Why do some players get so enraged by the existence of powerful (friendly) NPCs? I don't see it in every game, but I see it often enough that I know it's not just a few loonies.
Apparently, the only way the PCs can be 'real heroes' according to some is if they're the strongest around, instead of being in the right place at the right time, or heaven forbid, their heroism is based on something other than a statblock.
I don't get it myself, and I don't understand why some people proverbially foam at the mouth over it.
Grayson Bailey
Because they don't want to read your novel, nor do they want to play support to your shitty GMPC
Retards like you shouldn't be anywhere near a GM screen.
William Nelson
Because half the time they can be called upon to solve all of the PCs problems.
They also tend to be really fucking shitty snowflakes, from my experience. Like, beyond the acceptable tier of snowflake and into fucking retarded territory.
Jayden Anderson
Agency
Anthony Green
That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
James Gray
Players don't like to feel like they're walking in the shadow of an NPC. Although I do agree that it's not a crime for the pcs to literally always be the strongest people in the room.
You can remedy this somewhat by creating crippling weaknesses flaws or bad character traits in the npc that let the pcs also shine around him. For example in my game my pcs found a powerful caster in the swamp who is like the "guardian of the wilds". It wouldn't make sense for him to be a weakling but if he's a total badass why does he need the pcs? So I made him have sort of esoteric and mysterious powers (aren't on any spel list) and they are powerful but when he uses them he becomes very exhausted due to his extreme age and if he was surrounded by even very weak monsters he could be slain. In this way his high power works with the pcs and doesn't overshadow them.
Josiah Perry
What if the powerful NPC is either busy with other things or simply in another part of the kingdom and thus can't handle the crisis?
Like, the heir apparent could be a Paladin 18, but also shackled to bureaucracy in the church or working in the capital with dad... And even if he wanted to help, the PCs are across the mountains and that's a two week's journey.
Or even have the party engage in small-time campaigns while they get stronger! What's the shame in helping a village with their bandit problem, or rescuing a baron's wife?
Dominic Miller
If that's something your players like, being little fish in a big pond and getting to be bigger fish then that's fine. But some people don't like to feel like they're just minor troubleshooters while the real action is elsewhere. Low level doesn't have to mean low in scope.
Josiah Morgan
What's wrong with being the small fish in a small pond? Just make the high-level stuff casual rumors or stuff that happens somewhere else.
You always hear the best way to make a compelling setting is give the players a sense there's life beyond what's happening immediately on screen, and high-level activities happening for a low-level party is an easy way to do this.
Cameron King
OP here again, I think some if it also might be due to genre issues.
Case in point was my own game, which was set in the Quadrail sci-fi books. It's mostly near-future sci-fi intrigue. PCs were members of an alien corporation's "troubleshooters", who got caught up in a minor rebellion on a series of worlds therir parent corporation had dealings in.
Think secret agent types, good at hand to hand combat and being good at making clever plans on the go, which is necessary because interstellar travel is monopolized by an enigmatic race of spider-creatures, who don't let any weapons on board their trains. And I'm not even talking guns or exotic bio-weapons, things like glass bottles are considered too dangerous to let on the trains.
A lot of the PC jobs are on these trains, and their skillsets are designed to be useful in the rather limited and supposedly non-lethal environment of it.
Long story short, they manage to track down the leaders of this little insurrection, lure them out to a planetside place where they can ambush them, and as support, have a quartet of Filalean soldiers overlooking where they'll meet the 14 of the baddies. PCs have some hidden weapons. The friendly soldiers have hypersonic rifles. In the ensuing fracas, the 3 PCs killed 2 of the baddies. The soldiers got 12 of them, because it turns out genetically engineered soldiers are really tough. And I didn't think this was a problem. They had to do considerable nut-busting to get enough influence with a mid-level Filalean commander to dispatch a squad of soldiers on the q.t. like this, and the whole game was about cleverness trumping the need to actually fight whenever they could manage it, there were almost no even fights before this, just ambushes the PCs set up and ambushes they got sprung against them.
But having friendly soldiers, friendly soldiers who could fight better than they could, apparently crossed a line with one of my players.
Tyler Miller
Hm, sounds like that player just wasn't as understanding as the rest of the party that they busted their ass to get a team of ultimate badasses to do all the work for them.
Did that particular player have an agent that was more geared for combat?
Landon Brown
I mean, all of them were "geared for combat" to an extent, but they were geared for combat in the no-weapons zone of the Quadrail trains and stations. They were great at unarmed fighting and turning otherwise innocuous items into weapons, but they'd still be blown away by anyone with a gun if they lined up a shot.
He was quite good at the whole "improvise weapons" thing, I should add. But again, that was only really on the trains or the stations, which admittedly was where most of the campaign was. When they did go on-world, they were using pistols for the most part, and he wasn't particularly great at that. (None of them were)
Kevin Nguyen
That's a different story.
Aaron Robinson
Hm, yeah sounds like either
A) he wasn't on board with the idea that they were hiring badasses to do a lot of the heavy lifting (don't be afraid to literally tell this to your players)
or
B) He felt like his character didn't get enough chance to be a badass for whatever reason.
Fuck he just might not be all that into the the idea of not being a dude who just goes around kicking people's teeth in.
The scenario you set up definitely sounds badass as hell so something went wrong in the game's execution from that player's perspective.
Justin Johnson
thats the same potential story, but you assumed it wasnt and projected possible problems onto it.
Noah Morales
Because they're either unfriendlies or an annoyance you aren't allowed to lay hands on.
Logan Butler
No, I didn't project possible problems onto it.
I referenced my past experiences with shitty GMs.
Christian Martin
/v/ plz leave
Easton Richardson
Newcommer to tabletop here, I thought you guys would like to see some friendly powerful NPC's lying around somewhere, especially if they tied up with older campaigns you played.
Anthony Lee
I don't mind them. I mind when they steal the spotlight and solve our problems for us.
They should have their own shit to deal with.
Anthony Butler
Having the players not be the strongest most powerful people in the setting does not automatically mean the DM is going to railroad or have the stronger NPCs solve everything just to make the players look bad.
Personally, I prefer that there be stronger NPCs around, because it seems weird to be the best in the world (unless we're at the end of a very long campaign or something like that). The really high level ones should be pretty few and far between, in my opinion, and typically have their own shit they need to deal with (which can include kicking back and letting other people level up a bit so they can eventually retire).
This is probably the main reason. So many DMs (and authors) have their super high-level guys just chilling at home not doing anything while the world is on fire, and that bothers quite a few people.
You do have to be careful about adding stronger NPCs because you then need to have an answer when someone asks "hey, why doesn't [strong dude] just deal with this instead of us?"
Cameron Parker
Any "fuck off" that happens are people who knee-jerk from bad DMs being bad.
Jack White
My GM has very serious issues with his NPCs. He's copped to his personal failures, but it still comes up from time to time.
>Spellcaster NPC asks party to help him and a team of Paladins clear an underground tomb suspected of undead and shit >We go our separate ways at a fork >Party takes out a handful of zombies here and there >"I think we're near the center of this" says the Bard >Party finds an underground opera house >Opera house filled with stolen coffins starting to rattle >Lich stands on the stage, mocks us for daring to stand before him >We're level 4 >I decide to go out fighting and rush the Lich >DM sighs and points out I could only hit on a 20 >I actually get it even if no one here believes me >Dropkick Lich through curtains >pissedofflich.webm >I accept my fate, bought time for party to escape >open arms as fireball comes roaring toward me >Suddenly Paladins everywhere >One leaps in the way and takes the hit, gets cooked >Spellcaster NPC shows up, hands glowing with blue fire >He rocks on up and grapples the Lich >Lich becomes human again >Lich and NPC share cryptic farewells hinting at a past association YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!!! >Lich explodes >NPC tut tuts us and praises his deity he was able to save us in time
We were "saved" from similar situations at least twice more in that campaign, once in the next, and ALL THE GODDAMN TIME in the one after that. That last one he also ended early via TPK Rape so he could be a player again, which I'm only slightly salty about.
But those NPCs. Fuck those NPCs. All I want is for one of us players to be relevant in a game.
Pic related. Me after most sessions.
Lincoln Ortiz
One of our group has gotten way better at making super-powered NPCs but his overall communication abilities need to improve.
Once we had to sit through a monologue of how badass these guys were only for the first one to be way less interesting than fighting his mooks.
Leo Anderson
In the campaign I am telling there's a buttload of people who are very powerfull politically, very mighty martially or superpowered socially. There's a giant Sandbox of People running amok and fighting and pissing each other off.
the PCs are right in the middle in a 6 or more faction Free For All. they Understand, that for some of the "Bosses" of these Factions, they can barely if at all best him, if it is a fight of the entire Group versus that Boss. Surprisingly, they managed to take out the Big Boss in the very first engagement they had face to face. ( Which was after 6 oder 7 battles fought and won by the Big Bad Boss ).
They were surprised. I was surprised.
I think, most people make the mistake of having "stronk NPCs" be, in essence, uninteresting GMPC.
However, if they make "stronk NPCs" be interesting and multilayered characters, who are not exclusively antagonistig to the heroes (one) or on the other hand taking care of business the heroes want or should take care of (two), then the Players can come to love some of these Guys.
I think, one of those my players love most is a superpowered Knight. He's carrying the Bard's Title of "King of the Knights" and is an old fucker. He's basically tougher than nails and almost un-defeatable in single 1on1 combat. He's such a Big Damn Heroe that he leads a cavallery charge into pike formations - and gets out the other side almost unscathed.
They love him. They worked together with him. They also fear him. They have tip-toed around him on occasion. They don't need him. They got the major Win on blackops missions while he was fighting the larger engagement. They can't control him, and he doesn't control them. He's a Knight with a very, very, very strong code of Honour. He's also not the Knight in shining Armour. Him and his Retinue rove like Bandits: as a Knight it is their right to take from the peasentry and farmers what they need to stay fed: People starve where he rides through.
Jayden Hill
>No, I didn't project possible problems onto it.
>I projected possible problems onto it.
??
Thomas Evans
>Players don't like to feel like they're walking in the shadow of an NPC. I actually run a campaign where the PCs have willfully become the pawns of a NPC I didn't even plan to be important.
As a result I changed the overarching plot altogether and they are the NPCs tools for not so subtle affairs.
Connor King
pretty much all campaigns i do let the players start at mook-level. NPCs who are stronger than a PC do exist for simple logic reasons, but it takes things like magic artefacts and modifications to reach superhuman levels, both PCs and NPCs.
having a world around them that doesnt allow players to fuck up everything because their stats say so, actualy makes players make use of the society around them to help them with the bigger problems. having players complain about their powerlevels never occured to me on more than 1 guy at once, since most did agree with the fact that their character need to earn their right to be called heroes.
Jacob Clark
...
Logan Scott
I've had no problems and I've used powerful npcs all the time. The key is to not have them take the spotlight, you'd have the same problem if a weaker npc constantly stole the spotlight.
Just to make sure that the npc the players meet, occupies a niche the players don't have covered, helps them but doesn't do things for them, and occasionally the good old zero in megaman option. Show the players what they can become in a world they're unfamiliar with.
What do you do afterwards? Depends on how powerful you make that npc. If they're gods in comparison to the players you're going to have to ass pull something. But if the npc is only a bit more powerful than the party they can easily co-exist in the same general area without overshadowing the heros.
Maybe they prefer different approaches to problems? Maybe they do get contacted for the same problem the pcs are trying to solve down the line, and meet up with the players half way through with some new information.
Charles Ortiz
>Character has a reason to be with the party, but not to do the task at hand. >Party is the reason they assist with the task at hand >Everyone bitches at me because that apparently means my character has no motivation at all to participate.
Gavin Moore
>bitching at players for working as a party What an embarrassment of riches.
Jayden Howard
If he either can't or won't help, why do we need to know about how lulpowerful he is? Furthermore, why make him that powerful in the first place if he's not going to do anything?
Camden Davis
Because if an NPC ever does something the players could have or should have done themselves, there's no point to the players being there. the players are the protagonists of the story. Even if they aren't the most powerful people around, the focus should never cease to be on them. generally when a side character saves the day instead of the heroes, it's because the heroes are all fresh out the womb and are too weak to fight the threat. it should never keep happening. If it does, you as the player are left to wonder what you are doing there since clearly you aren't needed.
The reason why so many people are ass blasted over the idea is because they've all been there when the author's insert (or, god help them, his waifu) has swooped in and stolen the spotlight so spectacularly, that they have to wonder what the point was. I don't know about you but I don't want to waste my time watching someone jack off. they can do that shit on their own time.
