NPCs – Just as important as PCs

I like to read magazines more than I like to read books. A magazine is broken down into easily digestible chunks, costs less than the average book, and you nearly always fine something useful to you.

When at gaming stores and the like, I tend to pick up older copies of Dragon Magazine, or whatever else strikes my fancy. So today, nine years after it was released, I would like to address something brought up in a copy of Dragon.

June 1988, Issue #135, Page 26 through 29, there is an article entitled When Game Masters Go Bad, by Sherri Gilbert. (Sherri, if by some odd chance you’re out there, email me!)

This was a fairly good article, about common GM’ing pitfalls and how to avoid them. One line stops me cold, however. I quote:

Powerful NPCs exist, but they exist to meet the PCs – they don’t exists for their own sake.

Stop right there! Hold the fort! Bullshit! NPCs are just as important as the PCs. Play the game without NPCs, you aren’t going to get very far. Play the game with the stock NPC archetypes provided, boring! Next to PCs, NPCs are the most important part of the game, if not just as important.

In the ideal campaign world (And I’m not saying I run one myself.), every character, whether player or not, has a full background, personality, and all that. Even if it’s not written down, it should be there. A NPC should be able to be played as convincingly as any PC, and if a PC dies, a NPC should be able to be moved to PC position with little growing pains.

This doesn’t mean that each PC needs a full sheet of stats, or a 6 page background, but saying Oh, my contacts? Yakuza boss and a bartender. Yeah, that’s it. is grossly insubstantial.

Better: Contacts? Well, there’s that Samantha girl that works at the stuffer shack. Yeah, my brothers ex-girlfriend, the meta-human rights activist. And Big Joe, that Troll from the Rippers go-gang. He’s not doing so good right now, he’s tied down with gang related stuff.

I realize it’s not always easy to do this. I do come up with most of my NPC’s on the fly during the game, and then take notes and write it up after the game, or just before the next session. By the time they’ve been used a few times, I have a good idea of how they are going to figure into any upcoming plots, and how I should be role-playing them.

When my players pick their contacts, it’s part of the character generation process to write a paragraph (Minimum) for each contact they chose. This does several things: It gives me less work to do, and ensures that they get a contact that they will be happy with. If the background of the character is highly out of line, I’ll change it, of course. Most of the time, my players end up creating contacts that I have no problem with. That takes the pressure off me, and also gives me a helping hand in working them into future encounters.

Every single human being on this earth has his or her own dreams, fears, and goals in life. Saying that the NPCs only job is to meet the player characters is a gross misjustice to every NPC that lives in my game world.

As always, I can be reached via email at fro@lis.ab.ca

Adam Jury
Monday, December 15th, 1997