Consequences of self aware NPCs

[Warchon]

Bsckground: There's no moment in a tabletop game quite like the session where a player realizes they've accomplished the BBEGs goals for him, and a deeper discussion leads to the players realizing they've been doing his bidding all along--or worse.
I have what's basically a bet between friends as to who can go the longest before their players figure out they've been playing a horror game (the players I have in mind have played CoC and Paranoia, so I'm not worried about anyone getting freaked out over it).
The angle I've chosen to take is a world where the NPCs know that they're characters in a story. They understand that they don't exist when the players aren't paying attention to them and that experience is hell.

I'm looking for input on societal effects stemming from that reality. While individual interactions are sure to be interesting, what I'm really looking for is suggestions on how the world itself would behave strangely -without giving away the game-.

Examples I have so far:

Urban nomadism; Entire cities will just pick up and move if they know where the PCs are going. In the best case scenarios they'll throw together a ramshackle community or shanty-town in the target space, with or without relevant building and survival skills.

In worse scenarios, the common peasants will invade a target community and kill off the locals in order to take their place--when the PCs get there, the bodies are hastily hidden and whomever is left alive on both sides immediately stop fighting and do their level best to appear to be a longstanding, peaceful community that's always been there.

Players will see familiar faces everywhere and the characters will generally deny it.

If PCs visit a town that has been abandoned in this way and the original residents are prevented from moving back or from knowing they're coming, they'll either find a ghost town or an entirely different group--maybe even a different race--trying to act like they've always been there.


The appearance of extreme xenophobia: incoming messengers from other cities will be shot on sight when the players are in town. Nobody wants to risk the players finding out about some catastrophe they can help with elsewhere.


Alignments seem to make no sense:
The evil mayor who arranged for the outskirts to be invaded by hobgoblins? Actually CG just trying to protect his citizens.
That mercenary do-gooder group who solved the mystery plague while you were away? They're members of an LE death-cult that wants the world to cease to exist.

Unearned fame and fanfare:
Self explanatory, I think.

Manufactured crises:
Anything to keep the players in town just a little longer.

[Vahnavoi]

You seem to have figured out the large trends already. Just remember to bring them to personal level on occasion.

Numerous and super-clingy lovers, for example. Where ever the PCs go, there's a line of people all waiting their turn to woo them, all of them Guy Holden levels of persistent.

Children latching on the PCs and bawling whenever it looks like the PCs might be leaving. "Don't go, we can't live without you! Bwaaa!"

Super friendly and oddly intelligent animals, also. Make them feel like a Disney princess.

If there are bad guys who are not in on this "destroy the world gig", they could be extra reasonable and willing to parley, attempt their best to hire the PCs to their side, etc. Possibly multiple rival "arch nemeses" all vying for the attention of the PCs. Bad guys being horrified at PCs not being heroic enough (by ignoring challenges, not helping the townsfolk, being apathetic to threats)...

[Wizard_Lizard]

Sounds absolutely chilling! I love it!
Perhaps have some divide between some people who are in on it, and some people are not, so the whole thing doesn't get old or whatever. Could potentially even be only maybe three or four town things that are raiding and pillaging and replacing the rest of the not-aware towns.

[Duff]

I presume they don't actually stop existing when the PCs are away, otherwise how would they move into villages?
But presumably their state changes to become far less pleasant.

So, how would things change? I have more questions than answers...

Is there a reason the NPCs are keeping the reality a secret from the PCs? What?
- Maybe they know that if the PCs work out what's going on then the "simulation" they inhabit will be ended? Or the PCs escape if they realise? Or they need to realise before they can escape, but once the NPCs know the PCs know, they'll do everything in their power to stop them? And will the PCs want to escape? Maybe just because it's not real, but maybe they have important things to do if they can only escape this prison?
- Or maybe the PCs realising whats going on turns them into the same halfreal things that the NPCs are. Any PC realising whats going on suddenly becomes more willing to die than see their companions die and they must keep the secret at all costs. I can see the last "real" adventurer wondering what's going on with the rest of the party as they cluster around to protect them while desperately hiding the fact that they've survived wounds which should have killed them
- Are monsters part of this half reality as well? If so, they very much want to hold the PCs as prisoner forever. Or maybe just one, and sell the others to other communities. But they *Really* don't want to kill them. Or the monsters aren't part of the half life. They really want the PCs to be anywhere but here so they can get on with their ordinary monstrous lives. That means clever monsters who don't think they can kill the PCs want to tell them what's going on and help them escape. I can see a sudden switch where the NPCs are wanting to imprison the PCs while monsters try to help them

and one sure thing. Any time the PCs leave town they'll have lots of volunteers as spear carriers and torchbearers

[KineticDiplomat]

So wait..do they literally cease to exist when the PCs aren't thinking about them or looking at them? If the PCs pass a, let's say, shoe store and see a cobbler, was he only brought in to existence once there was any reason to occupy mental space? Is he an imprinted caricature built immeidately for that moment with no experiences or thoughts other than that needed for his role, or is he a fully fleshed human being who just is kept in purgatory-esque holding until the moment a PC looks left and gets a generic street description that involves a shoe store? The moment the PCs round the corner does he disincorporate with his soul or alpha waves or whatever being held...somewhere? Or does he go back to constituent components, his uniqueness burnt to nothing?

I ask because if they can only exist when the PCs are paying attention, then they can never actually take a pro-active action like slaughtering the other villagers. Because the attackers don't exist yet. And those villagers don't exist yet.

[TaiLiu]

The angle I've chosen to take is a world where the NPCs know that they're characters in a story. They understand that they don't exist when the players aren't paying attention to them and that experience is hell.

I'm looking for input on societal effects stemming from that reality. While individual interactions are sure to be interesting, what I'm really looking for is suggestions on how the world itself would behave strangely -without giving away the game-.
The concept is super cool! I'm not sure the metaphysics of such a world would be coherent, though. That doesn't mean you can't play around with it, but larger societal implications would be off-limits.

The player enter a town. The denizens of the town pop into existence, along with the rest of the town. Down to the last child, they are cursed with this knowledge of attention-as-existence. They have histories and memories, preferences and personalities—but they all know that these things are forgeries. They did not exist a few moments ago. And when the players no longer pay attention to them, they will cease to exist.

The main problem is that attention is particular. The players pay attention to the barkeep. Everyone else ceases to exist. The players now switch their attention to the blacksmith. Everyone else, including the barkeep, ceases to exist. It would be exceptionally difficult to do anything as a society, or even as a group, because people would continuously cease to exist. It would be a horrible existence, but I don't think that they could do anything societal with it. The barkeep, the blacksmith—they would try to keep the attention of the players as long as possible. But all the players can just go, "I leave the blacksmith's and head to the inn," and the blacksmith vanishes.

There's also the question of re-existence. The players interact with the barkeep to get rooms at the inn. They eventually lose the barkeep and go to sleep. The barkeep vanishes. The players wake up and go downstairs, where the barkeep exists again, washing a cup. What is the ontological status of the first barkeep and the second? Are they the same person, just popping in and out of existence? Is the second barkeep different than the first? How could they even tell? They couldn't—indeed, they explicitly know that memories can be faked, so the fact that Barkeep 2 shares memories with Barkeep 1 doesn't mean a thing.

We struggle with that same problem as these NPCs, curiously enough. Is the "you" the same you as last night? Every time you break consciousness—even every time you move your attention around—you don't know if you died, and there's a new conscious you that simply inherited the memories of the last one.

Urban nomadism; Entire cities will just pick up and move if they know where the PCs are going. In the best case scenarios they'll throw together a ramshackle community or shanty-town in the target space, with or without relevant building and survival skills.
But surely they can't move if the players aren't paying attention to them! They could be nomadic, but they would have to travel with the PCs. And even then they would still pop in and out of existence, since the PCs would only pay attention to certain members of the town at once. That's one possible consequence, but it would have to be a decision made individually by ever single NPC, not as a group decision.

The appearance of extreme xenophobia: incoming messengers from other cities will be shot on sight when the players are in town. Nobody wants to risk the players finding out about some catastrophe they can help with elsewhere.

Manufactured crises: Anything to keep the players in town just a little longer.
I'm not sure they can do that except in very exceptional circumstances. The players would have to be paying attention to the messenger and the shooter at once, and then of course they would have some explaining to do. In such metaphysical circumstances, I guess any attention really is good attention.

Alignments seem to make no sense:
The evil mayor who arranged for the outskirts to be invaded by hobgoblins? Actually CG just trying to protect his citizens.
That mercenary do-gooder group who solved the mystery plague while you were away? They're members of an LE death-cult that wants the world to cease to exist.
But the mayor couldn't have made that arrangement without the players paying attention to him, right? Same with the mercenaries?

[Warchon]

I am loving some of the responses here--the bawling children hits the heartstrings immediately and is definitely my favourite take so far--but am a little frustrated with the overarching theme of "your NPCs can't do things while they're nonexistent."

And that's ok! If so many of you are interpreting it that way, it's likely some of my players will too, so this gives me the chance to build a self-consistent response ahead of time.

I think the general feeling I'm going for here is that the characters' level of existence is exactly what any other fictional character's is.

Vibrant and meaningful while the reader or player is paying attention to them, but wan and thin when they're offscreen. Literally having their actions described and considered gives them depth.

They aren't actually winking in and out of existence between scenes, but the less important they are in the players' minds--and they do recognize that it's the players they need to please and not the PCs--the less *real* they are.

Doing things the players won't hear about until later is like sleepwalking without any control of it, barely aware at all. Doing things the players don't know about at all is even worse.

And they all quite reasonably believe that if the players figure out it's not just a game, mixed feelings will take shape and they may not come back at all.

These NPCs aren't vying to be talked about at the table--they want real estate in the actual players' minds. That's the closest to real they will ever get to be.

[Vahnavoi]

I think a useful way to think of it would be to consider the world as a simulation with a border that expands and contracts based on how likely the PCs are to interact with things in the world. Everything beyond that border is abstracted, frozen in time or even non-existent. This would handily explain the migrations and have plenty of other effects as well.

For example, suppose the PCs climb on top of a tall tower and look around with a telescope. The border of the simulation now expands to accommodate their increased field of vision. Warring hobgoblins on the hills realize they are being simulated again and immediately begin a forced march towards the presumed location of the PCs.

On the flipside, ordinary townsfolk might be anxious about letting the PCs into windowless enclosed spaces and such, because they fear the border will contract and trap their furthest friends and relatives in oblivion. There should be conspicuously many windows, mirrors etc. around with people always speaking very loudly and being noisy on purpose, just to remind they're there.

One of the most common, recurring sidequest should be of the type "little Timmy got lost in the hills, could you please look for him... with these binoculars?" Timmy isn't really lost, they know exactly where he is, but because he's out of bounds of the simulation, the NPCs can't fetch him themselves. If there are no scrying devices around and someone gets desperate enough to beg the PCs to take them to their lost relative/pet/whatever, other NPCs who get a hint might try to lynch that person for being so "selfish"... because they know that if the PCs go looking too far, the entire town has to move again or be captured out-of-bounds.

As for how open the NPCs should be, I suggest they be pretty open about what's going on... but play up the romantic, melodramatic and even comedic elements of that so that the players don't take it seriously (at first). For example, if some loverboy goes "I'm but a side character in a play, it is you who are the star of the show, only your beauty is real", it should appear he's just being poetic, at most painting on the fourth wall, not being aware of it.

As for monsters, maybe the worst monsters are beyond feeling angst about their situation and are instead abusing it to get at the players. To give a concrete rules example: in Lamentations of the Flame Princess module God That Crawls, there are two ways to model the movement of the titular God: the "hard way" where you track the specific location of the God and use exact movement rates, and the "easy way" where the God is abstracted to a random encounter, with a die roll dictating whether it will arrive at a given spot. You can also think of "rubberband AI" in video racing games, where the AI drivers only drive according to normal rules when they're in sight of the player, but drive perfectly at a steady distance behind the player, even clipping through terrain, when not in sight.

So, some monsters know they can benefit from the abstraction and let the PCs "get away" just enough that they can jump ahead of them with a random encounter roll or some such. Eventually your players should start to wonder things like "isn't it odd how the goblins always seem to stop a chase after a given distance, only to suddenly get ahead of us again?" If the players start to suspect some teleporting power is being used, give that to the goblins. Indeed, maybe this is how the monsters "level up". They use the game rules to influence player expectations, trying to make them think they are stronger than they really are, and then these expectations become the new reality.

[NichG]

In terms of what it might be like to 'be' such an NPC, imagine that you have something like an AI chatbot trained on your posts, demonstrated behaviors, thoughts, etc. When you go off-screen, the AI chatbot steps in for you, but inaccurately. Then, when you're back on screen, you suddenly wake up with memories of what it did in your name and even what that felt like and what not-you thought about it at the time, but now you have to live that life. And if you mess up, you get to be recycled into some other role that you might like a lot less; something like Dark City, where the people are having the elements of their lives swapped around and carefully constructed anew by an external agent. You can remember thoughts you had when you were onscreen, and the AI chatbot does take thoughts into account, so any kind of social offscreen conspiracies could be constructed on your behalf by extrapolating from those thoughts - but its the sort of thing where if you go offline while thinking 'damn I could kill for a drink' you might wake up finding that the chatbot took you literally.

[Vaern]

The first thing any self-aware NPC is going to do upon meeting the party is introduce themselves with their first and last name, and shoehorn as much of their personal background story as they can into any given conversation. They know that if they can make the players invested in or sympathetic to their story then they are much less likely to fall victim to murderhobo shenanigans.

[Kyutaru]

You need the one wacko who finally cracked from the stress and immediately charges in grabbing the PCs by the shirt and screaming "LOOK AT ME!! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" with a half-sobbing state of panic and desperation about his face. Every other peasant, fearing he's going to ruin it for everyone, naturally tries to drag him away and apologize for his actions, playing him off as delusion and crazy when his actions are quite reasonable.

Advertisements would be huge. Everywhere you go there's some sort of Notice Me Senpai billboard trying to outshine the other ones and lead the players to paying attention. Inns are extravagant places built purely to attract attention, all in the presence of PCs obviously, and construction may even be in progress while they're there because obviously it would have to be. Free samples and shop discounts are the standard fare and every merchant clamors "Adventurers! So good of you to come!" while playing at haggling with the singular purpose of keeping the PCs in the conversation for as long as feasibly possible. When they start to lose interest or turn away here's another offer to show them or some free gift or discount.

Meanwhile the children walk around depressed as all hell about all the things they're never going to do when they get older because they're never going to get older. Presumably the other NPCs have backstory stuff they think they've already done but the kids feel all the pain of youth without the prospect of overcoming it.

[Warchon]

Man I thought I had built something pretty dark but now it's getting worse fast.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I've already picked several of my favourite takes and worked them into my prep! Scene setting is going to be pretty elaborate at this point, and every town visit is going to feel quite madcap.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Another potentially interesting take is that the NPCs start off unaware at the beginning of the campaign, but as soon as the PCs leave, they gain conciousness, meaning that when the PCs return things will be a lot.. different.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

I have some suggestions for meta things to do at the table.

Something big should happen at the end of every session. Cliffhangers are great, but if possible you should always be ready to play longer and failing that you should say you would like to play longer to deal with what just happened. The NPCs will always make a grand gesture to keep the PCs involved when the session is wrapping up. You want the players to be excited for the next session, but the NPCs want the game to go on another half hour.

In combat enemies should telegraph their actions, but things the PCs don't notice are less threatening. If the PC doesn't ask wether they are affected by an AoO or aura damage, don't mention it.

There should be a hierarchy of awareness and agency that mirrors how long the notes on a character are. "Orcs" are basically automatons satsfied to snarl and follow their leader's plans. "Orc Captain" can use squad tactics and shout stereotypical threats, bit that's it unless he makes an impression. "Grimjaw the Mascerator" Has numerous quirks and abilities revolving around his bear trap like prosthetic lower jaw and will try to solidify this in the PCs heads but also will try to drag out the combat.


I imagine combat rounds to be near euphoric for NPCs. On a related note "suicide by PC" will be sought by NPCs that think they are about to lose all reasonable hope of getting attention again. Whether in or out of combat, but especially in combat, asking questions about an NPC will make them more interesting, more real, and more powerful. A nameless bandit that survives a crit and loses an eye will probably become the new leader of the bandit camp or strike out on his own as masked anti-vigilante harassing the party.

Have a speech with much wailing and gnashing of teeth ready for whenever the players decide it's time to wrap up the campaign.

[Clistenes]

What if they exist only while the PCs are aware of them/remember them?

When the players are told about a village, the village springs into existence, and keeps existing until the PCs forget about them.

That way the villagers can move while the PCs aren't there... they keep existing until the PCs start forgetting them... People start disappearing in order of least to greatest involvement with the players, as they are erased from the PCs long-term memories.

The players don't need to be thinking about the NPCs, they just need to remember they exist... when the players are told about the village, its inhabitants all appear at the same time, but if the players never visit the village they disappear simultaneously shortly afterwards if the players never visit and forget the village even exist...

What is more, the villagers believe that their current existence, their faces, bodies, abilities, lifestyle, job, relationships, everything is produced by players' expectations when they learn about them, so they may resent them if they aren't happy about those.

If the players are kept in the same area, the local group of villages and towns can keep existing so long as the players are involved, but if they don't visit a village for long, people start to disappear, and the locals panic...

The locals will try very hard to convince the players that they are needed very badly in their village or town, and that there isn't anything interesting out there... of course they can't read the minds of the players and they don't know what the players are interested in, so they try to guess... some peasants say that the world beyond the mountains is a desert devoid of life, some say that the world is beyond the mountains is a dragon, giant and demon-infested hell, and some say that it is a boring, peaceful prosperous place that doesn't need the PCs... and of course conflicting stories are likely to encourage the players to leave and check themselves, rather than staying...

People guilty of saying or doing something that may have provoked the PCs to leave or to get interested about a different place are kidnapped, tortured, murdered and buried at night, and their place occupied by a different NPC.

The final twist: The NPCs don't cease to exist when the PCs forget them... they only believe it... they were tricked into accepting a devil's deal, and their wish was twisted so their minds would be warped that way... "when you meet a hero, you will believe yourself a character in a story" didn't sound so terrible back them...

[MoiMagnus]

If you're going for a somewhat long campaign (not just a single scenario), I'd discourage full self-awareness for most of the population. That's very messy, and having the entire population deal with existential crisis is difficult to handle.
And it causes other problems like discussed by others in this thread: You can't make a big conspiracy while you are non-existing!
Last but not least, what do you do once the PCs found out that the NPCs know? They can just takeover the entire universe without opposition, rewriting it at will? Once the illusion is broken, there is no real point continuing playing in this Trueman show. [And if the illusion is never broken, it is just you as a DM which is having some fun while for the PCs it is a normal campaign.]

It's much easier and much less problematic to go with some weak self-awareness similar to the early OOTS comics or slightly more self-aware: The characters are aware of the tropes of the universe, and will play on them because they understand "that's how the universe works". This will be enough for the population to try to deceive the PCs and manipulate them as they understand that it is beneficial to them, without going full existential crisis mode.

You can keep one or few big characters (like a god) that has a total understanding of the situation, and maybe want to end the world because of this. But having too much of the universe self-aware is way to difficult to handle correctly on the long run.

As for additional ideas:

Something else you can play with is the power of ret-con. If you create from nothing an interesting legend, the PCs will certainly be interested and the "fate" (of whatever is the name they give to the DM) will change the past to make it true. If you're an uninteresting farmer, just follow the PCs from town to town to give them cryptic advices, and with some chances you might become a god is disguise or member of an all-powerful secret society.

The best way to find the rightful heir of the throne might be to put a brutal dictatorship in place until the rightful heir inevitably comes to take his place and fixes every problem.

On a similar note, if you are a villain in this universe, be sure to say in your dying breath "Everything is going ... according ... to my ... plan..." or "I will ... be ... back...".

[Fable Wright]

I think a useful way to think of it would be to consider the world as a simulation with a border that expands and contracts based on how likely the PCs are to interact with things in the world. Everything beyond that border is abstracted, frozen in time or even non-existent. This would handily explain the migrations and have plenty of other effects as well.

[...]

One of the most common, recurring sidequest should be of the type "little Timmy got lost in the hills, could you please look for him... with these binoculars?" Timmy isn't really lost, they know exactly where he is, but because he's out of bounds of the simulation, the NPCs can't fetch him themselves. If there are no scrying devices around and someone gets desperate enough to beg the PCs to take them to their lost relative/pet/whatever, other NPCs who get a hint might try to lynch that person for being so "selfish"... because they know that if the PCs go looking too far, the entire town has to move again or be captured out-of-bounds.

You bring up an interesting point by accident—scrying devices would be huge. I could imagine the NPCs trying to figure out amongst themselves whether it's worth thinning the PCs' attention on them by opening up Scrying and Teleportation. If the PCs can and will be informed of the entire state of world affairs, time moves forward for everyone, and they get to exist even if they fail to get the PCs' attention. On the other hand, what if their attention gets too thin?