Non-Combative NPCs @ Kismet's Dungeons and Dragons

Non-combative non player characters are essential to any game. Non player characters come in a multitude of forms, not just in the form of the enemy. They fill all of the roles that your player characters do not. They make the food, run the kingdom, do the laundry and interact with player characters just by walking by. They are not part of the backdrop of the world you run - they are vocal, moving and breathing chess pieces. I want to encourage every DM not only to use NPCs, but to use them to their fullest potential.

One of the easiest ways to make your setting seem alive to your players is to involve them with the people who live there. How many people do you talk to in a single day? How many conversations do you catch snippets of as you walk from place to place, even in an office building? If you were in a D&D game, you would be a player character and all of the people around you would be NPCs. Ever bumped into someone you once knew working somewhere you wouldn't have expected to see them? Grocery stores, movie theaters, gas stations, mall stores? All NPCs in the story of your life. Think of your gaming NPCs in those terms - they're everywhere, often leading perfectly boring lives, and they are unique only to a point.

One of the masters of characterization is Stephen King. Read some of his books. Hell, read all of his older stuff. After a while, you get to know the people who live in his towns (especially Castle Rock and Derry, Maine, respectively). By all means, read my favorite book of his: IT is full of NPCs so perfect you might try to pinch them to see if they're real. He captures quirks and habits excellently. I swear that I know the characters in that book as though I had grown up with them (in a way, I did: I've read IT once a year just about every year since I was about 15). I am not the only fan who feels this way. I remember talking with my boyfriend about Ace Merill once and in the middle of it, I realized we were talking about Ace as though he had gone to high school with us. I can see Castle Rock in my mind quite easily. Derry is a place that I know intimately - not just the geography, but the feel and soul of the place. This is the essence of storytelling at its finest and NPCs help give a place its feel. Do the people belong to the place, or does the place belong to the people? Sometimes one deserves the other.

Your player characters do not exist in a vacuum. They have families, friends, acquaintences, enemies, and people they just know by face. Familarity is a powerful bond, folks, and proximity can engender fellow-feeling. Have you ever been in a natural disaster? I was in the Northridge earthquake in the early 90's, in my hometown. When the aftershocks had died down enough for motion, I saw people checking in on neighbors. I saw people helping each other. I made dozens of phone calls to check in on people. I was nicer to everyone I met for a while afterwards and I wasn't the only one. Why? Because they were my townfolk and we were all vulnerable to the same forces of nature. What would it be like for people in most D&D worlds, where life is harsh and frightening beasts lair not far away? What it would be like for folks who live in smaller settlements than the cities of the real world, where everyone might just know everyone else, at least by face? Your player characters will know lots of people.

First of all, NPCs enrich your setting and the believability of your world. The ties that bind are important. NPCs are bound to the player characters as well as to each other. Do you know how much time we spent talking about each other in real life? Or how much time we spend talking about the past? Gossip, old dislikes and feuds helps to underpin the new bit of reality you're trying to create and demonstrate.
Secondly, NPCs are often the way that DMs deliver plot points and quests. Your PCs aren't always going to be moved by strangled screams in the night, but news from a friend might spur them into action.
NPCs are also the bait: "The township of Cerra's bein' held captive by orcs. No, lad, the orcs didn' kill the folks, they're keepin' 'em. Horrible, isn' it?" You can use the friends and family of PCs to weave plots with: your brother's been poisoned, your mother died in childbirth and you're being called home, your niece is being married to the evil lord and you'd better bring one hell of a wedding present. Think about all of the ways that you interact with folks in your life and use them - wedding parties, funerals, dances, get-togethers, reunions, divorces, the whole gamut.
NPCs can deliver entertaining plots just in being around. Does one of your player characters find the blacksmith's niece enchanting? Go with it! Is the thief in the party still being hounded by the rival of their playground years? Use that! Is a player character married to a total ass who wants more than anything to keep her home and away from her adventuring pals? Side-plots abound!
NPCs can help to reinforce the boundaries and consequences of your world. If the player characters run rampant through a town and plunder everything, the next town might be alerted. The NPCs of that place might just be ready to attack the rebels and bring them in for justice. If a player character tries to go the evil route and is suspected of something heinous, the gossip will spread and folks will react. NPCs are not just the workers of your world. NPCs also encompass the kings, soldiers and city councils. You can use your NPCs to help your player characters better understand their morality: is a repentant man worthy of mercy? Is the efficient government right in enforcing zero-tolerance laws?

How much you use your NPCs is of course up to you, but hopefully by now you see how many possibilities you can take advantage of. You should not center your game around NPCs because your player characters are likely to feel neglected. Player characters want to be the stars of the show, and they should be. Think of them literally as the stars of a movie or television show. Consider the soap opera, for the sake of argument. The characters in soap operas begin by leading normal lives and start to get more fucked up as time goes on. More and more unlikely things begin to happen to the characters and yet they survive it all (for the most part). You almost never see the characters working, even though you will hear about their skills as a doctor, psychiatrist, what have you. Soap operas use down time for the character's boring paper-pushing jobs just as a DM might use down time for their player characters to make money in. Soap operas center themselves around a city so that all of the characters will be in one place. DMs tend to try to keep player characters together in a similar fashion.

Soap operas generally have large casts, but there are a few core members who get more airtime, more plot attention and more recognition. The core characters will always have something going on, but smaller characters will be cycled in and out of the spotlight as things revolve around them for a while. (If any of you watched Days of Our Lives in the 1990s, you'll remember: Marlena, John, Bo and Hope always had things going on. Victor and Stephan were cycled as villains. Everyone else got their turn.) Eventually, you're going to have a plot that is going to seem like it's revolving around an NPC. Try to involve your player characters as much as feasibly possible but don't feel horrible - even the supporting cast gets a piece of the spotlight.

By all means, do not deem one of the NPCs to be your personal player character while you are running. Even if you have to use an NPC to fill in the gaps of a party (say, if they didn't create a cleric), keep the character as an NPC. Even the best DM will tend to favor their own PCs over the rest and given that you're god at the moment, that's really unfair. Players get resentful really fast when DMs stake their claim in an NPC because it sets up a DM vs. Players atmosphere. You should not be DMing to prove how much your NPCs outdistance the player characters, and if you are DMing for that purpose, please stop. You're giving the rest of us bad names. A DM will always be able to outclass the player characters because everything is at their command. A DM can create an epic-level druid with a long and fabulous past at the drop of a hat. A DM can give a second level character anything they want. Just because you can do these things doesn't mean you should. You might just end up wrecking your game. NPCs are indeed powerful but their power should be a device, not the point of your campaign.

I suggest creating some major NPCs - the ones that your PCs will see the most - in greater detail. Stock NPCs can have small quirks or attitudes but you don't have to flesh them out into full-fledged characters just so they can sell the PCs cheese. But expect merchants to have competitors and grudges. Expect churches to be at odds with one another. Things like that are not too difficult to keep track of. Make lists of your NPCs and leave a bit of room for notes.

Here is a quick list of things to consider when you're creating non-combative NPCs:

Appearance: The first thing that PCs will take note of is the appearance of a person. Give a thought to how the NPC holds himself and any things in their appearance that might stick out.
Demeanor: How does the NPC act? Are they friendly, aloof, business-like? Everyone wears masks and some folks wear more elaborate ones than others. Consider how the NPC acts.
Motivation: Consider the NPC's true motivations. Do they act friendly but secretly want to thwart the PCs? Do they hold an old grudge or lust after something the PCs possess? Do they just genuinely like the NPCs and want to help?
Ties: Consider the ties of the NPC to others. Is the blacksmith the uncle of a player character? Is the local lord the distant cousin of a PC and unhappy about being related to a lousy braggart? Does the clothier refuse to sell to a PC because he dishonored her daughter or beat up her son?
Profession: Everyone has a job of some sort, a niche that they fill. Most people spend a good deal of their time working and some jobs come with a lot of politics. Was the local butcher framed by a competitor, who put poison in some meat delivered to the nobles? Are the guilds at war?

Below is a small list of professions for NPCs taken from my own thoughts and the 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide. They are mostly general categories (I am not going to list every kind of cook, for example). If you have any suggestions, feel free to email them to me.

DUNGEON MASTER'S NOTES

Non-Combative Non Player Characters