I want to share the way I do NPC templates. I’ve been really focused on character and diplomacy-driven scenarios, and have been playing around with different sets of building blocks when it comes to designing NPCs--here are the qualities that I’ve found most consistently useful in-play. Specifically, the parts I’m most proud of are the ways I use the “Tips fo RPing” and “Motivation” sections, although I have some innovations to how I use “Abilities”, as well.
I should note that these tend to run a little heavy, prep-wise, because they are for modules on the path to being published. I often skip quite a bit of this in more normal day-to-day play.
On the flip side, I do at least start this process for every NPC in a scenario I design. I think it’s just as important to get some motivations and qualities down for nameless goblins as it is for kings and rivals. Every faction having both a motivation and conflicting takes on how to achieve that motivation within itself is key to giving the players opportunities to cause trouble.
Let’s take a look at an example template and go over all the parts.
Part 1: Core Info
There’s just some basic info that comes up a bunch mid-play but isn’t super interesting, so I put it all up top for easy reference.
Title: First off, I give the NPC a title. This usually isn’t their name, it’s the role they fill in the scenario. I find it easier to refer to NPCs this way than by name, since it’s easier at a glance to remember who the blacksmith is than to remember what Henry Twobeard’s deal was.
Name: I then write down their name. If the template is for a group, I make sure to write out at least three names for members of that faction, to make my life a little easier when my players inevitably ask.
Faction: Fairly straightforward, what faction are they a member of?
Level: Since I’m trying to keep things system-agnostic I generally try to avoid going too deep into stats. In an old-school system, Level is just equivalent to hit-dice. You can generally extract HP/to-hit rolls/etc all from this one stat.
Armor: One important quality not baked into level is defense--how armored is the NPC? Again, to keep this system-agnostic I just have four options: None, Light, Medium, Heavy. You could just retitle this “Unarmored, As Leather, As Chain, As Plate”, if desired. I don’t think there’s too much value in going into more detail than this.
Part 2: How To Run Them
This is where the more interesting stuff comes into play--if you’re going to run them in a conversation, what do you need to know? There are some implicit patterns I like to use when filling these out, which I’ll get to in each entry.
Description: One paragraph giving the gist of how they fit into the scenario. My goal is to give just enough info that a GM could run the character and not feel lost even if this is all they ever read about them, while still being as short as possible.
I almost always start this with a short phrase followed by a comma. “Short humanoid rats, “ “An unassuming old woman, “ “A gangster in the guise of an administrator, “. Again, I want to make sure that there’s a little nugget of prompt baked in there that can be digested at a glance, if the GM needs to pull up a NPC they haven’t gotten to reading up on yet. The more you read of the template the more ideas and help it should give, but you should also be able to skim super fast and get something out of it.
Appearance: Three physical traits you can reference when describing them. Meant more to set a tone or give you interesting descriptive seeds than to exhaustively describe what color trousers they’re wearing.
Tips for RPing: A list of ideas for how to act as them. I almost always give two entries here, each with their own agenda--acting instructions and a potential bit.
The acting instructions are meant to give you at least one physical mannerism you can use to make it clear who’s speaking when. Maybe it’s a physical gesture to repeat, maybe it’s a tone of voice, maybe it’s something as simple as just “go ham on your mafia movie impression”.
The "bit” is an immediate hook you can use to make them interesting to the players during first impressions. It’s okay to get a little silly here--it should be something that makes a strong first impression and gives the players an opportunity to build a dynamic with them. It can maybe be a goof, like the rats above making threats but then volunteering each other to carry through on them. It can be a challenge, like an ogre who misunderstands everything you say but gets mad if corrected. It can even just be a verbal motif, like a phrase a shady adventurer repeats when trying to convince a mark. It just needs to be memorable and get the players interested in the NPC.
The bit is very possibly only something you ever use one or two times. As the players get to know a NPC better and they get more fleshed out through gameplay they’ll naturally become a less cartoonish and more nuanced personality that the players have meaningful feelings about. Once you’re at that stage, you’re golden--this is just meant to be used as an icebreaker.
It’s pretty common that I disregard what was written for both of these in-play. It’s better to let a NPC’s dynamic with the players emerge organically than to force it, but it’s useful having both of these as fall-backs if nothing naturally arises.
Motivation: What does the NPC want? In my mind, this is the core of the template--it’s what you actually use when figuring out how the NPC will react to the various situations that come up in play. I almost always give the NPCs three motivations, and usually sort them in this order: a quest, a vulnerability, and a philosophy.
I try to make my first motivation always be a quest--something that the NPC can ask the players to do for them. This might be a fairly typical quest like “help me with the protection racket threatening my shop” or “rescue my kidnapped friend”, but for minor or non-sentient NPCs it might even be as simple as “wants the players to leave their territory” or “wants food”.
The quest is often a great excuse to keep the players bouncing around between NPCs--NPC A asks the players to talk to NPC B, and in the process they learn about the situation with NPC C. A good web of NPCs with favors they want PC help with can be a great force for immersing the players within the scenario’s greater situation. The point of a quest is to keep play moving forward--there should be concrete actions that the players can take in response to the quest as soon as they decide to help out this NPC.
Second I try to give my NPCs a vulnerability--a motivation that the PCs can exploit. It’s a good reminder to always give your NPCs some weak points that can be exploited; just as a NPC who’s unbeatable in combat is boring, one who lacks any moral codes or personality traits that can be exploited diplomatically is boring to negotiate with.
Fears are good vulnerabilities--things they don’t want to happen. So are prides or social blind spots--things the NPC doesn’t want to admit about themselves. Passions can be good, too--topics they drop their guard when they talk about, or ways they can be flattered or put into a good mood.
Third, it’s important to give each NPC a philosophy or long-term goal. Vulnerabilities are passive, and quests can be resolved, so you need some deeper motivations you can use to determine the NPC’s actions moving forward through the campaign. These shouldn’t be attainable mid-scenario--if they’re attainable at all, it should be what the NPC is hoping to get out of the scenario’s resolution. Ideally, this should be a mix of a world-view (I want to protect my friends) and a method (to protect them I need to get stronger).
Part 3: Abilities
Finally, I list any abilities that the NPC might have. This section varies quite a bit from NPC to NPC, but there are a few basic categories of abilities I tend to list--attacks, special abilities, quirks, and triggers.
Attacks are pretty self-explanatory. If the NPC is a combatant, I list their attack stats. I tend to mostly just list damage and, if relevant, range, along with any special rules the attack might have.
Special Abilities are also relatively straightforward. If the NPC has any skills or special rules to them--being good climbers, producing webs, resistance to a damage type, memorized spells, etc--they go here. If they have any items, they typically go here.
I try to give every NPC without any special abilities a quirk--a non-combat ability that’s as much about establishing a personality as it is being useful in actual play. The ratfolk guards can speak to their trained giant rats. The shopkeeper has an apron full of any ordinary tool or item you might expect to need. The spice merchant can eat extraordinarily spicy food without flinching. Give every NPC something they’re exceptional at, even if it’s probably useless.
Bonus points if you can add some situation to the scenario where that skill might actually be super useful.
Triggers are more situational, and I try to use them sparingly, but they can be useful. A trigger is often an “if, then” ability--an idea for some sort of trouble the NPC might get into based on how the scenario unfolds. The urchin child will, if they end up separated from the PCs in the dungeon, always be adopted by the local faction rather than being eaten or imprisoned. The bored noblewoman is surprisingly good at making ropes from bedsheets and sneaking out of the castle. The washed up old alcoholic hero could overcome their depression and become mighty again with some rekindled hope.
There could easily be no end to the number of triggers you could write for any NPC, so I try to save them for unexpected directions NPCs might take. The child being adopted by monsters is fun because it’s not how that situation usually plays out. The noblewoman being good at stealth is worth writing down because it encourages her to do something surprising.
Part 4: Threads (optional)
This is semi-rare, but I will also sometimes include a final section at the bottom for the ‘threads’ a character is wrapped up in--parts of the scenario that span across multiple characters, where changing one character will potentially disrupt the larger plot.
For example, if there are a number of spies infiltrating an event intending to pull a heist, I would typically note on each spy’s template both that they are part of a larger conspiracy and what role they will take once things begin.
I like to take this format because I want to let players customize how they run NPCs I design, and if there’s anything about that NPC that’s a load-bearing part of a larger thing going on I try to make special note of it so they can either avoid unintended consequences (playing the getaway driver as a normal civilian) or come up with a replacement (pick a different NPC to be the secret getaway driver).
In Summary
And there you have it--this is how I usually write out my NPCs.
As you can see, I like to go pretty light on the ‘statblock’ side of things. In part this is to try to keep my notes system-neutral, but it’s also because I tend to find a lot of what normally goes into a statblock pretty boring. Ability scores and skill ratings and so on take up a whole lot of space, but rarely do much to make a character memorable. I’d say that 75%-90% of my NPC infoblocks tends to be about how to place them within the narrative, with only 10%-25% being mechanical.
I also try to treat the template like an onion--with layers of usefulness. You should be able to get a good sense of a character by skimming their description and their ability names, but for anyone wanting more guidance or inspiration there’s a ton of it at hand. I’d expect that even the majority of GMs would make modifications to how they run any given NPC, but I want to make sure that even a GM feeling totally uninspired has a fun NPC they can give their players.
More than anything, I want to try to make sure every NPC is memorable and fun to bounce off of in some way. I’m drifting more and more away from padding out RPGs with a bunch of nameless goblins who just appear to attack the players and then drop some XP and GP as they’re inevitably massacred--I want every NPC to be someone the players could conceivably end up with a relationship to, either as friends, rivals, or nemesi.
My Sources of Inspiration
Motive, Means, & Opportunity by Retired Adventurer
Advanced NPC Templates by The Alexandrian (this was basically the original form of my template, before it naturally evolved a over time)
The Dark Hot Spring Island -- this module has been a huge influence on the way I format information in my games, and the way they handle motivations for each NPC is great
