Design Diverse NPCs with Enneagram (ft. Theater Director Sveta Azriel)

[@bennieperritt2819]

That was very great discussion. Using the Enneagram system for character development sounds like a wonderful way to add defined personality to each NPC. It should make the player and NPC interactions more fun and interesting. I plan to research it a bit more and add it to my game design process. Thank you Sveta and Aviad!

[@BeyondTheScreenRPG]

Thank you Bennie! Sveta and I will explore even more uses for the Enneagram in future videos 😁

[@thegreatjohnjohnson4016]

Collab that’s DOPE! Bro your moving up in the world.

[@BeyondTheScreenRPG]

Thanks man! We had a few sponsors before, but Mammoth Factory are dear friends and they make stuff that GMs are likely to love, so I'm happy to showcase their work!

[@BeyondTheScreenRPG]

Did you find the Enneagram useful? Got any other questions for Sveta? Let us know!

[@konatelassina5301]

I’ve been delving into the various personality type testing for about 8 years now and agree, they can be magnificent when role-playing, or dealing with people in general. From my unprofessional understanding of the enneagram, it’s frigging witchcraft the way it predicts personal behavior based on motivation. It’s eerie how accurate the description is of your behavior when healthy and unhealthy, as is the reasoning for that behavior. According to the enneagram, motivation is based on your insecurities. It also addresses personal behavior based on whether a person is psychologically healthy, normal, or unhealthy, which can get pretty complex for someone that is looking for a surface “how to play an NPC”. Another more famous personality type indicator is Meyers-Briggs, MBTI, which is more a determiner of how people interact with one another than what motivates them. MBTI is more well known but was created to help people determine their cognitive functions (created by Jung). MBTI seems to have gotten way out of hand in terms of popularity and is much less “reason”-able, thus less useful, in predicting behavior than Jung’s cognitive functions. Of these 3, when role-playing NPC personalities, cognitive functions is most useful, MBTI is helpful mostly to determine cognitive functions, and the Enneagram is most useful for players to address their own personal growth and understanding why the heck they do the things they do, but bares their own greatest inner fears and insecurities, things that are quite personal and don’t really want to be public knowledge. The least complex to understand is cognitive functions, but determining a persons combination of cognitive functions, or cognitive function “stack”, is difficult without understanding MBTI. Otherwise you could combine a series of cognitive functions that are not possible.

[@BeyondTheScreenRPG]

Oh wow! Thanks for all the insight. I remember taking an MBTI test once, but I've never considered it for any of my characters. I'll try to research and dive into MBTI and cognitive functions in another video in the future!

[@thegreatjohnjohnson4016]

Hi