Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Telling Stories: The Art of War

There have been several very good Storytellers who give advice on how to build antagonists and NPCs that are suited to the power level of your PC's. You don't want to curbstomp your PC's into the dust, but you have to challenge them so they don't just steamroll over every opponent that crosses their paths. This can be a big problem for a lot of ST's. You can't rely on the NPCs printed in the books because all of them are terrible. Hardly any of them have any Epic Dexterity, few of them have useful powers and basically they're just a huge mess.

So what's an ST to do? I can only give the same advice that you'll have heard from other people who pontificate on such problems. You check the capabilities of your PC's and create antagonists based on those. Design the enemy's DV to be just high enough to require above-average effort from your players to hit. Set their soak to shave off damage from when the players do hit. Their damage should be enough to punch through the soak of your players.

I want to be clear about something: Don't try to build your NPC's as if they were PCs. Don't try to give them however much XP and spend it. Don't even bother with full-on character sheets. Not even ones as rough as the examples in the Scion books. All you need to do is rough out their stats. Designate how many dice they roll for attack, how many they roll to activate powers. Give yourself a general idea of what kind of powers they should have access to. Make notes like 'God-level Darkness' or 'minor abilities with Fertility' and stick with that.

Why do I say this? Because otherwise you are wasting your time. A player has one character to deal with. Maybe two or three if they have Followers or Creatures that they control sheets for. As a Storyteller you have dozens of major characters and just buttloads of incidentals. You don't have time to devote as much effort to the sheets of each character as a player does.

A player is going to have carefully considered how to spend their XP. They'll have their characters optimized and organized, all on the ball and put together properly. They know the strengths and weaknesses of their characters, they know what all their Boons and Knacks do, how to combine them to the best effect. They know all their buffs and what order to activate them in. As a group, they know how to combine their abilities to best effect.

You, the Storyteller, are throwing NPCs together sometimes in just a few minutes. Even if you're taking hours to do it, you still don't have the months or years of time to build them that a player does. You're not going to be as ready to go into a fight to the death with one of your NPCs as a player is with their character. If you want a shiny analogy, your players are Koreans playing Starcraft. They're Zerg every time, all the time, forever. They know exactly how to Zerg. You're a game-tester who not only has to be Zerg, but also Protoss, Human, Orcs and a Russian Sniper. You're not going to come to the table with the same degree of comfort and familiarity with your stats that a player does.

If you try to treat your NPC's like normal characters, you're going to waste your time and still not be as effective as PCs. Relics alone are going to drive you nuts. How many special bonuses do your players get from their collection of Relics? How often are they rolling their base dice-pools? Hardly ever, for me. Most of them have buttloads of extra dice coming from Relics, special Knacks or Boons. It simply isn't practical to try developing the same level of detail in an NPC guard or even an antagonistic God.

What I have found to be most effective is to do exactly what I said at the beginning: create stats that challenge the abilities of the PCs. Does it really matter how that Gaulish War God gets the 50 dice he rolls in a generic Melee attack? Nope. Does it matter exactly where all of his 33 automatic successes come from? Again, no. What matters is that those numbers are balanced to provide a challenge to the PC he's fighting.

Do you need to know exactly which Knacks and Boons a thousand-year old Troll-Witch knows? Not really. You know that she's a specialist in seduction, illusion and magic. Within those areas, she has whatever powers she needs, as appropriate to her Legend. If you want to get a bit more detailed, break it down into the things that she's Perfect At, Decent At and Dabbles In. Give her everything she needs to have maximum power in the Perfect things, give her "average" ratings in the Decent category and for things she just Dabbles in, she might have a Knack or Boon or two, but she isn't particularly great at them or they're very minor and low-level.

It's important to be flexible once a combat starts. If your NPC's are too strong and it looks like a minor encounter is going to end up turning some of your PC's into paste, start reducing Legend pools or increasing costs. Apply extra penalties to the NPCs, or just reduce the number of auto-successes. Doing the reverse and suddenly buffing your NPCs in the middle of a fight can feel like cheating (the bad kind of cheating), but it's easier to stomach if it takes the form of activating buffs or reinforcements arriving just in the nick of time. The key is to make sure that your mistake in statting the enemies doesn't either overwhelm the characters or make their triumph hollow and lame.

TD;LR version? Don't treat your NPC's like PC's. Treat them like story elements. Give them what they need to serve that purpose. If it's fighting your PC's, base them on the PC's own abilities and don't be too concerned with explaining how they work. What's important is that they fulfill their function.

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