A few things converged creatively for me recently.
The other day I picked up the 1st edition AD&D DMG for the first time in a long long while and while I was paging through it I came across the section on NPC generation. It brought to mind this post where the author describes creating a town for Boot Hill alongside some of the great generators to be found over at Archons March On.
I was recently discussing Infinite Jest with an acquaintance and I was trying to remember the bit about figurants from that novel. At one point in Infinite Jest, the ghost of James Incandenza discusses the “myriad thespian extras” in the background of sitcoms and films with recovering drug addict Don Gately. You know them: those extras that sit at tables in sitcom restaurants and move their mouths and hands as if they are engaging in conversation even though we do not hear what they are saying. DFW calls these “concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move realistically, but without sound." Incandenza's success as an avant-garde filmmaker was in giving a voice to these “figurants” (a piece of terminology I gather comes from ballet), and this is something the book itself mirrors, introducing fully fleshed out and realized characters even nine hundred plus pages in - the point being, in life, there really is no such thing as a figurant, though we sometimes treat others as if they were mere extras. We are surrounded by people with their own dreams and worries and lives.
Another topic of discussion recently was the incredible sense of distance that Cormac McCarthy manages to convey in his work. In contrast to and in light of the Infinite Jest discussion, I had a sudden realization that the way McCarthy achieves this is by divorcing his characters of any inner life whatsoever (at least in some of his earlier work). We get only their mechanics - what they say, what they do, etc., never what they are thinking or feeling. Probably I am a bit slow on the uptake, but this was revelatory for me.
All of these things converged for me and I thought I might like to create a framework for a village that could easily be dropped into any setting, from the medieval to the futuristic. I say "village" but it need not be an actual village. This could be a spaceship, an aircraft carrier, a border town, an isolated village, a self-contained fortress, etc. The main thing that I would like to try to craft or capture is a population comprised of individuals with their own inner lives that players can interact with. From a player perspective, the inhabitants of this place would be something along the lines of McCarthy - described by the DM in terms of what they say and what they do, never what they are thinking or feeling. But from a DM perspective, they would be more like DFW's creations, their actions informed by incredibly rich inner lives, interests, dreams, and feelings.
I think the first step to that is probably going to be something very similar to what is described in the Boot Hill post I mentioned above, the random generation of lots and lots of characters. So, I have decided to create a generator and I thought it might be useful to others. This is a living document; I may change it at some point in the future, and I welcome suggestions for additions or revisions. To create families, the simplest thing to do is to simply reuse the same last name a few times. Where there are apparent contradictions, this may be the difference between the appearance of the character and their inner life. This table is meant to define the basic long-term tendencies of a character; I believe the next thing I do will be tables for current mood, preoccupation, etc, the transitory things that might impact an interaction with a character.
The tables are mostly adapted verbatim from pages 100-101 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, with some insertions of my own. The generator HTML was created using the Slight Adjustments blog. For transparency, I have included the option to see the tables, but some of them are quite long and not very pretty!
Here's the generator:
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I am surprised you remember the Figurants in Infinite Jest, it was a fairly small part and especially considering how long ago you read it haha, but this is an interesting observation in its implications for worldbuilding and sandbox campaigns. I still have not read McCarthy although I own several of his books, but this is an interesting juxtaposition. I also enjoyed that Boot Hill post- I had at one point been potentially interested in trying that game out.
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily design my games for lethality, but that idea of Social Intrigue is actually one of the things I'm most passionate about wrt RPGs aside from Weird Worldbuilding (I differentiate Social Intrigue from Political Intrigue only in that I think it can apply as much to politics as romance, which narratively uses similar trappings imo, or for that matter any number of other genres or frameworks).
I take a somewhat different approach to how to impose or promote this Social Intrigue, where it's often less about lethality/danger per se, and more just that the problems are not ones which can be solved straightforwardly with violence- or to attempt to do so is to fall into a greater trap. Sometimes it's about creating really weird and abstract situations that it would be like trying to punch an idea, other times it's about playing off of principles from psychology or behavioral economics like perverse incentives. Other times it's a "genie wish", giving the PCs what they want, only for there to be a catch (not one to punish them, but to drive new conflicts). I'm not fundamentally opposed to lethality, but it is a limiting factor, particularly if you care about your characters, and may lead to cautious behaviors or avoidance which is just kinda not fun for anyone. So to the extent that you can get the benefits of danger, the Intrigue, without the need for the limiting factor, why not? That said, lethality per se I suppose can be valuable, I just personally am generally not interested in it.
The randomized / emergent approach suggested in the Boot Hill post and that you're proposing here is probably in a lot of ways more practical, and definitely worth pursuing, but without some kind of crafting or intentionality, I imagine it could fall really flat. The Boot Hill post acknowledged as much, and anyway this is the typical kind of thing people debate about wrt sandbox play, but anyway I appreciate this attempt to create a generalized character generator, this is cool.
I hesitate to call books life-changing, but some of them are certainly at the very least permanently perspective-changing. For me, Infinite Jest was one of those books, along with Blood Meridian (as well as a handful of others) so I tend to remember material from it better than say, the stuff from the Black Company books (not a knock on those, they were a blast). The two authors (Wallace and McCarthy) are very, very different stylistically, but both masters as far as I am concerned. I hate to call them diametrically opposed, but in their approach to the inner life of their characters they really are (at least if you sit those two particular books, Infinite Jest and Blood Meridian next to each other).
ReplyDelete"without some kind of crafting or intentionality I imagine it could fall flat" - Yes, I agree! I'm intending on using the generator to give me the bones, so to speak, but the characters will still need some attention and fleshing out I believe, and the relationships between them will need to be developed, if the whole is to be as intriguing as I would like. And yes, though there will be opportunities for danger, social intrigue is at least as important here! I do intend to share this when I finish it, along with any tools I use to develop it along the way.
Excellent excellent post. Richard Pearce, director of The Gardener’s Son, wrote that one of the characteristics of McCarthy’s writing that had attracted him as a filmmaker was that in Child of God, “By never presuming an author’s license to enter the mind of his protagonist, McCarthy had been able to insure the . . . inscrutability of his subject matter, while at the same time thoroughly investigating it”; I think that’s exactly the effect you’re describing here. There’s a paper I read a while back on the changes between drafts for McCarthy’s Outer Dark - a fantastic book, but I guess that’s a given - and the most revealing differences in the first draft are those in which McCarthy explored Culla’s motives and haunted inner life more explicitly than in the published novel. He ends up cutting out a monologue directed at God (even labels it “AWFUL” in big bold letters) and a couple other stuff:
ReplyDelete“Clearly these seven passages that represent the transition from Culla’s dreams to more objectively presented triune scenes are the labor of a craftsman hammering out a set of effective strategies for his novel, ways of presenting Culla’s tortured inner life without resorting to interior monologue or addresses to the God who torments him or to the child, of conveying by implication that the triune who judge Culla and who kill in his place are outer manifestations of the dark night of his soul. While Outer Dark had its genesis in McCarthy’s pain over the loss of his infant son and in his own dream of eclipse, even perhaps in a spiritual crisis, the drafts he compiled from 1962 to 1965 were also the product of much judgment and creative thought about how best to manage his materials.”
It’s kind of interesting to see that process in action, starting with conventional ways of getting at interiority and then paring them down more and more. I wonder if there’s a way to replicate that for games, maybe even using a version of some of the stuff you were thinking about already? Like, begin with the DFW style (I always translate that acronym as Dallas-Fort Worth in my head) and cut it down to a McCarthyian one. Could help with some of the points Max raised about crafting and the like?
That same Boot Hill post got me to rethink a planned Western game (never happened, but I live in hope) set in the Civil War period Hill Country. I think that if I ever do try to start it again, I’d probably use this generator here in combination with the ones they made.
Yes, that is it, you've really nailed it! When I read I am always sort of looking at technique - and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what gave McCarthy's work that sense of distance. There were other things about his technique that immediately made sense to me - the use of conjunctions to slow things down being one - but I was having trouble comprehending how he achieved what is possibly my favorite thing about his work. It was really only thinking back to Infinite Jest and in considering the both that it suddenly "clicked" for me.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my thought here is that the experience of the players will be pretty "McCarthyian" at least to begin with. I think most RPGs lend themselves to this a bit anyway, since they are so focused on the material words and deeds of both the PCs and the NPCs. For DMs, it is a little different - we're concerned with that interior life (or at least I am) when I decide what course of action makes sense for an NPC. But it will be interesting to see how this all comes out, and even more interesting to see what hurricane will develop once the butterfly wings of the PCs start flapping. What I'm hoping to do is set something up where any given NPCs could rise to become "main characters" in the storyline depending on how they are interacted with. Not DMPCs - but like, if one of the PCs decides to hug Mavis Rowland, the bag lady, and get her a room at the inn just because she's a human being, I'd like that to begin a chain of events in terms of the way she then interacts with others. Perhaps that chain of events won't be quite as important as the one where the PCs expose the bribes that Fabian Cochran, one of the town policemen (or guards), is taking to look the other way when Belen McNeil "brings in a shipment" but either PC interaction will have ripples. Maybe Daniel Ball, one of the junior police officers looked up to Fabian and is so disillusioned that he quits the force and starts drinking seriously, and then maybe his wife Camelia leaves him. Perhaps Camelia felt trapped in the marriage anyway and is so much happier living with her "friend" Alana Coleman that she does something nice for Marcus Cleveland one day and lets him have lunch on the house at the restaurant where she works. He gets the wrong idea and rapes her later that week, which would never have happened if she had stayed with Daniel. But in the meantime, with Belen out of business, four year old Noah Sweet isn't kidnapped by his men. His parents stay together, whereas the stress and sadness of loosing their only child would have eventually driven them to murder-suicide if Belen had been allowed to carry on with business as usual. And on and on and on.
Anyway, that's the idea! We shall see where it goes!