Have you ever had a DM good enough to make you care, as a person, about his NPCs/his stories/his universe...

As a DM, I always wish players will remember some of my NPCs fondly. On the other hand, my first and arguably worst campaigns have always had excessive focus on NPCs with intricate backstories, or required said NPCs to do things integral to the plot. It's a player-driven medium, I guess, and lately I've really come to enjoy the players doing their own things in my worlds and have them surprise me instead. It helps that I've been blessed with a great group that, while not necessarily being excellent roleplayers, have a great grasp at controlling themselves and acting in-character.

It's come at the cost that a lot of my side NPCs don't have too much forethought put into them, and only get developed if the players want to get involved in them. But it feels good in a way when players are more concerned about Gerald, the generic, now-masterless butler they rescued from a murder-mistery campaign, and his well-being than the foreign warrior-princess in disguise you tried saddling them with after you spent a week developing her story as part of a plot hook.

No, not really, that kind of feeling is not something many people seem to be aiming for when they play.
I wold like to, but I don't think enough people want to.

this, I like to spend a lot of time on the world that my npc inhabit and what they do in the background.
What the strange thing I find is when my players get attached to ones I never intended to be that important.
I once had a group of sailors whose boat sunk, swim to a lone island and some of them died. The island however had a curse of undeath on it, so the crew member who managed to get to the island but die, came back. However he and the rest of the crew believed he was still alive (despite his bones showing).
He had a very positive and friendly attitude and was always willing to lend a hand in any way he could. My players really wanted as part of the crew and he came along. Once he got kidnapped and found it the highest priority to risk themselves and their boat to save him.
To this day, I don't know what they found so endearing about that crazy skeleton sailor.

Thanks for this user. This is some good advice.

In my favorite campaign we had a clever if perpetually grumpy gnome guildmaster who was basically our go-to man if we needed to advance the plot or get interesting weapons, when we made the effort to get to know him beyond plot device he became a sympathetic ear, someone who was equally quick with a joke or an insult. In short, he became a friend.

The climax of the story was one of the members of the guild was under a geas and was ordered to bring it down from the inside, when we found out about it the mind-controlled npc attacked all of us. In the midst of battle, the guildmaster was running to get the city guards when the npc we were fighting scored a crit on him and killed him instantly. Completely took not only us but the DM by surprise, he even had to rewrite parts of the campaign because he wasn't expecting the guildmaster to die.

We were all shell-shocked, and a lot of our personal storylines eventually revolved around either ptsd or guilt complexes. I still regret not being able to save him.

I've only ever been the dm, and I'm to awkward to ask the players.

I once cummed during a game but that was because another player was giving me a handjob under the table.

this, I feel like no matter how much effort I put in as a DM the player's won't care.

A lot of anons have given some really good advice so I am just going to tell you something really basic good GM's do.
Don't be afraid to use shit you have watched or read. It's not like your writing a book here that you want to sell. Don't try and be original. If you like a idea use it for a NPC, Story or Quest.
For example I am currently running a Rogue Trader game.
Right now my party is currently working on developing a planet and they also have some HUGE plot hooks that I am not ready to run for them.
So I create a side mission in which construction on a rail way has been completely halted because something has been killing the workers.
Party goes down there and they find out there is a beast that is ripping into and brutally murdering these people. It has supposedly killed 230 people.
The party immediately thinks "oh its a demon or a lictor" cause this is 40K
It wasn't it was just this planets equivalent of a lion that due to starvation had resorted to using people as a food source. When they found the beast they literally killed it in a single hit.
That entire quest line I got from a movie based on a true story called "The Ghost and the Darkness." My players had no fucking clue until I told them because its a pretty good movie.

Play with newbies or people who don't treat it like an opportunity to be edgy/ try out their stand up routine. Normal people put the same weight on RPG shit as they do on novels, and they care about the characters in those just fine.

So no then

A good technique to make a interesting NPC
for every NPC you make
give them one good trait
one negative trait
and one crippling secret.
Just giving a NPC a secret will get your players interested in them. So long as it's believable that they would want it kept secret.

Players need to be willing to engage themselves.
And there are players out there who just play these games to be a audience member. The key is to find the player of your group who is the aspiring actor and engage them in the hopes of drawing in the rest of the players.

>Have you ever had a DM good enough to make you care, as a person, about his NPCs/his stories/his universe ?
I'm the GM and even I don't care. Get in there and solve my maze.

>Have you ever felt strong emotions
Can't say I have.

This is pretty good advice, and odds are that once you get started using something, you'll probably come up with a way to put your own twist on it anyway.

>Get in there and solve my maze.

Yes, that is the reference I was making.

In short time, your fate will be sealed, user.

Yeah the endearing NPCs tip is definitely the key to this. Make an NPC who's funny, or vulnerable, or happy and positive, someone your PCs will want to be around, and then make them complex.

Then there's no time to waste!

I don't think I've delt with to many NPCs that I have cared about.
I had one DM who would try to force NPCs to be important and try to force us to live them. But the party and I hated his NPCs more than the BBEG.
I had another GM who dis a decent job of making NPCs enjoyable. Most of the time they where never important enough to matter.

Only time I could say I cared about an NPC was this one time during a Call of Cathullu Campaign. Our Expedition leader was this high ho arragant dumbass. But he really did try. I ended up almost dieing trying to save him. But then I didn't die and he still did. But by god I tried!

I think I might like to have the experience of really getting invested in a world and its characters like you describe, but I'm not really comfortable opening up and showing emotions like that in person. I get emotional very easily, but I usually hide it. Instead, I just play video game RPGs and get invested in those.

Which is probably the same thing the person who created the thing you're stealing did.

All right, here we go.

First off, a bit of base techniques. Ian is this weird hybrid of old school style and modern GMing. You are sitting down and playing a game with him. And he makes them hard. Of the 9 campaigns in this big arc we played, I can only count two as real victories, with the rest being some kind of conditional victory with huge costs and losses at best. If you don't pay attention, and if you don't play your cards very well, bad things WILL happen, and you WILL lose the game. Not necessarily PC death, (in factthere was only one of these campaigns that ended in TPK, and that was caused by in character betrayal of the group by one of the party members), but stuff that we want will be forever out of reach. Also, he goes in for this "overwhelm the players" mindset. There is a metric fuckton going on, all the time. One of the campaigns mostly took places in this little backwards out of the way hamlet, with a total population of the valley they were in of about 30, mostly dirt farmers. Even they were wordy people, going on about local politics, who they liked and disliked, their recipes, etc, if you let them. I know he never created an actual world, and in fact he once told me that a big part of his technique is to always leave empty spaces on the map to keep people wondering about stuff, but he damn well created a great simulation of a living, breathing world. NPCs existed on their own terms, not just to provide us with quests or equipment.

Anyway, onto the story of fire, blood, death, and despair.

1/3?

>Homebrew classless system based vaguely on those old Jeff Vogel Exile games mechanically.. We are playing what essentially amount to special forces working for a small nation, kind of one step up from a city-state.
>We are in a big war with a coalition of these people from an archipeligo chain to the north.
>They are kicking our asses, mostly owing to a large number of semi-humanoid troops they seem to be able to turn out (we don't know how), providing them near limitless manpower.
>Even this wouldn't be enough on its own, our own people are in a web of alliances, and we have a lot of troops, and a lot of conventional magical resources, more than the enemy.
>Most importantly is large scale use of teleportation magic. In theory, we should be able to move almost anywhere in mass on the continent of Athraf, which you can imagine gives all sorts of major advantages.
>The enemies aren't stupid though, and build these large scale "anchors", usually into their command posts, which stop teleportation in a large (dozens to hundreds of miles) radius around them.
>For most of the war, they advance, build a new command post, advance to the new limits of that one, etc. Gobble and digest.
>We, on a covert mission discover that they're building a new one, which would put our nation's capital within anti-teleportation range and lead us to being majorly fucked.
>We deliver said information, and High Command deliberates on it. Come back in a bit when they have new orders for us, and in the meantime, try to help things locally

2/3

>Due to Ian's overwhelm the players philosophy, there are about 3 quests for every 1 we have time to run down.
>And each one we don't do leads to disappointment at best, and people dying at worst.
>Of course he won't tell you which ones have the higher stakes, you have to reason it out.
>Spend the next IC week disrupting enemy shipments, fighting over a ruin, dealing with a small opportunistic mind flayer incursion, and chasing down some obscure books in a colossal, badly referenced library.
>Oh, and we raided this large enemy fort, mostly trying to steal information. Among other papers we acquired, there was this one little thing about how the enemy were stockpiling some sort of crystal used in summoning rituals at this one bridge. A fucking lot of them.
>This turns out to be a vital clue that we completely overlook.
>Anyway, when the intel is processed, we get our real marching orders. We could knock it out now or in the near future, but that just buys us a few months, they'll build another one. No, the bitg bosses want us to time it exactly right, so that we destroy the anti-teleporter while the bad guys are in the field and we can cut their army to pieces.
>Because we overlook it, this ridiculously elaborate plan that we already had bad feelings about was pretty much doomed from the start.
>It fails, our country is overrun.
>And through it all, we played 4 sessions, each about 6-7 hours long, in which NOTHING we did mattered, because we had already committed to the operation without shutting down that summoning site which was situatied to block one of the prongs of our operation that was necessary. Ian gives away nothing in his face. And all that sweat, toil, personal triumph (the major enemy of this segment was a lich made out of the PC who betrayed us campaigns ago that I mentioned upthread), was for nought. And he's just smiling blandly, seeing everything.

Yeah, we cared.

That is really cool, you should keep going I'm sure your group will eventually catch on !

GM here
I had a courier character that was supposed to be expendable and potentially die off early. My party was securing an unknown drop pod that fell off an alien ship. They kept him there and pressured him to stay with intimidation. They made him part of the fight because letting him go would alert the nearby settlement about the pod.

Somehow, they liked their hostage and made me RP this Jerry guy until he was shot by raiders. I rolled so desperately for him but every shot missed.

>in short
I should have gnomed

I'm trying to build that in my campaign. There's a court magician that wants to help out to clear his name. He will have information and his wife runs the herb and potions store

Players are unpredictable and that's why I think improv is so important when you're a GM : you have to be able to expand the world in the direction which players are taking. I'm glad you managed to keep your NPCs interesting even in these situations of unplanned development.

You're welcome, I'm happy to help.

So much feels.

It depends on the people you're playing with. I'm perfectly fine with playing with people who only want to have a fun afternoon and I'm fine with playing for drama, feelings and storywriting but I don't play them with the same groups.

Nice, thanks for your advice.

I don't really agree on the secret part because you don't need secrets to make someone interesting : players won't look for things in NPCs usually so they don't need to hide anything really, the players will just find out about stuff when they get interested. Although I do love addind secrets to major NPCs.

GM forcing things onto the group is the worst.
>LIKE MY NPC
>we don't
>BUT HE'S COOL
>but we still don't
>FUCK YOU I'LL STILL PUT HIM IN ALL SCENARII
>*sigh*

You'll need to find a group that you feel confortable with and taht can take time and work but eventually it's worth it.

Awesome. Would love to play with your GM. Congrats on getting wrapped up in a story like that.

I often have trouble DMing because I get wrapped up in my stories very much when I prepare them, I can't wait to see the look on their face, I can't wait to hear what they have to say about it, I can't wait to see what route they will take...

And then when I get to the table, they do'nt care. They just care about what they loot on the bodies, how much XP they get. Once they had to escort a guy who was really sweet, helped them with their spells and equipment, payed them well and cracked jokes all the time. Once, they failed to protect him, completely leaving him to go chase some orcs and found him dead when they got back. They looted his corpses and burned him with the orcs, left with his stuff, never talked about it again.

I felt ignored and I felt terrible. Haven't played with them again for now.

Read
Adding: Don't play with people who treat it like a videogame.

Yeah but the thing I don't get is these people can get very emotional about other medium. There's one that watches shows all the time and gets attached to the characters and even cries. There's one who reads and writes books all the time and who talks about how she likes to create situations and characters that make the reader feel things. All of them experience this with things other than RPG but when I DM for them it's like they don't care it's a story and I wrote it and it has characters and intrigue.

Maybe I don't do it properly.

Whenever we were missing more than two people (Usually had a group of six.) We'd put D&D aside and play a game of WFRP, to this day I'm pretty sure this was our GM's way of dragging us into a system that's not D&D, since it's now our go to. We were under the employ of a border prince determined to try and dissolve an Orc Waagh before it got too close. The border princes militia was dead weight at best and downright detrimental at worst. So the best way to do it was pit the orcs against each other, and use the militia as a nudging tool/bait. The game was styled A-la Shadow of Mordor, ie orcs would gain xp and take career advancements if they started winning fights

>We spend a few days milling around and doing general 'this orc called you gay' shit getting the minor bosses to smack each other around. Managing to get a couple of the smaller ones onside for a few odd fights before they got bored and decided to kill us.
>Then, during one session, our GM throws a random boss at us (Basically a captain) Xkat Dreadstink.
>Xkat was a basic boss with only one career under his belt. The careers chosen were rolled randomly (d4 to emulate a race, then d1000 from the career compendium.) He was a scribe.
>Now, Xkat wasn't particularly bright. With an intelligence of 35 at the outset. And his orc related stats (W/BS, S and T) were all base level, so basically he was doomed from the get go.
>To this day, we're still not sure whether Xkat was a stroke of luck or our GM had planned to use our memories of being a small nerd surrounded by people who are stronger and tougher than us to manipulate us into siding with him. But he spoke Reikspiel, could read/write and generally was of nicer temperament than the other greenskins we met, so side with him we did.
>First port of call was setting him up as an apprentic wizard. This required getting him a stick, backpack and a printed book. So off we went to murder shit so we could buy a printed book.
(Cont 1/3)

>Printed book freshly acquired and wiped of blood, we gave Xkat his new toy with the explicit rule that we would help him krump people if he kept reading the book and trying to learn from it. He seemed receptive to this idea.
>What began was a protracted greenskin on greenskin war that lasted through what must've been about 16 or so player characters over about as twice as many sessions. Dragging Xkat into combat, trying to ensure he won, and dragging him back into safety when he did/if shit went wrong. Our characters had a very short life expectancy.
>This soon became our primary campaign and the D&D game kind of fell by the wayside as we rallied behind Xkat.
>Granted as he gained more and more Magic stats going from apprentice-journeyman to master eventually, he refused to roll anything less than the maximum number of casting dice. So situations got pretty hairy on the regular and frankly I'm still surprised he lasted as long as he did without just fucking exploding or being dragged into the warp.
>Xkat by all accounts was doing well, we had enough mulch from the militia that most of the other bosses couldn't get to him before he blew them to bits, he lost a number of limbs away and had a few chaos runes burned into his flesh due to overzealous casting but aside from that all his warp manifestations had been non-permanent or insignificant.
>And frankly, it was awesome to see the weedier of the bunch come into his one with a little magic and human intervention at his hands, he was never able to physically intimidate any of his underlings, so he just became a ruthless pragmatist who blew apart any dissenting members the moment they spoke up.
Cont(2/3)

I care a ton about my contacts in shadow run. My character actually spent over 100k nuyen just to try and save one suffering from a rare awakened disease.
When the operation failed and she died he left the team for a while and wept. It was emotionally draining for me as a player too since the gm always had her act, well, like a best friend would.
She ended up coming back in an interesting way by becoming my characters mentor spirit, which was another cool emotional moment.

I don't know what it is, but sr is great for making memorable npcs at our table. Don't know if it's because they're in setting just a phone call away, or what, but they made it one of the few systems we try to be moral and cautious in.

That's just great, using the game's system (like contacts, allies or ennemies) to create actual roleplaying and emotional opportunities.

>Rather than spreading out and gaining all of the Big Bosses as allies and marching on the Warboss, we put all our eggs in Xkat's basket, got him promoted to Big Boss Basically Warchief, if the Warboss was Sauron). Loading him up with as much equipment as we could manage, promising we'd take care of the other Big bosses ourselves and his orcs under his banner would take care of the mulch.
>We were fucking ready, Xkat was a magical powerhouse, we each had three or four career characters and a bunch of orc bosses ready to take out the Warboss of the Waagh and his remaining Big bosses. We had spent months preparing Xkat for his big showdown with the Warboss, pumping him up, getting him ready, ensuring he had a good suite of combat spells. Making sure he'd come out on top. Trying to plan for any chaos manifestation to happen that wasn't Xkat just outright fucking exploding.
>I'd like to tell you that in the final fight, Xkat emerged victorious, blowing apart the Warboss in a single spell, claiming the Waagh for his own and starting a new orc empire with his friendly human advisors.
>I'd like to even be funny and tell you that his astonishing good luck caught up with him and he just fucking detonated and got dragged into the warp.
>Nope.jpg
>The Warboss had a TB of 9 or something on top of armour. And just kept shrugging off whatever Xkat could throw at him. The Warbosses underlings tied us up and prevented us from being able to keeping Xkat out of melee.
>The moment the gap closed it was a done deal, Xkat had very few wounds and basically no toughness in comparison, it was a massacre of significant proportions.
>We were lost for words, all that time and that effort routed before us. There was nothing else we could do. Our superweapon was just slaughtered in the open field.
>We were broken, the game ended there. Little has been said about it since.
(Fin/3)

That fucking sucks.

Wow. That's not good DMing in my opinion.
The DM is supposed to write a story with the players not destroy all their efforts.

bump for interest

>Have you ever had a DM
No, I am it, forever and always

I have made my players tear up a few times with stuff that has happened in our games.
Make your NPCs fun to be around and varried.
Don't let them upstage the PCs and make sure they seem like more than just someone for the PCs to talk to.
A good beginner tactic is having them start out as rivals (or at least slightly antagonistic) and having them bond overtime like in a shonen manga.
It may sound simple but it has never not worked for me.

>have child that players rescued, but left town undefended leading to it being ransacked and burned to the ground because long reasons
>little girl is now an orphan, 9 years old
>players take a literal hour of time to argue what the best course of action would be
>we're all working adults in our late twenties, two are parents, and most characters are early thirties paternal instincts are pretty high by default
>barbarian wants to keep her and add her to the band since the "civilization" the paladin always talks about did neither jack nor shit to help the village in the first place
>fighter wants to keep her as well, could always use a hand around camp
>Paladin, wizard, and ranger use common sense however and say how this life is not for a child
>finally they decide that leaving her in the next church would be the best thing to do, about a month's trip
>girl starts to help around camp until then with small chores
>fighter shows her how to cook with minimal ingredients and proper upkeep for things like boots/armor
>also teaches her how to sharpen a blade over the course of a few days, paladin makes remarks on how the fighters weapons look duller than usual, fighter eventually teases paladin by telling her to tend to the paladins weapon to get on his good side
>hurts herself on the blade, paladin gets protective, and begins to teach her how to properly use a sword so whenever they split up she can defend herself
>give descriptions of the girl looking downtrodden/scared when he mentions them leaving her all the time
>he ends up cracking on the inside every time I do this, sending me private messages on how he thinks he's going to change his opinion on the kid
cont.

>plays with the rangers pet (female wolf) eventually making him teach her a few things to look out for in the wilderness in case she ever finds herself there like edible plants, poisonous/herbal ones, etc.paternal instincts are increasing
>sleeps snug against the wolf every night, and the ranger begins to have conversations with his wolf when he goes out to hunt about her new "pup"
>barbarian is rough with her on days he sees her being down to try and help her vent
>gives her a club and does mock combat with her, giving her small cuts and bruises to toughen her up paternal instincts are at critical levels at this point
>accidentally ruins a few books of the wizard but wizard isn't having it, at first he is pissed off that they have to take care of the brat and tells her to rewrite everything in the books but finds out she's illiterate
>spends off-time teaching her to read and write and soon starts a student/teacher relationship
>eventually they reach the church but by now all players have silently agreed to keep her in the group
>as they walk towards the church she clutched onto the fighters tabard, he noticed and puts his hand on her head, and they kept walking
>girl stops walking, looking at the church, then at the group confused
>barbarian turns around and tells her to move her ass or they'll leave her behind
>ran to the group and stayed as an NPC for the rest of the campaign
In future campaign set a decade or so after the original
>new characters
>players are wandering the forest, dying of dehydration/injury, and being pursued by band of goblins
>death seemed certain but are saved by a young woman and an old grey-haired wolf
>at camp she introduces herself as [girls name] and players go full dad-mode happy to see their girl grown up
Their old characters became NPCs, one of which (wizard) thought a new character was trying to get into her pants and told me that he would threaten him with obliteration if he tried.

I don't know how to answer your question OP, but when I make an NPC I just make them act natural and insert them into any scene that makes sense for them to be in. I'm and at first I tried to lean them towards leaving her since I didnt want to have a lingering NPC but as they interacted with her more and more she just sorta stayed. And she isn't the only NPC that they have spent an inordinate amount of time around. A grizzled warlord, a never-give-up young guard, a mage down on her luck, the list goes on but I dont think I ever did anything special I just tried to insert them whenever possible and the players just went with it.

The girl one stuck out though because of your pic. Stealing and showing to players.

he did write a story, the story was they tried real hard but in the end xcat got fucked up by a big green dude with a sharp metal stick. Its a tragedy not a triumph, but its a story all the same.