Oh I hear you on the "here's another magical item, team!"-issue 😆 I've had to escalate the threats in more than one of my campaigns because I've realized I've given the party too many powerful toys 😅 But balancing that with environmental hazards is an excellent way to keep the game fun and challenging!
Yeah, it's impossible to flesh out all necessary NPCs. You'd never get anything else done if every darn urchin or mill worker the party ran across had a whole prepared life-story! Has your party ever glomped on to an NPC you didn't expect them to enjoy that much, or do they tended to go for the NPCs you've prepped an extra bit? My parties tend to surprise me at times with who they get emotionally invested in 😆💖
When I start out plotting a campaign, I tend to make a few key NPCs and then focus on having different 'fractions' aka groups that have goals within the campaign that will affect the plot and the party's journey somehow. That way, even the most central NPCs tend to start out more as functions rather then fleshed out people, but I do flesh them out as the campaign goes on. If I know the party is about to run into a character who will have an important role to play, I put time aside to focus on fleshing that person out in detail, if I haven't established their personality beyond being "part of faction X".
And sometimes the party surprises me by deciding to seek out a magic shop in a town that shouldn't, reasonably, have one - which leads to me on the fly creating one and justifying to myself why it would be there and who owns it, because that's more fun that saying "No magic shops here" and OF COURSE those are the NPCs the party decide to dedicate their lives too 😆 One of my parties once took a break from stopping the end of the world to make sure two magic shop owners didn't get divorced because of a domino effect they accidentally caused. Oh, and one time they started a campaign by adopting a random kid they'd saved in a side-mission. So yeah, some NPCs are planned and some a thrust upon me by my players, 'cause they think they're shiny~
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-02-18 01:43 pm (UTC)Oh I hear you on the "here's another magical item, team!"-issue 😆 I've had to escalate the threats in more than one of my campaigns because I've realized I've given the party too many powerful toys 😅 But balancing that with environmental hazards is an excellent way to keep the game fun and challenging!
Yeah, it's impossible to flesh out all necessary NPCs. You'd never get anything else done if every darn urchin or mill worker the party ran across had a whole prepared life-story! Has your party ever glomped on to an NPC you didn't expect them to enjoy that much, or do they tended to go for the NPCs you've prepped an extra bit? My parties tend to surprise me at times with who they get emotionally invested in 😆💖
When I start out plotting a campaign, I tend to make a few key NPCs and then focus on having different 'fractions' aka groups that have goals within the campaign that will affect the plot and the party's journey somehow. That way, even the most central NPCs tend to start out more as functions rather then fleshed out people, but I do flesh them out as the campaign goes on. If I know the party is about to run into a character who will have an important role to play, I put time aside to focus on fleshing that person out in detail, if I haven't established their personality beyond being "part of faction X".
And sometimes the party surprises me by deciding to seek out a magic shop in a town that shouldn't, reasonably, have one - which leads to me on the fly creating one and justifying to myself why it would be there and who owns it, because that's more fun that saying "No magic shops here" and OF COURSE those are the NPCs the party decide to dedicate their lives too 😆 One of my parties once took a break from stopping the end of the world to make sure two magic shop owners didn't get divorced because of a domino effect they accidentally caused. Oh, and one time they started a campaign by adopting a random kid they'd saved in a side-mission. So yeah, some NPCs are planned and some a thrust upon me by my players, 'cause they think they're shiny~