Thank you to Guy the Great GM for that phrasing.
My self check on whether an NPC is getting too big for it's britches is to ask a simple question: Does this plot point need a PC to solve it or is this plot point about expanding the NPCs role in the world? If the answer points to the NPC the idea is either rejiggered to fit the PC instead, scrapped, or happens off-screen because the Players are not here to see me play with myself. As a result I create a large stable of NPCs for the Player Characters to interact with. I consider myself to have a lot of experience in this area because I spend around 80+% of my time running either solo games (one on one) or games with one DM and 2 players. The NPCs are important to meet with and interact with, but they are not the center! But in the end, the story rotates around those three PCs. Chewie tags along to bring firepower and occasional humor to a scene (Get this walking carpet outta my way!). Ben just leaves to do a task that he can perform, and the PCs go to another area of the "Dungeon" to rescue the Princess. Neither is a PC, they can motivate the plot and even perform important tasks (like shutting down the tractor beam) but they don't make the PCs (Luke, Leia, and Han) unimportant. Think about Star Wars, in my head there are two NPCs that could be considered such NPCs, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Chewbacca. That focus needs to be on the Player's characters. You can have NPCs that are well developed, interesting, and even powerful in your game, but they cannot be even for a moment the center of the game. The idea is that you cannot have a character in the game that is *your* proxy or avatar. In short a DMPC is considered by the vast majority of experienced and skilled DMs to be a very bad idea. There are dozens of threads about this and a simple search can pull them up. So does anyone else have any experience doing this? I'll try to keep the character as a follower so they're not being constantly led around by it and can make their own decisions as well. So I'm wondering if it would be okay (or if it's a common occurrence) to have a PC to help them out in their game. But both of them have no knowledge of D&D other than it existing. A great friend of mine was listening to my experience with it and I casually offered to let her and her daughter play as a way to kind of keep her daughter involved in the conversation.įast forward to now and I'm in the process of building a campaign to teach them the game and to play with them. Got invited to play with the group I now play with and it's been an extremely positive experience in my life) and it's really been a fun time and has helped me temporarily get away from some of the bad things going on in my life. I started playing D&D again after many years (first experience was terrible so I wrote it off. So let me put the scenario out there since I'm not too sure if this is a normal occurrence.