Questions tagged [npc]
For questions about NPCs (non-player characters). NPC refers to any character in an RPG whose decisions and actions are handled by the game master (or a designated assistant) rather than by a player.
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A player always wants to recruit NPCs into the party. How do I handle this?
TL;DR: I have a player who wants to recruit lots of NPCs to avoid putting his own character in danger and to grab more spotlight for himself. I'm concerned about how this will affect challenge balance ...
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How can a GM quickly create interesting, engaging NPCs?
What techniques do people have for coming up with interesting personalities and histories for non-player characters? I'm mostly interested in the GM side of things. I don't want to do a ton of prep. I ...
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How do I indicate to my players that an NPC is no longer useful and that they should move on?
I am a rather new DM, still learning stuff.
So I have noticed that my characters tend to talk too much with the NPCs, trying to get a lot of information, and probably even trying to 'cheat', thinking ...
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How much should NPCs charge for spells cast as services to PCs?
As the title suggests, I need to know how to compute the appropriate cost for spells that NPCs provide as services (components included) to the party.
My search has come up with the following:
...
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How can I use powerful NPCs without overshadowing the player characters?
I’ve been playing P&P for years and have taken my first tentative steps into DM’ing over the last year, mostly leading One-Shots. I am also a passionate world-builder and so I jumped at the chance ...
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Risk of a TPK vs realistic NPCs
I am a novice DM running a game for an even more novice group of players and I beginning to think that my next session may result in a TPK (total party kill, for the uninitiated). Is this something I ...
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What is a good way to become a better NPC/monster actor?
One of the biggest problems I have as Game Master, (going on 30+yrs) is in portraying NPC and Monsters in any RPG. Is there a good resource for becoming a better 'actor'?
Instead of just saying... ...
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Players constantly capture enemies and question them, how to deal with it?
I'm running a campaign for five sixth level players and the bard has hypnotic pattern. Whenever the party runs into any fights with enemies who can speak, they always find some way of making an enemy ...
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How do you handle verbal exchanges between NPCs without taking the PCs out of the spotlight?
One of the assumptions I make as GM is that the players should always be in the spotlight. Sometimes the players find themselves in a situation where they watch NPCs speak to each other. I don't ...
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How can I handle players killing my NPC outside of combat?
My players tried to capture one of my bosses (they didn't know it was a boss) and after a few rolls they succeeded. They started to interrogate him (the NPC is a human) and after obtaining the ...
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How can I best handle monsters/NPCs using social skills vs PCs?
I've checked the books and can't find an answer by RAW other than the DM decides, so I'd like to know the best way to handle this in my games.
What happens if a thug tries to intimidate/persuade the ...
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How do I create a great fantasy villain that inspires the party to rally against them?
In my early years of GMing it was simple enough to say that the badguys were evil and that was all the justification we needed. They are attacking the village because they are evil, they are stealing ...
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My players are thinking of abandoning my NPC. What should I do?
I created this amazing NPC that is kind of the guide towards the true story line; he's an old Grung war leader, his entire army gets decimated by these big bat creatures, and he is forced to live ...
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How do I respond to players who keep asking powerful NPCs to help them in ToA?
I'm playing Tomb of Annihilation(ToA) with my group right after playing Waterdeep Dragon Heist. The group have met powerful characters like Vajra Safahr, the open lord Laeral Silverhand, Mirt, Artus ...
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How can I protect an NPC's death scene from interfering PCs with cure magic?
In my current campaign, a plot point is going to involve the PCs finding a dying man who has been kept prisoner and beaten repeatedly over a long period of time. He is able to give the party some ...
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How can I tell how powerful an NPC is without being explicitly told?
Recently in a session, I almost caused our party to fight a lich at level 5. For D&D 5e, a lich has a CR of 21. There were a few clues to his strength that I missed, such as being locked in a room ...
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How can I make an NPC useful without overshadowing the player characters?
I play DnD 5th and I find my group often has many NPCs accompanying them, like 4 players and 4 NPCs. Most have some form of tie to the group, but few are actually as useful as the group members, as ...
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As a DM, do I have to declare the actions that NPCs ready?
A question arose when I was reading the PHB's section about "Actions in Combat: Ready" that reads:
Sometimes you want to get the jump on a foe or wait for a particular circumstance before you act. ...
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How can I learn how to negotiate as an NPC?
I'm a new GM in D&D 4e. I've quickly found that I perform very poorly when I'm portraying a negotiation between the PCs and one or more NPCs. Even when they have common ground and could easily ...
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Does having a recurring NPC ally incur the same risks as having a GMPC?
I'm brand new to table-top RPGs and I am my group's DM (D&D 5e). I've been brainstorming ideas to work into our next campaign after LMoP, and I'm liking the idea of recurrent NPCs who are on their ...
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How to set up love interests for player characters
A few of my players (2 out of 4 in the current group) would like having a love interest in our campaign. I feel like it's something that we can achieve, as the campaign is not too dark and into "...
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What's the difference between an NPC and a GMPC?
I was reading this question, and while I do agree on the answers stating a GM should avoid having a character of his own as it's hard to properly play it, I don't really see what the line between that ...
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How do I use God as an NPC while being sensitive to players' real-life religious beliefs?
I'm currently running a 3-year long campaign that is coming to an ending in which God is likely to appear as an NPC. Since this is the end of the campaign I won't need to manage it for very long, but ...
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What is the best way to deal with NPC-NPC combat?
I'm about to run a premade adventure, and reading through it I see a potential situation where one group of monsters could, though PC actions, end up fighting each other.
As a PC, I hate seeing my ...
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How can I tell how many damage dice to roll for an NPC's cantrip?
For PCs, cantrip damage increases with their total character level and not their class level (see this question for reference: Do Cantrips use your character level or class level?).
However, NPCs do ...
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Who gets to write how character backgrounds tie into the game?
One of my player's character is searching for a long-lost brother whom he never knew. Who is ultimately responsible for how this NPC is written into the story?
I realize that I am the DM, and ...
user32165
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How to deal with a DM who controls us with powerful NPCs?
I'm currently in a campaign run by a friend, and so far, I'm having a great time. However, he does do one thing that has been irritating to me, he makes all of the important allied NPCs far more ...
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Strategy to roleplay conversations between groups of NPCs?
I'm a newish DM, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a strategy to roleplay conversations between NPCs.
For example, in the game I'm currently running, there is a "town council" ...
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Can you lower your AC on purpose?
For roleplaying reasons I would like to make a NPC appear weaker than it actually is. When the players first fight it, it should seem to have a very low AC and miss many attacks.
Is this possible in ...
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Curing NPC phobia
This is a another version of Curing trap phobia, but as you can guess, the party is now using Insight checks on all NPCs they meet!
I've cut down encounters with unnecessary NPCs, so every NPC they ...
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Why do we assume that PHB rules apply to monsters?
The party is deep into my 5e-updated classic Greyhawk Giants series.
They are returning the body of a stone giant killed in the siege of Headwater to the stone giant's clan. The Thane of the Stone ...
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How to create a villain for level 1 players
I want to build a cool devil overlord as a villain for a group of three level 1 PCs.
How would I go about making a villain who's more powerful than them without going overboard?
Should I be scared to ...
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How do I learn enough about military tactics to run credible military-type NPCs in combat? [closed]
I'm the GM of a Shadowrun Campaign and have difficulties letting the NPCs move in a battle like they would in real-life.
Two of my players are pretty informed about how military or police would act ...
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How can I introduce an “enemy” faction NPC without players killing them?
I have a campaign I'm running that heavily involves cultists working to save the planes in a kind of "we live here too and would prefer not to die" motivation. There is a cultist that one of the ...
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Self-Preservation: How to DM NPCs that Love Living?
I have it in mind that humanoid NPCs do not "rage against the dying of the light" as much as they should. Combat encounters frequently result in a full-on massacre, when realistically a single ...
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How is cantrip damage determined when cast by NPCs? [duplicate]
A Green Hag (MM, p. 177) has an Innate Spellcasting trait that includes the spell vicious mockery. The description of the vicious mockery cantrip states, in part:
[The target] must succeed on a ...
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Can any creature other than PCs use Two-Weapon Fighting?
The rule on Two-Weapon Fighting (PHB, page 195) states:
When you take the Attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you're holding in one hand, you can use a bonus action to attack with ...
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If I design a PC for use as an NPC, how much XP should he give when killed?
As part of an early quest, my PCs are likely to face off against a wizard.
The problem here is that the stat block for Mage NPCs listed in the Basic Rules has a Challenge Rating of 6, while the PCs ...
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How can a DM communicate to the players that subtlety is needed in a mystery adventure?
I am a beginner DM and also a player.
In our current adventure (Rise of Tiamat), where I am a player, we are tracking some shady individual (Mr. X) involved with a cult. We recently entered a tavern, ...
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Helping players remember NPCs with uncommon names
In my game of The Dark Eye we play in the south of Aventuria, and thus the players come across many NPCs with names that are not that common (especially compared to common german names) and my players ...
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How can I make conversations with NPCs more succinct?
IMPORTANT: don't just read the selected answer, all of the answers to this question provide good techniques to apply in different scenarios when it comes to conversations with NPCs. I chose the one ...
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How to make large number of NPCs manageable to the GM?
I'm planning a game where there is about a dozen important NPC actors, with some more less important ones. "Important" means that even if they are not directly involved in current events, they play a ...
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When should I have an NPC actively investigate an illusion created by the Phantasmal Force spell?
The phantasmal force spell can be broken if the victim examines the illusion and makes a successful investigation check against the spell's DC.
What general guidelines should I use to decide when the ...
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How can my PCs discover an NPC's class if they are trying to hide it?
I'm pretty new to DMing and I'm working on writing a campaign in which it's important to the plot that the characters not know at first that the BBEG is a multiclass wizard-warlock. Basically, this ...
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How can an NPC replace some pages of a book with different pages, without leaving a trace of manipulation?
A NPC in my adventure (set in Eberron), which I lead as DM, wants to replace some maps in a book with different maps. The person removes the maps by cutting out the pages containing them and somehow ...
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How to voice an NPC?
As a GM should I use a different voice for a NPC who is, for instance, a sick old man, or if it's a kid, or even a member of the opposite sex? What advice can you give me to enrich NPC acting?
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What is/n't an Ally?
In Pathfinder, who is (and isn't) your ally?
I'm inclined to think the following are allies:
Your willing party members
Your animal companion
Your summoned creatures
You
I think the following are ...
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Can the Knight give infinite Leadership dice for 1 minute?
I got a Knight servant from a Deck of Many Things, and am looking at his Leadership ability.
For 1 minute, the knight can utter a special command or warning whenever a nonhostile creature that it ...
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Is it possible for a person to be tricked into becoming a lich?
A great evil has been prophesied and a powerful wizard knows that he is unable to stop it himself. His plan is to create several heroes who will be able to fight the evil despite the event taking ...
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Make NPC death most dramatic
For reasons that would take to long to explain here, my campaign requires are certain feel of fear and paranoia for my PCs.
There will be quite a few failed assassination attempts and so on. I'm ...
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