Creating Impactful NPCs
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Sometimes you create an NPC and you make them so beyond what is accepted of humanity and think to yourself, “you idiot, no one will care about them now, what have you done?”
And you find yourself proven wrong since many characters do seem genuinely invested. There is always some way PCs will sympathise with a character and I am impressed.
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@Smile i empathized with the fridge yesterday that i kept leaving open to clean it.
‘i’m sorry! just one more time. don’t be sad.’
I think one of the greatest abilities of humans is to find a connection to almost anyone/anything. And when it happens with a cute moment of storytelling, it’s nice.
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@Meg I feel this way about toys I never play with. I hate throwing them away even though it’s been like two decades lol.
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Flip side: I do have an NPC who a player has referred to as “edgy” and showy and I fully agree. Yet that seems to be the NPC that many characters maintain a whole lot affection towards.
So… eh!
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An NPC needs to have something players want, and needs to have wants of their own.
That’s it, that’s the tweet, the rest is 100% personal preference.
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Don’t think of them as NPCs when you’re using them. They’re just characters, and you’re the actor. Design them as you would any PC, with all the layers you want.
I think the only difference between a PC and an NPC is what they’re for not how they’re made nor how they’re played.
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I disagree with this idea that NPCs need to interact with PCs like other PCs do.
But I also don’t think “my NPC that I play for regular, everyday RP” is actually an NPC.
We need some other term for this shit. “Staff PC” is as close as I can come up with, because “NON-PLAYER Character” clearly doesn’t fit a character someone wanders around with all day long.
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My two cents is that not all NPCs are created equally. The purpose behind an NPC determines what that NPC needs to make them impactful. An NPC with multiple purposes needs that much more work, but more work makes for a more vibrant character (usually).
However, you have to know when making them that they may not be used for whatever purpose you design them for. Players will interact with them as they choose and things generally spiral off into crazy directions. Sometimes we spend a lot of time and effort into making NPCs then get really disappointed when players ignore/dismiss/misinterpret them.
Anchoring a character to your game world is an easy way to make sure that your NPC gets the attention it deserves. Making them important enough that the world doesn’t work right without them is a surefire way to anchor them. This is easily done at the start of the game. It is much harder to do after the fact.
It is important to remember that every institution exists for a reason ICly. Too many times we create institutions and NPCs for those institutions just because the book says it exists. That waters down any NPC if they’re only around because the theme says they should be around, but we ignore the reason behind it. An impactful NPC changes the world around them not only with their presence, but with their absence.
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So long as NPCs don’t overshadow PCs or their actions or their impact in a story and are more looked upon as guideposts, that’s about the only real huge thing I care about when it comes to how NPCs are handled.
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@Smile As a kid I used to feel slight distress every time I erased something I’d written, because I was killing those letters that now didn’t get to exist.
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@farfalla Oh my god I invented a weird ritual about this where I had to hold my breath after deleting letters because if I could type those letters before I ran out of breath they would come back to life. I had no idea anyone else did this!
