The Character You Never Meant to Love

Every campaign seems to have one, a character who was created as a throwaway NPC, someone the party would meet once before continuing with the adventure, yet somehow becomes the person everyone remembers.

Perhaps it was the nervous shopkeeper who gave the party a discount, the guard who reluctantly let them through the gate after hearing their increasingly ridiculous explanation, or the tavern owner who kept feeding them after they had run out of money. None of these characters were supposed to become important, which is probably part of why they did.

There is something particularly enjoyable about becoming attached to a character you never expected to care about. You did not arrive at the table knowing that this person would matter to your character, and the relationship was not carefully planned in advance. Instead, it developed through the game as a result of small interactions that nobody expected to become significant.

Sometimes all it takes is one memorable exchange, perhaps because your character makes a joke, the NPC responds in an unexpected way, or the GM gives them a mannerism that makes everyone at the table laugh. If the character helps the party with something small, or your character ends up helping them, that connection can easily become something everyone remembers.

The next time the party returns to town, someone might ask whether they can visit that person again, and before long this NPC has become part of the campaign. These relationships work because they develop naturally rather than because somebody decided that the party needed a close friendship with the baker, stablehand or elderly librarian.

One of the best things about tabletop RPGs is that the story does not belong entirely to the GM. A GM can create an NPC with a particular purpose in mind, but once the players start interacting with that character, things can move in directions nobody expected.

The NPC might have been intended to provide a piece of information and then disappear from the story, only for the players to become fascinated by them. The GM notices that interest and gives the character a little more personality, perhaps another conversation or a small role in the next adventure, until everyone has contributed something to a character nobody originally expected to matter.

Players sometimes feel that they should focus on the important parts of the adventure, when there is a villain to defeat, a mystery to solve or a kingdom to save. Your character can still care about the stablehand, shopkeeper or old woman who has become part of their life, even when the adventure seems to demand their attention.

Small relationships can give a character a sense of belonging. They provide reasons to return to familiar places, create things worth protecting and give the campaign moments that are not directly connected to the main quest. Some of the strongest character moments can come from these unexpected connections because they reveal something about who your character really is.

Years later, you might not remember every monster the party fought or exactly how much treasure you found, but you may remember the old woman who always kept a room for you, the grumpy blacksmith who eventually admitted he liked your character, or the ridiculous guard whose name somehow became part of the party's vocabulary.

Those characters became part of the story because you and the other players cared about them, and those unexpected connections are one of the things that make a tabletop campaign feel like something you experienced together rather than simply a story someone told you.