NPCs are not the main characters. The players’ characters are the main characters, and they should always feel like it. Players care about their characters, not your NPCs. Embrace this fact, and you’ll have fun. Resist it, and you’ll feel like the players are being mean anytime they outwit your NPCs. Your NPCs are there to be outwitted, outclassed, outdone, and ultimately, they are expendable.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with your NPCs, whether they’re good or bad. Monsterhearts puts it well: “Ultimately, the PCs are stronger than any villain you introduce. Remember to treat your NPCs like stolen cars. They aren’t your property, so you don’t need to worry about losing them. Have fun with your villains, cause chaos with them, and abandon them the minute they’re played out.”

NPC notes should begin as brief and concise. Like a game world or a story, an NPC begins with a small idea and grows throughout the narrative. Writing a full backstory for every NPC is exhausting, unproductive, and leads to Game Master burnout. Characters in TV shows often start as one thing and develop into another as the story requires, and your NPCs should do the same. In this blog, I’ll cover Descriptions, Motivations and Personalities.

Game Master Burnout

Some of you may not be familiar with Game Master burnout. This occurs when a Game Master loses the motivation to run a game. There are many reasons for this and it could be the subject of several blogs. Since this series focuses on preparing to run games, I’ll offer some tips to avoid burnout during game preparation.

To reduce the chances of burnout, avoid spending more time preparing for a game than you would playing it. The tips in this blog series aim to help visually impaired people maintain a smaller collection of notes and reduce the time spent on preparation, which also helps prevent burnout. At the beginning of a campaign, it’s easy to spend hours on details, fueled by enthusiasm. However, as the campaign progresses, this enthusiasm may wane and continuing to spend hours each week can cause burnout.

My advice to avoid burnout is to spend short periods preparing for games, take breaks from running the game and focus on having fun at the table. In a future blog series, I hope to provide detailed advice on running games as a visually impaired person. Within those blogs, I’ll expand on Game Master burnout and how to have fun at your table. For now, don’t over prepare, as players will ruin your schemes anyway. 

NPC Physical Descriptions

Players do not want to hear long-winded descriptions of your NPCs. They prefer a brief summary upfront, with details added over time. Many people design their NPCs in great detail and present all that information upfront. I am not one of those meticulous designers. That approach takes too much time and effort, often for content that won’t be used. I design what I need for the next session and the same goes for NPCs.

I write down three interesting aspects of an NPC’s description that can be quickly communicated, keeping each point as brief as possible (three to five words). Limiting yourself to three points, each five words or less, results in evocative descriptions focused on what is most interesting. More importantly, it keeps players’ attention. A thirty-second description works great, while a three-minute description tests your players’ concentration. 

Once you’ve delivered these points, you can explore the rest of the NPC’s appearance if the players continue to engage with the character. Like your world or story, NPC descriptions should start simple and allow you to build on them with additional details over time. 

Silly Voices Please

When I played D&D in high school 20 years ago, with my friend Lloyd as our Dungeon Master, absolutely no one used in-character voices. Everything was dictated in the third person. Many people today say, “These social skill mechanics seem redundant most of the time!” These people are often right. Back in the day, I would say, “Tommy goes to the king and convinces him to aid us agaibst the Orcs,” and Lloyd would respond, “Make a persuasion test.” We didn’t use funny voices to enact the conversation and that’s fine, you don’t have to either. Even now, I know people who play and run games in the third person, dictating instead of emulating. However, due to the popularity of shows featuring players who speak in-character, silly voices have become all the rage. If, like me, you’re the class clown and love doing impressions, then you are in good company here.

Entertainment is a great inspiration for voices: audiobooks, movies, podcasts, and TV. I recently added Tom Hardy’s ridiculous cockney accent from Peaky Blinders to my repertoire of terrible voices. Do I sound like Tom Hardy playing a Jewish gang leader in London a hundred years ago? Hell no! Is it fun? Hell yeah! Voices for your NPCs can enhance a game, but they can also detract from it. Use voices sparingly and don’t get so caught up in them that you steal the spotlight from the players. I typically use voices, but if an NPC needs to explain a big concept, I switch to the third person to quickly convey the information and keep things moving. Spending too long speaking as an NPC is the same as a long description, players will struggle to pay attention. 

If you’re using voices for characters, it can be helpful to add a note describing the character’s voice. This will allow you to maintain consistency. If you’re impersonating Kermit the Frog for a character, write down “Kermit” in your notes. To improve your voices, I recommend checking out voice actor coaches on YouTube and their various tutorials. I use one video to remind me of how to vary voices, which I watch once per year, I have linked the video at the end of this blog for anyone curious. 

Motivations Are Tools

It is important to provide NPCs with motivations, whether big or small. Without motivation, your NPC may stand as an impassable barrier to the players, as the NPC has nothing to bargain with. Clear motivations give players tools to persuade, assist or manipulate an NPC successfully.

Common motivations include love, wealth and power. Most things in this world boil down to these three motivations, but as a Game Master, you need to look beyond the basics and understand what they seek to achieve. Why is their love being tested? What do they hope to spend their wealth on? What do they hope to achieve with power? Exploring these questions can help you develop a compelling hook for an NPC’s motivation. Perhaps their love is being tested because their child was kidnapped. Maybe they are acquiring wealth to escape a bad living situation. Power could serve to help their community.

While these questions can help develop motivations, it can also be helpful to use inspiration to get started, as it is often difficult to produce something from nothing. Below is a list of twenty words designed to inspire the creation of NPC motivations. The word alone won’t provide a clear motivation, but it will help you understand how it may relate to love, wealth, or power. Roll 1d20 and use the result to pick a word from the list below.

1. Authority
2. Change
3. Chivalry
4. Control
5. Envy
6. Fame
7. Freedom
8. Gluttony
9. Happiness
10. Hope
11. Infamy
12. Justice
13. Knowledge
14. Obligation
15. Pleasure
16. Respect
17. Revenge
18. Servitude
19. Survival
20. Unity

Transactional NPC Interactions

While this blog does not focus on running the game, it is important to understand the purpose of NPC interactions and their function within your game. This understanding will help you build better motivations for your NPCs.

NPCs serve as a point of transaction, where your players gain something in exchange for something else. Players often seek information, but they may also acquire safe passage or items. In return, players typically need to provide the NPC with information, favors, items, money or sometimes nothing at all. While you may provide players with a clear idea of what is expected in the transaction, it is then up to the players to decide how to proceed. They may make counteroffers or try to manipulate the situation to their advantage. It’s important to adapt to the players’ suggestions and work towards resolving the transaction.

This is a basic explanation of social interactions with NPCs, leaving out many nuances and variables, but it should clarify why motivations are crucial in transactional interactions. Without motivation, players have nothing to work with in negotiations. With motivation, there are stakes in the conversation and players have options to explore.

Defining NPC Personalities

I never used to give much thought to NPC peprsonalities. I would let the motivation and the voice dictate how I approached them as a person. Since then, I have begun defining NPC personalities with a word or phrase. This small addition forces me to take the NPC and try playing them through a different lens. For example, a corrupt noble, motivated to gather power to seize control of a town, with the voice of Jeremy Irons illicit an immediately focused character personality of calm confidence. But what if he was anxious? Zealous? Naive? Adding one of these personalities can immediately change the NPC’s motivation and your delivery of their voice.

I would encourage you to introduce personalities to NPCs, before presenting them in your game. This small variable will make for NPCs who break expectation and will quickly grow into deeper, complex characters throughout the narrative. 

Much like motivations, it can be helpful to have a list of personalities to begin from. Below are twenty personality types. Roll 1d20 and use the result to select a result from below, to help inform your NPC’s personality.

1. Affable
2. Anxious
3. Assertive
4. Calculating
5. Cold
6. Confident
7. Courteous
8. Crude
9. Dishonest
10. Enthusiastic
11. Fierce
12. Indulgent
13. Naive
14. Obsessive
15. Opinionated
16. Reserved
17. Sincere
18. Somber
19. Spicy
20. Vein

Voice Video Link

• How To Create 100 Distinctly Different Voices

Game Prep Advice Blog Series Links

Below are links to the other blogs in this series on game prep for blind and visually impaired game masters.

• Jim’s Blog – Game Prep Advice 1 – Introduction
• Jim’s Blog – Game Prep Advice 2 – Combat
• Jim’s Blog – Game Prep Advice 3 – Encounters
• Jim’s Blog – Game Prep Advice 4 – Investigations
• Jim’s Blog – GM Prep Advice 5 – NPCs
• Jim’s Blog – Game Prep Advice 6 – Notes