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View Full Version : DM Series pt 6: Victims, Villains, Bigwigs and Thugs



Human Paragon 3
2010-06-01, 09:53 AM
This is part 6 of an ongoing series of DMing conversations.

Juris's DMing Series Master TOC Thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=8392687#post8392687)

This week's topic is NPCs of all stripes. No matter what kind of game you run, the PCs will eventually run into NPCs. By certain standards, every goblin or ooze that the PCs slay is a form of NPC. Any creature the DM has to roleplay for is necessarily a non-player character, and these can take many forms. Whether it's a mighty king, a conniving merchant, a slick vampire noble, a rival adventurer or a damsel in distress, without these nebulous persons, the players' world would be pretty empty.

NPCs serve as quest givers, victims of villainy, perpetrators of said villainy, obstacles to be overcome and allies to be used. This purpose of this thread will be to discuss how to create memorable and useful NPCs, how to tailor them to a given purpose, and how to best use them once pop into existence in the PCs field of vision.

What NPCs stick out in your memory as great? What made them that way? Advice, anecdotes, questions and theoretical discussion is welcome.

Kiroth6
2010-06-02, 12:13 AM
I'm not sure if this is necessarily what made these npcs memorable, but a lot of the memorable npcs in our gaming group were extremely useful people tha occasionally conflicted with our PCs.

Yuu Ataka

Acerbic rival mercenary from our BESM D20 campaign set in a high school on a space ship. Think Cromartie High in space for the intelligence level of the average student. He had the habit of sneaking up behind characters, holding a gun to their heads with his signature ka-klack and then giving us useful information. In his own way he way oddly friendly for a man we beat through a wall with a bagette. He has made a cameo in almost every single campaign since and has somehow managed to end up shooting my character each time.


The Shark on Wheels

A random throw away gag in aforementioned D20 campaign

Somehow the Shark on Wheels ended up being a race of mysterious godlike beings that never said a single word. Though they did have a strange fondness for pickles. In a later Disgaea themed campaign, a PC ended up rolling a 1 in 40 chance to summon it to swallow the final boss. It conveniently solved the problem of the continually returning Evil once and for all. Needless to say we do not mess with the Shark on Wheels.

Hexmaster

Hexmaster was a villain in our Mutants & Mastermind who did things out of pure schadenfruede. He was a master of bad luck and used it to cause random unfortunate accidents to people. He was impossible to keep in jail because of this, but managed to endear himself to the party because he was also strangely charismatic and would help us out for time to time for his own reasons. One of the PCs even ended up starting a bread selling enterprise with him. We ended up causing him to get launched into space because he really was just a jerk all along. However at the last second, the same aforementioned PC managed to convince him to use his power to help us out of the final trap in Hexmaster's own self interest.

The B String Session


We also have made it a habit to play as a group of favored npcs at least once every campaign. That said there were a lot of other well received npcs, We have a habit of reusing NPCs and PCs as NPCS but those are a few off the top of my head.

Human Paragon 3
2010-06-20, 10:58 AM
Hey all, Part VII is going up tomorrow. Just wanted to give people a chance to comment on this thread first, since it seemed to slip down the forum extra fast.

valadil
2010-06-20, 11:44 AM
What NPCs stick out in your memory as great? What made them that way? Advice, anecdotes, questions and theoretical discussion is welcome.

None of my own. They're all terrible. I'm a decent roleplayer, but it takes me forever to find a character. Even when I'm playing a character I know and love it can take hours for me to actually get into character. This makes playing NPCs difficult. It's what I'm currently focusing on improving as a DM.

The exception to that is the hated NPCs. I can vilify anyone to my PCs and make them hateful, in game and out. They still get pissy when we mention a certain gnomish whore who followed the party around. She wasn't even supposed to be an NPC - one of the PCs had trouble remembering someone's name. When he mispoke it I decided that should be another person and she poofed into existence and made enemies with the party. This was in a game 7 years ago and they still hate her.

I'd love to be able to elicit other reactions from the players, but I work with what I got. I make them hate someone and then I give them reasons not to kill that person. It's simple and formulaic but they seem to enjoy it.

Totally Guy
2010-06-20, 02:41 PM
How do people go about allowing the players to introduce NPCs? As in "Hey, I ought to know a cleric around these parts. We're but one city over from my home town and my backstory involved that visit to a church."

valadil
2010-06-20, 02:53 PM
How do people go about allowing the players to introduce NPCs? As in "Hey, I ought to know a cleric around these parts. We're but one city over from my home town and my backstory involved that visit to a church."

Something like that. Depending on the situation, I involve a streetwise or gather info check. For instance, if they happen to be at that church gather info determines if any of the clerics who are present are known to the PC. OTOH if the players are seeking out the church because a player has been there before I'll usually just give them the cleric for free. The PC chose to bring his backstory into the game, so I'll reward that instead of letting the dice determine if he knows a cleric or not. Of course I'm a bastard so in all likelihood the cleric was actually kidnapped and murdered 3 sessions ago and that's what the PCs will discover when they find the church.

Maho-Tsukai
2010-06-20, 05:39 PM
Back in my old DMing days when I was just learning the ins and outs of being a DM I had an NPC villain who was such a wonderful *******. Akai, who was a evil wizard with a focus on enchantment spells. He was a manipulative ******* who was memorable just because of how annoying, persistent and evil he was. He often used people for horrific arcane experiments and basically controlled the whole campaign world from the shadows, using enthralled kings, merchants, high priests and archmagi as his puppet rulers. He also was known to be extremely lustful for one of the PCs because during that game we had a house role known as "rolling for lust." You can guess what that rule involved. Lets just say that he did some rather despicable acts in the name of lust. This was of course an adult campaign, obviously, but was played out before the BOEF. If the BOEF was out at the time, chances are it would have been used for this game.

Akai was just an arrogant, selfish, annoying, power-hungry prick that made everybody's lives miserable, abused Mind Rape and Dominate Person, had Team Rocket level persistence and just refused to die. He was a master at escapes and coming back when you least wanted him to. Eventually other villains where introduced that where more powerful then him, but he was still able to come back with new tricks and was the only recurring BBEG in the campaign. Oh, and the best part? The final battle of the campaign was fought against him when he finally achieved godhood and had the divine rank of a GREATER DEITY. Needless to say that fight was one of the party's favorite parts of the campaign, especially since they finally got to kill him.(Though it took a very special homebrew item for them to do so.)

Oh, and also note, that aesthetically, this was an anime-style game. As in PCs had odd hair ect...

L41n
2010-06-20, 10:47 PM
My favourite NPC was in a game I watched while sketching up a basic character. The party had entered a dungeon where a Fire Giant sat in a giant chair, eating people. The party tried sneaking past the giant, but one PC - a human druid/wizard - was caught. The giant was understandably miffed, but the PC bluffed his way out by pretending to be the furnace repair man (the party needed to get to a furnace anyhow to complete a quest, so why not ask for directions to do the job).

The giant and the PC chatted for a bit (the giant being a bully and rifling through the PC's belongings), with the giant agreeing to let the PC go in exchange for the PC's Armor Amulet. The PC wouldn't stand for it, so he ended up playing a game with the giant where they tried to knock down a giant pillar with a rock as big as a human. The PC boasted that he could one up the giant by making a rockpass THROUGH the pillar, which he did by transmuting the pillar into clay then lobbing rocks to and fro. The giant was miffed at this point, and the rest of the party was growing impatient, so the DM had the giant lift up the offending PC, spread his legs, and crushed the poor bugger's unmentionables! The giant, smugly satisfied, kept the amulet and let the guy go to go about his work.

We now live in fear of Fire Giants, specifically those of the nutcrusher prestige class.

Human Paragon 3
2010-06-21, 08:43 AM
How do people go about allowing the players to introduce NPCs? As in "Hey, I ought to know a cleric around these parts. We're but one city over from my home town and my backstory involved that visit to a church."

If a player of mine said this, I would probably have them make a know: Local check with a bonus for the circumstances. Or, I might just say "Yeah, that makes sense, you probably DO know a cleric here." Then I'd make up a character, probably a pretty simple one. It would depend on why they wanted to know.

In the past, I used the "contacts" rules from Cityscape for an urban campaign. It worked pretty well.

Kiroth6
2010-06-22, 02:24 PM
Honestly, it seems that a sucessful npc is not a specific set of qualities in a character but rather the ability of the GM to read and roll with the party interests at the time.