Here’s my advice to anyone wanting the players to really bond with the other non-player characters (NPCs) in the setting.
Keep them around. Keep them interacting with the heroes.
But pay attention to which NPCs the players enjoy interacting with. Those are the ones you want to keep.
The other side of it: You need to enjoy running the NPC! It’s no good doing something you dislike.
Repeat NPCs do require reasons to reappear. In general, for the purposes of the D&D campaign,
- They need something from the characters (i.e. quest-givers),
- The players need something from the NPC
NPCs can give out information, magic, gold, or power – titles and the like. Or they can offer access to other services or organisations.
The leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, Wiggins, is a good example. He comes into possession of information the main character (Sherlock Holmes) needs, through his gang of children. But the Irregulars can also be used to do other tasks. Do the rest of the Irregulars need personalities? No, but Wiggins does.
But then, imagine a situation where one of the Irregulars is kidnapped. At that point, Wiggins becomes a quest-giver, spurring the heroes on to new deeds – while also strengthening his bonds with the heroes, especially if you can portray his grief and elicit compassion.
There is a limit to how many ongoing characters I can portray in a campaign, at least partly due to the matter of time. If you spend half an hour with each of ten ongoing characters during a session, that’s five hours of play and you haven’t even gotten to the other adventures of the party!
It’s that way with the Phandelver NPCs. There are more there than I can use. They aren’t described in much detail, so I will have to add to their personalities and provide reasons for them to interact with the characters. But there is potential, and we’ll see how it develops in the campaign.
One of my NPCs got to be so popular that he eventually was picked up by a part-time player. Skrunk was first just a background NPC. A coffee roaster whose goods were pulled in a cart by two giant turkeys, the group kept asking for him to do things in later sessions. “Can we get Skrunk and his cart to move the dead dragon?” “Can we ask Skrunk to help us find some barrels?” “Does Skrunk know if his neighbor was part of a cult?”
I wanted a one-off character. He eventually appeared in a third of the sessions after his introduction.
I know what you mean. I have a friendly gnome artificer NPC named Gimbles Timbers Stumbleduck (“Ducky”). This high-level party found out he had been murdered and went on a dangerous quest just to bring him back. He’s a beloved character.
That’s exactly what you want!
When running Descent into Avernus, one of my players got into a heated disagreement with Tarina in Baldur’s Gate and she became a recurring NPC until they left for Avernus rather than simply a one-and-done NPC. You never know who your players will glom onto, but when they do, you should definitely keep them around if you can.