Levels of NPC Development

Give just enough detail

The level of development spent on an NPC should reflect the amount of time the players spend interacting with him or her. It's a waste to completely develop the random wanderer players meet on the road. It's equally wasteful to avoid detailing the background and traits of regular contacts and followers.

For those familiar with management theory, I tend to use the Pareto Principle when working on roleplaying games. This principle states that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your effort.


For the odd bystander or townsfolk I'd often just create one or two memorable trait. These traits tend to be something you can sense physically. It would often be visual - perhaps the guard has a handlebar mustache, the butcher's accent marks him as a migrant, the librarian always has a hat.

For more regular contacts the NPC gains a personality and a few background details. I would sometimes use my Quick NPC Flavor method for more input. For example: The librarian's name is Rolf and his brother is the local hat maker. They both live in the same town. He often notes how people react to the hats and he tells his brother. Since the librarian doesn't have much of a sense of humor, he rarely reacts to people giggling at the more outlandish hats.

For constantly recurring NPCs there's only one way I'd prefer to do it - treat them like a PC. The more regular they are, the more detailed the record. Cohorts and followers will have their own character sheets. The same goes for a character's mentor or sponsor.

By providing the right amount of usable detail, you can avoid needless effort but at the same time create a useful resource for your game - an interesting character to interact with.