Village/ Town Encounters

[Snarkythekobold]

How do you guys and gals do village/ town/ fort/ etc. encounters and such?

I have found that coming up with a ton of NPC's and such is really time consuming and my players do not seem to be interested in interacting with them.

At the beginning of our last session, I just hand them a map of the village with a key to certain places. I even included the wares and prices since this was the starting place and I did not want us to get bogged down in talking about equipment and such.

I think that I am going to come up with a few NPC profiles, especially the proprietors, in order to give a little flavor. Also, I keep a list of rumors that lead to bigger adventures (I'm a sandbox GM).

I have heard of keeping false rumors . . . but what do you do with those? Get your PC's running in direction and throw a curveball at them? (I may have just answered my own question . . . ha! )

[Longman]

My group uses the acronym 'PRP' - pointless role-play. It can happen when characters get into town and go around chatting to NPCS. You typically end up with one person interacting with the GM while everyone else listens. It's more fun if player characters role-play with each other.

I tend not to design any NPCs unless they are connected to an adventure somehow. The downside of doing that is that when NPCs are relevant, it is pretty obvious to the players. ("Everything in the tavern is normal except for one guy in the corner sitting on his own. He's wearing a forest green hooded cloak.") I always think of Aragorn in the Prancing Pony in Bree, and how incredibly obvious he was.

But I figure that's a better option than making a bunch of NPCs for no reason.

My favourite town encounter lately was "small town gets attacked by monsters". The PCS were the main defence against some ogres who wanted to carry off villagers so they could eat them. Most of the villagers were 0-level and ran away. A few plucky ones fired some arrows, but it was mostly the party doing the fighting.

[Metroknight]

Never worry about stating up NPCs, just improv it.

Say the characters walk into the merchant's shop and you mention there are 3 people milling about while the merchant is behind the counter. Just give a quick description of the people and what they can be seen doing. If one of the character's decides to interact with one of the people, jot down a short sentence describing their personality and name.

[teaman]

Another option is that of breadcrumbs. For example, here's a list of what the party needs to know:

-Haven't heard from anyone in the next village over in sometime
-Some hunters saw strange beasts in the woods
-The local duke is offering a reward to whoever will check all this out

Them have 3-4 NPC's, maybe give them a quick adjective (greedy, suspicious, grumpy, curious)

Then whoever they talk to, maybe making a Charisma check or two gives them some information. String out the information between a few NPC's if you like. This works nicely in that you get them on the road to adventure while still giving them choices about who to approach. Is it "the illusion of choice?" Maybe a little, but you can always improv and change things based on what they do. Be difficult with that grumpy guy and he might just throw a punch!

[Dimirag]

I prefer to improvise them unless they are important characters form an important location.

If you want you can use online tables for random personalities, quirks, appearances, etc, so you can roll npc on the fly.