Are you tempted to make every NPC in your game a deep and complex character?

Don’t.

I love creating and playing NPCs in my games, and it comes easily to me. Part of this is because I’ve done improv theater—lots of improv theater. But mostly it’s because I use a few basic guidelines when I’m coming up with NPCs.

Since I apparently haven’t written anything about making or running NPCs since that article about naming them from over a decade ago, I figure this post is overdue.

My first tips?

Be boring. Be trite. Steal.

Understand that most people in your story world—no matter how fantastic the setting—are just regular people trying to live their lives. Reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; most people are doing what they can to get by, to have food and shelter and warmth and community, and to maybe have a little more of all four next week/month/year. That’s probably what they’re worrying about most of the time. For the sake of a background character in your story game, if you know someone’s social role or occupation you probably know how they’re trying to achieve or keep those things.

This simplifies your job as storyteller. You don’t need to prep lots of material to play the innkeeper, you just need to know that he’s an innkeeper. If you want to make this innkeeper distinct from other innkeepers, you can do that in small low-effort ways.

First, apply one adjective. That could cover appearance or demeanor, but it gives you something to come back to when you play the character. It’s an anchor point that you can use when you haven’t seen the character in a while.

Second, give the character one drive beyond “fulfilling my basic needs.” Describe what this character wants as simply as possible. These drives can be general or specific: eat tasty food, enjoy hedonistic pleasure, seek vengeance, aggrandize myself, marry the love of my life… whatever. These drives aren’t here to dominate this character’s scenes with the PCs, they’re here so that you always have a compass for this character’s choices and priorities.

When your lazy innkeeper who wants to marry the love of his life isn’t busy (avoiding) tending bar, what’s he doing? Probably mooning over his lover, or planning the wedding, or gearing up the courage to ask for his lover’s hand in marriage. You don’t need to add more complications. These two elements (one adjective, one drive) will determine nearly everything for you. These two elements are also easy to track, and don’t require lots of backstory or prep. If you love random tables, make a table of motivations and drives and roll on it when you don’t have an easy answer.

Finally, if your PCs do run into certain NPCs repeatedly, it’s okay to add another detail every few encounters. Keep those details simple too. Maybe on their third meeting the PCs learn about this NPC’s favorite food, or the song this NPC has stuck in their head. Focus on the easy, basic stuff that feels like boring background material, things that might be easily observable without peering inside the NPC’s head.

Think about this like meeting some rando on the street. Do you know anything about the woman who gave you coffee three days ago, the one you met for the first time then and haven’t seen since? Probably not. You’re only likely to learn more about her if you run into her again, several times, and actually talk about life in general. At least in my experience, most people don’t do this most of the time.

Taking this gradual approach lets you slowly establish character depth. Better, you’ll only reveal depth as that depth becomes relevant to your story. That saves you effort up front, and it means that you aren’t trying to info dump an incredibly detailed NPC backstory for PCs who simply don’t care that much about your lazy innkeeper.

What about your big important NPCs?

Try doing exactly the same thing. If you really want to add more details, if that’s where your fun is, you can do that. But remember: you don’t know whether your PCs are actually going to spend much time with your important NPCs. Your PCs might get distracted, or not care, or simply forget because this NPC is someone they’ve only dealt with once. Plus, conveying all those precious details in one encounter is a headache.

Remember that every extra detail you give your NPCs adds to your mental load. PCs can be complicated because you (usually) only have to play one. As the storyteller, you have to play many characters, so do yourself a favor and keep NPCs as simple as possible.

So, how do I make deep NPCs? Slowly.

Finally, obviously, these tricks can be used when creating your own PCs too. If you can relax into playing a character with only a few basic facts pinned down beforehand, you’ll give yourself lots of room to figure out all the other details in play. I find that a lot of fun, and strongly recommend it.