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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 5493508" data-attributes="member: 5948">As a player, I think it'd be very hard not to get bored to some degree in a game which had NO interaction with NPCs outside of combat.  There needs to be something - while it depends a lot on your group, a game that revolved around not much more than sneaking around until a beastie sees you, then fighting it, then repeating next sessions would be pretty repetitive.  And for longer-term plotlines, and to allow the PCs to have meaningful in-game choices, you have to have a way, as the GM, of passing useful information to the PCs, from stuff as basic as where to find drinking water, to as practical as the best precautions to take against deep ones when trying to navigate through the infested ruins of the Channel Tunnel, to as worlbreaking as the secret of chasing Cthulhu away from earth and back to Formalhaut or wherever it was he came from.  NPCs are a massively useful vehicle for infodumping, if nothing else.  There's some stuff you can do with ghosts, and diaries of dead people, old military records, spellbooks etc, and even (this is the far future after all) AIs like Cortana from the Halo games, but nothing beats a real live person to talk to.They also provide moral dilemmas and inspiration.  If EVERYONE on earth is dead or insane, why are the PCs bothering trying to reconquer the planet?  It's lost, the planet belongs to the monsters and humanity is a couple of hundred skinny pale people on Mars who are all going to die of inbreeding-related genetic disorders in a few dozen generations.  Your game setup implies that the PCs will take unspeakable risks for humanity and/or earth - if they're going to do that, the planet and the species have to be to some degree intact enough to fight for.  And it lets you wedge the PCs wityh moral choices.  Even really simple ones - do they or don't they use their dwindling supply of antibiotics to help the various crazed scabby sewer-dwelling survivors they meet?  Do they risk discovery of their larger strategy to help rescue ghoul feeding stock before a crazed splinter group of ghouls decides they'd rather eat now than wait for natural death?  If they get saved and hidden from hunting horrors by a tiny family group of survivors, what do they owe their rescuers, and can they abandon and/or betray them for the purposes of larger goals or personal survival?  NPCs open up stories and plotlines beyond 'kill X'.  I'd need to have a LOT of faith in the GM to play in a game in which there weren't any.</blockquote>

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