
How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs - MaximumMadness
https://pausebutton.substack.com/p/how-to-put-more-character-into-your
======
danmostudco
I feel Earthbound, the classic SNES RPG where Ness debuted, is a masterclass
on NPC dialogue. The dialogue is so well crafted it makes you eager to talk to
each NPC you come by, knowing even if they don't give you relevant information
they will give you a silly hot take on the world they occupy. It makes
everything so much more rich. The Rabbit Girl referenced in the article is
from Undertale by Toby Fox, who cut his teeth in gamemaking creating
Earthbound mods. I suspect this is why his characters in Undertale follow a
similar whimsical nature to this early influence of his. Undertale borrowed a
lot from Earthbound's character construction.

I've been playing through Earthbound over the last few weeks and consistently
find the writers and localization team put in just the right extra 10% to turn
a "bleh" interaction into one you think about for days to come. For example,
in a nod to the greedy, one character grumbles about the loan he gave to your
family and now he "lives in poverty" \- all while standing in the biggest
house in the game.

Later on, a key item with key information gets shipped to your character via
the equivalent of Fedex "Neglected Class." A rumpled delivery man eventually
shows up and tells you "Anyway, he said... well... uh... I forgot. Yep, I
forgot... actually I forgot the stuff I was supposed to deliver, too. I think
it was some weird machine to make trout-flavored yogurt. Yeah, I forgot it at
the desert... I'm not going back that way, so don't ask me to get the
package... I mean, it's your package, right? So YOU go get it! Go on, get out
of here." You then have to schlep to another part of the game to recover the
package the delivery man decided just wasn't worth his time [0]

If you've played the game and want to figure out why some of the quirkiness
just WORKS, I would recommend the later parts of Tim Roger's piece from a
decade or so ago [1].

[0]
[https://youtu.be/EIoLcNLyd0g?t=27902](https://youtu.be/EIoLcNLyd0g?t=27902)

[1] [http://archive.is/fMD7F](http://archive.is/fMD7F) (edit - huh, yeah this
article has NOT aged well at all I should have taken a closer look since it
first was released long ago, but I'll leave it here for the sake of discussion
& derivative comments).

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
Agreed on Earthbound. I will add one more data point. GTA V. We learn about
each character through the banter and their actions and not some long winded
exposition. If there was a time I could not help feeling for the characters
lately, it was GTA. They felt so tragic.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
A really good reference for things like this is D&D's Dungeon Master's Guide.
It collects a whole lot of advice about different parts of creating a world
and story. It doesn't go deep, but it's a great reference.

~~~
GuB-42
What I think is different between video games and tabletop RPGs is that video
games have the additional constraint of packing as much as possible in the
least amount of text.

With the possible exception of visual novels, no player likes walls of text,
efficiency is key. In tabletop RPGs, detailed descriptions are often
desireable, and not only that but GMs have to respond to players. For example,
a PC may decide to rob the NPC, because why not. And now you have a whole lot
of stuff to deal with: how rich the NPC is, how willing to fight, what are his
relationships with other NPCs,... Video games simply won't let you do things
that are not programmed.

In the article, dialog is limited to 3-4 lines. One of these tells you what
your next quest is "I hear there’s a mirror in the Fire Mountains that can
block its flames.". And another one mentions a red dragon. It means you only
have two lines to establish a character, and if you can do it in one that's
better.

~~~
simion314
>no player likes walls of text

It depends, there are players that love learning all the lore details, the
good games add additional dialog or letters/books/emails that are optional so
players that are in a rush can skip them.

~~~
bsanr
I think it depends on the quality of the text. Richly-detailed and well-
written (read: well-edited) descriptions as well as quippy dialogue are all
welcome, but the mountains of poorly-written copy you find in many visual
novels are a chore. I think a lot of writers fall to lawyer-ism, which I
define as the idea that you can convince someone of anything ("My characters
are deep! Their relationships are meaningful! My world is complex and well-
constructed!") so long as you just keep talking at them. It doesn't help that
some are often translated from or imitating the Japanese expositional style,
which can be long-winded.

Control, FFXIII, Fallout, Animal Crossing: Fun to read through all the extra
text/dialogue!

{Vast majority of visual novels}, Mass Effect, Tales Series, {Vast majority of
story-based gacha games}: Not so much!

~~~
simion314
It is your opinion, not all people are like you, but I think you can design a
interface where people that want to skip this ca do it. even visual novels
will give you a skip button and a log to go back if you need some information.

Not all things that seem bad to you are objectively bad, some people enjoy
that, remember how you taste in books/music etc changed in time.

------
jttyf
It seems like the author is conflating natural dialogue with creativity. You
can't give a character much personality in a few lines of text, so Mother-
style quirky dialogue (as in the Undertale example) is one way to make your
NPCs more memorable despite that constraint, but they definitely won't sound
like real people or have much character. "An animal walks another animal on a
leash" is a joke, not a character.

The author shows how to turn a short hint into a more fleshed out character
interaction, but "personality" is limited to a trait ("brave", "klutzy") or a
relationship to the player, and in an effort to convey these traits in just a
couple of lines of text, they end up coming off as forced, contrived.
Definitely an improvement from the walking hint, but trying to convey a
personality in too few lines and having it come off as a caricature, in my
opinion, is worse than an underdeveloped character.

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goda90
I think another thing that could help make it feel more immersive would be a
bit of unreliability or incompleteness in information gathered from NPCs. Why
does every villager know that there is a legendary mirror in the Fire
Mountains that can block dragon flames? Were they all at the meeting where
that was clearly and repeatedly announced? Maybe instead they could be saying
things like "I hear theres some legendary weapon in the Fire Mountains".
"Mabel told me she heard about a a magic mirror that drives away dragons". "An
adventurer came from the mountains the other day and mentioned a magical
shield against dragons". Now the player knows they should hunt for something
to fight the dragon, but what it is isn't clear. Perhaps the full info will
come from an important NPC later.

~~~
dragontamer
Its fine for NPCs to be wrong on flavor. But as soon as you make NPCs
incorrect on gameplay-defining moments (ex: There's a vampire weak to silver
bullets ahead!!. Woops, its not weak to silver because its not a vampire...),
players will get pissed off.

In my experience as dungeon master, players are very accepting of "I don't
know" as a response. But as soon as you "mislead" players, they start to think
of that situation as a betrayal of trust.

So "villagers don't know" whats ahead is far better than "villager MISTAKENLY
thinks there's a vampire ahead".

~~~
munificent
I think you touch on a deeper point about games.

Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not
in bounds for the game. Knowing that boundary lets you focus on only the
things within that while pleasantly mentally unloading all of the myriad messy
things outside.

Even though each videogame is different, there is a surrounding videogame
metagame culture that players tacitly assume defines what all videogames are
allowed to do. When learning a new videogame, players assume the rules of that
metagame still hold true. (This is one of the reasons videogames today can be
so difficult for non-gamers to get into: they don't have this absorbed
culture.)

One of the rules of that metagame is "NPCs do not mislead the player." (Other
rules of the metagame are: "Your savefile cannot get into a state that makes
it impossible to beat the game," and "It should not be required to die/fail
several times in order to learn how to proceed.")

It's valid for a game to break that meta-rule, but it will be very
unpleasantly surprising if they believe they are playing the stock videogame
metagame as they learn this game's rules.

This is kind of unfortunate because there's a whole giant space of possible
videogames that could be made with interesting rules if only you could set the
expectation for players that this game steps outside of typical game culture
meta rules. You occasionally see experimental games that do this like
Lose/Lose, which deletes random files off your hard drive when you lose (!).

~~~
xapata
> It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to
> proceed.

I played a game a while back that made a sort of Groundhog Day repeated dying
a requirement to make progress. That was a central theme to the game, so it
ensured the player understood the situation pretty quickly.

~~~
kibwen
Indeed, any time there's something that a creator ought not to do, that
creates fertile ground for interesting subversion by doing exactly that thing.
However, the point remains that the consumer needs to be briefed properly in
order to avoid a sense of betrayal; a game like Dark Souls is chock full of
characters that will lie to and mislead you, but the game does a good job of
communicating its own atypical nature to the player via a prevailing
atmosphere of despair and callous indifference.

------
vepea2Ch
Matthew Mercer (the dungeon master of Critical Role) gave this useful tip
about NPCs during a Q&A after an early episode of the first campaign : the two
most important things to know about your NPC is 1/ what they want and 2/ what
they fear ; after that, you can improvise.

Of course, in a video game, NPCs won't improvise, but I guess it's a useful
advice to tie NPCs in their environment and not just have them being some sort
of isolated entities.

That being said, as both a d&d player and a RPG videogames players, what I
would really want from NPCs in videogames would be for them to stop being just
"switches", which I activate using an action button and who provide always the
same text. The videogame which allows discussion with NPCs to be initiated by
a question asked by the player will get all my attention :)

~~~
MaximumMadness
What role do you see fear playing in NPCs via video games? Outside of the
occasional "scream" or "run away" I can't think of a time where I've seen fear
utilized deeply via gaming NPCs

~~~
vkou
For some cliches:

The old sharecropping farmer may fear his landlord squeezing his finances in
the fall.

The greedy merchant may fear that her husband is pissing away too much money
on drink.

The cobbler's apprentice may fear his boss, because his boss is a huge,
sometimes violent asshole.

These fears can add background flavour through worldbuilding, that make these
characters memorable. Nobody cares about, or remembers generic merchant #2 in
Bumtown, Nowhere, but they may remember if their first introduction to her is
walking in to a family fight about liquor.

Even if the players never explicitly discover that fear, this grounds your
design of the characters into something more interesting than "He's a farmer,
she's a merchant, he's an apprentice."

~~~
ourmandave
_Nobody cares about, or remembers generic merchant #2 in Bumtown, Nowhere_

They would if Bumtown were in the first circle of hell, and she was the only
one selling gate-back-to-the-prime tickets.

------
brootstrap
Cool read thanks for sharing. Probably just bias but my experience with some
games man the NPCs really make the game tick. Two quick examples, hollow
knight, dark souls (or all soulsborne-kiro). Both are big on exploration etc.
NPC interactions are so memorable. Will never forget certain times playing,
making progress, finding crazy ass new hilarious NPC.

Fromsoft has plenty of these memorable NPCs from demon souls to sekiro!

~~~
MaximumMadness
As a primarily single-player gamer, I totally agree. The varied impact NPCs
can have on a game is awesome, an example off the top of my head that I enjoy
- Skyrim.

There are hours of entertaining content [0] just based on some of the weird
quirky behaviors of NPCs in that game.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzxv-
MKtXZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzxv-MKtXZc)

~~~
Aardwolf
Fully agree with that and the post above!

Most Bethesda games have amazing NPC's, and the lack of them is exactly what
made Fallout 76 so unappealing to me.

~~~
phonypc
Really? I feel like Bethesda game NPCs are mostly memorable for their "so bad,
it's good" quality. Unless you go back to Morrowind maybe.

~~~
acomjean
I liked em. They had good character, some made me laugh (John Hancock is
trying to sell insurance?) though I was just watching my Girlfriend play
through fallout 4 they kept it entertaining.

"A settlement needs your help"..

Thanks Preston... Well that NPC got kinda stuck on the same topic after a
while..

------
pixxel
I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance at the moment. It’s one of the best open
world experiences I’ve played thanks largely to the NPCs and their
stories/requirements. A smaller world, by modern open world standards, which
allows devs to create a more meaningful world. Hell, I’ve spent a third of my
time playing Farkle (dice) with various NPCs, simply enjoying the pub
background chatter etc.

~~~
goda90
I'm also playing it right now. If you haven't gotten it yet, I recommend the
DLC "A Woman's Lot". There's a full side quest where you play as Theresa from
Skalitz on the day of the attack. I just finished another side quest from the
DLC where you help out another woman from Skalitz over in Sasau as she gets
tangled up in church affairs that I found intriguing.

~~~
thom
I don't believe this is a spoiler, but:

There's a point at which you get to join the monastery in Sasau and I'll be
honest, I just stayed there for ages going about my daily duties because it
seemed like an okay life, translating illuminated manuscripts and such.

------
Animats
Aw, I was hoping for some approach to making NPCs more conversational.

I've been trying to use Rasa for that. Rasa is really intended for Siri/Alexa
like things, or rather, it aspires to be. In practice it can do a phone tree
with a few digressions. It's based on TensorFlow. You put in a list of
questions users might ask, and when someone does ask, it detects which stored
question is closest. So you can put in a FAQ, and people can get answers based
on it.

There's a notion of "slots", so someone can ask "How do I get to PLACE", that
would match "Where is PLACE" (that's the TensorFlow part) and the matcher
returns PLACE, which can be looked up. I'm not sure this is much ahead of
Bobrow's BASEBALL program from the 1960s.

~~~
thom
It's sort of funny to me that this is how RPGs worked for ages but then voice
actors came along the horizon narrowed somewhat.

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atum47
Man, this is great. I have a project oriented to give NPC's a more human
touch. The project is on a early stage, (just a prof of concept, really), but
with a dialog generator, I think I can make a NPC behave's like a player in
the game.

It's kinda hard cause programming games is not my real job. I work at a bank
and the hours are long, but I still wanna finish this project someday and test
with on a RPG.

[https://github.com/victorqribeiro/gaia](https://github.com/victorqribeiro/gaia)

The proof of concept I was talking about. By the way, I'm open to discuss this
project with anyone interested.

~~~
anchpop
I like the idea of making NPCs agents that affect the world just like player
characters

~~~
atum47
righh?! I have a half implemented RPG that I'm dying to try this out. But I'm
a long way still.

------
Riccardo_G
Memorable NPCs definitely make or break games, or having NPCs at all (looking
at you Fallout 76!). One of the most recent great experiences has been with
Hollow Knight; I got so immersed in trying to figure out more about these
interesting creatures and their stories, even though they barely really had
much to say in some cases. I think something that helped a lot was also how
different they all were from one another.

On the other hand, a game like Zelda BOTW, I really wanted to get more into
the characters, and the cut-scenes were they used voices were incredibly
capturing, but then most of their dialogue then ended up just being text, even
for the primary characters, which really hurt a bit at the start. The game is
still one of the best ever, just wish there was more voiced dialogue. I cannot
believe that it was a monetary thing, so maybe just space conservation?

Hopefully [https://replicastudios.com/](https://replicastudios.com/) will be
able to help make NPCs more like characters.

------
thom
With the latest Unreal Engine demo out, I can't help but think that we've
probably had enough polygons for a while. Maybe we could have a few iterations
of game engines with really revolutionary procedural generation, and ultra
realistic text-to-speech.

~~~
Riccardo_G
The Unreal Engine demo was spectacular. The polygons pretty much become quite
noise which made the scenery look almost too real in some cases ;) Biased, but
I think Replica's AI voice will help a lot of game devs in the future to come!

~~~
thom
Got a demo link?

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platz
Better themes in games would go a long way to make more interesting NPC.

If you have a stereotypical theme, your NPC's may have a hard time not being
stereotypical too.

[https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-
content/uploads/2018/...](https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-
content/uploads/2018/10/roguelike_theme_list.png)

~~~
karatestomp
Oh man, I clicked that link expecting a totally different sense of "theme".
Setting is closer to the what's intended here, not literary theme.

------
MaximumMadness
Hey all - I'm Max, one of the co-editors of The Pause Button, a publication
all about video games.

I wanted to share one of our recent contributor posts that I thought you'd all
enjoy. If you have any recommendations for good gaming content to check out,
are interested in writing for our publication, or just want to chat - feel
free to commment here or email me at max@pausebutton.news

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freediver
I always dreamed of building a MUD, which lives on two completely independent
servers and features the same world. But players from one server would appear
as NPCs (in-character descriptions would be mandatory) on the other and vice
versa. That way the NPC dialogue and gameplay that would emerge on any one
server would feel magical to PCs.

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at_a_remove
I recall that each of the ghosts in Pac-Man has their own hidden behaviors
which help define their character.

~~~
catalogia
The red ghost cases you, the pink and cyan ghosts try to cut you off, and the
orange ghost alternates between chasing you and fleeing from you.

~~~
Izkata
Cyan is actually much more complicated than that, it's goal is a combination
of Pacman and Red's position: [https://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-
man-ghost-behavi...](https://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-man-ghost-
behavior)

Also all of them have "chase" and "flee" modes.

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magicalhippo
It doesn't have to be much. I still vividly recall my discovery of what
happened when you repeatedly clicked on the same soldier in Warcraft: Orcs &
Humans[1].

[1]: [https://youtu.be/qPN-x7rST58?t=15](https://youtu.be/qPN-x7rST58?t=15).

------
Kiro
I go the complete opposite direction in my game. The NPCs convey as little
information as possible and nothing that is not relevant to the gameplay.

This makes them completely braindead and not immersive at all but for me it's
all about the gameplay and mechanics, not superfluous NPC dialogues.

------
seph-reed
Just want to plug Cross-Code here.

I didn't make it, and don't know the people who did. But I loved it for very
relevant reasons to this article.

[http://www.cross-code.com/en/home](http://www.cross-code.com/en/home)

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50ckpuppet
Make them Republicans?

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microtherion
I used to put character into my NPCs, but then I took an arrow in the knee.

