Handling many NPCs

[Stormcrow]

One thing I'm doing in my next game tomorrow, and which I've never been very good at, is running multiple NPCs, all with distinct personalities. Either all but one gets ignored, or they all turn out flat and similar to each other.

Any ideas on how to make a roster of NPCs come to life?

[Craig Oxbrow]

I try to keep the number of NPCs talking in a given scene to a minimum. If there have to be more than one, I keep all their dialogue short and I mention who says what.

There are various tricks for differentiating multiple NPCs - giving them particular voices or mannerisms or other tics, for example. If the spaceship's captain always frowns seriously and the security officer sounds Cockney and the navigator is a psychic who always talks in riddles, the players should be able to tell them apart. These generally elad to fairly broad-strokes characters, but if they're only going to appear in one adventure they don't need to be very nuanced performances anyway.

If you're stuck with a scene of multiple NPCs with differing agendas who should really be talking to each other, you could summarise it - "the council discuss things, Eli says that the colony is in danger but Sar dismisses it and Raff agrees with him".

Or, experimentally, you could hand NPC roles to players whose PCs aren't involved.

[stahlman]

I agree with that-Dickensian archetypes-larger than liife characters and a focus on no more than 4 or 5 main NPCs should work

[da professor]

You could note a fictional character your NPC is inspired by and in effect play him/her when playing that NPC

[satheian]

I love the idea of handing NPC's to PC's who aren't present in the scene, you keep everyone active in the game, and it takes some load off the GM.

We do this almost every session in my SOIFRP group and it works really well. (Though, this can also lead to some NPC's becoming PC's, but that may just be the flavor of GoT's, since everyone dies eventually.. lol)