Method Acting NPCs using this one, very complicated trick

An unhelpful overview and a somewhat helpful roll table

I’m teaching a webinar tomorrow on roleplaying villains, and it occurred to me that a lot of what I will be teaching sounds very complicated in theory, but is very simple in practice. And if it’s that simple, surely it can be shared in a substack, yes? Right?

I’m going to write out some background here because I think it’s helpful to understand where ideas come from, and why they are important. But if you want to just see the “one, very complicated trick”, you can just scroll down to “Applying Fast Food Stanislavski”.

I think when people consider playing NPCs, they often default to focusing on voice acting. And that’s totally valid, I consider it one of the three basic pillars of improvised characterization. But there’s another pillar that often gets overlooked, unless you’ve taken a lot of drama classes: objective. A lot of RPGs these days even have NPC sheets that come with pre-baked “agendas” and so forth, but I find most GMs don’t really understand how to apply this concept properly.

So let’s talk Method Acting.

What is Method Acting?

Often, when people think of Method Acting, their minds go to Daniel Day-Lewis or Jared Leto: getting really “into character” (whatever that means), and fully adopting their emotional mindset and mannerisms, without regard for Bleed.

I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a. not super accurate and b. not super helpful (and c. not very healthy).

When we’re talking about actual Method, we’re talking about the school of dramatic acting founded by Konstantin Stanislavski, and the traditions carried on by his students. The premise of Stanislavski’s “system” is rather simple. To quote Keith Johnstone: “He believed that if an actor is absorbed in trying to achieve a purpose, automatic systems will kick in.”

To put it in my own words:

Using your conscious will to believe in the same things a character believes, to want the same things a character wants; in order to feel the same way a character feels, and to do the same things the character would do.

I find that’s an insightful way of putting it for our purposes, because it gets to the heart of all Roleplay reasoning: “I did X because it’s what my character would do”! If you are doing a thing because you truly believe it’s what your character would do, and for no other reason, then congratulations! You’re method acting.

The Meisner Method

Ok, that’s cool and all. But don’t method acted characters normally have a script, and nuanced backstory, and an experienced writer at their helm, and take years of expertise to adopt as an actor? Well, not necessarily.

Sanford Meisner was a student of the Method taught by Lee Strasberg, who was himself inspired by Stanislavski’s innovations, and his “technique” of the Method is probably the most favoured amongst all prestige actors today. His style was pioneered by actors like Marlon Brando, who saw character work as a holistic art of the mind and body.

According to Meisner, all characters are inertial. They only act insofar as they are acted upon, and they only act with intention. They do not care about whether or not they are “themselves”, instead characters act to affect other people and their environment. They have something they want to achieve in everything they say, do, and believe.

Fully adopting the Meisner Method for theatrical production requires undergoing a lot of training involving spontaneity and vulnerability. For all those who nerd out on such things, check out the famous Meisner Repetition Exercise.

BUT, we can pull from Meisner this basic principle of characters only acting towards their objective to create something entirely new. And using this for improvisation was pioneered by improvising legend Keith Johnstone.

Objectives and Tactics

Keith Johnstone is essentially the father of modern narrative improvisation. While much of American improv was focused on improv as a methodology for producing comedy, he was much more concerned with investing in storytelling and “being obvious” as methods for producing improvisational theatre (and it usually ends up being funny anyways).

In Impro for Storytellers, Johnstone outlines, as far as I am aware, the first time somebody specifically taught Objectives and Tactics as a methodology for improvising characters. The book is from the 90s, but I believe he was teaching this method much earlier. In a section titled “Fast Food Stanislavski”, he outlines the following exercise:

I tear paper into long strips, and write a purpose at the top of each.

The father’s strip says: ‘to give people a good time’.

The mother’s strip says: ‘to get sympathy from other people’.

The son’s strip says: ‘to give people a bad time’.

The daughter-in-law’s strip says: ‘to be thought intelligent’.

This fails to delight [the students] (because at some subliminal level they understand that knowing your purpose doesn’t help), but then I divide the class into husbands, wives, sons and daughters and ask each group to write a list of things that their ‘characters’ might do to achieve their purposes.

They laugh happily as they write their ideas, but some of them soon get stuck, even though I’m only requesting six items.

‘Don’t search for good ideas,’ I say. ‘The purposes don’t have to work.’

“Why not?’

‘You’ve seen a lion-tamer removing his head from the lion’s mouth and towelling off the saliva? Well, it would have been a lot more memorable if he’d failed.’

He then gives an example of typical lists. Here’s one for the Father who wants to “Give People a Good Time”:

• Smile, be friendly

• Give presents

• Ask advice

• Respond promptly

• Introduce people

• Offer food, drinks, drugs, etc.

According to Johnstone (and also, by my own personal experience teaching), this very quickly leads students to a much more holistic and truthful way of being on stage. By focusing naturally on what they want to achieve, improvisers “get out of their head” on how they ought to be, and instead focus on how they can affect others. This kickstarts what we might call “Meisner Mode“, which is a term I just made up now but I’m sticking with.

And it centres around two basic concepts of playwriting/acting: Objectives and Tactics.

An Objective is the thing a character desires above all else. As Johnstone points out, a character’s objective is not just to “rob a house” if they’re robbing a house, it’s to “impress their friends” or to “annoy their parents”. The strongest Objectives, for the purposes of dialogue/acting, always involve affecting another character.

A Tactic is the various methods (“purposes”, in Johnstone’s words) by which a character tries to achieve their Objective. If you have ever been reading a play and seen the word (Beat) scattered seemingly randomly, that is the point at which a character realizes their tactic isn’t working and changes.

A character without an Objective has no reason to be there. A character without Tactics has no purpose by which to act.

Writing out lists of Tactics is helpful - indeed Johnstone has a decent glossary of Objectives like “To seduce a man” and “To be thought of as smart” at the end of his book. But a character thusly adopted with an Objective, by my experience, will eventually find their own tactics as time goes on. Like any other form of performance, it’s a skill you can master with practice. And the only way to practice is by doing it in a live environment over and over (ie your games).

And that brings us to:

Applying Fast Food Stanislavski

So, your players walk into a tavern. You describe a mysterious hooded man in the corner, a bartender with a brimming smile, a strange wanted poster on the wall, a dragon on the loft banister. All rich and glowing with atmosphere.

“Is there anybody else in the tavern?” they ask.

“Uh... yeah. A... [rolls dice] goblin,” you reply.

“What’s his name?” they ask.

“Uh... Boblin?” you say.

“We go to Boblin.”

Oh god! You know nothing about Boblin. What do you do?

Well, you could lead with physicality, or voice, but those are stories for another time. Right now, you need as intriguing a character as possible, one that seems motivated and mysterious. One that you know will reliably hook the party into this chapter’s quest.

You close your eyes. You have 5 seconds to make a decision. What do you spend your mental energy on?

My suggestion is to use Fast Food Stanislavski.

Now, I would personally suggest you use this incident to practice the true hardest thing you can do as a GM: make a decision. Choose, right here, right now, what Boblin’s motivation is. “To make others feel dirty”? “To seduce player X”? “To make everyone afraid”? Make that decision, and then go through every tactic you can think of, as soon as the last one is foiled.

Let’s go with “To make everyone afraid”. How would you, as a person accomplish this?

Maybe have the goblin try to be as mysterious as possible. Open his eyes unnaturally wide and have a menacing expression (now your Objective has chosen your physicality). Have him speak in unpredictable and startling sentences, with a low timbre and sinister register (and now your Objective has chosen your voice). Have him constantly ask questions about if the characters are feeling ok, if they have noticed anything off (and now you have a very intriguing hook). And so on and so forth...

However, doing this spontaneously takes practice, and we don’t always have the time or emotional capacity to be doing literal Method Acting. You should practice when you have the opportunity and you feel safe doing so. But sometimes you need a quick reference.

And since we’re talking roleplaying games, I would be remiss to not leave you with a rolltable to get you started. So allow me to present:

Roll Table Stanislavski

When you’re introducing a new NPC, and you want them to be strongly motivated, just roll a 1d20, and choose an objective from this list. Reference the Tactics listed as needed, or roll for them as well (they’re all d6). Yes, you can literally sit there and just go through the tactics every 5 or 6 lines of dialogue, and it works surprisingly well. But, of course, it will work best if you simply repeat the mantra that is the Objective in your head over and over again, and then act.

Most of these (1-15) are straight from Johnstone, some (16-20) are mine own creation. Check out Impro for Storytellers for much more comprehensive lists of Tactics for all of his objectives.

My Objective is to make people recognize Roleplay as its own art. Hopefully this pretentious addition will add to that sentiment. Thanks for reading!

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