Everyone who has ever run a few tabletop RPG sessions has had this happen. You’re setting the scene and you toss in some local color: “You enter the city, and because you are a dangerous looking bunch people tend to avoid you. They see your weapons and armor and decide to get out of your way. Mothers take up their children and head home, an old fellow carrying a rooster clucks at his bird and ducks into a tavern door, and a city guardsman even avoids eye contact, like he’s hoping you won’t come his way.”
None of this has anything to do with the scenario you’re putting the players through. It’s just you, as the GM, trying to provide some details to make things feel immersive. But what happens?
At least one of the players says, “I want to talk to the man with the rooster.”
When other players ask why, the player just says, “He might know something about our quest” or “He’s probably a wizard who can help us,” or some other silly thing. Players sometimes just do weird things.
When I run a game, I want to give my players as much free rein as I can. I seldom tell them they can’t do something. If they want to talk to the man with the rooster, they can talk to the man with the rooster — even though I have no stat sheet, no motive, hell, not even a name for the rooster man. He’s just a guy I briefly described on the fly to make the city seem like a real place.
So, when this happens to you, what can you?
You don’t want to say, “You enter the tavern, but the rooster guy is not to be seen.” No, no, no. You might think that’ll help you avoid going down a rabbit hole so you can get your game back on track, but you’d be wrong. The vanishing rooster man suddenly becomes more mysterious in the player’s mind, and he’ll want to track down that rooster man no matter how long it takes. He’ll question every occupant of the tavern, look for tracks and clues, fight his way into the kitchen, search rooms upstairs, you name it.
So … you need to create a rooster guy NPC on the fly.
On my best nights, I have a list of four or five NPC names jotted down in advance, to avoid having players realize I am just making things up. When the party approaches the rooster man, you don’t want to say, “Um, my name is, um, Bob. Bob-Bo. Bob-Bo Baggins-pants.” If you have a few names, you can just pick one and scratch it off. “I’m Arvoh,” you say, “and this bird is Dak.” Sounds like you planned it all along.
That’s the easy part. What kind or person is this Arvoh? How does he speak? What are his goals, his motivations? Is he helpful, wary, paranoid? It’s a lot of stuff to make up on the fly, but as a GM running multiple systems for many years, I’ve come up with a way to improvise these situations that might help you, too.
I pick a character in a movie or TV show I know fairly well, and use that as a template. For Arvoh the Rooster man, for example, I might pick Dr. Leonard McCoy, from the USS Enterprise.
Does this mean Arvoh is a doctor? Not necessarily. But it means he has a bit of a Southern drawl, is highly expert in whatever he does, and isn’t just carrying a rooster around for no reason. It means he’s a reasonable guy, but maybe a little suspicious of elves (it’s the pointy ears, you know). It means he’s intelligent, but acts on emotions and has a strong sense of right and wrong. It means he’ll not react well to violence or suggestions of violence.
If you pick a character like that, you suddenly have a very good template to work from, and you can handle almost anything the players through at you.
They might ask: “Why are you carrying a rooster, Arvoh?”
The reply: “This bird was handed to me in payment. I just helped a lady get over a bad cough, and this is how she paid me.” (In this instance, I’ve gone ahead and made Arvoh a healer, but I could have made him a carpenter, or a cooper, or some other skilled person.)
If they offer to buy Arvoh a drink, the answer is likely yes, since Dr. McCoy likes a good stiff drink now and then. The party may seem dangerous and exotic, but Dr. McCoy is around aliens all the time so won’t likely be put off by such things. See how this works?
If the players ask Arvoh about their quest, I can judge whether a healer like Arvoh would likely have any useful information or not. If the quest involves finding a medicinal drug or a runaway healer or something, he probably knows something that can help. If not, he can say, “I’m a doctor with a rooster, not a goddamned adventurer!”
If the player characters are polite and deal squarely, Arvoh will do the same, just like Leonard McCoy would do. If the players are impolite or rough, they’ll get no cooperation from Bones, er, I mean Arvoh.
If I’d picked some other TV or movie character for my template, say, Willie Wonka, the encounter would go in an entirely different direction but would be just as easy to manage.
And the best part? I use a similar technique to create major NPCs as well, building a personality template based on Faramir or Malcomb Reynolds or Igor or any other TV or movie character I think I can improvise. Those major NPCs get full stat blocks, of course, and I know what their plans or goals are. But since I use my actor-actress template for almost ALL my NPCs, my players can’t always be sure when they’ve met a major character or if I’m just improvising.
And, of course, sometimes a minor, off-the-cuff NPC like Arvoh becomes a bigger part of things than I planned. For instance, the party meets danger along the way, gets banged up a bit, and goes back to town to find good ol’ Arvoh for a bit of healing. And because Arvoh is based on the esteemed Dr. McCoy, I know he’s a high-level healer, even if his down home charm might make a stranger underestimate him.
The next time you have players back you into an NPC-improv corner, give this technique a try. I have found it useful countless times. Let me know how it worked for you, and use the comments to share your own improv ideas. — Steve
Swords Against Boredom