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I DM a 5e D&D campaign. I've been playing D&D for under a year. In this new campaign I'm planning to have a few NPC allies. While I'm able to roleplay less important NPCs, these NPCs feel more intimidating. I have a hard time adding depth to them. I have a complex personality for them inside my head but I have a hard time putting it out on the table.
How do I roleplay NPCs in a way so that they feel real, and like they have unique deep personalities?
A lady I work with was starting a D&D group with her church youth group, and discovered that I had long experience with D&D and DMing. She asked a very similar question to yours, in terms of "How do I do this NPC thing? There are so many kinds of characters to play!"
I broke it down into a few parts.
When you are new to DMing, no matter what someone else tells you, you still have to go out and do this NPC play and as you do it more you'll be more comfortable doing that.
I recently noted that some of the published adventures do this now, but back then I hadn't noticed that. I pointed her to Chapter 4 (Player Backgrounds) in the PHB and walked her through how to roll for or hand pick those aspects for an NPC. One of each. These weren't to be a three dimensional character study, they were meant to be a point of departure to help her get a feel for who the most important NPCs are.
As each NPC interaction begins, determine if the NPC is generally hostile, neutral, or friendly to the PCs. The DMG has a small section about that that I showed her when I gave her a new copy of the DMG (my 'welcome to the world of DMing' present). She had not seen that and appreciated how it would help when she got stuck.
As one gets more experience with NPC play, one can get sneaky and more nuanced, but I suggested to her not to make her job hard on herself. Start with a regular conversation, and let it grow from there based on what the PCs do and say.
Result? After about a month and a half I got a box full of homemade brownies and a big "thank you" for helping her get started. She told me that she had found those all of these tips useful.
She's still DMing for that group. Last time we talked, she's near the end of her second campaign a bit over three years later. (I also introduced her to roll20 as a resource when the COVID nearly did for her campaign).
After all these years, there's no simple answer but some things I typically focus on during an NPC interaction with PCs are:
Justin Alexander has an RPG blog with a lot of good DM advice. When I am looking for a better idea, I check out his articles on NPCs.
Here are some of his articles on NPC from the DM perspective:
NPC templates., advanced NPC templates, memorable NPCs, and a couple of others here and there.
"How do I play NPCs" is a pretty big topic. 😊 As The Alexandrian notes in the memorable NPC article:
This will not attempt to be an exhaustive discussion of how to create memorable characters. You could write whole books on the subject, and people have.
Making engaging NPCs, how to show emotions for different NPCs, becoming a better NPC/Monster actor, and creating emotions. (Thanks @MikeQ for digging these up and putting them in a comment under the question).
Remember that, as the DM, your most important job is to make sure that everyone is having fun. When you're making plans for how you will roleplay something, you should first ask yourself: how will I make this fun?
For myself, I believe that the PCs are the stars of the adventure and the NPCs are the supporting cast. NPCs should have exaggerated, easy-to-grasp personalities, ideally funny ones. If I tried to roleplay a complex NPC personality, I would expect my players to miss most of the nuance and then think: "Wow, this NPC talks about himself a lot. Can we get back to talking about us now?"
I've played in a series of games with a DM who was a really good roleplayer, and he did much the same thing. Every NPC we met had a personality which could be summed up in a few words. The good roleplaying was in portraying that personality in a funny and interesting way.
I am currently running a game with 4 players, who have on their own initiative recruited five (formerly six) other NPCs to the party. They just liked the NPCs, found them helpful, and wanted to keep them around. Like you, I was then faced with the issue of giving them enough depth to have lasting power.
When I realised they were sticking around, I built upon them the same way I would go about fleshing out a PC:
Be sure to tone it down a notch from full PC-level of detail to find a happy middle ground and avoid the GMPC trap. More on that later.
One important thing to remember is that you don't have to figure all of this out right away. Start with something basic, and if the players like it, they'll interact with that character more and more. During that time, you can figure it out better.
Of course, for me it helped that two of the NPCs were actually my old PCs whose campaigns ended before I got to play them much.
See: What's the difference between an NPC and a GMPC?
GMPCs are not universally a bad thing, if properly managed.
Don't forget that the story is about the players, not the NPCs. This means that long-term NPCs should generally not be dominating scenes, be more powerful or impressive than PCs, or making important decisions. For me, that means creating stats that are roughly one level lower than the PCs, and only have them speak sparsely during group conversations, unless spoken to. When it comes time for the group to vote on a decision, they stay silent unless specifically asked to cast a vote.
The Sidekicks rule from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything seems to address the "lower level" angle, and looks interesting on paper, but I don't have personal experience with it to say.
I'm quite new at this too. But what works best for me is to focus on a particular aspect of its personality while keeping one or a maximum of two at the back if it becomes necessary. If it still too important to show that, i like to make a small scene highlighting that aspect of this NPC.
