Improving Your Storytelling – Build Characters not Stats

Let me ask a question, when you create your NPCs for your role-playing game which do you grab first, the Game Master book. the Player book or a pad of paper?

The correct answer here is the pad of paper. I can hear the outcry now about the need for stats, equipement and spell lists but to be honest they are really secondary to what you need for an NPC – a lifelike character.

To give you an example from the campaign I run, a major supportive NPC is a wizard called Amarth.

Amarth is a powerful individual and has many titles including the lofty one of Defender of Valon, a city on the edge of the kingdom he lives in.

The statement above is how the NPC came into being. I didn’t even determine his stats until after he had been introduced to the party. Why you may ask? Simple, the stats weren’t necessary. When he was introduced I needed to know his station in life, who he knew and would associate with. I fleshed him out with the titles he carried, where he lived, his lifestyle, his servants – not a single one of those items or even his motivation for becoming involved with the party required me to know how smart or strong he is so I didn’t bother with it until later.

I think it helps to realize that we interact with a number of people during everyday of our lives and we don’t think of them as a block of stats. So why should we treat the NPCs or PCs that we create as just a column of numbers? Take a few minutes before you start to fill in the game mechanics and determine the character as it is the character and not the stat block that will drive the story forward.