Running contacts and other NPCs, Averting the clone wars Options

[Talia Invierno]

The scenario: a quick meet with a Lone Star cop contact. He's got some information for you that's going to break your investigation wide open. The negotiation is set, the deal is on, you're about to get down into some heavy and character-shattering revelations when --

"Hey, doesn't he sound just like the last five Lone Star cops we've interacted with?"

It's an issue, and it's a problem because we tend instinctively to think in types, to assign people to social pigeonholes and thereafter deal with them based on what we've decided they are rather than who they are. In Shadowrun this natural tendency in us is amplified by frequent use of templates to represent NPCs: consisting of a collection of attributes and skills and powers and professional ratings. And without some active and applied brainpower on our side, that's all NPCs will ever be.

Character templates can't bring across personality or motivation -- and they shouldn't. After all, they're intended as a quick fill-in-the-blank for number purposes only. If that's all you're seeking for campaign purposes as a whole, if you really don't care what's behind the "bad guys" or the "not-so-bad-guys" or even the "neutral guys", the rest of what I'm writing here probably won't interest you much; and given that there's as many ways to play Shadowrun as there are groups, that's perfectly acceptable.

For me: I find it absolutely essential to individualise every one of the NPCs I bring into a game, if only by some minor quirk or mannerism. Beyond the common questions of "what do they look like" and "what can they do", I add three:

• What is the major motivation for this NPC?
• What is the specific motivation for this NPC in this context?
• What is the NPC like to interact with?

The first usually requires in parallel some minor fleshing out of character history, if only to know that (for example) they had a really bad experience with gangers in the past ;) It might drive their life; or it might just come up when the situation warrants it. Where the primary motivation does turn out to be "money", it's an interesting question, for me, to ask what exactly the money means for the character. In most cases, it won't be the physical accumulation of money that's important, so much as what it represents to that character ... and that could open up alternate ways to deal with that character.

The second: well, an easy way to approach this is to ask what a contact gets out of their continuing relations with a PC, over and beyond what a complete stranger might get out of the same deal. (In a surprising number of Shadowrun games, the differences aren't all that great, if not completely non-existent.) I've found that where the contacts aren't completely generic, there seems frequently to be an assumption that because they are contacts, they'll pretty much do whatever the PC wants them to (as long as it isn't absolutely over-the-top extreme). In other words, contacts become literally nothing more or less than resources: the person existing only in what they can get or do for you. So I ask: why? What, exactly, is the contact getting out of this, what is their interest in this, how does the relationship with the PC serve the contact's deeper motivation (or clash with it!): in general, how does it benefit this contact to maintain the relationship with this particular PC?

Edit: contacts can lie. Contacts might even do so in a way that isn't immediately obvious. Not everything out of a contact's mouth is chiptruth -- any more than it is for any one of us. Through omission or commission, deliberately or inadvertently, contacts won't always tell all the information that is theirs, or they might tell it completely differently than what another might recognise as true. Getting all the information and getting it accurately will always be a matter at least as much of approach as of NPC knowledge. Heck, it's even possible that a contact lies about a key piece of information in order to "spare" the PC!

The third is far more nebulous: drifting into that strange area where personality ceases to be quantifiable. Are there personality quirks that come out regularly, or when the NPC is stressed? Does the NPC always carry some item around with them? Do they have a habit of playing with that item unconsciously: eg. fiddling with a coin? If they like dealing with people generally, how does it show? If they don't: how does that show? It could even be as simple a matter as the pervasive body odour that the NPC never, ever notices -- and occasionally doesn't really have to, since the skills or information that NPC deals in almost forces others to come to their door when they need that kind of help.

Edit: I'll add in a paragraph here to reiterate that description exists in more than one or two senses. Visual description is common, auditory description less so, but still relatively common -- but it's the olfactory that really sticks with us. Did that NPC just come from working a soydonut joint, with the smell absolutely permeating their clothing? Do they use far too much perfume or cologne? Do they constantly reek of alcohol (or other substances)? Do they have bad breath?

There will always be situations where not much more than "just the numbers" are needed for a given situation: but I find it helps greatly to lightly personalise even these cookie-cutter NPCs, even just by taking the few seconds to give them a single quirk and assigning them some kind of deeper motivation beyond the obvious. After all, we all spend far more time on NPC stat generation than that!

So there's a starting point. Thoughts?