We’re down to the final pillar of Dungeons and Dragons. So as a Dungeon Master, how do you make for good social interactions. And what tools can you add to your arsenal to create interesting and memorable NPC’s and interactions? This one is interesting because it requires less planning, in some ways, and more working on the fly, so let’s look into it.

Dungeon Master Tools – Social Interations

The NPC

Let’s start out with the NPC. How do you create a good NPC as the Dungeon Master? We already talked about this in world building. You can read about that here. But let’s recap it for the basics. You want to create an NPC, add in these things: Name, Defining Feature(s), Brief Description. That’s what you want to start with for it. Maybe add in an occupation as well so you can keep track of who is a shopkeeper, a quest giver, or any other role.

Again, the mantra is keep it simple as you plan out the NPC. If you want to add more to the NPC, add it in the moment. Give the NPC an accent, jot it down where you created your NPC at. That way you remember for next time, though odds are your players won’t remember either. But the big thing is keep your NPC creation simple so that you aren’t over planning and over engineering them.

Social Interactions

This one is tough to give a ton of advice on. The biggest thing to create good and memorable social interactions is to have social interactions in your game. Why, because it just requires practice. There are things like “Yes and” that we’ll talk about with social interactions, but it really is true across the board for your RPG as well.

But let’s face it, as the Dungeon Master the hardest element is coming up with things on the fly. And while you can plan out some combats, and you might know the direction of a conversation with an NPC, you can’t know how the PCs are going to interact with the NPCs.

The player character is being aggressive with the king, what do you do? They are asking about the shopkeepers family, what do you do? They want hire a street urchin as an informant, what do you do?

You need to be able to react in the moment. And you get better at that the more you do it. It’s a skill for players to, what happens if the king becomes hostile to them? But as the dungeon master, you can plan for that, you can’t plan for the players interacting.

“Yes and”

So let’s talk about “Yes and”, it’s probably something you expected sooner. But this is an improv idea of going with the flow. If the players say, “I want to hire the street urchin as an informant” and that isn’t your plan, how do you go with the flow. “Yes and” is the answer. So let’s look at this example I’ve created.

Example – “Yes and”

Street Urchin: I saw the robber run down that alleyway.
Player: Thanks for the information. (pause) We think there is a group of thieves who just came into town, if you keep your eyes and ears open for anything suspicious we’ll pay you a silver a week for information.

As the Dungeon Master, this isn’t our plan, this is a one off NPC that we didn’t even plan ahead of time, now the players want to hire them. So we “yes and” it.

Street Urchin: Sure, I’ll help for a silver a week, but I’m not going to do anything dangerous, and I want a meal every time.

What We Did

So it threw us off our game, kind of. But we created some rules around it. The players now have an informant, it costs them a silver per week, it costs them a meal per week. And the Street Urchin has said that they won’t do anything dangerous. We created some guard rails around the character. And this being an unplanned NPC that matters now, it creates some of our world planning for the character.

Name: Street Urchin (until they ask for a name then have them name it)
Defining Feature(s): Always after a good meal and eager to chat, but is cautious if anything looks hard to do or dangerous since they can’t afford to get hurt.
Brief Description: They are a small, undersized human who is living on their own on the streets. They ran away from home after their village was attacked by goblins. As far as they know their family is dead. And they don’t have enough food or money to go back and find out. But they have been making it on the street by being careful and cautious around anyone who looks dangerous.

Other Social Tips

So what other things are worth noting about social interactions. Firstly, keep an eye on two things that the players do. Players will tend to find NPC’s that they like and NPC’s that they don’t like. Those are your key NPC’s for your game. When you need someone to give out a new quest, go with one of those, on either side. Because it is going to make it more interesting and gives you a framework for good interactions.

What do you do with them, let’s look at the different types.

NPC’s Players Like

So these are going to be the ones that you do a few different things with. The simplest is that the majority of them are just going to continue to be friends with the players. Let’s take the street urchin for example. They just want a friend, they are going to be nice to the players because the players feed them and give them money, they won’t turn on the players.

The next option is that you put them in harms ways. The players are going to want to protect them, so let’s again look at our informant street urchin. They try and be careful but these new thieves are good and realize that the street urchin is informing on them. So the group of thieves go and kidnap the street urchin to lure the players into a trap.

The final option is that you make them betray or always be evil. This is harder for the street urchin, in some ways, but the secret backstory could be that the street urchin is actually the head of the group of thieves and used them to get rid of a bad apple at the first meeting. And now they are feeding them just enough good information that the players trust them while they really are planning and executing a bigger and grander heist.

NPC’s Players Dislike

Now the flip can generally be true, in some ways. The NPC could just stay unlikeable and be a rival to the players. In fact, build them up as an adventurer who gets their own party and is beating the players to completing some things to really drive home that rival feeling. But that’s a rare case, mainly you just keep them antagonistic to the PCs.

It’s also fun, once in a while, to give them an interesting and truly heartfelt backstory. They are abrasive because they don’t trust adventurers. An adventuring party kidnapped their brother and made him work for them carrying around their packs and things like that. And they don’t know where their brother is, the adventuring party left and didn’t come back from an adventure so they fear the worst. But it comes across, until you get to know the NPC as just being mean to adventurers, which the players are.

Now, the final one is putting them in harms way. But why would the players care. Well, you need to tie that to more of the plot. They hire the adventurers to keep them safe, but the adventurers don’t like them, that’s some fun interactions. Or they get kidnapped, but they are important so there is a good reward for getting them back, can that tempt the players?

Final Thoughts on Social Interactions

The best advice that I can give is just do it. You are going to stumble, you are going to need a pause. I’ve ran a game where because of a social interaction we took a ten minute pause to use the bathroom, grab food, things like that. You don’t need to always figure it out on the fly, if you need to take the time to make it work, do that. And the more you have these social interactions the easier it will get. It might never be easy, but it will become easier.

Down to our final Dungeon Master Tools topics:

• Meta Game and Players at the Table

And let me know if there are other things to cover as well that you want to know more about, or help with. I think that there are a ton of different things that new Dungeon Masters are curious about or that feel intimidating. So I hope that I can help make them clearer and simpler for you.

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