Do your players like your NPCs, Veeky Forums?

They seem to like the ones I put the least effort in. Cardboard cutouts with names get more of a response than the leader of a country.

Wonder what that says.

I don't know. What I do know is that groups seem to enjoy dragging my NPCs along with them, for example, when one group encountered a hapless young wizard's apprentice hired to guard a necromancer who may have escaped, they insisted that he come along with them to investigate, despite his (and my OOC) insistence that he wouldn't be much help. Another group kept trying to cajole the villain into joining them to help them loot the treasure... of his own dungeon. They wanted to tie him up and drag him along with them.

If I knew this meant they liked my NPCs, I'd be happy about it, but mostly I'm just confused.

Quite a strange life he must have been living to end up with that job combination

Fairly frequently, yeah

BUT! They always somehow gravitate towards neutrals and villains rather than 'likable' good guys though.

Which is fine I guess, but I would have thought they would have liked to have someone they can interact with positively.

Not to go all /reeee9k/ but it seems like they always liked 'alpha' characters while the 'nice guy' NPCs were ignored or actively reviled

Eh, they're ambivalent towards most of them, but have a few they love (Like the S/u/mmoner's C'iel Dragonfu and The Brotacular Sylvain), and a few they hate with a spectacular passion (Barnabas and Matthew Gaul).

Gonna need that sauce.
As for my NPCs, my players tend to like them even if it's in a kind of bullying way. For example I had a Gnome Shopkeep that was a part time inventor that they refused to remember the correct pronunciation of his name

They're walking inventory slots/emergency food sources.

They seem to quite like the allied NPCs, and hate the villainous ones. At least two of my players have what seem to be ongoing crushes on NPCs for games that are over.

they tend to like the weird shop owners and barkeeps that show up, not so much any rulers or soldiers

They seem to. Our campaigns take place in a single universe from campaign to campaign, so they seem to try and draw NPC's they liked from previous campaigns into the next one.

>They seem to. Our campaigns take place in a single universe from campaign to campaign, so they seem to try and draw NPC's they liked from previous campaigns into the next one.

I should add that I don't actually like reoccurring NPCs like that. NPCs from one campaign are nice but I think each campaign should have their own ones that grow and develop and react to the player's actions and the consequences of those actions rather than bringing back in ones they liked before.

Usually how it ends up

As a player out of the four last DM's I've played with, two made consistently 10/10 NPCs and two made consistently 2/10 NPCs.

As a DM I think it's sorta hard to tell at times, but after last session two players stayed an additional hour just to finish a conversation with a newly introduced NPC. Some of the best RP I've had in ages.

When I am not trying to make a character annoy the crap out of the party, the players end up enjoying my characters, even most of the vile and messed up guys I throw at them that I don't want them to. They sometimes like my villains even when I don't plan for them to like them.
>Evil warlock is being tyrant over local town; takes taxes and kidnaps people for experiments
>Comes earlier than one month; asks for volunteers for his experiments as usual
>CG elf monk actually volunteers
>oshitnotwhatiplanned
>Have evil warlock say he was looking for human subject, but he'll think of something for him and invites him to his lair
>Monk is satisfied
>Next, have evil warlock try and take kid from mother, blasting mother away with Eldritch Blast and instead taking the kid's father, a guardsman the players liked
>Flies away to lair; players give chase
>Players kill/capture experimented minions
>Players enter evil lair den one by one; Monk is in first
>Warlock explains another experiment to the Monk about infusing troll blood to gain regeneration; offers to monk, and he accepts
>absolutemadman.jpeg
>Rest of party arrives; ask why he is doing evil things instead of just killing him
>Warlock passionately describes his dream to become a devil, explains experiments are to perfect himself
>Turns into evil pit-fiend-esque devil; surely combat will begin now
>NG fighter tries to dissuade him from tyrany, tells him he should experiment on himself if he wants to become a demon
>Have warlock be triggered by being called a demon instead of a devil, so he finds a book on fiendish biology and reads off differences between devils and demons to the fighter
>N Necromancer and CN Evocation wizard help him explain; fighter holds opinion
>Monk is waiting for enhancements

cont.

>Warlock begins enhancements, restraining him to table and preforming dark rituals
>Fighter and necromancer backstab him, initiating combat
>Monk chides them for attacking the warlock
>Evocation wizard literally betrays the party to help the warlock, giving him helpful suggestions
>wat
>Evil warlock dies, but evocation wizard kills friendly mooks and almost kills the fighter
>Evocation wizard dies; monk is sad the experiment wasn't finishes

I either have some weird players, or I am a retard and made my villain too comedic in my quest to make him an eccentric lover of devils and talking about devils. At the very least, I can get them to hate a character for story reasons easily (party hates kitsune because of the illusion shenanigans I pull with them).

Why does it matter?

I demand you casually throw in that NPC character in a game and tell us what happens.

They sound like a fun party. I took on a goblin as an apprentice to my monk.

I hope you go along with them and male the characters they focus on more engaging. The fun of gaming is being able to do stuff you can't do in a video game. Like tie up the bbg and drag him along.

It means all of those traits belong to the same person

And do they not? I don't see as to how a comma would change that, though that may be a result of an oxford comma not being used in Western Australia, possibly the rest as well.

They seemed quite fond of the inquisitor after the flirty Sister of Battle and bitchy psyker PCs turned her from an asexual Amalathian to a yandere lesbian in two rolls.

Those fuckers.

Must of been some pretty good rolls.

Do they always derail that hard or was that an exception?

The original poster acknowledged it was meant to be a description for separate characters.

Not all my NPCs are winners, but sometimes for me it's kinda like this
>Half of party is KO'd
>NPC Friendo Bob gets a scratch
>Dying PC to Cleric: "LET ME DIE JUST SAVE BOB"

Ah. I thought his reaction was just based on his preferred use of grammar, not on an unintended meaning. My bad.

The Marines had been trying to press her for info concerning their upcoming mission with absolutely no luck, so the puny regular humans decided to try another tactic.
Something like a 3 to charm from the SoB, followed by a 98 from the psyker who had been doing some particularly stupid stuff just moments earlier. Psyker spent fate to reroll and got a 100.

They have their moments, usually once a session. Like when the techmarine practically Righteous Furied a Maulerfiend to death with a single burst from his bolter or Assault Marine bisected a juggernaut with a thrown cultist.
Nothing else quite as impressive as getting an inquisitor so flustered she starts blabbing every single piece of classified info (including the secret Grey Knight backup) just so her crush will pay attention to her.

Oh, and at some point after she let down her guard, I think the Marines convinced her they reproduce via buttsex. I don't remember if there was a reason, or if the players had figured out she didn't have any lore (astartes) skills and had just decided to fuck with her.

>Do your players like your NPCs, Veeky Forums?
As a DM. I hope not. I fucking hate when the PCs drag someone else along, then I have to worry about DMing AND playing a character.

As a player? No. I fucking hate them. At some point in the campaign they are hogging a spot-light that should be on a player- this even includes healing which at very least can be done by a pointed stick over a fucking DMPC.

Kek'd

My group has a habit of collective NPCs over the course of campaigns until each party member has their own entourage. They usually do this with unimportant NPCs I put no thought into. To give some examples...

>Took a crying housewife who was just supposed to point the party toward the plot and made her a revolution leader and later the queen of Ireland.

>In that same campaign, the angel and the shadow demon handed out magic powers like candy until they'd built entire religions around themselves out of their adopted NPCs.

>An entire session was spent with the bard and the redneck paladin going around collecting NPCs for shits and giggles.
>This group consisted of:
>A lazy, sarcastic cleric of Wee Jas that could see through time
>A Russian stereotype who worked at a warehouse
>Billy the bartender
>A pack of wild dogs
>Sproctor Poons, awkward teenage wizard apprentice
>Probably some more I'm forgetting

>In that same campaign, the party orc punched every orc he met in the face and declared himself the king of all orcs.

>Party doctor planted mind control chips in the brains of a giant spider and the sole survivor of a UFO crash and made them his servants.

I forgot my Magic deck one night at my LGS, so I decided to see what was going on with the Pathfinder group. I asked what was happening, but I did it "in character" and pretended to be a courier delivering some weird, foreign mail to the city's (leader?, king?, judge?). They liked my act so much they added me as a temporary character to help the party with the start of their quest. They made my backstory as a courier (not THE Courier) from the Mojave Wasteland that somehow ended up in their world. Unfortunately, I died eating fried chimera eyes and failing fortitude. I ate them because I asked the GM if my character would be crazy enough to do it and he said that cow eyes are considered a delicacy where I'm from. I was supposed to be killed off in that session anyways, since I was just there for that night only and both the GM and I didn't want me to become too ingrained in the campaign.

Speaking from a player's perspective, my party and I make it a habit to make fun of our GM's NPCs.
>GM introduces us to an apparently important character underneath a colosseum
>i say apparently, because he's got a good amount of spells he can cast on command as well as a superior version of a magic weapon in the party
>never find out his name, so we only have his appearance to go by
>which the GM makes a point to describe in detail as being a cool-looking character
>GM naively thought that a big white splotch on his right eye would look cool
>our faces when
And that was how we ended up fighting Cumshot the Countering Spellsword. He's still mad.

Google image search gives me nothing pleases help.

exhentai.org/g/1019226/fafee1845d/

Dark evil eyes
skinny figure
adventurous attitude

8/10 would bang

The first campaign I ever ran years ago died because one of my three players quit, when an NPC they particularly liked died to spider venom. He called me a shit GM, and I know it's a stupid reason, but I've been gunshy to run another game ever since.

My players seem to like my female NPC's.

You done did good user

Also vibrates when unhappy.

>pcs hate baby sitter
same but my pcs left there baby sitter behind where they were attack by a horde of zombies

you're a cool guy

Started a game of Deathwatch with a few friends and threw in a random pilot who would pilot all of their fast-travel systems like Aquilas and cargo trawlers.

I accidentally dropped into a Russian accent while voicing the NPC, so he was quickly dubbed "Kahzin Niko."

Of course, my whole plan went out the window when the players took the Drop Pod and he went in with them; he was pretty much chunky salsa when they hit the planet.

With a quick retcon, though, Kahzin Niko is now a recurring NPC in every campaign and system I run; the players think it's a running joke and get a good laugh at the random places he turns up, but it's actually cause he's a Lord of Change, and every campaign I run is Just As Planned.

As a player, no. Most of the ones from my last campaign were insufferable.

Fuck the elves and their condescension. They just loved to drone on about how all the humans were naive fuck ups because dead people from centuries ago made a dumb world ending demonic bargain that WE WERE ACTIVELY TRYING TO FIX WHILE THEY JERKED OFF IN THEIR TREES.

Fuck the dragon priests and their insufferably pedantic issues. Whiniest bunch of lizard worshipping idiots on the continent. "Why won't my god respond to my daily phone calls anymore? How could he possibly have something better to do with his divine time?"

Fuck the mafia and their insufferable hypercompetence. Every leader captured or facility raided would just get the same smug little message saying, "Oh wow, you thought that did anything? We were going to get rid of those guys anyway. Btw we intentionally left those important clues behind because we're literally always 30 steps ahead no matter what you do. Enjoy the next fake mission!".

Man that felt good to let out.

Yes and no. They even fell in love with a throw away npc that I pulled out of the NPC book and named Bob (Now a permanent NPC)
They also tell in great length outside the game how much they hate my villains and can't wait to kill them.

Yes actually, I've made a number of likable NPCs in my current game.
Turns out players fucking love authority figures that are agreeable to them.

Mostly, except the one guy who keeps trying to blow up houses on a native American reservation

My GM has made quite a few likable NPC's.

One was a lizardman that I befriended while gambling. Some broke pirate dude that was at our table got fed up with my character's ceaseless boasting and bet his girlfriend against all of my gold. The lizardman joined in on the bet. I won.

Then the pirate justifiably went mad and tried to kill me. During the fight I forked over a bunch of my gold to lizardbro and then he basically became my very own Chewbacca. Unfortunately, the girl I won winded up betraying me down the line.

There was also a really cool Goliath NPC that I beat in a boxing match. We started traveling together since then and he winded up getting one of his arms cut off by some fucking elves.

Our party healer then attempted to magically restore the Goliath's arm. He rolled a fucking 1 and now the man has cancer and is slowly dying. So, now our healer is super depressed, and the Goliath is faking smiles and desperately trying to stay upbeat and forget about the fact that he's dying.

That's really nice.

>rolling a 1 on a restoration spell = cancer
wat

I support fun outcomes for shitty/awesome rolls, but jeebus, dude, that's depressingly harsh.

Your next mission is to find a spell to heal him, only to come back and find him too far gone; the treasure is actually friendship etc etc

Yeah, we thought it was pretty harsh too, but ultimately accepted it because we thought it'd be funny for the party to be depressed for a while.

I questioned another DM I know about how'd have handled it, and he said he'd have just blown him up altogether, so I figured we got off pretty easy with DM we have.

Our healer is actually trying make amends by searching for someone that can cure him.

Meanwhile, I'm getting the Goliath drunk at taverns and trying to hook him up with random women. Make him forget about it, you know. We're having a pretty grand time.

Sounds like a pretty fun party, user.

Count your blessings and whatnot. Good luck!

If you want them to hate someone, them simply being evil will not cut it. Thats just a backdrop to the story. If you want them to hate someone, you need to make it personal.

Don't just cheaply kill characters. that wears off after a time, and people will simply get edgy as fuck. No, you need to have him deter them. To attack them and get away. To do everything in their power to mess with the party.

Look at it like this. Your setting for the character is great. But to the players, its just that. a setting. They won't be emotionally attached one way or the other. They will be open to pretty much anything, and this is where the wacky stuff happens. Its a double edged sword. It doesn't matter how evil this guy is, how big and bad he is, if the players never directly interact with him in a way that it seems evil to them. You need to play on the parties emotions, and not the characters setting.

The best example i've heard is of a halfling. He would get adventurers to do quests. Seemingly simple ones, but once the party looked back and saw what happened, saw the places they had worked in destroyed, they eventually realized they were being played for chumps. Governments destabilized. Evil cultists running amok. All sorts of shit. It got so bad that they made it their mission to kill this halfling that had never so much as seen combat. Never so much as looked at them funny. All he had them do was run odd jobs. Get this item. Grab those documents. And yet, he was the most hated thing they could think of.

Its not about setting, its about interaction.

What system are you guys using where this is possible?

Fuck off dumb WAfag, oxford comma is important

we hated our gms npcs that we killed an entire arc's worth of them

I can NEVER predict which npcs the pcs are gonna hate or love

I can always predict it. You just need to get good.

Depends on the player. For one of my players it depends ENTIRELY on whether the NPC is female or not.

Tfw the Paladin player's favorite NPCS are an archdemon and the overgod of chaos

Hi chris.

They get along great woth the monstergirl that tried to eat them & two separate BBEGs (in fact, their poor attempts at friendship towards the 2nd BBEG just drove him more evil). For a while, I was wondering if they COULD hate, but then a druid lost his soul to a succubus. Pretty sure they hated her. Ended up trading her the BBEG's soul to get the druid's back, though. But it was good. Better than killing town guards on sight.

>Like tie up the bbg and drag him along.
Oh, I'm not saying I'd be down for that under normal conditions, but they hadn't actually defeated the guy yet. They wanted him to come along with them, willingly, and fight alongside them, despite the fact that their most urgent priority was taking all his things.

I don't know, man.

I have my players run into creatures and npcs that aren't hostile but they lack the ability to communicate with

Had a player get obsessed with a small group of chimera that he ran into within a labyrinth and another befriend a harpy that spoke entirely in vulgar cursing

Watching them try to discern any information from the npc's usually makes us lose our shit

"So the medallion is here right?"
>"Shit, Cock, Fuck!"
"I-is that a yes?"
>"Balls!"

>wizard just holding back laughter as he watches the whole exchange

I'm laughing imagining it
>"Would you just cast Speak Languages already?"
>"No way, this is too much fun."

I wish, I could get along with my GMs NPCs, but they always obtusely resist any attempt at friendship, unless they were clearly meant to be taken up as a part of the party. God forbid they be an enemy, in which case the inexplicably seem to hate you from the depths of their very souls

I just want a bunch of wacky monster friends, is that so much to ask?

They seem to.

I made a character so likable that one of the PCs are in a committed relationship with her.

Not all of them, but not all NPCs are supposed to be liked. I don't really pander, either.

They still collect the fuckers like trading cards and have them all hang around in the party airship. Or they waifu them, though I've really been working hard to curb that.

I've been told I write convincing NPCs, but if allowed to, I'll do that to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, throwing the plot, system and setting under a bus in favour of character interaction. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing, but I'm trying to improve anyway.

We have a tendency to kidnap them and force them into our service. No, we are not evil.

We have a tendency to start shit and get into fights with the questgivers. Last one, the Paladin threw a rock at him to make him shut up.

It's not a bad thing, In fact it's actually quite the opposite. Good Character Interaction and development are some of best ways too hook people into a story, especially if they're relatable on a personal level. Good Stories remember that setting and Plot are just excuses and tools to create character development and interaction.

I had a family of Wood elves that were basically a ''compeeting adventurer party''.
The players liked them enough to ask me to play those characters when they retired their old ones.

All i get is a sad panda. Does anyone have a name for the comic?

Just google how to access exhentai. Odds are it'll be a worth your while.

>exhentai.org/g/1019226/fafee1845d/
[Chapedizo (Aruse Yuuji)] Salamandra no Hako | Salamandra's Chest [English] [S.T.A.L.K.E.R] [Digital]

My DM's NPCs only comes in two flavors.

Guard and pity asshole who only cares about money. About to quit.

As a GM, in some caverns leading towards a boss fight I had a dwarf with a couple of crappy wooden limbs sitting on the ground.
He was just supposed to offer a couple of hints, and if asks about his past offer some setting info within in it.
A few of the players came to like him, and decided to offer him a place in their party. They rolled high, and he had done a bit of adventuring stuff before, so he joined them.
When the first fight the dwarf was involved in started I had players who wanted to control him roll d20 and add charisma to decide
The player had him attack a giant salamander-serpent thing by going into his open mouth and slash away, 2 of the players slashed at the ouside of the head, 2 tried to reposition, and 1 went inside of the mouth to assist him.
Got some unfortunate rolls, and it was a serious boss fight so after 2 or 3 turns the dwarf lost one of his real limbs and slipped into the stomach of this that had some kinda harsh saliva.
Every round the dwarf took 1d6 damage from the stomach acid.
As soon as the players won, a couple of them started to try to figure out where in the giant salamander-thing he was to cut him out and heal him.
None of them had a revive, just first-aid, so once they cut him out a one of the players tried medicine, and another was prepared to spend a cure on him.
They weren't able to though.
They were both amused and distraught I think, though I can't tell if it's because they liked the character or because they liked having a minion.

I am told that NPCs are one of my strong points of DMing. But I can never truly tell when a character is appreciated, despite DMing for a long time.

Is this a meme?

You thinking about the content of the comic or are you a newfag too inept to open the link?

Usually, they do. At least I think they do. They tend to adopt random NPCs they saved, which is quite heartwarming because they're otherwise usually playing as selfish assholes. It's almost always improvised NPCs who get this treatment, but in my new campaign they sponteanously decided they'd stand on the antagonist's side because she looked badass. So I don't really have an antagonist anymore.