Setting and the proper number of NPCs

Originally published May 27, 2012

When building a setting there is a careful balance between too much material and too little. This is particularly the case when running simulationist or sandbox style games where the expectation is that the players can go anywhere and do anything. Too little and your setting seems empty and undeveloped, while too much and your players will be unable to follow all the plots and characters.

Specifically I’m interested in the upper limit for important non-player characters (NPCs) for a game. How many is too many? Obviously if there are too many, then players will begin to forget or confuse some of them and the gamemaster (GM) might do so as well. Just as a large group of players limits the focus in a game for any single member, a large cast of NPCs means that the GM will be unable to spotlight them all. If the NPC isn’t in the spotlight from time to time, then they will fade away from the story and from your player’s memories. At that point you might ask yourself why you created that character in the first place.

It is rarely an issue of having too few NPCs in my experience, as long as you are open to creating new ones of the fly. Players are always looking for experts, merchants, and sources of information and by their very nature they attract enemies. As long as you put the effort into establishing some guideline for what exists in your game you should be able to create an appropriate character with a little bit of time.

The problem of too many characters is a common one for me in White Wolf games where I feel that I need several dozen fleshed out and important characters for every city. I don’t have this issue in other systems, likely because the expectations are different. In D&D, I might make hundreds of monsters and dozens of NPCs for combat but most never survive contact with the party and thus are unimportant over the course of a campaign. Only a few allies and recurring villains make up the permanent cast. Likewise in my GURPS and BESM campaigns, I rarely felt the need to create more than a half-dozen personalities for any adventure and recycled them as much as possible.

In terms of finding the correct balance I think my Amber Diceless and my current Mage: the Awakening campaigns have come closest to finding the correct upper limit. In my Amber game, I had 7 players and about two dozen NPCs at the end, of which perhaps a dozen were important at any one time. With my experiences there I found that the players could generally keep the characters straight and I usually could remember to bring the action back to each NPC from time to time. I was certainly near the upper limit (both on the NPC and player side of things) but it seemed manageable.

My Mage game has a much larger cast and I feel suffers from the flaw of too many NPCs. However there are a few groups within the setting where I think the cast of characters is sufficiently small to not lose focus while still large enough to give the right feel of a serious organization. Specifically the group called the Adamantine Arrow in my game seems to be the right size. It consists of about dozen members split between 3 groups, or cabals.

What helps here is that each group has a face or leader which can be used as a shorthand for the cabal as a whole. The Iron Hand is represented by the criminal Black Dog and the other members are the lieutenants (loyal or otherwise) and soldiers of his gang. The Inner Monastery is led by Lealtad, and her companions are fellow warriors on an ill thought out quest of heroics and glory. Finally Quick, an ex-cop, leads the Fist of Talos which works to protect normal people from the supernatural threats of the city. By focusing on these leaders and the characters of the groups as a whole, I find I can better manage the cabals and reduced the overwhelming number of NPCs for the players.

An important aspect of this idea is that each group or character should be compelling on their own. You want to make sure each of your key characters suggest stories and have hooks to push the game forward. Black Dog’s criminal activities could easily make him an enemy of the players while Lealtad’s impulsive leadership can lead to tragedies that the heroes must clean up. This keeps your game moving and evolving as the players interact with the various NPCs of your world.

So based on these experiences I think a dozen important NPCs is probably a good upper limit. While you will certainly add many more minor NPCs who are important for a particular adventure, by focusing on your main cast while ensuring they are compelling and interesting you can hopefully ensure that your audience (the players) are able to easily remember them. Ideally if they are interesting enough and a sufficient history is established by focusing the story on them, it will be your players that reintroduce the NPCs to the story again and again after a while.