I'm trying to make NPCs with the right amount of dialogue and affect on the players for an upcoming campaign. It's also really hard to balance the amount of NPCs. What should I do?
NPCs are the DM's tool to give the PCs information, guide them, or grant them access to something in game. The right amount of dialogue is the amount needed to make the NPC useful in accomplishing whatever task you design them for.
As for the amount of NPCs, you need as many as are necessary to fulfil the task(s)-at-hand. Many of your NPCs will be one-time-use, others will be persistent in the game, with a slider bar of variation in between.
The DM needs to discern what is base necessity for their game world, and the players/PCs will ask for whatever else they feel they need to interact with. Build your base requirements that are needed to move the story arc along, and the rest that are needed to complete the verisimilitude of your setting. Keep a list of names that are common in your world, and when you use one, cross it off, and label that NPC with whatever personality traits and physical description you design on the spot. The players may come back to that NPC, just because they thought it was interesting and want to poke at it.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
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I'm trying to make NPCs with the right amount of dialogue and affect on the players for an upcoming campaign. It's also really hard to balance the amount of NPCs. What should I do?
DMing:
NPCs are the DM's tool to give the PCs information, guide them, or grant them access to something in game. The right amount of dialogue is the amount needed to make the NPC useful in accomplishing whatever task you design them for.
As for the amount of NPCs, you need as many as are necessary to fulfil the task(s)-at-hand. Many of your NPCs will be one-time-use, others will be persistent in the game, with a slider bar of variation in between.
The DM needs to discern what is base necessity for their game world, and the players/PCs will ask for whatever else they feel they need to interact with. Build your base requirements that are needed to move the story arc along, and the rest that are needed to complete the verisimilitude of your setting. Keep a list of names that are common in your world, and when you use one, cross it off, and label that NPC with whatever personality traits and physical description you design on the spot. The players may come back to that NPC, just because they thought it was interesting and want to poke at it.
Creating NPCs - DMG
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad