Some friends have asked me to run a game for the first time. We are going to play All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It's fun, easy and rules are not as important as actual roleplaying.
I have created the main storyline, maps for important places so I don't have to come up with things that may contradict what I previously said, a bunch of side quests so there is plenty to do even if they decide to simply screw around and some random encounters so the game doesn't feel on rails. I've also made myself a four page guide with tables, damage values, and such, just in case someone does something unexpected and I have to check something I can't make up.
I have a problem with NPCs, though. I created the main antagonist following the rules on the book. I gave him the stats and chose the skills, and then I created a main henchmen to make things more even.
Then I started creating the rest of the NPCs. It was a royal pain in the ass, so instead of that I took a piece of paper for each one and wrote only the basic and secondary attributes, name and relation to other characters and clipped them all together.
That is, I have the main antagonist and two other important NPCs very defined (Attributes, qualities, drawbacks and skills) according to the rules, and the rest of them stored in pieces of paper.
Should I make a full character sheet for each NPC?
Should I give all of them qualities, drawbacks and skills or I can make them up if needed?
The important NPCs that are fully created, should follow the rules? should I boost random feats, skills or attributes?
I have also created two of those very simple NPC sheets for zombies, soldiers and random people running around, allowing me to generate random encounters with two or three rolls. Is this a good idea or should I make myself a good stack of generic NPCs just in case?
I have read this question and this one, but I am still unsure about following the rules for NPCs or not.
Rob's answer was extremely useful. I made myself a handy dandy NPC generator and it worked like a charm. The players liked this way of coming up with NPCs and everything went smoothly, so I'm definitely keeping this approach.