PCs are not the center of the universe, even though they may think they are. As a game master, you need to have your NPCs do stuff that is in their character to do. Give NPCs an in depth backstory and sequence of events that they've done to get up to the present time when the PCs are in game... and let NPCs do things they do - set them up with a set of actions that they are planning to do. If PCs happen to stumble on to NPCs in game and cause the NPCs plan of future actions to be altered, let the NPC act naturally. Also remember that sometimes, the best NPCs aren't necessarily "on screen" so to speak... in movies a lot of the best villians ever never are seen on screen, or aren't revealed until the last few minutes of the movie, or could possibly never be revealed until late in the action and then it's discovered that the NPC villian is really a PC or NPC Hero who's been leading a double identity behind the scenes... In Ninjas and Superspies theres one section focused on character backgrounds, and it lets characters be double agents, or even triple agents. This sort of stuff happens in real life all the time, so let it happen in game sometimes... let the layers of the onion slowly be revealed...
Many times when I used to GM a lot in SDC world - which is what I call a mix of Ninjas and Superspies + Heroes Unlimited + TMNT + Beyond the Supernatural all played in the same game, I would have an entire city's NPC's politics and many of the NPC's course of past and future actions figured out way before even introducing the PCs in to the game. That way the city seemed alive and villians could become freinds, etc. and characters more or less had free reign, sort of like players in video role playing games like Grand Theft Auto do... there's plot hooks I could put in there, but for the most par, I just letting PC characters run around and do their thing... they chose where to be and when to be there. I let the actions that the NPCs do get done and if the PCs found an interest in interacting with the NPC's course of actions, I let it happen... The key in setting up this sort of campaign is to make sure that you, as a game master, have a solid idea of everything that's going on in your world, and a pretty good grasp of the timeline you have things happening in... and that you have multiple NPCs taking major actions silmultaneously in different places, which may or may not affect one another... that style of play was awesome for the gaming we did since all the PCs were a part of a major crime fighting organization, sort of like a super powered police or FBI, but run by a private organization.
I had mafia members robbing people on street allies, bank robberies going on, newfound illegal drugs that could invoke superpowers or psychic powers being created and sold all over the place, all taking place while across town there were Mutants fighting one another in illegal cage matches that were being run in a secret basement complex under a Casino... People that didn't know about it upstairs didn't need to know about the cage matches, and the sounds of the Casino kept them busy and drowned out the yelling downstairs...
There were some supernatural mystics and magicians playing behind the scenes secretly influencing some, but not all of the actions going on... sort of like WoD does with older vampires in Masquarade, but this was all before I had any idea of what WoD was... Some otherworldly magicians and other supernatural powers that they had associated themselves with needed the illegal superpower creating drugs to be created so that they would be able to influence the weak willpower of the hallucinating duggies and use them as pawns to do their bidding or force them in to doing what they wanted so that they could get more of the dope, etc.
Some mutants who had just found their powers were dragged in to the cage matches so that they could be killed or made to kill like old Roman Colloseum Gladiators or video game street fighters or like animals in cock fights... so those betting on which side would win could get richer..
There were certain actions that influential NPCs would take, whether or whether not they crossed paths with PCs. Some of those actions would cause a chain of events that might or might not cause the PC's worlds to be massively crushed as their stocks crumbled or went through the roof and made them millionares...
The entire world was nicely worked out like a Soap Opera. The PCs were a part of the action and could do what they wanted to, and sometimes it had a big impact... somtimes maybe not.
Also, there should be real consequences if players get too greedy just like there are in real life if a gambling addict keeps going to a casino too much... or alcoholic insists on drinking and not taking steps to overcome that fatal character flaw.
My style of game mastering is based on cause and effect.
One time one PC made a pact with a demon that was partly responsible for some of the main things going on in this absurd reality of a city that I'd created, and as a result that PC paid for it... before he knew it he was going unconcious only to wake up finding himself declothed standing over murder victims with a bloody knife, or standing on 20 story tall buildings on a ledge while nearby police had guns aimed at him.
On the other hand, that pact let him have some amazing powers that he didn't have access to prior to making the pact...
Eventually the act of accepting that pact led him to be in conflict with other PCs... I did let him lose that possession eventually, but it took a lot of work to get to that point, just like it'll take an alcoholic quite a bit of work to overcome their addiction...
Some game masters would say I stepped over the line by allowing a PC to get possessed, but in Beyond the Supernatural there are rules for possession, and things of that nature, so I think I was game mastering well inside of the rules... in many ways this was sort of like a fatal flaw that some characters in WoD games have, only I was making it all up on the fly before I had been introduced to that sort of idea in a game...
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