NPCs, Strings, and Playing with Few Players

This is who you want to fight:

You want the PCs to fight. I don't mean you want to have them swinging fists and firing guns all the time.

But you want the PCs to be getting Strings on one another, forcing one another into ugly situations, fucking one another, making promises to one another, loving one another, betraying one another, and doing horrible things for one another.

The PCs shouldn't ever "team up." They can depend on each other, and they can even do things to save one another... but they should never be... You know what, Spike says it better than I do:

"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love until it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other until it makes you quiver. But you'll never be friends.

Love isn't brains, children, it's blood. Blood screamin' inside of ya to work its will. I might be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."

You never want the PCs to be friends, in that sense that Spike is talking about friends. This is part of the agenda: make sure that they are unaccepted. Blind love is okay. Acceptance isn't.

This is what NPCs are for:

NPCs are there for a few things:

1.) To form PC-NPC-PC triangles.

2.) To force pressure on untenable situations.

3.) To infect the game with interesting conflict, in the hopes that the PCs become host to that infection.

4.) To provide countermeasure. EX: Jake is playing Sylvan, the emotionally-needy Fae, and Carly is playing Lillian, the tough-as-nails Ghoul. They're in a relationship, but it's mostly about Lillian pushing Sylvan around, and meeting her needs at the expense of his. This is awesome! But give it enough time, and the pattern will become stale. Your job, as an MC, is to use NPCs to provide countermeasure and infect the game with new conflicts.

So, you introduce someone that challenge's Lillian's resolve, maybe. How about a werewolf dude... One who's personality is half The Joker (from The Dark Knight) and half Faith (from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer)... out to provoke Lillian and to test her resolve and to force her to see the path of darkness.

Or you introduce someone who sees Sylvan as powerful and unwavering, who looks to Sylvan for salvation. You give him a taste of being a hero, and then you remind him that he's trapped in an abusive relationship with a cruel dead chick. What then?

PCs and NPCs:

So, I'd make some of those expectations and goals clear to your players, at the outset. It is absolutely not their job to get along. It's their job to form dysfunctional, imbalanced relationships with one another and to fight for the acceptance that just straight-up isn't coming.

Now, use NPCs to reflect this dysfunction and to fuel it when it's not coming naturally. That's what NPCs are for. That, and to give interesting options and outs.

NPCs and Strings:

NPCs can take Strings, and people can take Strings on NPCs.

If you're a PC, you can take Strings on NPCs in the normal ways: turning them on, and any other ways that your moves give you.

The MC has an MC move that I forgot to list: "Have an NPC take a String on a PC". Narrate how this happens: a big threat, a turn-on, a magical ritual, helping them out at a crucial moment, etc.

As the MC, you get to just take Strings on them whenever you get to do a move. If the PC is in a relationship with an NPC, use this move all the time.

NPCs don't take Strings on NPCs. Boring.

Playing with Few Players:

If you've only got one player, play something else. This game will not work. I recommend My Supernatural Romance, by Jamie Fristrom. Or S/lay w/Me (despite its title).

If you've got two players, then you've got just enough to play. But you'll want to lean more heavily on NPCs than in bigger games. During "your backstory" in character creation, have each player assign one of their backstory interactions to the other PC, and then invent an NPC to assign any other backstory things to.

Does that make sense? Like, for example, The Vampire has:

someone once offered themselves to you in a moment of weakness. gain 2 Strings on that person.

someone once saved your unlife. give them 1 String.

So, the other PC? Either they offered themselves to you in a moment of weakness, or they once saved your unlife. Choose which. Now, invent a new NPC to assign the other one to. Just a name and a title, like: "Mrs. Beckins, my biology teacher, offered herself to me in a moment of weakness. I cut her down, left her crying, and now use it as blackmail whenever I'm doing poorly in her class." And then the MC writes down "Mrs. Beckins - Biology Teacher / Cougar" on a sheet of paper.

Managing Strings:

So, at some point in the first draft, I suggest using pieces of string to track Strings. That's actually a bad idea, I think. Instead, just write names down and write the number of Strings you have on them there.

So, if you're a PC named Jake, maybe your page will look like this:

STRINGS
Lukas - 3
Windy (NPC) - 2
Molly (NPC) - 1

And if you're the MC, you'll have to keep tallies for each NPC that has Strings, on who they have them on. So, something like this:

WINDY'S GOT STRINGS...
Lukas - 2
Jake - 1

MOLLY'S GOT STRINGS...
Jake - 3

LUCIAN'S GOT STRINGS...
Lukas - 4

So, the MC has 3 different NPC's who have Strings on one or both of the PCs. Make sense?

Why are actual, physical strings a bad idea? (Particularly for PCs, I can see it being a hassle for NPCs.)

Because they imply finite limits, because they imply that Strings
come from somewhere rather than being created, because it's needlessly fiddly, because it'd be impossible to differentiate Strings on various NPCs unless you had a different colour for each, because you'd need 30-60 pieces of coloured string.

I just imagined a sort of relationship map, in the centre of the table, that everyone has access to. When you take a String on someone, you record it on the relationship map. (And when an NPC gets a String, you add them as a character to the map.)

I think I'm going to try this in our next session.