Creating NPCs

Because my game uses a central mechanic based on a skill system, creating NPCs out of whole cloth was originally rather challenging as I needed to think through how much training the individual might have received and in what context in order to evaluate what skills they had.  I had a revelation while refining the Bard tables for my world (I'll post the revised tables when I'm done) that I'd like to share here.

As you may recall, my discipline system has 6 tiers of skill: novice, apprentice, journeyman, specialist, master, and grandmaster.  If I were to translate them to a 20-level system, I might do the following: apprentice is 1st level, journeyman 3rd, specialist 7th, master 12th, and grandmaster 18th, and the number of people of each skill level drops dramatically with each tier.

I'm representing that by rolling 5d10 for each discipline (or, if I'm low on time, for clusters of disciplines based on the NPC's trade).  Each 10 rolled increases the tier by one, with a resulting 1/100,000 odds for a grandmaster skill level.

I have a wide list of trades (I've edited the list since I last talked about them) and by placing the NPC into one of them, I can determine their general skill of competency in all the affiliate disciplines of that trade by reducing their tier by one: if I get a Master soldier, then one of their disciplines will be master tier and the rest will be specialist.

This gives me a handful of dice to roll for any character and quickly determine their abilities.  For NPCs that I know will be more powerful, I might raise the base level of their skills to Apprentice and see how much better they are on top of that with the same roll.