Building Neurodivergent NPCs with Care, Not Just Good Intentions

Opening: Why We Wrote This Together

Crafting neurodivergent characters requires careful consideration regardless of your own neurodivergency. It’s a topic that comes up often in D&D and TTRPG spaces, and it’s one I hear frequently from my game design and storytelling students: how do you represent neurodivergent characters so that people can connect with them, feel empowered by them, and feel good about seeing things close to their identities or lives reflected in the stories we tell?

I’m neurotypical. I want to be upfront about that. A few years ago, some friends of mine attended a panel at PAX Unplugged about representation of neurodivergency in TTRPG spaces. The panel featured licensed therapists, psychologists, and scholars discussing how neurodivergent people experience the hobby, what they enjoy about it, and how the space has grown to include more of those experiences. One question from the audience stuck with my friends enough to bring it back to me: “I’m a neurotypical individual. Is there anything wrong with wanting to make my characters neurodivergent?”

That question inspired a section of my book on NPC creation. It also inspired this article. And it’s exactly the kind of question I can’t answer alone. The best way to think about incorporating neurodivergent characters into your stories is to talk to those who are close to that experience or who possess their own.

Dr. Alan D’Aiello is a lecturer and professor at Fordham University, where he teaches classes on digital media, media advocacy, social responsibility, and LGBTQIA+ issues. He’s also someone who’s played at my games for years, an experienced D&D player who has shared quite a bit about his love of character representation and storytelling. Alan talks openly about his own neurodivergency and how he incorporates those elements into his characters, his teaching, and his conversations with students. I asked him to co-write this article because I felt like he would be the perfect person to share insight on this important topic.

I asked Alan: if a neurotypical DM came to you and said, “Should I even try this?” Here’s what he said:

I’d strongly encourage it! …it is something that would really help players at the table feel like they are being seen. It also will help the DM to be able to develop creative, culturally complex and “complete” worlds. It allows the DM and table to get beyond the “power fantasy, high middle-ages, high fantasy” trope of “powerful warriors and damsels in distress” towards a world that is complicated and nuanced; thus more real. Further, I’d tell them to be open to critique and to making mistakes. The biggest thing the DM can do is go into this with an open mind and open heart because it’s almost inevitable that mistakes with these things will happen, particularly if they are not neurodivergent themselves or are trying to portray one that they are less familiar with.

The Intention Matters

Before you build a neurodivergent character, ask yourself one question: why? Sit with the question for a second. “Because representation matters” is a bumper sticker. It’s not wrong, but it’s not a motivation either. The real answer has to go deeper than that.

If you’re a neurodivergent DM, the answer might be personal. Character creation can be a way to explore your own experiences through the safety of fiction. You get to examine how your brain works, build that into a character, and play it out at a table full of people who are there to engage with it. You’re working with your brain, not against it. That’s powerful.

If you’re neurotypical, the honest question is harder. Why portray experiences you don’t share? And the answer has to come from genuine curiosity and a willingness to do the work. Not from wanting a quirky NPC. Not because you saw something in a show and thought it would be interesting flavor. If the motivation starts and ends at “I want a character who’s a little different,” that’s where harm starts. The intention behind the character shapes everything that follows.

Alan on spotting the difference between care and flavor:

When the DM is able to portray a neurodivergent NPC without the portrayal necessarily resorting to stereotypes or, especially, not resorting to tropes. For example, if an NPC has a form of Tourette’s Syndrome, immediately having them exhibiting that condition by something like the swearing tic, or by making noises, would be an instant red flag that the DM did not flesh the character out but is rather using the neurodivergence as a center of their reason to exist as a character. A DM who has thought this out would have neurodiversity be a part of the character, not the character’s whole raison d’etre. This isn’t to say that the neurodivergence can’t come up as a plot point or complication, but rather that it is subtly handled, like finding out a character is left-handed or LGBTQ as a form of difference.

Alan on what it feels like when it’s reduced to a quirk:

It is something that honestly happens so often that I find I fail to notice it. When I do I tend to lean towards the laughs to “not make a big deal of it” because I am very non-confrontational myself. It isn’t a great feeling that I get when it happens and it’s marginalizing if it isn’t dealt with.

Where It Goes Wrong

There are a few ways this goes sideways, and they all come from the same root: the neurodivergence becomes the character instead of being part of the character.

The first is the diagnosis-as-identity trap. You assign ADHD or autism like a character tag and build the whole personality around it. Think about it this way: would you describe a neurotypical NPC as “the normal one”? No, because that’s not a character. It’s a label. Same thing applies here.

The second is stereotypes played for laughs or drama. The scattered wizard who can’t focus. The anxious NPC whose anxiety is an obstacle the party has to manage. These reduce real experiences to punchlines or plot devices.

The third is assuming one size fits all. ADHD doesn’t look the same in two people. Neither does anxiety, depression, or autism. If your NPC’s neurodivergence looks like every TV portrayal you’ve ever seen, you haven’t done enough research.

I asked Alan what he’s seen go wrong, and his answers hit harder than anything I could write from the outside.

Alan on the worst portrayals:

I’ve seen characters who are utterly flat, or a trope where the character’s neurodivergence is the whole character. Just as people who need mobility devices argue that their device is not them, the neurodivergence cannot simply stand in for proper character development. It is far better if the character is not going to be fleshed out that any implication of neurodivergence should be left out. This kind of character portrayal is the worst possible thing that can happen because it makes the character their neurodivergence. It’s harmful because it literally makes the character become opaque and one-dimensional; the opposite of being “seen” or visibility insofar as it tells others at the table that the DM, this world, or both, is directly hostile to that neurodivergence and it has a chilling effect on everything else that happens at that table.

Alan on the most common well-intentioned mistake:

I think that inserting a single character can be problematic because it could smack of tokenism. It has to feel natural as part of the world vs just a single add otherwise it risks feeling like adding the character is being done for diversity’s sake. It’s a very nuanced issue because representation and visibility is extremely important. At the same time, a well-informed DM could be risking trading visibility for realism in that it feels like the character is just there for representation. DMs also have a habit with NPCs of trying to give that character a good, compressed exposition in order to avoid lore dumping or slowing the plot too much. When this happens with a neurodivergent character, there’s a high risk that the character’s neurodivergence is just expressed and comes across as a trope. The character has to really appear as a natural part of the story and of the world. Other NPCs would need to see this as just “how the (NPC) is” and the PCs should be able to look at the NPC in the same way.

When It Works: Ddewiniaid the Wizard

When Alan told me about his wizard character, Ddewiniaid, something clicked about this whole topic.

Alan had been building composite versions of himself into his characters for years. His personality, his quirks, his way of engaging with the world. And his characters came across as complete people because of it. Then he was formally diagnosed with ADHD, and he had this really big aha moment. He realized he’d been creating a character in a similar likeness to himself without even knowing it. In thinking about that, he learned something about himself, but he also learned something about the importance of not just intention, but impact.

Having said that, the quirks can and should come up if that is part of who the character is! The main difference is if there is no depth being brought to the character. I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Many of my characters in the past have been composite versions of myself, so my own personality characteristics will come out and thus my characters come across as a complete person, quirks and all. Only recently did I realize that I actively portray the more ADHD side of myself in my characters. My wizard character, Ddewiniaid, is very disorganized and easily distracted by technical rabbit holes that can cause him to wax eloquently about the most mundane parts of academic lore or spellcasting, much like myself. Other characters know this and will often use it for a laugh, or an eyeroll, but it’s part of a broader role-play arc that shows an appreciation of Ddewiniaid for who he is and how the party gets along.

That’s what authentic portrayal looks like. The party doesn’t laugh at the ADHD. They roll their eyes at Ddewiniaid’s academic tangents the same way you’d roll your eyes at a friend, and then they move on. It’s part of who he is, not the reason he exists.

Because Alan took the time to build composite versions of himself into characters for years, he brings a deep insight into this. Not just from his PhD and his background in scholarly work, but from how he represents his characters at the table. That combination of lived experience and academic rigor is exactly why I asked him to write this with me.

Alan also pointed to a character in media who gets this right:

Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I feel that her portrayal of someone who is ambiguously autistic (it’s never outright stated in the books but implied by one of the other protagonists) is excellent. It has her personality just being accepted and interacted with throughout the series and when her neurodivergence causes a plot complication, the reader feels like this is what they would expect from the character that they’ve grown to understand. Larsson never makes the neurodivergence a center of the plot but also doesn’t sugar coat how the other characters react to Salander either. Sometimes her neurodivergent attributes cause other characters to be frustrated with her or worse and this is explored as a normal human interaction. I feel it’s the sense of normal that is the most important part of the portrayal.

The sense of normal. That’s the key. Not erasing the neurodivergence, not spotlighting it, just letting it exist as part of who someone is.

How to Do It Well

So how do you actually do this? Here’s what I’ve found works, both from writing about it and from the conversations that shaped this article.

Show, don’t label. You don’t need to announce a diagnosis. Focus on how neurodivergence shapes the character’s traits, their coping strategies, how they engage with the world around them. Let the behavior speak for itself. If you’ve built the character well, players will recognize the depth without you ever naming a condition.

Build them as a full character first. Every NPC worth running has three layers: physical, psychological, and social. Neurodivergence lives in the psychological layer. It’s one part of who they are, not a replacement for the rest. If you strip out the neurodivergence and the character falls apart, you didn’t build a character. You built a label.

Talk to your players. Open communication before and during the game. Ask if anyone at the table has experiences or boundaries related to this. Be receptive to feedback. This isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s ongoing.

Do your research. Listen to neurodivergent people. Read personal accounts, not just clinical descriptions. There’s a great resource called Limitless Heroics: Including Characters with Disabilities, Mental Illness, and Neurodivergence in Fifth Edition, written by therapists and people from diverse communities. It’s worth your time.

When in doubt, ask. Humility is the whole game. You’re going to get things wrong. That’s not a reason to avoid trying. It’s a reason to stay open, stay curious, and keep listening. Alan said it best: go in with an open mind and an open heart.

Closing: Try With Care

If you have an interest in representing neurodivergency at your tables, talk to your players. I’m not suggesting you ask anyone to out themselves if they haven’t shared. But talk to them about what you want to do and why. If you feel an inkling to try this, do your research and put in the work. Look at other media and how these kinds of characters are represented and showcased.

Remember that a person’s neurodivergency is not their whole identity. It’s a small piece of who they are. If we make it the core of every challenge they encounter, we run into tokenism and generalizing.

If you’re neurodivergent and you want to represent characters as a way to express yourself, that’s wonderful. If you’re neurotypical, like me, we have to answer other questions. Why do we want to do this? Why is it important? And how can we do it respectfully? We do that by doing our research, by making our characters multi-dimensional, by making them feel authentic and living and breathing in the worlds we create.

The real world is neurodiverse. A fantasy world can be too. But it must be done carefully.