Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Like a lot of discussions, this one has polarized, into "Always have a full character sheet for everyone" and "Never have a character sheet for anyone but the PCs." But for a lot of us, somewhere in between is the right place.
Bill Stoddard
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Well, I actually think part of the issue is that jeff wilson framed the discussion as a binary in the first place--well really, as a straw man. Most of the people who seem to be responding on the pro-side, keep trying to reframe his original post...not from his original: "stat up nothing!"--which I've not yet seen anybody advocate--to their "don't stat up things that aren't necessary." Which isn't the same thing.
Like you, I tend to stat out all the major NPCs. But I don't stat up everyone. Because that doesn't seem necessary to me. And if someone who is random becomes necessary, then I stat it up. And even my "statless" NPCs are quasi-statted because I work from ideas of baseline people.
So to answer his original question.
Jeff Wilson, your original reframing is a straw man...at least for me, and it seems many of the responders here. I am one of the "don't stat up more than necessary" camp. This doesn't mean that I stat up nothing. It means I don't stat up more than necessary. I do this because it saves time and I have found that statting up every random servant or librarian in full detail does nothing to increase the quality of my games, rather it often decreases quality because I'm spending time on details that don't impact the players rather than spending time on details that do.
I also operate from a very strong sense of who average people are stat-wise and skill-wise so I don't need to write down the stat before hand for every hot-dog vendor, because I already know what they are likely to be. For me, the stronger the simulationist base of the world, the less necessary it is for me to stat things out in advance. Because stats and skills follow logically from the simulation for average people. People who are special, and who are not average...they tend to need more statting up before hand.
But even when I stat up someone beforehand, my sense of method actory-ness also means that I have no problem evolving that sheet based on things uncovered about the NPC in play (not for people who are fixed like Allies and Enemies). For example, if during an IC conversation with a PC it comes about that the librarian was an Anthropology major as an Undergrad, then I have no problem adding one point in Anthropology.
The players have one character they think very deeply about. I have got millions. I cannot think as deeply about all of them. So random people get to become characters in the telling and that means their character sheets are evolutionary. Some random people never evolve because they are on stage and off in four seconds and never come back again. People I know will have heavy stage time get more development.