You know what’s great about being a player? You don’t have to be good at anything. You don’t even have to read the rules. You just have to show up. And most GMs will bend over backward to remove anything from the game that makes it remotely ‘hard’ or ‘tedious’ or ‘not fun’ for you. There’s not a single aspect of RPGs I haven’t seem some GM try to remove from the game because it’s ‘ruining the game’ for his players. Including tracking f$&%ing hit points. Meanwhile, as a GM, you’re reading this godawful s$&% on my site every week because you WANT to get better at running games. You feel OBLIGATED to. The players and the rest of the damned gaming community make you feel like you have to.

And it ain’t easy to get better as a GM. Especially when you’re dealing with someone like me. I’m not a nice, friendly, mollycoddling kindergarten teacher who makes you feel special no matter what. I’m a f$&%ing drill sergeant. I’m constantly breaking you down so I can try to rebuild you as a passable GM. I ain’t afraid to tell you when you’re wrong and when you suck. That hurts. And worst of all, I constantly remind you that the human brain is an imperfect, irrational lump of goo that doesn’t work as well you wish it did. And if you try to claim that you’re special – that you’re above average – I remind you that the statistical likelihood is that you aren’t. Your brain is just as crappy, irrational, emotional, and biased as everyone else’s.

To be fair, I do that because, once you understand how your brain actually works instead of how you wish it did, you can lean into your ACTUAL strengths and minimize your ACTUAL weaknesses. And you can design better, more satisfying, and more engaging games for all the flawed brains you’re trying desperately to entertain.

Try that s$&% with players. Try telling them that what they are saying is wrong because their brain doesn’t work like that and they can’t see it because their brain won’t let them. Try saying something like:

No, you’re not good at multitasking. No one is. There’s no such thing. You’re just switching your focus between two different tasks. And there is a scientifically documented switching lag and also a lingering sluggishness after each switch. So, when you’re dividing your time between my game and your Instagram feed, you make decisions and respond more slowly, you speak in shorter sentences and use more closed language, and you forget more s$&% that I then have to repeat.

Players don’t believe you. They think they’re special. They think, “yeah, maybe the AVERAGE person is like that or maybe MOST people are like that, but not ME. I’m good at multitasking and you’re just being a selfish a$&hole because you have to be the center of attention.” I know. I’ve had that exact conversation.

Why do I bring that up in this especially long, Long, Rambling Introduction™? Well, today’s topic dujour of the day is creating and portraying relatable NPCs. Specifically, it’s about how to minimize the work you have to do when making and portraying relatable NPCs because you can’t hold enough in your head to do it properly and you suck at role-playing. As a longtime fan of mine, you’re going to take all that s$%& in stride. You have no pride left. You’ll just say, “I never thought about it like that, but yeah, this is probably just another way my brain sucks. Thanks, Angry, for helping me by making me feel like s$&%.” If I tried to explain to a player how the way they learned to make PCs is wrong and it doesn’t take into account how the human brain actually kind of sucks at role-playing, I’d just get a fight.

But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The second part of this article – coming in the next day or so to make up for my unplanned health-related absence over the last two weeks – is an article you can let your players read that offers the same kind of advice I’m about to give to you. Because they suck at role-playing and need to learn how to make characters better. Especially because their favorite games are telling them to make characters and role-play wrong. And I’m going to try desperately to do it without offending their delicate player sensibilities by suggesting they might be bad at anything because they are a completely normal, average humans.

But today, I just get to tell you why you suck at role-playing and how to work around that.

The Only GMing Advice Worth a Damn

In this series’ last article, I talked about building relatable NPCs. I told you that you can’t make players like – or hate – NPCs. The only thing you can do is fill your world with NPCs that people might like – or hate – and hope they latch on to one or two. And the key, I said, was learning how to trick the flawed brains at your table into thinking that imaginary game constructs they can’t even see are actually human beings just like them. Fortunately, the stupid human brain actually wants to mistake everything in the world for human beings. So all you have to do is give your game constructs a couple of qualities that human brains associate with humanity and the stupid brains will do the rest. Remember?

I rattled off this list of seven broad categories of traits you could assign to NPCs that would help your players mistake them for humans. We call that relatability, by the way. The traits were:

• Personality
• Vulnerability, Fear, and Pain
• Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations
• Values, Virtues, and Beliefs
• Flaws and Failings
• Self-Awareness
• Challenge, Growth, and Agency

Of course, that list makes the whole ‘relatable NPC’ thing seem impossible, doesn’t it? The RPG world is filled with a near infinity of imaginary beings and you – the GM – have to be able to conjure up new imaginary beings out of the ether at a moment’s notice. How the motherloving f$&% are you supposed to assign seven different humanizing traits to an infinite pile of imaginary beings. And portray them effectively? Especially given that you – as a human being – can’t actually role-play very well at all. You do it by applying the only trustworthy piece of GMing advice you’ll ever get from someone who doesn’t have ‘Angry’ and ‘GM’ and ‘The’ in his name.

When people ask, “how the hell am I supposed to build an entire world for my RPG campaign,” the answer is always the same: “start small and build.” It’s the single most common piece of GMing advice you’ll find anywhere. And, as f$&%ing unbelievable as this is, it’s totally and completely correct. It’s actually the single most useful piece of advice you can give any homebrewer GM about anything they want to homebrew. It’s the one thing everyone gets right. Because even a stupid clock is right once in its stupid life, apparently.

If you want to make a relatable NPC, you have to start small and build. And I’ll tell you how to do that right after I get done telling you why any other approach is going to fail.

You Suck at Role-Playing

You don’t want to make it too hard to role-play and portray NPCs because you’re not very good at role-playing and portraying NPCs. Which is okay because nobody is. Our brains aren’t really wired for that s$&%. Not completely. But they are wired to fake it.

Now, I’m distinguishing between role-playing NPCs and portraying NPCs. And that’s important. Because you can actually be pretty good at portraying NPCs. It’s the role-playing thing that you’re bad at and have to fake. But that’s okay. Because, as a GM, you actually don’t need to role-play. And you don’t want to.

To be clear, role-playing is what you’re doing when you project yourself into the mind of an imaginary person in a hypothetical situation and try to figure out what that imaginary person would do. Role-playing is about making the choices someone else would make. Portraying a character – acting – is about engaging in certain behaviors and adopting certain mannerisms to convince other people you’re a different person. And you can do one without the other. When you role-play, you could describe all of the actions of the fictional person in a totally detached, dispassionate, and third-person way and you’d still be role-playing. And most actors in movies don’t role-play. That is, most actors don’t actually have to figure out what their characters would do in a given situation. Keanu Reeves didn’t decide how Neo would respond when Rufus killed his dog with a time-traveling phone booth. The person who wrote the story did that. And Keanu didn’t have to decide what Neo should say to Patrick Swayze to convince him there was a bomb on a speeding bus. The screenwriter did that. Yes, some actors DO help make decisions like that. They work with the director and the writers to help them decide what the character will do. But lots don’t. They just adopt the mannerisms of their character and play out the script.

Now, fictional characters don’t act like normal humans. If fictional characters behave like normal humans, we call them unrealistic or poorly written. I s$%& you not. That’s something that authors, screenwriters, and actors have to learn pretty early on. So, when you’re acting, you’re trying to trick people into thinking something that absolutely doesn’t behave like a human is actually a very realistic human. Amazingly, that s$&% works. It just shows how desperate your brain is to see humanity in everything. Except for actual, real humans anyway.

When you’re role-playing though, you’re trying to figure out how something that should actually act like a real human would act in a given situation. Which means there’s already a conflict between acting and role-playing. Fortunately, we can’t actually role-play very well.

Much of what you do and even what you think is shaped by your biology and your experiences. Yes, there’s an open question about how much is shaped by biology and how much by experiences – nature and nurture – but in the era of modern psychiatry and neuroscience you can’t ignore the fact that individual people perceive the world and therefore think about the world in fundamentally different ways based on their experiences and their brain wiring. That’s why two people can look at the exact same event – the same pattern of facts and circumstances – and reach two wildly different conclusions. And why it’s so hard for most people to understand how anyone can reach different conclusions than the ones they, themselves got to.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to understand how others see the world and therefore how they think and act. It’s possible. But it’s really hard. And people seem to be getting worse and worse at it every day. Especially because people seem to have forgotten that what they think and know and perceive is actually way more subjective than objective. Thus, people can have very different worldviews that are nonetheless valid, logical, and even ‘correct.’ Whatever the hell ‘correct’ actually means given that most of the human world is actually shaped by emotions and relationships.

Now, if I go much further, I’m going to have to add an unconvincing disclaimer about how I don’t give life advice; I only give gaming advice. So I’ll stop. Just accept that the way you think and act and perceive is totally unique to you and it’s based on a combination of extremely complex neurobiology and your false memories of every moment you’ve ever experienced in your life. Try not to worry too much about why I added the word ‘false’ in there.

There’s two really big obstacles to role-playing. First, to effectively role-play, you have to hold in your head every experience that a fictional character has ever had in addition to all of the experiences you’ve already got in there from your own life. Second, even if you can keep all that stuff in there, you’re still running every decision through your own mental hardware instead of someone else’s. Which means you can only get the sort of answers that only you would get.

This is why empathy is based on projection. Empathy isn’t about imagining the pain someone else is in. It’s about imagining how that pain would affect you if you were in it too. It’s about putting yourself into someone else’s situation. And your brain is really good at that. It has these neat structures that are specifically designed for it. But the thing is, you are still you in that whole thing. You do not understand their pain, you’re understanding how the same pain would affect you. And that brings me around to the concept of ‘you, but…’.

When you role-play a character, you can’t actually experience the world as an ageless, magical otherbeing whose existence is tied to the ongoing existence of the physical world. Instead, you can try to imagine what YOU would be like if you happened to be ageless, magical, alien, and had your fate tied to the world. You can’t reason like an elf. You can only reason like you and try to warp the reasoning through a handful of elf-like traits. That’s ‘you, but…’. You’re always role-playing yourself; you just add or subtract or modify some qualities.

And yes, the distinction is really important. And it has a lot of subtle implications. And when people complain that the nonhuman fantasy races need to be more nonhuman instead of just being humans with one or two unique, special traits laid on top, it shows that they understand neither their own brains nor role-playing. And they also don’t understand that we actually want it that way. All of our fictional stories are about humans. Even the ones about elves and robots. Otherwise, the stories would be useless to us.

How does this help you? Well, it takes a lot of pressure off you. You can’t really role-play well and you’ll always start with some flavor of yourself, so don’t try to do any more than that. In fact, maybe don’t try to role-play at all. Why bother? You just need to act.

Remember, you don’t need the NPCs to act like real humans, you need them to act like the much more realistic fictional characters they are. You don’t need to BE the NPCs, you just need to PORTRAY them. You don’t need to be a role-player. You just need to be an actor and a screenwriter.

Let me put this another way. You didn’t put King Roderick Naransferf into the game so you could experience life as a misunderstood noble who is trying desperately to do what’s best for his people even though his actions are constantly being misinterpreted as greed and villainy due to crazy circumstances. You put him in the game so that you could hand the players a quest and convince them the quest was coming from an actual well-intentioned but misunderstood human being so they’d have some sympathy for the guy. And maybe so they’d get into a fight or two with the locals when defending his name from slander. See the difference?

You don’t have to role-play. You’re not role-playing. You’re running a game. Your NPCs exist to facilitate game purposes. You don’t have to decide what they would do if they were real people, you just have to think about what the game needs them to do. Or what the dice say they should do. Might Paisley Rummydunder, halfling brewer, be convinced by the players’ cunning lies? That’s a question for the dice. You just have to worry about how Paisley Rummydunder ACTS when she is convinced. Or when she isn’t.

And that brings me around to something else that works in your favor. This one is hard to explain. And it’s hard to believe it until you’ve experienced it for yourself. While your brain is actually bad at conscious role-playing, it’s actually very good at putting on masks and putting on a show. It’s actually good at playing ‘you, but…’. We do that s$&% at all the time. When we move from one social situation to another, we actually change our behaviors to suit the situation. We’re different people when we’re with our friends than we are at work. It’s part of the suite of social software that humans have evolved to, you know, be human.

Once you start portraying a character – if you portray it at all consistently – eventually, you’ll find that character will kind of portray itself. You’ll open your mouth and the character’s voice will just come out. The character will start behaving like it’s a real thing. This is something that authors and screenwriters and actors often take advantage of. Some authors talk about how their characters take on a life of their own. Some actors believe in a sort of immersive method where they try to stay ‘in character’ even when they’re not on set. Even if that seems completely insane. Well, it is insane. But it also works.

The more you portray a character like King Roderick or Paisley Rummydunder, the more likely it is that you’re going to accidentally find yourself role-playing them. Without thought or conscious effort. And the more practice you have, the more quickly it happens with each character. What’s amazing though is that the character’s behavior can actually surprise you. Because the truth is, you still don’t know precisely what’s going on in their heads or why. You don’t have to. It’s happening nonetheless.

And that’s why you “start small and build” when it comes to making relatable NPCs. You can’t really role-play very well on purpose, you don’t need to role-play anyway, and you can’t keep enough crap in your head to role-play every character you need to. But if you start consistently portraying a character with the right, humanizing traits, the players will buy it. And eventually, the character will emerge on their own.

So allow me to introduce Angry’s Two-Note NPC.

A Song with Just Two Notes

If you want to create a relatable NPC you can portray in your game – that is, an NPC that seems human enough that the players could grow to like them or hate them – there’s only two things you need before you can start portraying that NPC. And that’s good because that’s about how much you can handle when it comes to portraying the NPC given that you’re also trying to run an entire game at the same time.

First, you need to define the NPC’s game purpose. Why is the NPC even in the game? What is it doing? Is it giving a quest? Is it an obstacle in an encounter? Is it providing resources or information? Is it a villain? THE villain? Or is it just there for local flavor; there to make the world seem like people live in it? You need to figure out just what the f$&% the NPC is for.

Now, sometimes, it’s pretty easy to define the NPC’s purpose. Which is good, because you should be able to explain in one SHORT sentence why an NPC exists. Otherwise, you screwed up somewhere. But some kinds of NPCs need a whole bunch of gamey stuff to make them work. Enemies need combat statistics, for example, and obstacles need skills and attributes and all the other mechanical things that make encounters work. That’s all separate from the Two-Note NPC thing. That’s game stats.

Second, an NPC needs one – and precisely ONE – humanizing trait. No more. No less. One. Remember those seven categories of humanizing traits I mentioned? Pick one kind of humanizing trait for the NPC and describe it in ONE SHORT SENTENCE. King Roderick believes ‘it’s his duty to protect his people from harm; whatever the cost.’ Paisley Rummydunder’s flaw is that she ‘assumes everyone will betray her trust eventually.’

A good, humanizing trait fits into one of the seven categories I mentioned above and it also fits onto an index card when written in fairly big letters. And the reason that second part is important is that, when you create an NPC, you’re going to write that one, humanizing trait on the front of the index card in fairly big letters. See? That wasn’t just an arbitrary limit.

And you should do this even when you have to invent an NPC on the fly. Keep some index cards handy.

When it comes time to portray the NPC, the first thing you’re going to do – and you will do it every f$&%ing time the NPC ends up on screen – is to read the trait on the front of that NPC’s card and then set the card down somewhere in your eye-line. Somewhere you can clearly see it but where your players can’t. And as you play out the scene, keep glancing at the index card. That’ll keep the NPC’s one humanizing trait in your head as you play the NPC. And thus, whether you notice it or not, it WILL shape your portrayal of that NPC.

Beyond that, just focus on resolving the scene the way you’re supposed to. Resolve actions taken against the NPC, answer questions asked of the NPC, and converse as the NPC as best you can either in first-person or by third-person summary.

If you do that – and keep at it because at first, it’ll feel a little weird – if you do that, you will start to fill your world with relatable NPCs. But that’s not the end of it. Because, eventually, you’re going to discover something new about that NPC. The NPC is going to say or do something that reveals another humanizing trait. Probably one in another category. And you need to pay attention. Because when the NPC does that, you need to write that trait on the back of the NPCs card. Write small and be brief, because, eventually, some of your NPCs are going to have a lot of traits. And you’ll be able to refer back to those cards if you haven’t seen the NPC in a while or when you’re writing adventures or before you have to play the NPC at the table.

The Right Non-Human for the Right Purpose

Now, I could end this article here. Because that whole Two-Note NPC thing is really all you need to fill your world with good, relatable NPCs. But I’m going to give you a little bit of bonus advice here. See, when you’re first creating a new NPC and you’re trying to figure out what kind of humanizing trait to give it, certain categories work best when aligned with certain game purposes. So, to end this article, I’m going to quickly tell you which categories of traits work best for who.

You’re welcome.

Personality

In my previous article, I mentioned that GMs – and players – waste a lot of time assigning personality traits to their characters, but that they don’t really humanize characters very much. I stand by that. There’s lots of things we might accuse of having a personality, but most of them aren’t things we’d mistake for humans. Things like pets and cars and late-night talk show hosts.

Don’t waste your precious one humanizing trait on personality. Trust me. Give your NPC almost anything else. Personality will emerge as you keep portraying them. And yes, I know I tell budding GMs to give their NPCs personality traits to make them seem more alive. I also stand by that. It’s a quick, easy way to build a functional NPC that seems alive and adds some character to the world. But this is about deep storytelling and emotional connections. Personality ain’t going to do that.

Self-Awareness and Challenges, Growth, and Agency

These two categories – self-awareness and growth by exercising agency while facing challenges – these two categories are pretty much the most powerful humanizing traits there are. They are the things that make us take a real interest in fictional characters. But they require a lot of screen time to set up and pay off. They’re great for the protagonists and for supporting characters that have been around a long time, but they aren’t good for fresh Two-Note NPCs who are just starting out.

Vulnerability, Fear, and Pain

Suffering is a strong way to humanize NPCs that you want the PCs to sympathize with. It’s good for object NPCs. That is, NPCs who are part of the goal of the adventure and need to be escorted, protected, or rescued. And it’s good for quest-giver NPCs who need the PCs’ help. Hopefully, that’s all pretty obvious.

You can also give a suffering-type trait to an NPC whose job is to be an obstacle in an encounter. It gives jerka$& PCs something to exploit to win the encounter and it gives nicer PCs a way to build a rapport with the NPC. That is, if an NPC is scared of something and that’s why they aren’t helping the party, the PCs can do something to alleviate that fear to get the help they need.

Suffering-type traits also work well for extras. You know, the random NPCs the players meet in the streets or taverns or markets or whatevers of the world. As I mentioned in the last article, suffering is pretty much the most universal human condition there is and it makes us instantly identify and care about most fictional characters. Just be careful. If the players encounter too many people in pain in the world, it can create a really oppressive and pessimistic tone. That’s okay if that’s what you want, but if you’re not trying to create a Game of Thrones world where everybody’s life is nasty, brutish, and short, don’t lean too heavily on the suffering.

It’s becoming increasingly popular to humanize villains by giving them suffering-type traits and that is an effective way to create a sympathetic villain. But you really have to do that only sparingly. It does create an interesting moral dilemma if your villain was pushed to villainy by all the terrible things that happened to them and it does create some interesting cautionary tales about how heroes and societies can accidentally create their own villains. But it’s also like agency cancer. It tends to absolve the villain of responsibility for their choices. It implies the villain didn’t make bad choices because they were wrong or bad but that they didn’t have a choice. They were just victims. I feel like I could do a whole article about the f$&%ed up morality and agency of sympathetic villains. Maybe I should. But for now, I’ll warn you to avoid them or use them only sparingly.

Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations

These hopeful-type traits are basically the opposite of the suffering-type traits above. They’re about the things people want instead of what they want to avoid. See, humans like humans who have dreams and aspirations and we’re inclined to want other people to achieve their goals. They work well for all of the same sorts of NPCs as the suffering-type traits. They are just more positive and optimistic and hopeful. They work for quest-giver NPCs and object NPCs who are trying to accomplish something and need some help. And they work well for obstacle NPCs because players can often resolve the obstacle in a win-win way by helping the NPC get what they want. They also work really well for extras and lend the game a more optimistic and hopeful feel.

It’s possible to take that too far, though. Overly positive, optimistic worlds feel saccharine or even artificial. And too much positivity lowers the stakes of the game. Helping people accomplish their goals is nice, but it isn’t urgent and it’s not as heroic as saving people from imminent threats or ending their suffering. When it comes to populating my world with extras, I tend to split the traits sixty-forty between suffering-type traits and hopeful-type traits respectively. I mean, I don’t actually count up how many of my shopkeepers have hopes and dreams and how many of them have fears or anything like that. But the split tends to be slightly on the suffering side of even. I find that makes a world that feels natural, but also one that needs heroes without feeling like it’s sliding into disaster. Of course, if you want to adjust the tone one way or the other, just adjust that mix.

Values, Virtues, and Beliefs

Ideal-type traits like these are the traits that keep people organized into teams. We want to work with people who believe the same things we do and we want to oppose people whose fundamental beliefs oppose ours. Thus, these traits create strong alliances and enmities between the players and NPCs of your world.

Obviously, they work really well for any NPC that the players need to work with or oppose. Allies, quest-givers, villains, enemies, and obstacles. And they also work well for wildcard NPCs. And now I’m realizing I need to do an article about NPC roles because these are just terms I make up. Wildcard NPCs are what I call those mysterious NPCs who come and go in the story. They’re on par with the heroes in terms of ability and influence, but they have agendas and stories of their own. Their activities intersect with the PCs’ activities from time to time. And the relationships aren’t clearly defined. Sometimes they’re on the same side, sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they’re just ships passing in the night. Well, it’s their values that determine whether the players like them or hate and whether they view them as rivals or colleagues.

Flaws and Failings

Finally, there’s flaws and failings. When you combine flaw-type traits with self-awareness and growth, you end up with a character arc. And that tends to make such characters more sympathetic. But if the only thing you see about a character – because it’s a Two-Note NPC – is a flaw or failing, it tends to make the character antipathetic. At best, we might pity such characters, but we don’t really respect them. At worst, their flaws and failings harm others or pose a threat and that’s what makes a character villain. Thus, flaws and failings are best for villains, enemies, and obstacles. Flawed humans – especially those who lack self-awareness and are unapologetically flawed – are great villains because, when they fall, we see it as justice. They also make great tragic heroes. But remember, we don’t like or respect tragic heroes so much as we pity them and learn from them.

Extras can also have flaws and failings, but remember that such characters garner pity rather than sympathy. And if you fill your world with too many pitiable extras, the players will start to feel like the world is full of pathetic sheep who deserve what they get. Nothing kills a sense of heroic adventure like the growing feeling that the people you’re saving aren’t actually worth helping.

And that’s the rundown. Just remember that I’m only discussing how these traits work if they are the ONLY humanizing trait an NPC has. That is, they are the big, defining trait on the front of a Two-Note NPC’s card. As time goes on, NPCs who get enough screen time will earn – or develop – more traits and that will make them more complex. Flaw-type traits alone make NPCs pitiable, but combined with self-awareness, agency, and growth, they garner a great deal of respect. Likewise, virtue-type traits make us want to work with people, but when their flaws start to show, we end up with characters that we respect, but may not like. Villains might start with terrible beliefs or flaws and make us hate them, but later, we might discover the secret pain they are suffering through and we might come to sympathize with them and show them mercy. Or even want to see them redeemed.

Or, we might discover that they are just as rotten deep down inside as they appear to be on the surface. Some people are just vile through and through. Sadly, that’s just one more thing humans are capable of.