PCs are Not NPCs

Art by Mirco Paganessi

It’s no secret that 3rd Edition D&D made player characters more complex. With the goal of making them more customizable and individualized, characters became elaborate, with skills and feats, prestige classes, and more. For many players, this was fun and rewarding.

However, one of the few directives we got from “on high” during 3E creation was that NPCs had to work just like PCs. A simple farmer couldn’t just be a level 0 human and that’s that. The farmer needed to have a class, skills, and so on.

And that’s fine, I suppose. But the larger picture of “NPCs have to be just like PCs” comes into focus once you start talking about major NPCs. One need only flip open a D&D adventure and look at the stats of even just a 6th level wizard and you’ll see that it takes up half a page even in an abbreviated “stat block” presentation. And I can personally attest that those NPCs took a lot of time to prepare.

Which, of course, was silly. Was it ever going to be important at the game table to know what that wizard’s woodworking skill bonus was? Or was it important to know what his bugbear allies’ climb bonus was? I’m going to argue, obviously, that the answer is no. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, those NPCs are going to last 10 minutes at the table, and the only things anyone would need to know about them are Armor Class, hit points, the wizard’s best couple of spells, and the bugbears’ attack and damage. And the other one percent of the time, other stats can just be extrapolated by the well-informed GM.

So the takeaway here could just be to not have game mechanics that don’t get used in your game. That might seem too obvious to state, but looking at the last 24 years of D&D (and all its derivative games) suggests that it’s not. It’s not just a waste of design time, but it makes the stats one actually needs harder to find quickly. Worst of all, it suggests to GMs that they have to spend a large amount of time and effort to calculate game stats for their original NPCs. Prepping for a D&D game is very time-consuming (although it’s better today than it once was—kudos to 5th Edition for that). And the fact that most of that work will never get used is just kicking a GM when they’re down.

And I don’t think the issue stops there. Mechanics that don’t see use are a symptom of the real problem. I believe that NPCs should never work just like PCs. Most of the time I don’t get up on a soapbox in this column and give direct game design advice like that. Most of the time, I talk about a design issue and go over the implications of the different paths a designer might take. But not this time. I’ll say it again: NPCs shouldn’t work like PCs. The reasons for this go beyond simply “it makes game prep harder,” although that all by itself is reason enough.

No, giving NPCs full PC stats implies—incorrectly—that NPC stats and PC stats serve the same purpose in the game. It suggests that the designer’s job is to quantify all elements of the world à la a complete and accurate simulation of the fictional reality. Neither of these things are true (although there are people—designers and gamers alike—who want the latter to be).

Not Fitting

PCs are the main characters of the story. NPCs are the secondary characters. Now, stating that suggests that the PCs should be “better” than the NPCs, but that’s actually a matter of genre and style. In many games, it might be true but in plenty of others it’s not. And in some games, the opposite is the real truth (I’m looking at you Call of Cthulhu and to a lesser extent the upcoming The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game.) So that’s not the point here. The point might be better stated that the PCs are who the game is about, while the NPCs are who the setting is about. The mechanical role of a PC’s stats isn’t to somehow simulate and replicate what an elven warrior or a cultist-fighting pulp hero is really like. The role of a PC’s stats are simply to enable and govern the options a player has while playing the game. That might be very simple and broad: “You’re a 2nd level fighter with 12 hp and a sword, what do you do?” or they might be complex: “You’re a hive mind creature with the personalities and psychic abilities of the twelve great ancestors and they each operate using different mechanics…” The level of complexity depends on the game, but either way, whether a few words and numbers or a three-page spreadsheet of mechanics, those stats provide the player with the capabilities and limitations of the character in the same way that a bishop in chess can move any distance along the diagonal on the chessboard, but can’t move straight ahead, to the side, or backwards.*

That isn’t what NPC stats do. Actual gameplay doesn’t care about NPC agency or choices while playing the game. NPC stats aren’t there to give the GM all the options for that character to interact with the world. If anything, it’s the other way around. The GM creates a way for the NPC to act (pirating the shipping lanes, threatening to destroy the entire world, or just selling food in a shop) and the stats follow along afterward, enabling the NPC to interact with the game in the desired fashion.

I may very well have used a chess analogy to describe what a PC can do, but an RPG is not a game of chess where each “side” has the same pieces that can make the same moves. Even thinking of it as a game having “sides” is going to cause more trouble than it’s worth. An RPG is more like a pinball machine. The PCs are the players, and the NPCs are the targets and the bumpers and whatnot. You might think that a game of pinball is the player versus the machine, but in no way is that a symmetrical match-up.

Too Complex

As discussed at the beginning of this piece, creating NPCs that are as fleshed out and robust as a PC often ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. Only in games with very simple PCs is this not true. But even then, the resulting simple NPCs should be a happy coincidence and not a design goal. From a design point of view, the designer should make PCs as simple or as customizable as the design requires. You don’t want decisions you make for how PCs work to have implications for how NPCs work. This affects not only GM prep but gameplay overall.

If you think of a RPG as a movie, the vast, vast majority of NPCs are only “on screen” for a few minutes at most, while the PCs essentially always are. In the GM’s imagination, or in the smoke and mirrors of verisimilitude, an NPC might have a rich internal life. The NPC, off-screen, has hopes and dreams, relationships (both good and bad) with others, and so on. But it’s all off-screen. This means that the vast majority of the time:

a. no one cares

or 

b. if they do care, “off-screen” actions don’t require any kind of game mechanics at all.

Too Limiting

Giving NPCs the same stats as PCs is also too limiting. Consider this: in a D&D game, the GM wants the NPC wizard to have guarded his library with a spell that animates the books to attack intruders. This is a cool and appropriate magical effect that will make for a great encounter. But there’s no spell on the wizard’s spell list that will do that. Where did this effect come from? Now the GM faces an (unnecessary) obstacle. They already have to come up with some mechanics to govern the way the effect works against the PCs when they come into the library.At best, the GM feels they’ve also got to create a brand new spell and add it to the NPC’s spell list, make sure it’s balanced at the right level, yadda yadda, yadda. Or at worst, they don’t institute the cool idea they had for the magical effect, and the game is all the more dull for its absence.

There are things that you’re going to want NPCs to do that PCs will never do and vice versa. Your game might have carousing rules like ShadowDark for the PCs to use for the time in between adventures, but you aren’t going to use that for NPCs. You might want to say that an NPC scientist has spent 20 years developing a FTL drive, but you don’t want rules for such an endeavor to apply to PCs.

The GM’s imagination is one of the greatest tools to make an RPG fun and interesting for everyone involved. The game shouldn’t limit their imagination, it should empower and expound upon it. New things (creatures, spells, equipment, and so on) should be as simple to create and incorporate as possible.

In other words, limiting the desires of players is an important way to maintain a semblance of balance in most RPGs. PCs are best when they fit into a pre-established framework. But limiting the desires of the GM just makes for a less interesting experience for all. NPCs are sometimes (often?) best when they break out of the expected framework. (The semblance of balance in NPCs comes from the GM, not the game mechanics—but that’s a topic for another time.)

---

* An OSR fan is going to read that and think, “Oh, but Monte, in our games, characters aren’t defined by what’s on their character sheet. Players are encouraged to come up with original plans and outside-the-box actions.” This is true, but it’s such a core tenet of those games that it could be listed on every PC’s sheet right along with hit points and Armor Class. The only reason it’s not is because it’s true for everyone, so it doesn’t need to be counted as a part of a character’s abilities.

One last note: Substack doesn’t make it easy to list editorial assistance, so let me add here at the end that every single article and essay here has benefited from the editorial assistance of Teri Litorco and the careful proofing eyes of either Dominique Dickey or Tammie Ryan. You folks are the best.