Characters bring a story to life, and that goes double for your TTRPG campaign. The best of your characters will become legends, most of the rest won’t be any more memorable than the thousands of monsters your players slay along the way.
But how do you bring those NPCs to life in a way your players will engage with, trust and remember? Does the DM make an NPC memorable, or is that something the players decide? Does it all come down to who lives, who dies and who tells their story?
In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about their biggest successes and failures creating memorable NPCs, their favorite characters in gaming and beyond, and all the tricks they use to bring their favorite characters to life.
1:00 Metagaming against the NPCs: Fighting snap judgments about the Zhentarim in Storm King’s Thunder
5:00 I KILL IT! When the PCs instantly hate an NPC and kill someone you had bigger plans for
13:00 What makes an NPC memorable?
- What is the NPC doing for the party?
- Do the players make them memorable?
- The NPC that knows things the party doesn’t
- The comic relief who supports the environment
26:00 How do we bring these NPCs to life?
- Communicate that they have something to offer
- Get the party to trust them, but not fully
- Don’t spill the beans, NPC secrets should tease the party over time
- Good NPCs have an internal compass, motives and secrets that drive how they act
- They need a distinct description and personality
- They need a backstory, but the players don’t need to hear it
33:00 Building NPC personalities
41:00 Our picks for the most memorable NPCs (in RPGs and pop culture)
53:00 What to avoid when creating and playing memorable NPCs (and WTF is a “non-descript” man?!)
58:00 Tips for creating NPCs with depth and character development
62:00 What makes an NPC not work?
72:00 Great NPCs don’t need to stay in their campaign: Tony’s Ra’s Al Ghul
75:00 Final thoughts