One of my weaknesses as DM is probably my fraught relationship with NPCs. I really love acting and roleplaying, and I’m also very conscious that my job with NPCs is to serve the players and the story, not put on a big scene for my own enjoyment, or to get more invested in some NPC’s lore than I am in the story of the PCs. I’m still trying to find the right line of making NPCs that are vivid and fun, but don’t take up too much space for my liking.
Curse of Strahd has a LOT of non-antagonist NPCs (let’s not even get started on the antagonists yet). Some of them play a clear story role and that’s easier to manage—they can steal their one scene, that’s fine—but a lot of them are recruitable by design (and we all know how players love to adopt random NPCs you never meant them to recruit, too). The players get assigned one of them in the early game Tarokka card reading, where they are given a fated ally—for us, Ireena Kolyana. Her role in our story is a little different because of the whole PC past lives things I explained last time, so she is the sister of one of the PCs. I’m happy with this outcome, because I think that’s going to make her a lot easier to manage. By having a direct relationship with one of the PCs already, I feel more confident letting that player take the lead on how present they want Ireena to be.
But this was still our first session of what I’d consider actual story instead of prologue, and it involved immediately entering Barovia village, where there are bunch of NPCs with very freeform roles to play rather than the very clear purpose of something like last session’s encounter with the fortune-teller Madam Eva.
So with all this in mind… naturally, the players immediately ended up pushing two NPCs into a conversation with each other, every GM’s nightmare. Not only that, a really emotionally intense conversation where they insisted that the local priest confront his son, who has been turned into a vampire spawn and lost his mind from bloodthirst. Thanks, guys.
I ended up leaning on description of their manner and a summary of their words more than I maybe would have wanted to, and focused on pushing the conversation back to a point of player decision as quickly as possible, because they had no particular information they needed to deliver. I was feeling bad for rushing what could have been a really powerful emotional moment. However, as the scene went on, it became obvious that what was actually powerful about the scene was the choice the players had to make. I’d done a good enough job of conveying the human emotions that gave their choice weight, they didn’t need some Oscar-winning scene between two random people they’d just met in order to invest in what actually mattered, which was their emotional responses.
Despite my not performing a tearful farewell between father and son, the characters came away from the scene angry, sad, and newly determined to defeat Strahd. It had shown them what he was capable of, and what might happen to them if they fail to defeat them. It was really clear that emotionally, the scene had landed, had an impact, and pushed the characters to a new place in their journey.
As one of many people who learned a lot of what I know about tabletop gaming from watching actual play, I worry sometimes about the generation of entrants to the hobby who, like me, still harbour a slight fear that you need to be an award-winning voice actor or professional game writer to be a great DM. But the reason that those stories need to be so narratively engaging is because we, the listener, don’t get to play them. We have to be entertained as if we were watching a movie or listening to an audiobook because we basically are. We’re passive consumers, and the story needs to engage us as such.
But if we set the DM ego aside, the truth is… of course players like description and enjoy good NPCs, but what they really want is to play with those things themselves. They care about that stuff only as far as it offers an opportunity for their character to engage, and for the word the character exists within to feel rich and lived-in—not as a matter of aesthetics, but because it helps them understand their character’s place in the world, and the opportunities available for them to interact with it or have a history of their own within it. No one likes being narrated to for the sake of being narrated to… or watching a GM roleplay with herself about something that they get no say in.
Every time I think I’ve fully rid myself of the belief that GMing needs to be endlessly cinematic, and I need to have elaborate ‘cut scenes’ and NPCs with pages of backstory, I face a moment like this where I feel instinctive worry or even shame at not living up to that totally imaginary ideal. And so I’m reminding myself again this week that the players are always the heroes, and the point of any scene is never really what they see or hear, but what they do about it.