Building NPCs

I've been reading the 5e DMG of late, and the other night I came across the section on building NPCs, which suggested that a detailed NPC could be written up with 10 sentences.

How I laughed.

Yes, it is true that writing 10 sentences in the format they suggest will give you a fully detailed NPC. But you'll almost certainly get a better, stronger, and more memorable NPC with three bullet-pointed items. And, specifically, the Three Most Important Things about the character.

What's funny is that D&D already knows this, and indeed encodes it pretty firmly in its design: PCs are largely defined by their race, class, and background.

The thing is, if you have only three things to hang a character on, you're much more likely to bring those three things into play, where if you have ten sentences it's likely you'll miss most of them, or you'll end up with something unfocussed.

(It's also important to be careful when picking the Three Things to make them individual facets of the character: a (1) steadfast (2) knight who (3) fights evil doesn't actually give you much more to play with than simply a (1) knight - the other two can easily be implied. But a (1) jovial (2) beggar who (3) dreams of adventure gives you much more to play with.)

It's also worth considering that D&D is, by design, a game of archetypes (elf, dwarf, fighter, wizard...). As such, it lends itself particularly well to this "three things" model - pick a solid archetype (mob boss, bounty hunter, guard, barkeep...) and then elaborate from there. And, as a rule of thumb, you then want two things that reinforce the archetype and one that subverts it - (1) steadfast (2) knight who (3) hates the poor.

And there it is. How to build NPCs in three easy steps.