Comments on: Give Your Players a List of NPC Names

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:29:04 +0000

I’d never thought of trying any of the things you all have suggested here — the “declassified” list, the gazetteer, having the players create the NPCs, or the build-as-you-go whiteboard list. That’s why I love running this site.

By: SteveS

SteveS — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:13:18 +0000

When we had a dedicated game room (back in the day) we had a big white board. And during a game we’d write important names on the board. Then we could add important details (priest, magic sword, whatever), that could stay up from one game to another, and if we wanted to, we could write it down and save it for later. It worked pretty well. In part, because it was immediate. This is the high priest, that is the priest that met us at the temple, that was name of the dead paladin, etc..
It was also useful for drawing pictures, and stuff like that.

By: Claire B

Claire B — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:20:06 +0000

For a game I’m about to run, I’m thinking of giving the players a list of the NPCs names, and getting them to provide the short descriptions of them that comprise the public record of who’s who. Less work for me, it gives me an idea of what they thought was important about the NPC (which may well be something that hadn’t occurred to me), and provides a way for the players to say ‘hey, this was a wonderful NPC, more of them please.’

I don’t know how it will work in practice. If anybody’s tried something like this, I’d love to here how it worked.

By: MountZionRyan

MountZionRyan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 18:34:04 +0000

For a modern campaign in which the PCs were all returning to their hometown for the forseeable future, I created a kind of Gazeteer which included locations and NPCs they would be familiar with. Part of the horror in the later part of the campaign was that the PCs knew and liked a good many of the Victim NPCs. Giving a list with Name and a brief physical/personlity description for these NPCs really helped foster that familiarity.

For NPCs who moved to town since the PCs left, I simply deleted them from the master copy and saved as a PC copy.

By: GlennZilla

GlennZilla — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:39:09 +0000

I’ve been doing something similar for a while. My D&D campagins tend to be NPC driven in that the early sessions are the NPC’s in trouble and the Characters riding to thier rescue. Then The Characters slowly develop over time and the plots begin to revolove around them.

But to keep it straight as which Cleric owes the party a favor and which Necromancer escaped thier wrath, I keep an “NPC LOG”. It contains brief physical descriptions, any notes on thier plot involvement and any stats I have assigned to them.

For my players I print a copy of this list and grab a big black marker and blot out the details the characters don’t know yet.

It ends up looking like a released CIA dicument, and gets them really interested in that stableboy that has two paragraphs of blacked out notes.

By: ScottM

ScottM — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:32:39 +0000

Yes, that sounds very simple– yet not something I’d have thought of.