needed.
Once you’ve got your basic class of individual, it’s time to figure out what elements you’re going to need. Purpose probably isn’t something you’ll need to think about too much—if you’re flash-generating characters, you’re generating them for a reason, and that reason is their purpose. Physical appearance to a certain degree can help, but doesn’t require too much detail, and might even be counterproductive on a list of names. The rest depends on what kinds of flash-generated characters they are.
The most common kind is living scenery. In a Hollywood movie, they’re the random people that make up the crowds, with no speaking part and no purpose beyond being A Population. The children chasing a chicken down the street, the old men playing chess or cards, the merchant talking a mile a minute, the horse that tries to raid the pockets of everyone that walks past it: they’re scenery. (Granted, the horse might not seem like “just scenery” to a character packing sugar who walks too close, but I digress.) Generally, with these characters, all you need is a vague description, which may or may not include a distinguishing feature. Distinguishing features make the scene feel less generic, but they also invite interaction by being Interesting. Keep that in mind.
Occasionally, the living scenery will need to interact with someone. Perhaps they’re delivering messages, or making presentations, or just waiting for those heroic lunkheads to move so they can finish mopping the floor. Conversely, they might have been sought out—witnesses to an important event, shopkeepers when one of the characters really wants a bag of dried fruit and is feeling chatty, or just distinctive enough that they must have something to say. They’ll need everything standard living scenery has, plus a demeanor (how are they speaking? How are they reacting to those talking to them?). Once a background character has a speaking part, a name might be necessary, so keep something from which you can pluck names handy.
Then you have the contact. This is the next step up in last-minute characterization; often they’re not detailed either because nobody’s expressed that big an interest in them, or because the character they’re supposed to be wasn’t ready and the GM is stalling until a preparation break or a gap between sessions. These sorts of characters often appear in professional organizations, on ships, and in well-frequented taverns; they’re expected to recur and meant to be expressed interest in. The minima for a contact are usually name, appearance, distinguishing feature, demeanor, partial background. Some contacts are meant as conversation-bait, meant to attract the characters’ interest and get them starting conversations; to create one of these, the easiest thing to do is to choose distinguishing features that hint at secrets, appeal to the characters themselves, or could be useful for the characters’ purposes (when the group, looking for people to help with a party, went to a community of god-animals, I randomly generated a corgi kitemaker, a bat who bred and trained fireflies, an aye-aye portrait artist, and others.
What you’re basically doing is tossing up a wire frame and chucking a cloth over it, then stuffing parts underneath when the characters look away. Slightly underhanded? Possibly. But it works, and it lets you fill your worlds without having to pre-generate massive numbers of characters you’ll never use; moreover, it lets you float concepts, and see which ones you’re going to have to fill out before you start going to the effort.
Needless to say, this is a vital addition to your toolkit.
Want to do more with secondary characters? The site hub is here.
One thing that bugs me: that whole “distinguishing feature” dealie. Yeah, people are all unique. But it’s not immediately evident. For over 2/3 of my friends, I could not look at them and point out something distinguishing about them. I would say the same about myself, had I not been told that I could be identified by my grammar.
I think, though, that the real trick is to make a better phrase than ‘distinguishing feature’. Perhaps ‘key feature’ would be better. Say, someone in a medieval-tech-level setting with a knife at his belt. Sure, a good amount of people at that tech level have a knife at their belt. It’s way too handy a tool. But by mentioning it, the person with the knife is regarded as practical, someone who carries something necessary, but not larger than they need. Someone who can take care of themself.
I love objects with symbolism. I think I was trying to make a point there, though, and it got lost. Oh, well.
Brick: A distinguishing feature doesn’t have to be unique, just comparatively unusual, enough so that it gets noted, or defining of the character. I’d use the streak in Ruby’s hair as a distinguishing feature, sure, but I could just as easily use the hyper and somewhat childlike demeanor, despite the fact that it’s shared by several NPCs and one former PC. It’s enough to be different.
Aywren: Process–yeah, that’s a bit trickier. When I’m designing a character on the fly, what it basically comes down to is tossing out a few details (name, appearance, region of origin if relevant, Thing To Remember Them By since that’ll help me make sure I remember them), then simultaneously acting as that character and doing the mental equivalent of one of those bubble-diagram exercises to add details.
One time I had to come up with a list of people one of the PCs had gotten to know when he’d joined an organization. I knew what they had in common: they were all fighters at heart, one way or another. So it was mostly figuring out what differentiated them from each other. The most developed of these started as “The best horse-archer of the lot.” Then I started bubbling off of it, mostly through asking questions. Where was she from? The desert region; I’d committed to that with her name. What else might that mean? …she likes spicy food. (Fun fact: there are evolutionary reasons why food tends to run spicier in hotter climates!) Hm, she’s from thereabouts, which city? Okay, that one will do. Though how did she interact with the gender roles there, and how did that change now that she’s not there….? Okay, got that; he’s probably going to ask about her politics at some point, so what’s her likeliest answer, and how do I justify it?
A lot of what I do is an instinctive process, and I’m having to pick it apart as I write–so expect a lot of these sorts of articles, and increased coherency as I figure out how to put words to what I’m doing. (I’m hoping to become The Place To Go for this sort of characterization, after all!)
“I might suggest a LARGE HAM!”
- Brian Blessed
Where would we be without the burly publican? Brusque monologues would go unsaid, counters would go unwiped. Who would tell us to go to the cave?
Who would tell us… not to go to the cave?
I am personally guilty of making a very large number of similar burly publicans, most of whom had names like Berntly Snaggleton and seemed to be in charge of everything for no apparent reason. I’ve also made:
- Mild-mannered, softly spoken religious leaders
- Urbane but distracted elven generals who are always busy
- Crazy old hedgewizards with unkempt hair
I have even been known to make judicious use of the Axebeard Rule, although with dwarves I don’t tend to play too close to type.
I put in a lot of effort with my central and supporting characters, but outside of the main focus the my incidental characters are the worst kind of boilerplate, approaching that of the Pokemon games. To be fair - as in Pokemon - players generally don’t notice.
*chuckles* Wow, that boilerplate? (Imagines some poor pre-translation NPC yelling “Why is my designation noun MINISKIRT?”)
I find myself not using types too much. Okay, there’s the occasional Lad Who’s In Way Over His Head But Trying Anyway, and I seem to have a soft spot for slightly obsessive, very driven lady bureaucrats devoted to pet projects that tend to be variations on saving the world from itself, and granted there are the anthropomorphic god-creatures who were once familiars before they lost their people…. but other than that, it’s really hard for me to come up with categories for my supportives.
They’re not always boilerplate. Sometimes I’ll pull a character from the ol’ cipher bag to fill a space, it’s true, but I try not to introduce an empty character space without planning for it at least a little.
Also, it’s sometimes just a jumping-off point. The character of Tallian Brighthammer is actually kind of interesting… the process I used to arrive at his name, somewhat less so.
I should mention that some of my more favoured characters have been in extremely minor roles… one such was completely absent, being an encyclopedia scholar who died centuries before the time of the story. Nevertheless the players referred to him on many occasions by name, as his magnum opus became one of their major reference points.
As an aside, that was something that worked very well - an encyclopedia written in a highly distinctive style, which the players collected fragments of during their journeys. It played out well for several reasons:
- It allowed paced delivery of the backstory that could be introduced at slow points to add some extra atmosphere, since the fragments could be found anywhere. Given that the game took place among the ashes of a collapsed empire and information was short, this was a big help for incongruous information
- I’d made the thing as a series of actual pages in a binder, so when more pages were found the players received them physically, which they seemed to like
- One of the players actually took charge of the thing and would advise on the basis of its information - “The Encyclopedia’s entry on sailing mentions this phenomenon”
- It only ever appeared in fragments so I NEVER HAD TO WRITE AN ENTIRE ENCYCLOPEDIA, something which I can’t stress the importance of enough…
But, the practical result was that, even though the scholar who wrote it never appeared directly in the story, they still talked about him all the time. An absentee character.
Just enjoyed the mental image, is all.
I like the scholar; that’s a really nifty trick. It wouldn’t work quite as well for my style of running, more’s the pity, and the last time I tried to come up with “files” for my group I was running behind and never actually finished it. I do, however, drop quotes from historians and writers who didn’t exist a moment ago pretty much constantly. There was an article I read a while back–one of Limyaael’s, the inspiring ones often are–that had said a world was ready when it could create a certain kind of document, and went on to link an essay that referenced some scholar or another philosophy or an author or a historical figure just about every other sentence. I can’t do that yet, not even in the worlds that are already half-made for me, but I try to come close.
I suppose it’s what I get for having players who perpetually visit people with decent-sized libraries and ask me what’s on the bookshelves. Some of the books are almost flash-characters in their own right.
Thanks! I’m really flattered.