Friday, May 1, 2020

How Do You Plan NPCs? (Discussion)

I believe I've mentioned before, but I change the way I prep everything from sessions to NPCs fairly regularly. It's like how I'm doing things stops working, or I forget some of the key steps that I am supposed to focus on which makes it lose the 'magic' so to say. I am always looking for new/better ways too, so it's not long before I find something and then I go off in that direction.

That said, while I've gone through a bunch of ways to make NPCs I don't know I've ever had one stand out to me as a solid, quick way to make an NPC that covers all the bases I need. Obviously there is more needed for a major NPC than a minor one, but sometimes an NPC is straddling the line where you're not sure if they'll be a big deal or not until you're in session and need that.

At present I am using a method where I try to define their weaknesses, wants, needs, allies, and enemies. It works ok, but leaves out some qualities that could be useful. I've previously done 3 aspects like I was making a FATE character which can also work, and you can scale to 5 aspects for bigger characters.

How about you? What method do you use? What have you found works well for you?


  1. I don't really try to be consistent with my NPC notes. For the most part I write a sentences or two to describe the NPC and treat the short paragraph like the NPCs "Aspect." How good they are at an given action is proportionate to how many things in that short description that seem to apply. Sort of like the description is just a bunch of meta tags that I count up to determine how (in)effective they are.

    1. That sounds kind of cool. Do you have an example sentence you wouldn't mind sharing?