Self-operating NPC's - The NPC's You Never Knew You Needed

hello and welcome to this week's episode of how to be a great gm my name is guy and today we are dealing with the interesting issue of npc ai which uh is hopefully going to revolutionize how you look at npcs and doing anything on the fly improvisation is going to be assisted by npcai now remember to hit that like button or the subscribe button it helps the channel in ways that you cannot possibly imagine and it takes just one or two clicks so please do that world anvil is today's sponsor of the video and world anvil is full of all kinds of super useful amazing templates guides it is of course an ultimate repository for all of your gm notes for all of your world building and even for your characters as well they've got just so much in terms of what you can do timelines heraldry maps pinning maps designing all kinds of cool encounters everything that you could possibly want in terms of creating your world space is waiting for you at worldanville.com use the code great gm for a discount when signing up for a subscription which is not required to use the basic program so the idea of npcai ai basically means artificial intelligence and so when we refer to npc artificial intelligence what we are referring to there is the programming that goes into an npc that allows it to autonomously act now what programming we're not programmers we're not going to be using markup languages or c-sharps or d-flats or hang on remember that's musical anyway whatever the programming languages are i think there's one's called python anyway whatever we're not going to be doing that we're going to be looking at how do we program ourselves as gms to create npcs that come with an inbuilt ai and the term i have come up with which helps me remember what i need to do for every single npc that i include in my game is ogas ogas is an acronym that stands for occupation goal attitude and stake now ogas is something that i apply to every single npc that my characters that my players interact with so the moment they walk up to somebody in in any situation whether it is a dungeon in a forest in a tavern and a spaceport the moment the pcs start to talk to an npc i apply ogas and that automatically creates this ai and what ogas does is it will create an npc that will tell me what they are most likely to do and to talk about when engaged by pcs so ogas o stands for occupation most npcs will have an occupation think about your own occupation for that matter doesn't necessarily mean that you are working for a living you could be someone who is living on benefits or you could be someone who has the luxury of you know very rich family members so you don't have to work it doesn't matter whatever you do on a daily basis that is your occupation in broad strokes because the occupation will give you something to talk about you might complain about your occupation you might complain about your co-workers you might enjoy your occupation and relish or cherish your co-workers but your occupation also requires you to do certain things and to have certain skills in order to do it so all of that suddenly is baked into the npc straight away when you decide their occupation if we take for example a city god a city god would have certain things inherent that they can't really do without they would have some combat prowess they would have some combat training hopefully they would have some understanding of the law and what is legal and was not illegal they would have some understanding of what their jurisdiction is what they can and cannot do to members of the public all of that comes along with just their occupation now some uh city guard might enjoy being city guard some might not again it all comes through in the occupation so occupation is our very first programming uh tool if you like we then move on to g of the ogas which is goal now every npc everything on the planet has a goal most of the time it's to survive to procreate and basically that's it so when you look at it how does it survive well it's got to eat it's got to have shelter it's got to have this it's got to have that so usually our goal is somewhere along those things the moment you step into the realm of sentience our goals become far more complicated at least we make them more complicated so the goal now is oh well actually i want that pretty maiden to notice me because i quite fancy that pretty maiden or i want to get free food so i'm going to go and try and get that free food by being a little bit bullish towards people who could possibly give me free food so they give me free food so i go away goals are there are billions of different goals for you to choose from so choose a goal which you think is going to create the most interesting space for your npc to operate in so without city guard let's say the city guard's goal is to get free stuff from taverns and pubs on their patrol route this means we are using their occupation they are using their occupation to try and further their own goal which is to get free stuff this then leads us on to the a of ogas which is attitude now the attitude of this npc is going to change our attitudes change from time to time but generally speaking this is their world view this is how they are in 99 of their situations this is how they behave now it could be brutish it could be simple it could be noble it could be dignified it could be happy it could be joyful it could be helpful it could be sorrowful it could be apathetic again there are so many different types of attitudes that you could apply to this particular individual again it's about applying ones that you think are going to create the most interesting outcome we're going to talk a bit more about that later on in the video so when it comes to our attitude of our god who's wandering around trying to get free stuff i think our god would have a pretty good sense of being apathetic they don't particularly care about their occupation they're really just there for the free food and so that is going to be their primary attitude then we get to the s of ogas which is steak what steak does the god have in obtaining their goal in their occupation and in their attitude the stake the stake basically is how much resistance how much effort are they going to put in to securing all three of the other letters of oh gas so if the guard stake in their occupation is well if they don't do a good job they'll get fired which means they won't get free food then their stake in their occupation is pretty high they will want to be a fairly good guard now if the stake in getting free stuff is also pretty high they might get quite brutish about it walk past the tavern going well i might not walk past this tavern tomorrow night and then what would happen imagine all the thieves that would fall upon you i could walk past tomorrow night but i get so thirsty that's if they've got a high stake if they've got a low stake in getting free stuff then they probably wouldn't try that they would probably just walk past and say oh yeah spare a drink for a guardsman on patrol no all right and off they go you see how building out our ogas starts to give us this npcai the npc is now telling us exactly what they're going to be doing just based on these four parameters now when we look at the stake this transcends into the personal as well in terms of our character's attitude now the character might be apathetic but if the combat that is about to ensue risks their life their stake in being apathetic changes very quickly to being pathetic or to trying to just survive remember those two goals survive and reproduce so we are going to then try to survive at all costs we are apathetic we don't really care we are pathetic perhaps because we have a high stake here please don't kill us the god will surrender very very quickly if of course the god is very angry and the stake in survival is they don't particularly care because their anger is overriding all of that then they might stay in the fight a lot longer to the death well i'm not so sure so we have to think about that now when we look at our ogas the interesting thing about designing an ogas on the fly is that if we remember that conflict is the central point around which all drama and which all of our entire adventures should be based when we create an npc we should be asking ourselves will conflict with this npc create a more interesting story or a less interesting story and by story in this particular context i mean encounter so the pcs walk up to a tavern keeper you apply oh gas to the tavern keeper that haven't keeper has to look after the tavern is trying to make money and is watering down the alcohol to make even more money and they don't want anyone to find that out that is their oh gas basically and their steak is very high if someone were to find out about them watering down the alcohol their patrons might leave and not come back so they have a pretty high stake in keeping that secret if we want there to be conflict we will let slip that information that the beer is watered down it will create a conflict point and the pcs will engage with the npc in a conflict type of way the pcs might try and extort that barman etc etc the barman might try to kill the pcs to keep that information quiet interesting how it just suddenly pops out because we wanted to try and create a conflict you don't have to always do this of course most of the time your npcs should be trying to avoid conflict that is not their goal but if you want to create conflict well just give them an opposite oh gas to what the pcs are after or to towards the pcs and you will create that conflict now finally we take our ogas and we wrap it into the space of the adventure itself and we stand back and we say okay we have our npc and we know how our npc is going to act we now can give it some additional parameters which is to help the pcs or to help the players so if the players don't know what to do if they're kind of lost and they're going well we're looking for plot we're looking for this we're looking for that then all you need to do is add to that npc that they're going to give the pc some additional information oh you look look you lot look like you are going on a hunt or something um i hope you know about the dangerous deer with the magical antlers it gives them something it gives them something to work with and you fall back on the ogas to work out how the npc is going to tell that information to the players it's really as simple as that so with your ogas in place your npc is going to have certain things that they will say and certain things they won't say is going to agree to certain things and not other things and will try to get something out of the pcs which is usually to their own benefit it's a fairly cynical way of looking at our interactions with other humans on this planet but basically sometimes that's what it really does boil down to we either want to get something information an item an object cash advantage over someone else and we seek ways of doing that ogas is going to help you to determine exactly how your npc is going to do that so your task for this week is to create an ogas create a whole lot of oh gases by the way the more you practice this the easier it's going to become for you to drop it into your games so create an npc randomly just pull one npc out of the air that your pcs are most likely to encounter and then apply oh gas to them and then practice going well this is what the npc is doing so how would that ogas exhibit itself how would it present itself out to the world how would this npc operate with this particular ogas then try a complete opposite oh gas and apply that to an npc and see how different those two npcs are try and figure out well what would happen if these two npcs met what's the dialogue that's going to happen between the two and it'll be very interesting to see you will start to realize that they can have a conversation with each other about something if they're in the same space and they're both waiting for something or they're doing something or just being bored sitting doing nothing what will the one say to the other and how will they then respond the ai should take over and you should be able to have a split personality conversation with yourself whilst completing this task anyway until next time a big thank you to my patrons who make this channel possible now if you are not a patreon that's not a problem if you head on over to our website www.greatgamemaster.com you will find a written uh version of this video with points and annotations and things done by our social media goblins thank you very much to her for doing all of that all of the notes are available just go to our website and click on videos and choose a video and you will see this as a written up note until next time thanks for watching and happy gaming

Channel: How to be a Great GM

Views: 49,602

Keywords: creating the campaign, campaign creator, how to be a great game master, how to gm, great gm, campaign creation, dnd campaign, dnd campaign design, dnd campaign ideas, rpg campaign design, rpg campaign ideas, rpg campaign, role playing campaign, campaign design, fantasy campaign, running the game, game master guide, dungeon master guide, gm tips, dm tips, epic guide to creating campaigns, npc d&d, npc artificial intelligence, npc AI

Id: RzWXuy8QWgI

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021