Often when I'm running a game, I focus on antagonist NPCs, characters who force me to think about what they're doing and how the player characters can react to their activities. It is rare when an allied NPC gets spotlight time, which brings me to this idea of "checklist NPCs". The NPC is associated with a checklist of prompts or events that best represent their purpose in the game. A player can check an item off the list to bring that event into play.
Tag: npcs
The NPC Who Lived: How to Survive Contact With Player Characters
There is a fine line in roleplaying games where a nonplayer character (NPC) flips from being a reasonable part of the fictional game world and starts generating antipathy from the players. There's characters you love to hate and there's characters you just hate. Hopefully we can stay away from the latter.