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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5501306" data-attributes="member: 3820">Chemistry, really. You can't really plan chemistry. The best you can do is when you know for certain that there are certain types of characters you believe are cool, and that your players also believe are cool. For instance, I know that my players can generally appreciate stoicism as a virtue (my wife in particular), and so they're favorably impressed by stoics, particularly stoics who may have to ask the PCs for help even though it goes against their grain. This shows a bit of vulnerability, and in several cases the players have attempted to genuinely befriend such a character rather than exploiting that vulnerability. Because they know the NPC is sparing with his or her trust, that trust becomes a valuable commodity they want to earn.On the other hand, the "funny guy" thing requires very compatible senses of humor. My most successful comical NPC at the moment is a former bandit turned manservant to one of the PCs. He's basically Eeyore with a pseudo-Italian accent, always making dour pessimistic observations but framing them in the form of "keeping everyone's spirits up." Because a lot of his humor is self-deprecating or comes at his own expense, the players can choose either to comically twist the knife ("Don't worry, Carpa, I assure you that if it goes wrong I will see to it myself that you will be mercifully hanged") or to take his side and engender more comic self-deprecation. If it were me? I would pretty much run with the random NPCs that the players find fascinating and then pad out their backstories as necessary. You know you have successes here, so run with that. The players may really feel rewarded when they get to pick the NPCs they want to hang out with, and you respond by letting them do so and allowing interesting situations to arise as a result. In fact, I do do this. The aforementioned bandit/manservant came out of a brawl wherein a surviving minion was very eloquent in his desire to surrender and not be killed. One player developed a serious interest in an NPC military archivist that I simply described as "a big guy covered in scars with death metal hair." Seducing said NPC became a project, and finding out the story behind those scars is her current goal. These are really great successes in my games. In fact, it feels all the better because I didn't plan them out ahead of time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against putting some extra thought into NPCs that I figure the players are going to want to spend some time negotiating with. But the random encounters that become allies, rivals, best friends or lovers -- they give the impression that anyone in the world could turn out to be significant in some way, that everyone has their own story. And that's some neat verisimilitude right there.</blockquote>

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