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.

Out of Reach

D&D has lots of great named villains: Strahd (okay, he's basically Dracula), Lord Soth (um, Darth Vader), the Lord of Blades, Orcus, Azathoth, Lolth, Demogorgon, Tiamat, Vecna...

But there's a huge great problem with virtually all of them: they're all high-level foes. Indeed, many are top-level foes and some are even above top-level foes - even 20th level PCs (30th in 4e) can't really hope to defeat these foes.

What that means, in practice, is that players come to a campaign with the cool promise of going up against Strahd (or whoever) and then months later they finally get to do so. Which is probably long after the campaign has started to drag. And that assumes that they get there at all - most campaigns fizzle long before reaching the top levels. Indeed, in 27 years of gaming I've only ever seen one campaign reach 20th level, and that was right at the end of the last session. (Plus two that reached 15th level, one that reached 11th, and a few that reached 9th.)

Basically, D&D has loads of great villains that are all completely useless.

(They frequently get around this by introducing an 'aspect' or 'avatar' of an evil god earlier, or by having a weakened version of the beastie show up earlier. Generally with the caveat that the PCs thus don't get to 'really' kill the villain if they win; all they do is drive him back to his extra-planar home. I'm really not sure that helps, though - is it really that much of a triumph to defeat baby-Tiamat and send her home to think again after months of playing through "Tyranny of Dragons"?)

Basically, what I'm saying is that D&D needs lots more named villains at lower levels. And it really needs to stop boosting the level of every 'iconic' villain every time they go up an edition - these things are meant to be beaten, not put on a shelf to be looked at wistfully.

Time For a Cull?

At the weekend I spent some time boxing up about half of my RPG collection. The shelves on which it had been stored have finally given up the ghost and are beyond the possibility of repair. This isn't a huge shock - take some cheap shelves from Argos, assemble badly, massively overload, and then leave for years and you're not going to have a good result!

Boxing all of these up really brought home just how much stuff I had accumulated, and really suggested that I should be having a cull of these books. This is tricky - the collection represents an accumulation of books acquired over 28 years (less a few things that were passed down to ARG, a few things that are somewhere in my parents' loft, and a few things that have just been lost). On the other hand, the reality is that not only will I never use "Relics & Rituals" again, but in fact I've never actually made real use of that book, or many others. And I can hardly claim to have some deep, abiding emotional tie to that book, or again to many of the others... though I do to the collection as a whole.

And on the other other hand, there's the issue of waste. For most of these books there really isn't any resale value, and indeed it would be more hassle than it's worth to deal with them on eBay. In many cases, the best destination for the books is recycling. As I say, it's a waste.

(Worst of all, this represents the opening of a floodgate. In addition to the RPG library, we also have a massive library of novels we'll never read again, and most of which weren't very good the first time out, a huge stack of DVDs that should be reduced, and so on. Basically, we just have too much stuff. But that discussion takes us into the territory of the other blog.)

One thing that does seem certain, though, is that some of these books won't be coming back out of the storage boxes even if they are kept. Any issues of Dragon magazine prior to #250 are included in the "Dragon Archive" PDF collection, and likewise any Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes are probably best accessed via PDF rather than having them take up room on shelves (unless and until I actually run them, at which point I would recover the physical copies). In some ways, it's unfortunate that I don't have PDF versions of everything... but, of course, if I did then that would just be yet another form of clutter, rather than a replacement...

The bottom line is that it's all just too horrible, and I'll clearly just have to keep them all!