Creating Impactful NPCs

[Solstice]

Yarr. NPCs are characters of import. Otherwise, they’re just mob characters and/or monsters.

I haven’t had an NPC, so my advice might be flawed. Grain of salt time for me, please.

From an outsider’s view:

Don’t be afraid to stand up for your NPC and not have it just be a Pez dispenser for plot. Sure, it has the capacity to create plot, but that can very quickly get tedious if your NPC is being treated like a questgiver rather than a human being. If people are just trying to hit the correct trigger word to make your NPC give them a quest, it gets super old, super quickly. Sometimes an NPC in a room reminds me of people in EQ trying to brute force the right answer to a quest.

What sword
What shining sword
What dragon
What shattered emerald <- (The one that never fucking drops, that’s what.)

I’ve had a lot of good scenes where the NPC was doing cool NPC things, but the thrust of the RP was really just, like, ‘Hey, here we are. Two people. Doing people stuff. Talking. Bickering. Drinking. Killing time.’

Interacting with NPCs in this way is often more impactful to me than going on a big awesome quest, because sometimes it’s just cool to see this big powerful awesome creation just… hang out, and shoot the shit with you. And then three weeks later demolish an army single-handedly or something. Knowing the NPC can, should, and is every bit as rewarding as knowing what the NPC knows, or getting a shiny.

A powerful or peculiar presence that happened to nudge or brute-force the trajectory of the PC’s life from that point forward, or even just that the characters feel proud to know or have known.

Because at the end of the day, people will remember that type of NPC more than they remember the Sword of Buttkicking+1 or ‘How to cure Acorn Fever’.

[shit-piss-love]

How I design NPCs is very different for initial worldbuilding and scenario setting than it is thereafter.

When doing the initial work, NPCs are to help set Theme and Flow. These tend to be a little more fleshed out than NPCs that are created later, by virtue of having to serve as skeletal structure for the setting and initial story hooks.

After the game launches, NPCs are tools for solving the problems of Storytelling. The central axiom of how I run games is that NPCs (and Stories) have no substance beyond the superficial until they have made contact with PCs. I look at the practice of running a game as the application of smoke and mirrors. Implying as much of the goings-on of the setting as possible with the fewest number of lightest touches. This lets me stay flexible and helps me avoid what I see as the main failure mode of storytelling; making something happen in the game world that no one cares about.

I see NPCs as just another trick used to achieve theatrical immersion. This actually dovetails really well with working with a large, collaborative staff. A NPC can be launched with nothing but the merest whisper of an idea, but with a concrete purpose. Hook PCs on this plot, provide a face for some rumor or angle a PC has displayed interest in, etc. When I or the staffer are done playing them, we write down what happened in interaction with the PCs and make notes about the impressions the PCs have been left with. This informs how we continue to mold the NPC. The key is that it all grows from the interactions with the players, rather than having a fully-formed idea that maybe does or doesn’t land. I get the scene tone I want every time because it was cued off of the players, and not some idea I’ve overthought in a vacuum.

Some NPC patterns I use over and over:

• Beloved Org Leader Who Will Eventually Die: My workhorse pattern. Their role is to establish the culture around some element of the game like a Knightly Order or a Mage Circle or a Thieves Guild. Through their RP, players will pick up on the themes, activities, and plots we want associated with that element. They will guide and mold the PCs that end up in their sphere. Ideally, they will eventually pass on the leadership role to a PC that has excelled at meeting the Theme.
• The Plot Mule: Shows up to hook PCs into some plot. Always getting themselves into trouble or dropping ancient lore or whatever the angle is. When players see them around, they know we’re rolling something out.
• The Decider: I tend to avoid letting PCs take the role of the game’s highest order authority, if there is one. The Queen or whatever. I get a lot more use out of having this character remain firmly in staff control. Both in terms of controlling theme/culture but also so that I have a NPC that the buck stops with in case things go weird and I need to wrangle something back into lane.
• Backpfeifengesicht: German term for “person with the punchable face”. PCs want to punch this person in the face, figuratively or literally. These tend to arise from observation of what individual and groups of PCs are trying to accomplish; the forces standing in their way.

[tsar]

I wing it based on whatever is going on.

I’m sorry, I know. I’m a goblin.

[Tat]

I watched this video last night (along with another really great one about Max from Stranger Things and making her a stronger character), and it was really good.

A couple takeaways for me:

Many of the things people suggest in this thread - giving them their own lives, creating them as if they were PCs - are the exact things that make NPCs really hard for me.

Creating a PC is a process that takes me a LOT of time and effort. A lot of who they are is actually a result of RP with other characters. I struggle to write rich backstories that result in a full-fledged, complex character out of the gate, and rely on building up a sense of the person via many early interactions with other characters.

NPCs don’t have this luxury. They may get a handful of scenes, but they’re often scattered and occasional. I also do not have the time to expend the effort on NPCs that I do on a PC.

For me, an NPC really needs to be a tool in a way a character isn’t, because my creative bandwidth just doesn’t have room to create them like a character.

So from that viewpoint, there were three things that really struck me from the video that ARE fairly easy to apply.

WARNING: I tried to avoid real spoilers, but this is about Stranger Things season 4 and there are some minor spoilers for episode 1 in here.

• Showing two sides of a character, usually in conflict, makes them immediately feel deeper and more complex and gives a glimpse at a rich internal life that players can extrapolate even if you never address it directly. In the example, you see a happy, popular cheerleader, and then you are shown that she has some sort of serious sadness or anxiety in her life, and this creates a more complex character than either view by itself. It’s important that these glimpses come quickly together, because you have limited time with this character.

• Lean into archetypes. With short-lived characters, archetypes help ‘fill in’ the emotional beats you don’t have time to actually trigger yourself. This one I particularly like - and I like that the example they used was a pretty specific one (girl with body issues, controlling mother, possible eating disorder) rather than broad (popular cheerleader). There ARE lots of these pretty specific archetypes out there that we can lean on. In this particular case, part of what worked is that they merged two (or more) archetypes to make her feel more unique.

• To make a short-lived story feel impactful, set up a future that will not exist. I think this is a really great point when it comes to making it feel BIG when you defeat a villain. Refer to events they won’t make it to, plans that won’t come to fruition, etc. In the video, this is done casually (‘you should come Friday night’). It was a great example of how dialog can feed a bigger sense of the story.

[Testament]

I’ll watch it when I eventually get around to watching S4 of Stranger Things. I’m trying to not get spoilered.

[tsar]

When I really think on this question, yes, I stand by my statement that I’m winging it. Mostly because so much of it boils down not only to what a plot needs, but what do the players need and want? So I tend to start off with:

Character has suffered a major set-back but is here now to improve things as a mentor to others.

The ‘to others’ part is REALLY important and one I can’t answer alone. What players are going to gravitate to my NPC? Absolutely no idea. Could literally be anyone. But as I meet them, I flesh out details to suit the situation.

Character is a successful life long military commander with strong feelings about topic

Why does he feel that way? Do players care? Does he have a family? How do I feel about the subject in the exact moment somone asks me?

I guess I really just like the flexibility. Dealing with my NPCs can be a little ‘choose your own adventure’ I guess.

[Tat]

@Testament It is spoilery, but only for episode 1.

[Testament]

@Tat I’m just honestly really bad at keeping up with watching tv. I still haven’t watched the two other seasons of Castlevania. But thanks for letting me know.

[shit-piss-love]

The key to the “NPCs are written fast and loose” strategy is to take copious post-PC-interaction notes. For example:

@tsar said in Creating Impactful NPCs:

Character is a successful life long military commander with strong feelings about topic

Why does he feel that way? Do players care? Does he have a family? How do I feel about the subject in the exact moment somone asks me?

I love to be able to send NPCs out with a simple handful of lines like this, and let whoever is playing them come up with what feels right for the tone of the scene they are in. To me, that scene transpiring in a totally holistic fashion is the goal itself. And I want the person playing the NPC to be able to make the judgment call about what feels right.

And then I definitely want them to come back and write down as much about what happened as possible so that we can synthesize it all together. My experience is that this creates NPCs that are consistently more engaging for the PCs, who have unknowingly influenced how the NPC develops through the tone/events of the scene they participated in. It achieves one of my core goals in running a game; to have significant amounts of observational data and subtle influence on the game flowing not just from staff to players, but the reverse.

[Roadspike]

@Tat Yeah, leaning into archetypes was a big takeaway for me too — I tend to do that anyhow for NPCs and PCs (and then break hard away from them when I can with PCs).

The other big takeaway that you mentioned also really should be — in my mind — generalized for more than just NPCs: show the status quo and then break it. I think that this works for games, scenes, NPCs, PCs, and just about everything else. If we don’t know and get used to the status quo, big changes just aren’t that big a deal.

As an example: if you start your pirate-magic game off with a big magical event without giving characters more than a week or two to settle into their piratical status quo, then it will never be a pirate game, it will be a magical creatures game.

[Pyrephox]

I build all my NPCs with the PCs in mind. What is the purpose of this character to the PCs’ story? What are they trying to do and how is that going to be an obstacle/boon for the PCs? What challenges will they provide to the PCs - whether physically in combat or psychologically as a challenge to the way PCs have expressed their views of the world.

I measure impact in effect on PCs. I don’t want NPCs to have their own stories, because for me, that’s not their purpose. But I want the PCs’ stories to be affected by the NPC in complex and interesting ways.

[Polk]

@Roadspike My strategy is to try to use ‘tropes’ as emotional cues. Love them or hate them, they should provoke a reaction

[Tat]

@Roadspike said in Creating Impactful NPCs:

As an example: if you start your pirate-magic game off with a big magical event without giving characters more than a week or two to settle into their piratical status quo, then it will never be a pirate game, it will be a magical creatures game.

‘How to start a game with the right tone’ could be a whole other thread. I do really like this, though. It works both for overarching game stuff - and I think games need a periodic return to normal, too - and for NPCs who you want to give a compelling story.

@Pyrephox said in Creating Impactful NPCs:

I measure impact in effect on PCs. I don’t want NPCs to have their own stories, because for me, that’s not their purpose. But I want the PCs’ stories to be affected by the NPC in complex and interesting ways.

I think generally an NPC’s story is SHAPED by the PCs - that’s part of how they affect the PCs’ stories in turn.

For example, some of @tsar’s NPCs had entire ARCS - enemy to kind of okay to straight up redemption - that were almost entirely a result of a PC making an unexpected decision to choose connection over other more nefarious means of gaining information. I think those arcs felt very satisfying to the PCs, because they were both true to what they knew of the character and the world and were a clear ripple from things they had chosen.

[shit-piss-love]

@Tat said in Creating Impactful NPCs:

‘How to start a game with the right tone’ could be a whole other thread. I do really like this, though. It works both for overarching game stuff - and I think games need a periodic return to normal, too - and for NPCs who you want to give a compelling story.

I always use some sort of Seasons format in games. Sometimes more explicitly than others, but there’s always at least some form of cyclical structure to the timing of plots. The beneficial effects are too many to name in a tangent.

[Mourne]

To be fair, I have altitis, so coming up with new pc’s, of any variety, is exceptionally easy for me.

So when I create my NPC’s that are as fleshed out as any character, it’s because it’s how my brain works. I would always say for anyone to do what works for them. Those who run stories have their own methods, we’re all unique, do what makes it great/easy for you to run stories people have fun with.

[kalakh]

I think it comes down to giving the PCs (and thus the players) a reason to care, and then being willing and able to roll with it when players suddenly become really attached to your random gate guard or orc #23651. I agree with the idea of the PCs being able to influence the NPCs (not necessarily in the ways that p.layers want or expect, but in ways that are good!memorable ). An NPC with an arc can be really cool, so long as that arc doesn’t overshadow what the PCs are doing, but they don’t necessarily need one to manage this. It’s not easy, there are folks in the entertainment industry that spend their entire careers trying for exactly this reaction, but I think a good thing to aim for is the following not-quite-contradiction:

An NPC cannot be a PC in terms of the plot or the game world, but they need to be a PC in terms of how other PCs interact with and consider them. @Solstice 's example of a bunch of players in EQ standing in a room trying to say the magic phrase to get something out of the NPC is a good one. Some players will do this regardless, and I don’t think it’s a failure of the GM in that case (but it can be exhausting), but the goal should be that most players feel their characters have more reason - or could have more reason - to interact with the NPC beyond whatever they feel the NPC can offer to advance their characters. This doesn’t mean the opportunity or reason ever has to manifest…but it needs to feel like it could.

From the perspective of a player, while I’ve had some incredible, character defining interactions with NPCs, there’s one that stands out pretty well whenever I think about this question.

Once upon a time I was playing on a MUSH where a random background NPC in one plot ended up suddenly being much more important and relevant in a following one. Behind the scenes, I later learned that one GM wanted a character to fill this role, and the first one simply went “here, you can use this guy”, but the player-facing impression was that this was a guy who had a thing going on, a life that the PCs had dipped into before, and suddenly that thing was relevant to the PCs and the plot in a way it hadn’t been (I am, admittedly, a sucker for things like this; doesn’t matter if the continuity was planned or faked on the spot, if you can sell it’s the former you’re golden). This NPC was essentially a macguffin, a plot element the PCs needed to locate, get information from, and then get to a certain place at the climax. This NPC could have been a book. Instead, he was a crotchety old jerk the PCs needed to convince to help them. In the middle of these attempts, the bad guys showed up, this crotchety old jerk told the PCs to hide while he tried to bullshit them into leaving, suddenly taking a risk that he didn’t have to and that the PCs hadn’t expected from him because he was a crotchety old jerk who seemingly didn’t care about anything, least of all the PCs.

Now, I did not know just how important he was to the plot at the time, so I don’t know if the GM was prepared to roll with the possibility that this dude was simply murdered in this scene (though, given other things that happened, I’m pretty sure she was), but it felt like he really could die, and suddenly the PCs had a choice…this guy, who clearly didn’t like them at all, and wanted them to gtfo, just stuck his neck out for them regardless. He was not just surface level crotchety jerk #234351, he clearly had reasons for doing that. They could probably stay hidden and hear a lot of information by just lurking. They could sneak out the front door while the bad guys were occupied at the back. Who knows, maybe the dude would be fine (though the conversation was going south fast). But they could also intervene, fight the bad guys, and save crotchety old jerk.

This situation could have come about easily in other ways. Saving this dude did notably help the PCs, and we knew it. The bad guys could have just shown up, a fight could have started, and then they could have carted crotchety old jerk to a safehouse until it was time to advance the plot further whether he liked it or not. Crotchety old jerk could have been annoying enough that it was more satisfying to let him get torn to bits.

But the GM made it compelling and reciprocal, and my PC, at least, had reason and the personality to feel a bit of fondness. They had some brief conversations. Crotchety old jerk turned out to be a crotchety old (and old old old it turned out) jerk with some pretty good reasons for it. He was not a hero. Turns out the plot was in large part his fault, that his own cowardice had led to a situation where his friends and family died, and the big evil the bad guys were trying to free and control was only in the position because of what he’d failed to do. He felt, rightly, endlessly guilty, was still something of a selfish coward despite seeing how necessary it was to help the PCs clean up his own mess and had to be convinced into it, but clearly did care beneath the surface, not just about what was going on, but, at least a little, about what happened to the PCs and the things they cared about.

The climax of this plot was three parts enormous epic fight, and one part escort quest. Get the NPC to the place to do the thing so you can win the day at the very last moment. My PC was invested. Beyond winning, she wanted to fight alongside this guy, help him do what he’d previously failed to do, because of their interactions (all of three scenes, iirc), because she didn’t like what he’d done but she understood it, and because, if in even the tiniest way, it felt as though they’d some tiny connection, that she’d had a little bit of influence in this decision to finish what he’d started.

At the culmination of this scene, when all seemed lost, my character asked this NPC what to do. The NPC told her to ‘give herself’. In the moment, both I and my PC misinterpreted that to mean ‘sacrifice yourself to stop this’, and we were suddenly prepared to do exactly that. What the NPC actually meant was basically feed the equivalent of her magic pool to the effort of binding the big evil, and get the other PCs to do the same. This was done. Last minute victory, hooray! Big evil banished. My character, half-dead and drained both from the fight and the ritual, turned to crotchety old jerk and said something vaguely affectionate, some version of “hey we did it.”

Crotchety old jerk was dead. This largely selfish coward who had been responsible for a whole lot of the plot, for the big evil not being fully contained because he wouldn’t sacrifice himself then, had done what he should have done all along. He didn’t run away like he had before. In the moment he didn’t even complain or explain what was going to happen. It was the culmination of his arc, but done in a way that made the PCs the stars, the ones who saved him and then convinced him to make that final decision, and then made it possible to happen by being big heroes in a spectacular battle in which some PCs straight up died.

This NPC’s death fucking got me as much as the PC deaths. It’s not because his story was unique, though it was compelling; this vague plot and his role is incredibly common; in fact, another plot near exactly the same in the broad terms happened a few years later, yet I didn’t find myself caring about that NPC at all. It’s because the GM had given me and my PC a reason to care, and when I did, their NPC responded - just a little! - to that effort. Because I and my PC had a reason to care, my character was changed from the experience.

It happened before and it’s definitely happened since, but that may be the one that always comes up first in these conversations.

[Roz]

omg there are some NPCs i’d be devastated to see die. including one who is very likely to die based on current story.

[Testament]

I finally made an NPC I’ve been playing recently into an actual NPC character bit and I’m already terrified if he ends up dying during the process of the current plot I’m just starting.

[SpaceKhomeini]

My happiest stafftimes just involved unleashing a hoard of NPCs on PCs in both social and plot contexts.

Kinda cheating but lean into what you love best, right?

It really amplified the gutpunch when one died, one turned out to be a traitor (but actually NOT), etc.

[Herja]

@Roz Now I wanna know who!