Writing Every Day 09: Character and Quirks

I love writing odd NPCs. Many of the games I run involve larger organizations, like government agencies, mercenary companies, military battalions, or even pirate crews. When the game starts, I'll begin to introduce a handful of NPCs by name. Those that get a bit of traction with the players start to move into a prominent role, while those that don't recede into the background. I'll often give a new NPC some quirk or habit to help set him or her apart from the others. These can be straightforward, like an interesting tattoo or scar, or complex, like "enjoys reading books on the history of the Achaemenid Empire."

There are numerous generators online, either presented as sites that you refresh to get a new list of quirks or a pdf with a table you roll on to generate a few. These tools are great to quickly get a handful of quirks for NPCs. I have several favorites that I use from time to time. I do not, though, think that quirks equal character.

Character is, in my opinion, an amalgamation of the NPC's personality, goals, beliefs, and so forth. Quirks are interesting or unique little details about that character. Compare the following examples:

• He is strong and has a stutter. This is a quirk, and a fine one to use provided you don't overuse it.
• His stutter drove him, from an early age, to commit himself to physical training. He believed that, if he couldn't influence people through his speech, he would do so through his strength. He tries to avoid speaking whenever possible, and becomes increasingly frustrated when he's forced to. He prefers to listen instead, dreading the moment when he meets a new person and they expect him to carry on a conversation. This is off the top of my head, and way, way more than a PC should get the first time they meet the character. For the overworked Game Master, this is probably too much to figure out for every desk clerk and street cop. Fortunately, you don't have to.

I picked two random traits off a list of NPC quirks to get the strong + stutter combination above. They're probably not something I would have come up with on my own, but I embraced the oddity of the combination and went with it.

In an RPG, like in writing, you can add detail iteratively. You can go back after a session and figure out how the players responded to a particular NPC, and how you, in that character's role, responded. A minor quirk is a decent starting point, provided you're willing to improvise and build off of it through interaction with the PCs. If you ever end up revisiting the NPC, you aren't starting from scratch; you begin with the quirk you assigned, your memory of how that interaction went, and how it was resolved.

From there, you can build out what the character's personality is. What his or her goals might be. What they believe in or what they don't. You don't have to figure all this out right away, though. Finding one more piece of the puzzle lets you refine how you take on the role of that character, gives you more data to use while improvising. Further on, you add more detail, figure the character out more, and keep building.

The advantage to this is you only begin to worry about it after the game. When the game begins, you pick a minor quirk or two, jump into your NPC's place, and let things begin to evolve. If the players don't bite, you haven't lost anything. If they do, you begin to construct a complex and interesting character that they get to learn more about over time.