Thanks for the thoughts, but I think I may have a different view on NPCs and GMing in general than you two. Who knows, possibly I'm not on the same page as the playerbase at large whereas you are.
I always thought that the PCs are made special enough solely by the fact that the campaign universe actually revolves DOES revolve around their lives & exploits. They don't need to ALSO be more powerful than everyone they meet, with the occaisonal super-villain exception. That's a general RPG assumption.. factor in this is the ATOW system where the players are presumably going to have access to fantastically powerful military hardware, there's little NPCs can do to interfere with PCs who for whatever reason want to begin their opus, Terms of Rampagement. Think about that. Having the ability to just wontonly destroy things virtually at will is a TON of special-ness, even if that option is never used. Sure, sure, there's obviously going to be repurcussions of levelling the local Police Department because you're angry at a cop who gave you a speeding ticket.. but there's pretty much zilch that NPCs can do to STOP you from doing it in the first place.
So, sure, there's something to be said about not needing to create an entire character sheet for every nameless body that a PC encounters. Neither is there any particular reason that every man woman and child in the universe also have something near the 5000xp that characters are built with. However, I DO believe that any NPC important enough to actualy have been given a name ahead of time should also be fleshed out to SOME degree, especially with 'superfluous' skills such as Interest and Career.
I did a bad job of expressing this, but I was posting archetypes of recurring NPCs, not people you bump into once and never, ever, ever see again. Those sorts of NPCs, in my opinion, definately need to be fleshed out as three-dimensional characters. And I also believe that there's no reason they have to be built as inferior to PCs.
Anyway, just wanted to clarify since I did a terrible job of it in the initial post. If it turns out that I'm on my own island here, I can just as happily do my own thing without needing to use the BBoards to crow about it :)
And of course, the last reason I started the thread and shared the NPCs was that I think it'd be fun to discuss the niches in the BattleTech universe that don't get all the coverage that MechWarriors, Battle Armor, Tankers, etc enjoy... since 99.99% of the people your PCs meet are NOT MechWarriors, etc.
