The best NPCs suck
When I ask my players what they liked about one of my games, their first response is almost always the NPCs. I freely admit that my plots tend to be straightforward and uncomplicated, and they would probably be considered boring if I weren’t able to infuse the story with pathos through my NPCs… And maybe distract my players with their antics.
During a campaign, I can be reasonably sure that my players will hate my villains and come to love their allies, whether they’re making them laugh or cry. Either way, my NPCs are doing their job — enabling the PCs to role-play and become the heroes of the story.
I’ve talked about a lot of different tricks for non-player characters, but this one is about how to ensure that no matter how neat they are, the NPCs never overshadow the player characters. So one of the most important things I do to make sure my NPCs are great is to make them suck.
Alright, that may seem like a contradiction, but it’s the NPCs flaws that often endear them to the player group. And just as importantly, critical character flaws keep my NPCs firmly in the position of support, and prevents them from taking over the spotlight. After all, the PCs are the main characters of my story.
Let’s take the example of Tareth and his team from a D&D game I ran some years back. Tareth was the spymaster and leader of a sort of special forces group that the PCs were recruited to. He worked as an NPC authority figure because he remained in the background and always pushed the player characters out front to interact with the plot — he just handed them resources and encouragement.
But I’ve taken a deep dive into Tareth and characters like him in My Storytelling Guide Companion, so now let’s take a look at his team. When the campaign started out, my PCs were first-level characters being recruited for a special mission by a master spy and his team: a shape-changing thief, a veteran warforged warrior, and a brilliant artificer. Each of Tareth’s existing team was one of the best at what they did. I wanted to show the players that their characters were being pulled into major events by high-level operatives.
Tareth did the bulk of the work keeping the PCs at the center of the action, but when he was struck down by a magical illness in the middle of a mission into a magic-torn wasteland, it became the job of the rest of the NPC team to make the PCs shine. So the changeling stopped playing tricks and making jokes, withdrawing into herself as she watched her commander waste away. The warforged fighter stopped fighting in the middle of combat to cradle Tareth and cry out for healing. The artificer had no confidence in himself, doubting his every move and squabbling with his comrades. With their commander sick, the player group had to rise to the occasion and not just get Tareth back to safety, but keep his team together. By falling apart, the NPCs pulled the player characters into the spotlight.
More recently, I’m running a game set in one of our home-brew settings, Tydalus. Alak’ai is the commander of the ship that serves as the group’s home base. He’s traveled half the world and he’s a badass in combat (by giving the PCs the coolest NPC bonus — I don’t have character sheets for friendly NPCs and I do not roll for them). As a Kelanua, his people know the most about the monsters that come up from the seas which most consider mere folktales.
Of course, using NPC bonuses instead of giving Alak’ai stats keeps the PCs driving the action. But even better, I had a chance to put Alak’ai out of his element — a proverbial fish out of water. The story led the party inland in search of an ancient relic, and as soon as they set foot on dry land, Alak’ai was utterly lost. He didn’t know the roads or how to get to any of the cities. He didn’t know how to survive in the mountains. Alak’ai just got nervous when he didn’t have water on at least one horizon.
Alak’ai sucked on dry land, and that let the PCs take the lead for the entire middle build of the story. When they finally returned to the ship, the players couldn’t help but notice that Alak’ai was a different person. But by then, the players had stepped up and developed into the heroes that would save the day.
Got time for one more example? How about Professor Silas Wingfield from my Vampire game, Rail City Serenade? He’s a 200-year-old vampire with blood magic that literally lets him conjure things out of thin air, and he’s a teacher with two centuries of knowledge and experience. Silas’ job is to literally teach my batch of first-time Vampire players what it means to exist in the game world. He’s an exposition machine.
But some of the best moments for my players are when Silas sucks. He’s so old that when he sends them a text, he writes a full letter, signed Sincerely, Professor Silas Wingfield. He doesn’t go to clubs or parties with the group because he knows he’s tragically unhip and would hurt their youthful reputation. And when the player party was just attacked by a pack of feral Gangrel and they reached for his kick-ass NPC bonus, I described Silas using his vast powers of blood magic to… summon a chalkboard.
Silas is a college professor. He doesn’t get into fights, and the last thing he conjured was a blackboard for their lessons — so he panicked. Everyone laughed, then they used his NPC bonus to put the hurt on those Gangrel. An NPC who would be far more powerful than any of the PCs on paper (if he had a character sheet, which he does not) has glaring weaknesses and flaws. The players love him the most when he sucks at something, and that’s when I get to make the most certain that even my most powerful NPCs are only there to make the players shine.
Their foibles are half the reason my players bond to my NPCs and fall in love with them. The reason they cry when the villains kill them, and the reason they fall for them in romantic storylines. And every time an NPC sucks at something, the PCs have to be good at it. That keeps your player characters in the spotlight, the stars of the show — as they should be.
