Today, Yax over at Dungeon Mastering brings an interesting post on how to play villains that will be hated by your players. (Emphasis mine, see below)

Vanir, from StupidRanger chimes in the comment section about how the villains in his play group actually take notes from the PCs actions. (Looking forward to your series on the subject)

This little raises two separate but related issues in terms of playing adversarial NPCs.

1) How to make memorable, credible adversaries in a role playing game
2) How to role-play evil characters without resorting to lame clichés or plain boring bullies.

I’ll tackle number 1 below, and I’ll ponder on number two for a future entry.

From my personal experiences, and hugely inspired by Monte Cook’s 3.0 DMG and Dungeoncraft series in Dungeon magazine, all NPCs should have 1 or 2 defining traits (physical, personality, rumors, secrets) that bring them out of the ordinary.

I think an adversarial NPC only needs to be fleshed out further if:

• It is a returning villain in the campaign
• One or more player ‘bites’ at one of the NPC’s traits and steers the role-play toward exploring the relation with the adversary.

Case in point, we were playing one of those Dungeon Crawl Classic adventures (The Mysterious Tower) and the party meets with an Othyugh (Trash eating tentacles-equipped walking-mouth) . Expecting to see it killed faster than I could say ‘roll for initiative’ I had given it just one trait: In halting Common-Speech, it always referred to other living creatures as food, including itself. So as the PCs come face to face with it, they hear it say ‘Ahhh, lot’s of Food-on-two-sticks! Come to Food-that-Eats, Food-that-Eats hungry!!!! (Bouffe-qui-Bouffe in French)

The player’s loved it! So much so that the poor creature became an instant Mascot for the PCs who actually fed it instead of fighting it.

So giving a few out-of-the-ordinary traits is a great start for would-be memorable NPCs.

Now I could not help noticing that Yax mentioned NPCs that his Players hated. Strong emotions are the best catalyst to imprint a strong NPC in the minds of players. And this here calls for some metagaming cheating on the part of DMs.

If you want an NPC to truly stand out with a group of Characters, you have to go after the Player’s guts (note the very metagaming distinction of player’s vs their characters). And one of the surest way to do that is to mimic a NPC’s personality or trait that your players hate in people. While all books of good DMing say to stay clear of Real Life issues, you can still ‘borrow’ from it and make that NPC a caricature of someone or a personality trait that is instantly dislikable.

Second case in point, I made this Bronze Dragon NPC that always, always asks for validation whenever he does or says something (So, you think I was scary enough with those cultists?, Do you think this breastplate is a good choice when I’m in Human form?). Knowingly, I had given a character trait that one of my players absolutely hates in people. So much so that we almost had a Good on Good fight right there. The other character’s rush to calming their friend down was priceless and made for one of the best Roleplaying I had seen in a long time.

That is emotional highjacking at it’s best and this Dragon became another instant recurring Good guy. But for that I went for the player’s guts, not the character.

Inspiration for strong Hateful character traits

• Web Forum Trolls!
• Ex-petty bosses (or college teachers, or schoolyard bullies) shared by most of the group
• Religious/Console/Computer Platform Fanatics.
• Passive Aggressive people

Lot’s of strong emotions there.

But! There is a fine line to walk. Do not bring to the table issues that are currently strongly affecting one or more players (especially for players that share work/school outside of the game). Go for the common cathartic enemy, don’t be that DM that plays an overbearing alcoholic or needy psychotic NPC that has a strong resemblance to someone close to the players.

Peace out.