Knocking NPCs down a notch
Any game’s NPCs (non-player characters) are a vital resource. They are the antagonists and the allies to the player characters, they provide exposition, and give the PCs someone to bounce ideas off. They can be romantic interests, mentors, and betrayers. They have to fill in and occupy every role in a campaign not taken by your players.
I’m not terribly clever in story creation, and so my RPG plots tend to be fairly simple — but what I am good at is making NPCs that my players love and hate, that make them laugh and cry. No really, they can bring my players to tears. Usually, my NPCs are vivid and enjoyable enough that my group doesn’t realize how truly simple my story is.
All of which is to say that NPCs are a very important element of your campaign, and that making good ones can add a lot to a game.
My Storytelling philosophy is that the game and the story are both about my players. They are the campaign protagonists, even if they’re not heroic archetypes. So my NPCs — both allies and the antagonists that strive against them — are all there to play off the PCs. As a result, making sure that my NPCs don’t overshadow the PCs is really important. So I always put a lot of thought into how to make an awesome NPC, then knock them down a few notches so they’re never more awesome than my player characters.
In a recent Vampire game, the party’s two century-old mentor was ostensibly more powerful than all of them, and had hundreds of years of wisdom and cunning to guide them. He served as a wonderful font of advice for a bunch of first-time Vampire players, and could explain just about anything to the group when they had questions.
But in order to make sure that no one felt upstaged by their own mentor, I decided that he’s a total dork. Being two hundred years old, he’s more than a bit old-fashioned. He texts, but he doesn’t just avoid emojis and abbreviations — he writes out full letters, starting with Dear Vampire Students, and ending with Sincerely, Your Vampire Mentor. Also, being a school teacher by profession — and in his story role — he’s not exactly an epic badass. He’s old, but he spent his centuries reading books. Whenever he’s on the scene during combat, he gets a bit flustered. By having their mentor entirely lose his bearings, I make sure that the PCs take charge — instead of standing by while a super-powered NPC saves their asses. Which, trust me, is not much fun.
In the Werewolf game I’m running now, the party includes some NPCs to round out their numbers. And one of them is a girl who can transform into a dragon. A giant dragon. She is mystically trained and an expert in dealing with spirits. She also has supernatural race memory and can dip into it to search for wisdom and knowledge from before recorded human history. There are setting and story reasons for an NPC like that, but the last thing I want is a god-like NPC making the players — the focus of my game — feel useless. So my dragon girl is twelve years old and gave herself the name Rainbow Murder Princess.
I suppose that she’s a sort of inverse of the vampiric mentor above. He’s old, wise, experienced, but out of his element in combat. Rainbow Murder Princess is young, inexperienced, and — if her name didn’t cue you — very ready to mix it up in battle. I took that over-eager youth and cranked it up to eleven so that her flat-out grandeur doesn’t end up eclipsing the PCs.
Rainbow Murder Princess is young, so she is all too eager to be treated like an adult. She’s quick to declare that she doesn’t have a bedtime, even as she yawns when the party is up all night and their cranky baby dragon really needs a nap. Her giant dragon form is awesome in the literal sense of the word, and really risks being a limelight-stealer — so I made sure that not every battleground has the physical space for a giant dragon to thrash around. So Rainbow Murder Princess ends up being a twelve-year-old in the middle of a firefight, hiding behind the PCs and howling impotently for blood.
She has the literal wisdom of the ages with her dragon-memory, but also thinks that kissing is icky and bugs are still pretty cool. Being a little girl means that Rainbow Murder Princess has to ask my PCs what some grownup things mean, run to them for support or for help when the monsters they face get scary.
Both the dragon-girl and ancient vampire mentor have made my groups bust up laughing, ensuring that no one ever takes my NPCs too seriously. But both of them have valuable knowledge and advice for the party and fulfill all their NPC roles — giving the PCs bonuses and aid — and role-playing elements to highlight their own stories.
RPG campaigns often need these sort of wise, powerful NPCs. Take Gandalf, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He’s way more powerful and wise than all the heroes of the story… But he also likes his pipe weed a bit too much. Gandalf is fond of children and fireworks. And at every opportunity, he wanders off to go do wizard stuff — or sometimes dies — leaving the main party with all the work.
If you look at your NPCs and notice that one of them is way more impressive than your players’ characters, chances are good that they’re getting in the way and probably making your players frustrated. Give them a flaw. Maybe they’re old and comically don’t understand modern slang. Maybe they’re young and make childish mistakes. Maybe they’re awkward or drunk.
NPCs can — and should — be on hand to help the player characters accomplish goals or to provide information, but the minute they start doing things for the PCs, make sure that flaw kicks in. Perhaps you can even take whatever power or aid they give to the PCs and give it a spin so that their strength is their flaw. Maybe mystic insight takes days of meditation to achieve. Or after a big spell that enhances the player characters, the wizard NPC has to sleep for a week. Maybe they even need protection while they’re helpless!
All it takes is one thing to knock an NPC down a notch so that they don’t overshadow your player group. So make sure that any NPC who’s going to be around for a while has one.
