Needing GM advice for Improvising

[T.K.]

As some already pointed, thinking ahead of time how/what the NPCs are, what they think, what are their motivations, might give a better understanding of what and how they'd say something.

You could make notes of main NPCs to give you a quick reference guide that might help you "get" that npc feeling during gameplay, like this:

"Goblin Merchant Alox - Stranghalm City
Likes PCs
Specially likes "Aristana" (PC) because she sold him some really nice stuff
Rich, like to show off
High pitched voice
Speech Quirks - finish questions with "friend"; uses "hmm, hmmm?" a lot"

So, with this you have access to something that connects the NPC to the pcs in terms of Reaction and also some quick, meaningful stuff that will make your players remember your npcs.

It might get a bit caricatured at first, but it'll certainly make your players remember those specific traits about your npcs and over time you'll get used to soften em up.

[mehrkat]

I don't know if this will work for you but the realer the character is the easier it is to talk like them.

I often try to give the character some specific speech pattern.

In one of the current games I'm running there is an entire culture called "The Under" basically the incredibly poor who have fallen so far down that the safety net has failed. -- all of them have a sort of stumbly way of talking and they squish their words together leaving out vowel sounds pretty often.

Turning on the accent immediately gets me in the space to play the characters from the Under.

Another game has all the "southerners" having a (admittedly very bad) cockney accent. As a general rule they are all pragmatic about certain things and tend to be us against them oriented towards outsiders.

I had a bad guy my high tech game shoot repeatedly a character that scared him (with a nonlethal sticky gun). He had just watched casually stab a guy in the groin. He shot her once and got her tangled.

She was the last known target and had no other backup. He was hunting around the battle field for ammo and every time he found some he shot it at her. This made the character real without saying a word. In fact everyone was almost glad to see him get away. It made the pc see how scary she was to be seen on the other side of the battle.

Preparation.
1. Its ok to randomly grab things from movies you've seen to come up with character examples.
2. Ask yourself several questions
a. what are people like him like? Put him in a social environment.
b. what makes him special?
c. have a few interesting speaking quirks to grab at random.
d. what primary emotion should he be feeling? (love, lust, greed, envy, fear, pride)
e. if you were feeling that primary emotion what would you do?
f. how would the cultural background you've established above show the action?

[Stormcrow]

I too have a hard time improvising dialogue, but I always remember that I don't HAVE to. It's a game, not theater, and if I say "He asks you where you came from" instead of "I say, old boy, that was a remarkable appearance, wot? Jolly good! Just where did you pop in from, eh?" then that's fine. I don't ask the players to improv, either, if they don't want to.

[Kromm]

I improvise all NPC dialog (and campaign planning, for that matter). I find that the secret is to visualize the person you're trying to portray. I don't mean their looks; I mean their persona. My experience has been that if I can "remember" that I'm so-and-so the action-movie henchman, fantasy lich, historical Musketeer, or whatever, with such-and-such motivation, then dialog happens spontaneously. Whereas in my distant past, when I tried to prep dialog, it always sounded stilted and stupid if it was inconsistent with my state of mind, even if it was flawlessly consistent with the NPC as written and with the plot.

[johndallman]

Something to avoid: long, portentous speeches. Some people running fantasy games feel that their NPCs should talk in A Highly Significant Manner, but this actually starts to grate very rapidly. Normal, informal speech does well for almost everything.

The NPC that's made the most impression on me in recent gaming sessions is amazingly laconic. She answers just "yes" or "no" to most questions; I can't recall her saying more than two words together. It makes her memorable.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Something to avoid: long, portentous speeches. Some people running fantasy games feel that their NPCs should talk in A Highly Significant Manner, but this actually starts to grate very rapidly.

Seconded with a vengeance. I have met a few re-enactors, fantasy-fiction fans, and theatre majors who appeared to believe that speaking like Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter would be a good idea. Rubbish! Kings and ominous spirits are decisive and powerful . . . they should spit out terse commands, not lecture. Everybody else isn't important enough to have the option. It's an Odious Personal Habit in real life and ought to be one for anyone in the game who speaks that way.

[Sword-dancer]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Seconded with a vengeance. .

I´ve a Special Place in my mind for People, who want to enforce what they believe is "atmospheric medival speech" in a Fantasy (rennaissance without firearms wannabe ) Age Setting

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Sword-dancer

I´ve a Special Place in my mind for People, who want to enforce what they believe is "atmospheric medival speech" in a Fantasy (rennaissance without firearms wannabe ) Age Setting

Especially fake English accents . . . A consequence of Britain dominating the "historical fiction" side of the post-WWII movie business and casting Shakespearean actors is that entire generations of non-U.K. gamers, in love with quasi-medieval fantasy, came to believe it was essential to fake an English accent, or occasionally a Scots or Welsh one, to be "in character." Argh. I deliberate sound Canadian just to get their goat.

[hal]

Originally Posted by whswhs

For me, the secret of being able to improvise is massive advance preparation. Not working out dialogue, but thinking about the NPCs: What sort of people are they, what are their motives, what skills do they have? If I have a clear picture of the person I'm more likely to think of something they would say.

Bill Stoddard

I would have to second Bill's statement here. I've been GM'ing since 1980, and have been using various techniques to GM throughout the years. One thing that turned me away from prepared game material is that while nice and useful, more often than not, my players decide to go different routes than can be anticipated.

I'm a strong advocate of not "railroading" adventures to the point where players feel they have no choice in what they do. If they pick tunnel A, they still wind up going to the big bad throne room they wish to avoid. If they deliberately decide to take an alternate path and they find themselves somehow going to where they didn't want to go - they resent it.

When I was working at a factory, doing repetitive stuff to the point where I could moderately disengage my mind from what I was doing - I would think about the NPC's constantly. I would run mini-scenarios of what was happening in the background when not gaming face to face with my players. I would also spend a fair amount of time reading up on stuff that I could use for background. Sometimes it was watching a movie and thinking "Hey, that would be useful someday". Other times it would be reading books. Yet other times, it would simply be a facet of my love for history that I could reach back and get a feel for the mindsets of various people.

Then, if that weren't enough? I'd put myself in the shoes of various people in my campaign world, and try to figure out those things that they could know or feel, yet not necessarily be apparent to the players at the table. In one campaign, I had this young woman who was stunning in her appearance, graceful and self-confident. She had the choice of men and chose to ignore the customary or traditional manners of behavior expected of women in the culture (This was a Harn World campaign if that helps). She rode in a saddle like men instead of sidesaddle like women would. She spent time at parties where she was a bit too bold. Some men loved it, some were intimidated, and most of the women despised her. One day, she made a request to the orchestra playing at a party given in honor of an Earl. She then asked a knight, the Earl's favorite, for a dance. Long story short, she disgraced herself in front of the Earl, and was told that for all her charms, perhaps she should spend time at the stable, as her manners weren't fit for human companionship.

In that campaign - over a period of months, the woman transformed from one who thought only of herself and using her beauty as a means of getting what she wanted, to someone who was refining herself (with aid from a sympathetic woman of the King's court) into someone who could be loved for who she was. My wife caught on to the personality change and burst out during gaming to the guy playing the Knight the NPC woman first was disgraced by at the dance - "Sir Kendryk - she is in love with you you idiot!".

HE (the player) hadn't the CLUE. In that campaign, she later became Sir Kendryk's wife, bore him two children, was nearly assassinated by the Constable of Kyg (she knew certain facts that had she been able to put two and two together, she'd have exposed him for what he really was - but she wasn't smart enough for that!). As a result of the near assassination attempt, the guard her saved her life (and NPC) was rewarded well for his attention to duty.

The trick in improvisational presentation for NPCs is to find ONE thing in your own mind that strongly colors the personality. I had one NPC 14 year old boy, get caught by the player character knights for roasting poached rabbits over a small fire at night. Rabbits being pests and wild rabbits not really being deemed protected animals in the King's forest (or any noble's forest for that matter), the player character knights decided not to do more than scare the lad telling him what they could have done, but deemed it unworthy to do. His forthright behavior and honesty impressed one player enough that he offered the lad the right to become a squire should he apply himself to the knight's service.

I could go on and on, but the real trick to improvisational GM'ing is paying attention to the players themselves. Listen to them, see how they respond. If they're interested, pursue it a little. Develop the walk on NPC (whom you didn't even have a plan to use for more than a single throw away encounter!) when the player characters keep trying to interact with him. IF they don't, then set him/her aside. If by playing on one player's tendency to be the "Hero" - then set up a victim or two. Perhaps the victim was robbed. perhaps the victim's mother was murdered and the victim never speaks a word again - but hates BADGERS with a passion and goes out of his way to kill those really dangerous beasts with little more than a dagger (fine by the way) with the head of a badger on the hilt. Perhaps it is a young man who arrives saying "M'Lady, if it pleases you and I'm not being too bold to ask, I have a boon to ask of thee". When asked what it was he wished, the young lad introduced himself as an artist, a painter - one who had been approached by a gentleman who wished to remain unnamed, but desired a cameo of the fair lady if she would but allow him to sketch her, and paint her portrait.

Intrigued, my wife's character sat for the artist, and purchased some of his sketches. Much to her chagrin, later on (a few months real life time later), a noble approached her asking "How is it that Red Tellen (A notorious robber Knight) has a small portrait of her in his saddle bags that he had to abandon to avoid capture?" That was the start of a sequence or thread if you will, that even I as the GM could never have foreseen. She MARRIED that bandit knight when she discovered he was employed by a noble who would eventually become Kaldor's future King. In all of my years of gamemastering, my jaw never bounced as badly as it did that day my wife had her character prove to Red Tellen that she would marry him (and this is a PG rated forum, so I'll leave it at that).

In the end? You have to remember two things:

You gotta love your NPCs enough to care about them. If you don't, why would the players through their player characters even care?

You gotta remember that the PC's are to be in the limelight, not you running your NPC's to the point where the PC's are superflourus (sp?).

The world is a stage. Make it a living moving stage for them. Describe the street vendors hawking their wares. Describe the lingering looks given to the player characters. Describe things as they feel natural to you. Have a few "Threads" or plotlines in motion set by the NPC's (the player characters are NOT the center of the universe!) and let THEM chose which thread to pursue and unravel. Never set things in stone so much that you can't change it where needed.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by hal

You gotta love your NPCs enough to care about them. If you don't, why would the players through their player characters even care?

You gotta remember that the PC's are to be in the limelight, not you running your NPC's to the point where the PC's are superfluous (sp?).

The way I try to deal with these points is to regard NPCs as PCs belonging to players who aren't around at present, so I'm running the PCs for their players. It's a good reminder that NPCs want to stay alive, and will be reasonable to that end.