I've begun creation of my player's home base neighborhood. So far I have slots for 25 npcs. Tapcaf owner, customs official, mechanic, etc. I was planning on naming them all, creating them all in detail, and giving personality and voice notes. I thought that since this was someplace the players were going to come back to often, it made sense to nail down the details.

But is it too overboard? Should I just assign names and adversary cards to some of the slots? I'm used to building a sandbox-style campaign where the players go wherever they want. This campaign is far more story-centric and episodic. Still, on TV shows we all learn the "home" characters beyond the main characters, so I thought that made sense here too.

I'd be interested to hear from those that have played through, oh... 10-ish sessions? Do you find a lot of "wasted" preparation on npcs or not enough?

I mostly just improvise names and voices on the spot, and many of the NPCs in my games don't get names at all (except one NPC, who is the sibling of one of my PCs)

My five players were considering making a group that crewed a Gozanti-class Armed Transport. I considered full write-ups for the other seven crewmembers, but even that might be pushing it for full stats. Each group is different though, so just figure out how far you want to go and how much enjoyment you'll get from it (I know some players and GMs that love making characters even if they never play them).

But is it too overboard?

Egads! That . . . that might be a bit much. In our game - that sounds pretty similar in set-up - each character has a handful of NPCs important to their past (but they very rarely show up), and the planet that they call home has nine major supporting NPCs, another five occasional drop-in NPCs. And honestly, some of them get shuffled off to one side and forgotten in the ebb and flow of concentrating on running the game.

I would say build the 10 most important NPCs and keep them on hand, but introduce them slowly and organically. You don't want to be a episode of the transformers where the autobots introduce themselves in a line at the start just so they can sell toys. Introduce them slowly will also let you solidify the character for the player, so they don't forget names and characteristics.

Oh - and keep it broad. One or two notable features for the players to latch onto. They will never remember (or care about) pages of backstory for each.

Lets hypothetically say that I want an archeologist professor at the city's university. I would say "He's human, he's snarky and flippant, wears a hat and leather jacket" and let it go at that.

Here - had to hop on my laptop that has my game notes. Here's a shot cross-section of some of my NPC writeups:

Gundan Pall (Human Male) -

Marshall (police chief) of Merron. Fair skin, red hair, good looking late forties. A straight shootin' good cop that's trying to weed out the bent men under him and weather the political corruption that is responsible for keeping funds from his police force.

Dekata Lorn: (Rattataki Female) -

Detective/investigator. White skin, no hair, facial tattoo’s and multiple piercings, athletic muscular build. She is a skilled fighter, sometimes a bit overly aggressive with the criminal element.

Bast (Calamari male) -

Owner of the antiquities shop just up the road from the bar. Not much for working in the field, but he loves to live vicariously through others and their travels.

Boolon Murr (Ithorian Female) -

Owner of the Used Books store from down the street.

Professor H'Darr (Human Male) -

An older easily distracted gentlemen, who tends to get caught up in his work. Head of the Merron Museum of Natural History, and Mo's old professor from her Academy days.

Dorook Turl (Klatooinian Male) -

Head bartender. Short for his species, but impressively muscled. Can be gruff at first, but once you get to know him he’s quite personable, and very loyal if treated well. Dorook is a skilled brawler who doubles as bouncer when necessary. Lives in one of the Hunter’s Rest studios.

Pawnee Llanya (Human female) -

One of the famous "Bounty Babes.” They are known for coming out in “bounty hunter armor” and then taking it off. Pawnee is a short human with short blond hair. She has a very positive bubbly personality, and loves being helpful and friendly. Lives in the one of the studios, roommates with Larissa

Larissa Kass (Cathar Female) -

Professional dancer, the second half of the Bounty Babes. Larissa is much more introspective and reserved then Pawnee. She sometimes has a haunted look, as though something in her past still troubles her. As a Cathar she has a full light brown pelt with darker highlights, and shoulder length dark brown hair. Shares a room with Pawnee.

It can make it feel more "real" but that is a LOT of work to build and maintain, and it will rarely come into play.

I would have a name/race/occupation list along with interesting quirks/accents/identifying marks and as you need someone to have backstory relevant to the plot, add it on the spot and make a note on the card. It will give you more flexibility.

don't forget to give them side quests. pick up this drop off that. kill the spiders. made a medicine for my son.

I don't think its too much, but remember, then won't come into play that often. it will mostly be hour doing a voice while they buy or sell.

I'd recommend keeping it simple and not tying yourself down to all the NPCs at once.

On a TV show, characters often get introduced when they're needed, and if they're a hit with the audience they might stick around. So you might write up a kid named Urkel for one episode but everybody likes him so much he sticks around and becomes the star.

But seriously, I think you can introduce NPCs on the fly and be inspired by what might suit the current episode best. Maybe one of the characters is a ladies' man who wants to try out his Charm skills. Then the NPC running the tapcafe' might be a beautiful lady.

If the encounter goes well (if it's fun, or funny, or entertaining) then she might become a recurring character. If not, maybe the next time the PCs go in, the tapcafe is run by a surly Devaronian. Maybe *that* character becomes a hit and sticks around.

But it can be fun to measure the interests of the players, see what they've been joking about or enjoying on TV or movies, and use those things as inspiration, rather than tying yourself down to 20+ NPCs for sessions that might not happen for 2 or 3 months from now.

I think creating every NPC in detail is too much potentially unnecessary work. BUT you can ask your players to make up one or two (or more!) of said NPCs. Just a few sentences should be enough, like "He is a mid-age Selonian, a has-been Cor-Sec, now spending his time trying to learn recruits a thing or two about handling blasters". This way the players will also participate and it will be "their" place.

I would only do it for characters you know your PCs are going to interact with on a regular basis or you need to have a particular way for a later adventure. The NPCs on our crew (Wayfarer) all have personalities and stats (the later because they actually aid and occasionally roll checks, particularly R2)

Otherwise, our group has gotten a lot of milage out of Random NPC trait generators, Random Name generators, and the occupation. Just don't be afraid to pause for a moment when the players a new person, punch the generators and think about how they interact for a moment. That's how we ended up with (not in a star wars game, obviously) an arrogant & dedicated sprint mobile phone employee who's phone we needed to borrow, and therefore stonewalled us for our characters having AT&T.

Also, sometimes you just run with what the players though out there. Half of Trax and Teemo's personalities are because of that, we made 'assumptions' about them based on what we saw in the Kryat Fang, (up to and including Trax's...preference for Gemorian women) and those became personality traits.

I've begun creation of my player's home base neighborhood. So far I have slots for 25 npcs. Tapcaf owner, customs official, mechanic, etc. I was planning on naming them all, creating them all in detail, and giving personality and voice notes. I thought that since this was someplace the players were going to come back to often, it made sense to nail down the details.

But is it too overboard?

25 does sound like a bit much.

You don't need to populate the whole town, just start small and work out. And you certainly shouldn't bother statting everyone.

Figure out the top 5 characters your players will be interacting with regularly. Do a brief write up and your character notes (no more then say 2 paragraphs at the absolute max). Now look at them and see if they even need a full stat block. Many characters don't.

A bartender that's largely going to be a source of info probably doesn't need anything more then a Discipline, Negotiation, and Perception number, if you're in a mood, add an ST. Pretty much every other number can be ignored since it will likely never be used.

Big Cheevo:

All stats 2 except Will3, Pre 3. 1 rank in Discipline, Perception, Deception, 2 in Negotiation.

ST 18

And that's all you'll probably ever need for Big Cheevo. If you need more you've got the bare bones to hang it on.

Also don't' waste time on Knowledge skills. Unless you have a very specific encounter that requires the NPC to have it, or the character is going to become party-controlled, Know skills don't matter. He knows what he knows and thats what he knows.

Now that you've got your top 5, do 5 more. These are even easier. Do their write up (probably not more then a few bullet points each) and just find a close fit in the rule book and make any note of any adjustments.

so somethings like:

FL-0

• Droid waitress in Big Cheevo's tapcaf
• Boston accent
• Super Friendly, like too friendly
• See "Twilek Dancer" Eote pg 414, all stats same except: Rival, listed skills 1, WT 10, Droid, no equipment.

And thats all you need to know about her. If you need more later, make more, but for now that covers FL-0 pretty solid.

Beyond that you're probably over preparing.

There's exceptions of course, if your campaign involves the odd interconnected social life of all these characters as a major plot point, then you probably do need to stat out a lot more. But just as a typical base of operations, I wouldn't overdo it. Stating up an entire town is sort of like tattooing your girlfriends name on your butt. It pretty much assures that something will go wrong and you'll never see her again.

I think you might be getting a little mechanically bogged down in the details. How many of these NPCs are going to actually be fighting the party? None? Oh, in that case, they don't need full stat blocks.

Really, they only need a few lines of description, a name and a hook or two. Everything else can be made up based on those few things. Consider reading ( http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=406 ) There are a lot of good ideas in there about what makes a solid NPC (and how to create them quickly).

Most of the time, when players interact with NPCs, they have a goal in mind. If you can guess that goal (usually not hard), then you can figure out how to make the journey to that goal interesting and rewarding. If that means it's an easy deception check as they pull the wool over the eyes of the town simpleton, then they have a story about the time the Wookie Marauder actually succeeded in convincing someone he was the King of Siam.

How hard do you, as a GM want to make the players work to achieve their goal? That's how you figure out the checks, not based on a stat block. The best stories come from left field -- remember the time when the players bought that stuff from that generic vendor? Neither do I. Remember the time when the players bought that stuff from Boris and Natasha who were constantly complaining about moose and squirrel? Ah, yeah, that was hilarious. Tom convinced them that we were fighting a group who were on a secret squirrel mission and we got 10% off the entire lot!

If you sketch out memorable NPCs with quirks and hooks, you don't even need to figure out their stats. Just figure out what they're good at and what they're bad at and assign a scale. Good means 1 red, 2 purple, bad means 1 purple. Used some aspect of the NPCs flavor in their check, boost die, foolishly insulted them or ignored an important part of their hook, setback.

Keep in mind that unless NPCs are going to be fought with, they should be sketches rather than photographs. The best part is that, over time, if the party keeps interacting with them, the sketches will evolve and get filled in more and more. If the NPCs grows organically with the party, you might wind up with an emotional attachment like R2's group had with their droid medic.

Thanks for the tips and advice. I'll keep the 25-ish npc slots for now, since they're just notable people in the neighborhood that the players are likely to encounter. But aside from names and a one-line description, I won't detail out any but a few. They'll get introduced as the players meet them, and if the players get aggressive I'll just snag an appropriate adversary card that comes close. After all, if the players are trying to kill them, now much detail do they need?

This may have been a case of everything looking like a nail when you're holding a hammer. I had Ogg's GM Tools which make it easy to create an NPC and the Order 66 broadcast on creating NPCs and... *sheepish look*

Thanks for the tips and advice. I'll keep the 25-ish npc slots for now, since they're just notable people in the neighborhood that the players are likely to encounter. But aside from names and a one-line description, I won't detail out any but a few. They'll get introduced as the players meet them, and if the players get aggressive I'll just snag an appropriate adversary card that comes close. After all, if the players are trying to kill them, now much detail do they need?

This may have been a case of everything looking like a nail when you're holding a hammer. I had Ogg's GM Tools which make it easy to create an NPC and the Order 66 broadcast on creating NPCs and... *sheepish look*

LOL, yeah that'll do it.

Yeah, I know what that's like

Like Braendig said, keep in mind that often you don't even NEED stat blocks for an NPC.

Unless an NPC is going to be a recurring character, or is going to an important character in a big fight, I often won't even bother coming up with numbers for them.

I came up with a Toydarian bartender as a contact for the PCs, they needed to meet with him and do a task for him. I didn't write down any numbers for him, but I think in the session they tried to Charm him or Deceive him or something.

So at that point I just say to myself "He's probably got a 3 in the appropriate characteristic, maybe a point in Cool or Discipline... so it's two Difficulty and a Challenge die."

This system is super-easy to improvise with!

I've begun creation of my player's home base neighborhood. So far I have slots for 25 npcs. Tapcaf owner, customs official, mechanic, etc. I was planning on naming them all, creating them all in detail, and giving personality and voice notes. I thought that since this was someplace the players were going to come back to often, it made sense to nail down the details.

But is it too overboard? Should I just assign names and adversary cards to some of the slots? I'm used to building a sandbox-style campaign where the players go wherever they want. This campaign is far more story-centric and episodic. Still, on TV shows we all learn the "home" characters beyond the main characters, so I thought that made sense here too.

I'd be interested to hear from those that have played through, oh... 10-ish sessions? Do you find a lot of "wasted" preparation on npcs or not enough?

If it's waist of time or not really depends on how much time in game that the PCs are going to spend interacting with these characters. Even then, for most of these characters a paragraph or two is all you should need for most of the NPCs. Maybe add a bit more detail if you feel particularly inspired to. Maybe add some depth to these different NPCs that you particularly like, especially if you can come up with adventure hooks involving those NPCs.

If this town ends up being a regular place that the PCs are going to be going back to, feel free to invest some more time, and create more stories going in the background that can take place with these characters in between the times when the PCs are gone, so that the PCs can get a sense that these are real living breathing places that change while they're not around.

create more stories going in the background that can take place with these characters in between the times when the PCs are gone, so that the PCs can get a sense that these are real living breathing places that change while they're not around.

This, I feel, is often as or even more important than extensively fleshed out characters. NPCs feel more real if they change over time. It doesn't have to be a big change, but in a small town or a large ship, something is going to be different after a year or three. Maybe a couple people hooked up? Maybe the cantina burned down and got rebuilt? Maybe Mr. Groundflyer at the corner store finally retired and left the store to be managed by his daughter. Particularly in partial sandboxes, a living world makes them much more engrossing.

create more stories going in the background that can take place with these characters in between the times when the PCs are gone, so that the PCs can get a sense that these are real living breathing places that change while they're not around.

This, I feel, is often as or even more important than extensively fleshed out characters. NPCs feel more real if they change over time. It doesn't have to be a big change, but in a small town or a large ship, something is going to be different after a year or three. Maybe a couple people hooked up? Maybe the cantina burned down and got rebuilt? Maybe Mr. Groundflyer at the corner store finally retired and left the store to be managed by his daughter. Particularly in partial sandboxes, a living world makes them much more engrossing.

On that same note, in sandbox games, it helps to have another "party" or two active in the same area as the PC party. That way, when something comes up that they ignore or pass on, there's an in-game group that can address the situation and produce a result. This result can be anything from total success to madcap failure. It provides the PCs with some external impetus to more carefully consider the jobs they choose to undertake as the competition will pick up after them.

If you truly want to irritate a party or cause them to go in a certain direction, give them a whiff of a "job" that they -just- missed out on to another group. If they're like most parties, they'll hate that and want to get more information -- instant adventure hook.

Terghon,

Lots of great info above. If you feel satisfaction giving all your nice names and quirks, I say go for it. Just don't let all that ambition and effort go to waste. Use your role play as tools to drop names of select pcs here and there, if just in passing. Bring up gripes or have an npc give credit/blame for a joke he just told the party that he heard from another npc. Use npcs to boost your pcs egos by having them approached for mundane, personal and professional advice.

Whatever you do to breathe life in your game will make it more the memorable years and years from now.

Good luck sir.

Thanks. I'm going to tone it down a bit. What I'm aiming at, for now, is still the 25-ish npcs in the "hometown." They may never run into the Ithorian grocer, or the gutter-kid message-runner, but they'll run into some of them, and maybe (eventually) all of them and more.

So everybody gets a name, race, and occupation. The top 10 most-likely-to-be-encountered get brief personality notes (e.g. red-head with a temper and too much pride in her work). The top few, probably 4 from what I'm guessing, get fuller personality notes and a couple will get stat lines since they may get into a fight (with or against the players).

My Adversary Cards should be arriving in the mail tomorrow (yay!). So I'm going to assign each of the slots one of those as well. Like... "Grillo Bnort - Human Bartender (Minion). Talks a lot, boring droning voice."

But! Based on the above advice, I'm going to make sure they all have room to grow. If the players grow attached to the slicer/forger with pockets full of half-wired bitz then he'll get more detail over time (thanks mostly to progressions for that one).

Lastly, I was planning on a between-session newsletter, the Wherever-We-Are Gazette, that has articles about events happening in the game world that the players might not be involved in. Tying some of them to "real" npcs seems like it would be a great idea. Example: the slick player is always hitting on one of the tapcaf waitresses. A couple sessions later, when they're off planet, they read a congratulations note about her and the Imperial Customs official on their wedding.