I know there are a ton of resources out there for finding out appropriate encounters for your groups, or giving better descriptions to your players, tailoring encounters to your party’s makeup, running the game on the fly, etc, but I have had a difficult time finding any resources for someone whose main problem with DM’ing is NPC dialogue.
I know, it’s a weird problem to have, but as a DM my NPC dialogue is just not very good. I wish I could provide a solid example, but its pretty much everything across the board for them.
My group wants me to DM quite a bit. I have done it only a few times before and I really enjoyed it. I felt I had an excellent story, great characters for interaction, superb description of everything going on, but horrible NPC to PC dialogue.
My group has been begging me to run them through another story. I did Ravenloft before, and a few of them said they had trouble sleeping after each session because they were too freaked out because of how I described everything. They all raved about all other aspects of the gameplay, but it was pretty obvious I lacked dialogue skills.
I think a large part of this is I’m one of those folks that likes to think things out, so for my sessions, I would plan tons of things out and have countless contingency plans, but you cannot really plan out how dialogue is going to go, so I always felt a bit stuck and sluggish with how the flow of interaction went with the NPCs. This is very odd, because I don’t seem to have as much of a sluggish response when I’m one of the PCs, perhaps because there is less of an expectation on you as a player as there is on the DM.
I have spoken with the other players about this, and their most common response is: practice. I agree with them to an extent, but I also want to provide them with the best entertainment possible, and I just don’t feel I can do that while I “practice” on them.
So what kind of tricks/tips/exercises/etc can the DM’ing community offer?
What kind of things do you do to keep the dialogue moving?
How much/little dialogue do you have in a “neutral” campaign (not a kick in the door, and not an intrigue (dialogue heavy) campaign?
What should I ultimately be shooting for with this?
Will I have to bite the bullet and ultimately just “practice” on my group?
Most importantly: What DM resources do you all use? (Please list as many online ones available to everyone that you can).
And thank you to everyone that responds and assists aspiring DMs.
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Ok one of the things I would look at doing is determining the role of each of the NPCs. Once you have that down you need to give them a minor personality or quirk or mannerism.
Wise Holyman
Extroverted clod
Scheming merchant
Trigger happy Mage
etc.
And then you take your queue from similar characters in literature, TV and movies.
Wise Holy Man - Obiwan in the original SW. Or even Booker from Serenity
They talk with some deeper understanding of how the world works and often (without thinking) try to convey their understanding to others.
Extroverted Clod - Look at any movie where there is a country bumpkin who is strong and clumsy as well. Well meaning wants to be friends with everyone - talks a little slow but often has amazing insight to a problems due to his simplistic approach. (especially useful when your players are over complicating things and missing the obvious)
Scheming merchant - Talk to your local Bank manager or Advertising executive. I think we get the picture.
Trigger Happy Mage - take look as some Westerns. I would actually recommend Tombstone (the one with Kurt Russel etc) because you had a variety of gunslinger types from the psychotically dangerous to the Intelligently Dangerous to the Skillfully dangerous. All had different mannerisms you could use.
Even look at movie trailers cause they have some of the catchiest dialogue in the entire film.
Vin Diesel in Pitchblack - Kills a monster with a knife and walks away muttering something like "Motherf....r did not know who he was dealing with".
Classic Hard man understatement.
But basically take a look at everything from RL to movies/TV and books. Take notes if you want. This will help build up a library of mannerisms which leads to dialogue choices. It is a lot easier that you think and given that you seem to have a very good vocabulary will be soon reaping the rewards.
Oh and practice some hand mannerisms and voice changes too: try and speak gruffly, pound the table for emphasis, squint with one eye, clasp you hands when begging for help or pretend to be polishing a glass - all dependant on who you are being.
Great suggestions, N.A.
If you haven't seen the Serenity series, there are a number of character tropes available from that show. You can watch both seasons on Hulu for free. IF you HAVE seen it, it's time to watch a few episodes again. It's very good for character types and their strengths and weaknesses.
I don't watch a lot of TV, and most sci-fi shows leave me flat. Serenity is one of those shows that combined hi-tech with lo-tech, and kept me interested because of the characters and fun/funny dialogue.
I really wish that show had lasted. I can't say that about SG-1. It was the writing.
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Dialogue works more naturally for me if I know what the NPC WANTS.
Scripting things rarely works, because players are bosh-tets and will want to seduce the character you want them to despise and to kill the character you spent ages working on the accent for.
Are you good at doing exotic or funny voices? Or does doing so make you feel self-conscious?
If the former - you already have an advantage then, the PCs don't get to see the NPCs they meet, only hear them through you. Practice imitating different accents (feel free to sound like a ridiculous stereotype, it's far easier to recognise). Don't feel self-conscious if the PCs laugh at the ridiculous voice, because they will REMEMBER the NPC with that particular voice. I have not-so-subtle cues my players use to know when to make certain checks (looking away from the PCs or over my shoulder at certain points makes it clear that SENSE MOTIVE is required, saying: "is that all?" prompts the PCs to use Diplomacy, Intimidate or Bluff for more information). Also OVER-ACT, this isn't a theatrical group, and the people seeing your performance are all friends and fellow players. Over-Acting is very easy and sticks in the PCs minds.
If the latter - You said you have a talent for description. Then use that talent to best effect. Whenever a PC talks speak their dialogue and follow it with: "she say seductively" or "evasively" etc. There is nothing wrong with a story-teller style game.
Most of all, feel free to experiment. If things don't work one week, try again next week, or try something different. The more you get into it, the more your players will respond in kind.
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I feel your pain, Baijin. I have the exact same issue when GMing my group. I want all the NPCs to be more in depth and multidimensional, but I have a very difficult time trying to pull that off, usually failing miserably (at least in my eyes. My friends are all glad to have me run, but know I can do better.)
As your players say, practice is always good. It also really helps to know the story and the main characters in it really well. I think that is usually the easy part, though. Often it's the characters/NPCs that you make up on the spot because you need such and such to fill a new role that need the most flavor.
Perhaps it would help to write down a list of common archetypes, such as shopkeeper, innkeep, noble busy-body, etc.. and do as Nikolaus Athas suggests. That way you have a cheat-sheet ready to go in case you need to bring one in to the story all of a sudden. You may even want to write down a few one-liners for each to help you keep their personality in mind as you roleplay off the cuff.
Let me know if you come up with anything good that can help me and anyone else in the community that may have similar issues. With a little internet searching, you may be able to find some really nice archetype write-ups already to go, too.
Not to get all "method actor" on you, but the problem may be with how you are approaching the problem. Instead of thinking, "what would this character say," consider approaching it from "what would I say?"
"I" am a barkeep in a town infested with agents of a criminal guild who will torture and kill at a moment's notice. "I" hate and fear them. "I" want them gone, but "I" have a family and a business to protect. "I" know that they are strangling the life from my town, but "I" have seen them murder in cold blood.
PC: "Good Sir, those men on the street with the tattoos and daggers. I need to find their leader. Do you know of him?"
"I" say:
What? What would you say? What would you want to know before saying anything?
The more you get into the heads of your NPCs, the more you "know" about them, the easier it will be to know what to say.
Hope this helps.
Talk to yourself.
Got an NPC coming up? When you're doing idle things by yourself like driving or sitting in front of the tube just talk to yourself. Think about how the guy sounds, if he has an accent, what vocal tones he uses. How he chooses his verbs and words. How he holds his head, how he uses his hands, if he looks the players in the eyes or not. All of these can paint a really strong image of the character, so just bust out talking to yourself and think, "What would Braskar the Magnificent say if someone was talking down to him?" or "How would Jeremy the self-aggrandizing noble introduce himself to the pretty girls in the party? How would he introduce himself to the men?"
When I read through the adventure paths I mutter on about the last NPC I saw, introducing myself as that NPC to the empty room. Sometimes, if the AP calls for a death scene or a betrayal or something, I practice what they'd say when the specific NPC dies-- would they curse or just let out a choking gasp? If the NPC betrays the party, how would they go about it? Would their voice change like in a saturday morning cartoon?
Some NPCs I go over a whole lot-- I had an NPC for a campaign I ran in October that was this immortal king of thieves who wore a mask. I went over his personality and who he was trying to find the right way for him to talk for ages. In the same campaign, I had an old necromancer hermit living out in the swamps that could brew potions for the PCs, and right after I wrote the character into my plans I had his drawling old miner voice ready and raring to go.
One suggestion is, when applicable, always ham it up. Chew the scenery like crazy. If the players are enjoying talking to a guy and you're enjoying playing him, play him up. A bad guy dies? Scream out "Curse you, interlopeeeers--- ack-guck, blehhhhh" or something. D&D is way the place for this kind of thing. It's not Le Dungeones and Dragonnes Theatre, and more like a night at the improv if you've ever seen Whose Line Is It Anyways?.
Sometimes, even planning out a bunch of witty lines isn't enough. Even so, remember being stupid sometimes endears the NPC to the heroes-- when running Second Darkness, for instance, after going through several witty lines and loud laughs and what-have-you for Tiryin Vonnarc, I ran out of material... so I just started shouting "Tiryin Vonnarc!" and laughing like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. It worked well enough for the scene and the players didn't mind.
In summary, talking to yourself is fun and can confuse people you didn't see in the corner of the kitchen. Try it out sometimes!
All good advice above. I'd +1 everything previously said.
I think the hardest thing is realizing that the NPCs are not props in the background. Or, more to the point, they are, but as a GM you want them to act realistically. When a GM runs their NPCs with only stock dialog and short replies, the players start to see the duct tape and stage makeup around them, and that is never good. One of the reasons I can never submerge myself far enough in MMORPGs was the stck NPCs and the tired dialog.
Ice Titan touched on something that I have used to good effect in tabletop-style games: Hamming it up. Can you do impersonations? Even bad ones? Giving the local captain of the guard a faux Scottish accent is always good for making him memorable. Having the local witch cackle and talk with a quaver makes her stand out. I once had a orc chieftan taunt my players in a Monty-Pythonesque French accent. The whole party instantly hated him (especially after he triggered an avalanche on them, but that's a whole 'nother story).
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All really good suggestions. To help myself get into character, I pick a few touchstones for each NPC. I usually pick a real/fictional person and a key phrase. I like to have someone to loosly base the NPC on and a phrase that will trigger the accent/voice in me. So--random example--the local herbalist might be Mrs. Doubtfire, and the phrase might be "Oh dearie." Something about that word just helps all the rest flow, and I can then carry on the rest of the conversation as if I were this person. If I ever start to stray, I just go back to my key phrases to channel the NPC's persona.
My group has been begging me to run them through another story.
...
I also want to provide them with the best entertainment possible
I'm not going to discount some of the fantastic advice already in this thread. By all means, listen to these people. I just want to take a different angle for a second: I'd say you have nothing to worry about. You've run a game before. They're begging you to run another. You obviously entertained them the first time around.. It sounds to me more like you lack confidence than skills.
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Not to get all "method actor" on you, but the problem may be with how you are approaching the problem. Instead of thinking, "what would this character say," consider approaching it from "what would I say?"
"I" am a barkeep in a town infested with agents of a criminal guild who will torture and kill at a moment's notice. "I" hate and fear them. "I" want them gone, but "I" have a family and a business to protect. "I" know that they are strangling the life from my town, but "I" have seen them murder in cold blood.
PC: "Good Sir, those men on the street with the tattoos and daggers. I need to find their leader. Do you know of him?"
"I" say:
What? What would you say? What would you want to know before saying anything?
The more you get into the heads of your NPCs, the more you "know" about them, the easier it will be to know what to say.
Hope this helps.
I'm going to try this on Tuesday. Great suggestion, Jake. And really, that's all that acting is to begin with... placing YOURSELF in a role. Great suggestions from everybody, by the way!
Great suggestions, N.A.
If you haven't seen the Serenity series, there are a number of character tropes available from that show. You can watch both seasons on Hulu for free. IF you HAVE seen it, it's time to watch a few episodes again. It's very good for character types and their strengths and weaknesses.
I don't watch a lot of TV, and most sci-fi shows leave me flat. Serenity is one of those shows that combined hi-tech with lo-tech, and kept me interested because of the characters and fun/funny dialogue.
I really wish that show had lasted. I can't say that about SG-1. It was the writing.
I just realized that I meant to say "Firefly series." Serenity was a movie based on the series (and I haven't seen it yet!).
So sorry!
BTW, 3 cheers for another great thread. I come here because I love PF. I stay because there are some really helpful folks 'round these here parts.
I almost forgot: A good Christopher Walken impression is a staple of fantasy game mastering tradition.
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that is contributing, this really is all incredible advice that is going to help a lot! This is, as you all know, a topic that doesn't have a lot of resources available specifically for it so if we can continue posting for this, we can only make other DM's lives easier.
thank you, everyone! ^_^
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The Atomic Think Tank (Mutants & Mastermind forums) had a series of threads on dialogue for different types of villain, like evil masterminds, or mystical threats, or psycho-killers (avoid that last one, it got a bit over-the-top). It was intended for super-villains, who are generally drama queens and prone to over-the-top statements, but you could probably pillage some useful lines from there.
It's easiest, for me, to try to think from the perspective of the NPC, as if he/she was my character. What does the NPC want? What sort of region is it? Do they have an accent? Any particular local foibles I want to drop out there (such as a prejudice against magic-users, or a fascination with elves, or a distrust of halflings?) would make useful fodder for me to present in the NPCs reactions to the party, even going to the point of perhaps having the character make a mistake (watching the gnome like a hawk, thinking she's a no-good halfling thief, or hitting on the leaner human, asking if he's got elf blood, 'cause his features are so 'noble').
If the locals are supposed to be suspicious and surly (and perhaps possessed or in thrall to some cult or whatever), I try and make NPC conversations short and dismissive, perhaps even a little bit threatening. If the locals are desperate for some big strong adventurers to go fight off the hobgoblins extorting protection money from them (or just to go off into the woods and sate the hunger of the Howler in the Hills for another season, so that they don't lose any more children this season), the NPC might be downright unctuous, and offer adventurers free meals, a room for the night, or other goods and / or services (on the off chance that the adventurers might never come back from said mission, out of guilt?).
Watching a lot of TV and / or reading a lot of books (even comic books) can give you a feel for dialogue. I *sucked* at dialogue for a long time, and was unduly impressed with fellow student writers in college who could write some good dialogue, but exposure to enough dialogue from various entertainment media can help to work up some useful dialogue off the cuff.
Listening to real people talk, on the street, at work or at the mall, is, unfortunately, quite often useless. Ten minutes of 'uh-huh' and 'I know' and 'totally' isn't going to prove useful for a game dialogue where the NPC is meant to convey something, whether it be actual plot relevant data, or a sense of tone or theme or mood (surly suspicious, stares-at-the-party-creepily with fiddle music in the background, overly, almost desperately friendly, utterly unfocused, as if in a stupor, etc.). If the NPC isn't communicating useful information, whether through establishing tone and mood, or actually saying something revelatory, it's best to shut them up. If the PCs want to go shopping for a masterwork bastard sword, and the local smith is in no way at all involved in the storyline, and has no useful information to tease out, it's probably easiest to have him work quietly, or even point to a scar on his throat and a list of prices rather than waste twenty minutes of game time wracking your brain for inane things for him to say about his daughter marrying the miller's boy and yadda, yadda, yadda.
(Alternately, this sort of inane chatter, which you can crib from your last family gathering, and that tiresome anecdote about what little Molly did that was the cutest thing ever, can also serve as a clue to the players that this particular NPC has no useful information, and won't shut up! Still, I prefer just having NPCs that aren't relevant to the setting of the mood or the disbursement of useful information, be less than chatty, since I'm not always in the mood to spend game time blathering on about some imaginary person's imaginary life.)
The Big Bad Evil Guy at the end of the story probably has a whole rationale for why he's doing what he's doing, and why it's destiny, and why the heroes can't win, but unless you stick an acoustically-transparent Wall of Force between him and the PCs, he's never gonna get to deliver that speech. He's gonna be all like, "And now, Mr. Bond, you wonder why I did this..." and everyone else at the table is gonna be rolling d20s for Initiative and announcing what weapons they are attacking with / what spells they are casting while he's warming up his monologue. And so, whatever information needs to be delivered to the party, needs to be delivered before they are in the same room, preferably by frightened townsfolk that he captured, or defeated subordinates, or some ancient scroll that prophecied his rise to power.
Delivering the information *after* he's beaten, tends to be anticlimactic, in my experience. The players should know what they are fighting to stop before they kill Dread Necromancer Wesley. Finding out after the fact that he was trying to bring back the royal family of Westfallen by extracting blood and spiritual energies from their descendents, trying to cause the captive descendents to warp and shudder and, in some grotesque fashion, give birth to their dead ancestors, after the fact is kind of, 'Yeah, whatever. He's dead now.'
Unless, of course, his plan didn't end with his death, in which case it becomes, 'Oh crap, we just rescued a bunch of ticking time bombs, that are going to bust open and reveal new threats!'
But generally, the 'big speech at the end' doesn't work well in a game-play scenario, unless the party have already been captured, in which case the BBEG is an idjit for not killing them already (and clearly needs to read the Evil Overlords Guide). As a result, the BBEG, the person cinematically most likely to have massive dialogue, is unlikely to get a word out sideways before the Magic Missiles and blessed crossbow bolts start flying, which is where all the entertainment media in the world won't help, since movie and novel characters tend to stand around like chumps while the archvillains explain the plan and make various menacing comments or insult their families or whatever. Player characters, not so much, and so the vast majority of your dialogue is going to be needed before the final battle, as set-up and mood-establishment.
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In answer to the admittedly difficult timing of the villain's monologue w.r.t. player initiative rolls etc. I can only offer the following item:
A Dramatic Moment has +1000 to its initiative roll and causes everyone to time-stop (friend and foe) for its duration. In other words nothing can happen until the BBEG has said his piece or the king makes a proclamation or the rope breaks or the button is pressed etc etc.
Contrived? Yes.
Aids in the delivery of your story? Yes.
Can be used all the time? NO
Like all good stories the Dramatic moment should not occur every page or paragraph - otherwise it would end up reading like a Twilight novel ... oops sorry ... I meant it would cheapen the effect of the drama.
I hope Im making sense cause its hitting 2 am here and Id best be in bed
ciao