Bit Players

Turn of a Friendly Die has an interesting little query:
Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game. The NPCs can be from any game you’ve been in as a player or GM, and any system or genre.
Kethos: Sort of a hybrid of several of Michael Wincott’s characters from this or that movie, Kethos started out in Keys to the Pattern as a Bad Guy, but that campaign ended too quickly and I hadn’t gotten him out of my system, so he appeared again in TiHE. That was a strange situation, as Jackie was so sure that he was still a bad guy that I had to go to great lengths to convince her (and everyone else) otherwise, making him Scum-with-a-heart-of … well, tarnished silver at best, but you get the point. Still one of my favorite guys.
Vaughn: Flora’s kid in TiHE, Vaughn had several strikes against him — he was introduced by a player who could rarely play, was manipulated by his mom, and was quite simply plain… not as flashy, tough, or flamboyant as any of his kin but still a good guy… maybe one of the better guys – and he loved his cousins. I think I found a place for him in my head when he told Breann “I’d rather be a secondary character in your story than the star of mine” to explain why he was willing to do the things he did for her and her brother.
Nayda: Currently a walking plot-hook and love interest in my Star Wars game, Nayda has (I think) real potential to become something more than than what she is… the players are constantly trying to make her one-dimensional (“the addict”, or “the slut” or “the danger magnet”), and like Kethos, my efforts to make everyone see that there’s more there than that is giving her a lot of texture she wouldn’t otherwise have had.
All my best NPC’s are those honed against other players.