In March 2024 I attended the Yorkshire Games Festival in Bradford and was able to observe the presentation from Adrienne Law titled 'Writing with Character: Lenses for Crafting Compelling NPC's' and wanted to utilize the advice she gave during the presentation to add more depth to the NPC's within my own practice without having them just provide binary options, hopefully, this will provide a more engaging experience for the player so that any social benefits I hope to provide are more successful.
At the moment there is very little information given to the player, barely any interactive experience which is the main form of immersion during dialogue. The player just has the option to talk to the Innkeeper and if they do they will gain more information from other NPC's as it is implied that they learned something extra from the Innkeeper, however, if it was a real interaction there would be other questions asked and the motives of both the player and NPC would be present during the conversation. So let's solve this.
CHARACTER MOTIVATION
So the initial thing to look at is the function of the NPC in question. As an Innkeeper they are a basic trader but also since we have the option to speak to them about the other NPCs that may be chosen to be part of our team they are a source of information and my job is to turn this character into something more engaging than their function so will have to look at the narrative lenses that can be incorporated into the manufacturing of a compelling character. The three narrative lenses that Adrienne suggests are as follows:
MOTIVATION - what drives us forward
CURIOSITY - what sparks our imagination
IMPACT - what makes our characters memorable
Often these qualities can be missing when crafting a character because we don't appreciate what they are there to do - function.
1. MOTIVATION
Finding our purpose
Whose motivation is at the forefront of the dialogue - a good balance is required for a really satisfying scene.
"Human beings have [. . .] three dimensions; physiology, sociology, and psychology. Without a knowledge of these three dimensions we cannot appraise a human being."
"It is not enough, in your study of a man to know if he is rude, polite, religious, atheistic, moral, degenerate, you must know why."
- Lajos Egri -
PHYSIOLOGY
- our body, our health, our beauty, our pain.
SOCIOLOGY
- our upbringing, our family, our society, our job.
PSYCHOLOGY
- our temperament, our values, our emotions, our priorities.
To build a better character for the innkeeper I should be thinking in these three dimensions about the character and understanding them beyond the players' horizon since they exist outside of the player's journey - there is a natural flow to the innkeepers' life with the player interjecting within a small section of it. All while focusing the lens appropriately based on how integral to the story the innkeeper is, a one-line character doesn't need a fully-fledged backstory.
The innkeeper is of human race like most of the families that the village of Wyvernpond originated with, the idea being that a small group of adventuring humans came across the carcass of the Wyvern that had died in battle with the crater formed from the crash landing creating a lake over the years and the humans that first came across the body started to mine it for resources which drew more locals or there extended families until a village started to form, many people ended up staying due to the necessity of their skillset i.e blacksmiths/ leatherworkers/ farmers/ alchemists, etc but it still stayed small and with the thick spruce forest around them relatively isolated from the rest of Soliverance just as the corpse had been. This helps separate the village mostly from the war going on with the land and so is a nice basic land to start the player in akin to other worlds with starting areas (pallet town in Pokemon) but makes sense since the value of the products produced from the wyvern is due to value being placed on the scarcity of an item, the village only has citizens that it requires, with that being said over the years they have been welcoming to any and all visitors with many different races and cultures being included to the growth of the village due to the interesting and unique skills or traits they had such as a reliable trading alliance, etc. This led to the innkeeper marrying a wood elf hunter and having two children - the hunter brings in wild game for the inn to serve and the children help out where they can with chores around the tavern as the innkeeper did with her own mother, many of the work stations within the village are family owned and passed down generation to generation.
Objectively a beautiful female, she found herself gaining a lot of male attention, especially in her younger years working behind the bar, and could have had her pick of the villagers before choosing the Wood elf, but through the experience of unwanted male attention, she has learned how to handle herself exceptionally well through words over violence. Now in her early 40s and her daughter a mid-teen, she is aware that she too will have to endure this sort of behavior and is torn between over-protecting her daughter and also wanting to give her space to grow into her own individual. With this age comes a lot of her concerns and anxiety that she tries to hide, the fact that she is past the midpoint of age that she is expected to live whilst her husband has hundreds of years left and each day she grows more concerned with his hunting trips knowing that with each trip he has to travel further and further away so as not to hunt any local creatures to the extent that they can no longer breed she worries that something could happen to him, whether that be caught in a battle of the war or have some vampires capture and mutilate him, a horde of people with ill-intent following him back to the village and raiding it in the middle of the night many of these keep her up at night whilst he is away. It doesn't help that she has to keep this apprehension of new visitors in the village hidden whilst at work since the inn is the first place travelers attend to rest themselves during the journey and she wants to provide a pleasant and welcoming environment to any patrons. This keeping of emotions bottled up has led to more than one dispute between the innkeeper and her spouse but they do communicate well and work past these difficult circumstances, recently they have gone to the local alchemist for a concoction to alieve the catastrophizing thoughts she has when her anxiety peaks. A lot of her concerns have grown from her just wanting to protect her family whilst she is alive knowing full well that they will live far beyond her years due to their Elf blood.
When interacting with the Innkeeper, since the player has only been present within the village for a week the Innkeeper will still retain some apprehension to questions so to get the most information from her you will have to provide a sense of altruism and empathy to her to help bring her barriers down, if successful more questions will be accessible to the player.
2. CURIOSITY
Why do we need curiosity as a lens when crafting a believable character to have a dialogue with;
- It's important for player motivation
- It engages imagination
- It makes our world feel bigger
- It offers it's own rewards
So what the character says and doesn't say should increase curiosity in the player, curiosity to ask more questions or explore areas and other characters brought up - not just answer questions efficiently and accurately as they are there for a function other than just exposition.
"The enemy of curiosity is exposition"
Where do we get exposition wrong?
- Treating the extraordinary as mundane
- overloading the player with information
- pre-empting questions the player hasn't asked
As people, we understand what believable people would do. so to use curiosity correctly we need to identify what's important to who. In this instance, we can have the player begin the interaction with the innkeeper but we don't have her full attention as she is watching her daughters' interaction at one of the tables giving us the sense of familial protection and we need to respect the value that we have found for this. We can't have the player just solve the problem and go back to the conversation with undivided attention on us now, we are interjecting in the innkeeper's life for a small conversation, and these concerns of hers are years old and will evolve through her entire lifetime, perhaps conversing that you understand the concerns she has for her daughters' safety would be more beneficial to extending the conversation. Careful use of ambiguity allows for the player to fill in gaps with imagination and this use of 'show don't tell' helps with this, the innkeeper doesn't tell us we don't have her attention because she is observing her daughter we observe it and asssume the rest based on our own known conventions of societal relationships. We can also set things up now to be paid off later, a good example of this is when a character lies about something and the truth is revealed later on, or the common cinema trope of Chekhov's gun where a weapon or item is shown and detailed early on in the story and is utilized to some effect later on perhaps to kill the bad guy or fail to work for comedic effect.
"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep"
- Anton Chekhov -
3. IMPACT
Why is impact an important lens when crafting a character that gets the player engaged in your content?
- Offers the player unique and well-established characterization
- Keeps player emotionally grounded
- Allows for meaningful interactions with the player (especially positive for pro-social games)
- Causes character development
To craft an impactful character we need to find their voice, this incorporates their vocabulary or what words they use, in this case, what languages they speak and how well, their education and dialect can also be reflected upon within their voice. We need to give them real-world emotions; how does the great war in Soliverance affect the emotions of the Innkeeper - we understand that whilst there has been no impact on her life it is an ever-present danger that could escalate to the point of massively impacting the village, looking to real-world equivalents will enable a more realistic emotional response for this character causing greater impact for player. I can search for contrasts between NPCs as well especially when it comes to the party members thinking of archetypes and subversion of expectations (the dark and broody-looking individual is actually the most friendly and helpful one) which would help make players no longer judge a book by it's cover when it comes to their future interactions in society. I should aim to define the characters' background to the player through their actions, especially the parts of their background that are relevant to the story or scene, an impactful character is always going to be one the writer understands. This can lead to creating an impactful arc for the character if they are substantial to the story (think hero's journey etc) I should decide whether the character can change with their emotions/values/physiology and provide a challenge to that state and then make sure it's shifted by the end of the scene/arc whether they have changed their mind, had a loss or gain or simply doubled down on their original state. Their life has changed due to the players' interaction which will have a significant impact on the player knowing their actions have consequences in this world - more immersion.
WRITERS' MOTIVATION
After establishing the ways and means of constructing an engaging and compelling character with their own motives it is important to understand the writers' motivation - though as a one-man team in my own practice, a lot of this is already known as there isn't the same level of communication required as in a multi-person team or even multiple department studio. But the motivations suggested by Adrienne are;
- to deliver key information
- driving the player forward in their journey
- worldbuilding
- convey a story of theme
- balance with other departments (art/level design/programmers etc)
Without balancing our own motivations with the characters and players it will feel lifeless and seem like the writer is just talking at the player and delivering an instructional voice.
It is important that our role is to define the structure of the story through the particular interaction, dialogue, or scene and the character translates it to the player who just wants to enjoy it so by understanding all of the characters' motives we have crafted to fulfill our own functions we can ensure more success at this.
PLAYERS' MOTIVATION
These are fundamental to why we make games at all, they want a high-quality narrative experience that causes immersion and that offers elements of delight and surprise, basically to have the time and effort they put into the game as well as financial to be rewarded. So when crafting dialogue and interactions we can't just diagnose our players' motivations but utilize them with our own and the characters to meet and then exceed them.
With this being a game all about choice and consequence there have to be applicable consequences to all possible directions the player may make, without this and having every player end at the same spot no matter what background they've imagined for their own character will lose all immersion and leave the player feeling let down like their choices didn't matter - a lack of payoff for interactivity will make the experience redundant. We have to understand the players' journey and make our characters a part of it.
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