Summary
Creating NPCs inDungeons & Dragons- whether they’re planned or you have to improvise one - can be quite tricky. You have to give them enough personality to show that they’re an actual person and not just a character, while sometimes making their role in the story clear through their behavior or sometimes through clichés you can add to them.
One type of character that can come up a lot is merchants - and a lot of times through improvisation. There’s a good chance the party needs to buy random stuff before traveling or check out if the city has magical items, rather than just searching for them on enemies' corpses. Thus, let’s talk about these merchants.
Not every group enjoys roleplaying all minor interactions. Talk to your players beforehand if they want to do purchase conversations in character, and keep in mind that this will make the session longer. If you’re running low on time or your players are not fond of these interactions, feel free to do these purchase scenarios out-of-character and save these tips for merchants who are plot-relevant.
5Be Social
It’s Part Of The Job
From the eyes of your merchant character, their job (literally) is to verify that potential customers buy something. That means starting a conversation with people who come into the store, having a positive attitude, being nice to them (within reason), and so on.
That said, you may play around with the character’s personality to make something more nuanced. For example, you can make a merchant who’s not a social person but has to be because of their job, mixing grumpy humor with fake positivity as they do their best to be nice to customers. Either way, you’re probably the one who’ll start the conversation.
Since this is likely an interaction with a minor NPC, don’t worry about taking it too seriously. Do silly voices, weird mannerisms, and make jokes, even if it means making fun of what one of the players just said.
4Use Merchant Tables
Especially Useful For Improvising
Since improvising can be tricky, the more you prep beforehand, the easier it is. Thus, it’s always nice to keep a list of essential items and their prices, which you’re able to see in the book or get online.
For magic items, you can have price ranges based on their rarity or even roll to see if the merchant has said item available, giving it higher ‘DCs’ based on how rare the item is.
With that, you won’t be easily stuck when a player begins asking for prices. And depending on your scenario, the merchant’s personality, and the situation they’re going through, you could ask for more or less. A merchant desperate for money could charge extra for their weapons, for instance.
If you have a hard time improvising, you’re able to also write down a small table of merchant characters with their appearance and basic personality; then, you can choose or roll one of these whenever you need a merchant to appear.
3Connect Them To Their Products
Why Do They Sell These Things?
Whether you planned or improvised with a random table, once you decide what type of stuff the merchant sells, you can further dive into the roleplaying by giving them a connection to these products. The obvious example here would be a potion trader enjoying the process of making potions, helping out identifying mystery potions the party may have found, and just overall being a good alchemist.
Someone who owns amagic item shopwould know about said items, talk about them with passion, and be more inclined to talk (and attempt to sell) their items to the spellcasters of the party, while a weapon vendor would have a great time chatting about creative ways to kill people with the barbarian. If this is a one-off character, don’t be afraid to run into a cliché area - clichés are great to give your audience (in this case, the players) a lot of information about someone in a short amount of time.
2Boost Your Charisma
For Mischievous Merchants
Another technical aspect that can help you with interactions is thinking about how charismatic the merchant is - if you’re improvising, you may just give them a bonus from three to seven, depending on how charismatic they are.
Though you won’t roll to persuade a player to buy something, that trick will help you out if you want to make a more ‘evil’ merchant willing to sell bad products, from quality to cursed items, to the characters. You’ll have to ensure your Deception is good, just in case rolls get involved.
Thinkingabout their stats, creating a proper sheet, and using them to give you a basis for how to roleplay the character is particularly useful if the merchant is relevant to the plot and will appear more than once. Use their other ability scores then to improvise how you’ll behave, like lacking information about items and their uses if their intelligence score is low, for example.
1Let The Players' Reputation Affect The Merchant
Hero’s Discount Is Always Nice
When it comes to minor NPCs, you can use them to reflect how the party’s big choices have impacted the common folk. For instance, if the party is famous for saving the city, a merchant could be more lenient with discounts or even hand out small items for free as a thank-you.
Parties with evil characterswho have a bad reputation can go both ways; the merchant can increase prices or even refuse to sell them anything, or, if the characters have a reputation for being dangerous, the merchant can give free stuff out of fear for their life - though you can wait and see if the players will properly intimidate the merchant before giving away discounts or items.
If you want to make a storyline with heavier themes and your players are on board with the idea, you could also have the merchant have good or bad reactions to the party based on their classes and species.
