Proto-NPC's to NPC's before play

I realized, in a thread over on Vincent's blog, that I had mistaken my own way of doing NPC's for the book way.

My bad.

That being said, I'd like to speak about my way... a somewhat more traditional way of making NPC's.

When I'm making up a town (just like when the players are making up PC's) there are certain things I want to say. Certain things I want to come up. One of the places I can give that some authority is in the traits and relationships that the NPC's have.

So rather than leaving all my NPC's traits and relationships blank, I write a few things down.

"Comfortable with money." "Roaring." I don't fill in ALL of the blanks most of the time, but I do occasionally.

I do this for two reasons.

For one thing, when I'm GMing, I'm paying a lot of attention to the cool ideas that the players are having, and less to the cool ideas that I had when I made up the NPC in the first place... ideas I don't want to leave behind because I forgot.

For another, there's a lot of 'handling time' in thinking up traits and relationships on the fly, time I'd rather spend playing. Quite frankly, I have a lot more time available to me in front of the computer than I do in front of the players. Anything I can do ahead seems to be worthwhile.

Am I missing something?

Am I missing out on something?

Maybe what I could do instead, is write up a thumbnail sketch of the NPC's, with all my little ideas about what they're like, ahead of time, but not assign their attributes until game time. Then, if play warrants it, I can just drop the text into a blank trait and go. That seems pretty much tantamount to what I'm already doing, though.