How should I run a game which PCs are "Followers" of a NPC?

> inb4: "You shouldn't," but let's ignore that for now.
> inb4 2: I'm trying to avoid making said NPC a DMPC.

Suppose that PCs are taking place of "support casts" of an established story, and/or servants/slaves of a NPC. I think a good example would be that PCs are being Sancho Panza from .

Well, how should I make a story not boring for the players, while avoiding the NPC (who will be a center of the party and/or the plot) becoming a notorious DMPC? And how should I make the PCs be more "active" in this situation?

I like the idea that they're retainers of a nobleman, who is ineffectual and gets into trouble a lot, so the players have to sort out the mess.

Kind of like if the Marriage of Figaro were a DnD campaign. It requires the players to be on board with it as a premise though, so they don't rock up with Mercenary McMurder, who has no reason to be involved in the game.

The NPC is woefully inept at everything they try to do, but totally oblivious to their ineptitude. All these "great adventurers" and "legendary victories" the NPC is convinced they've achieved are actually the PCs doing everything to keep the NPC from getting themselves killed with their dumb bravado.

Of course, the NPC pays them good coin, so it's not bad work.

Maybe you should just ask your players if they're interested in that kind of game, instead of running whatever you want and dragging them along?

>Make your DMPC tragically bad at everything they do, they're the brains/direction/money behind the group, but can't get anything done on their own. Basically an eternal escort quest.

>The DMPC always finds themselves in situations where they can't (or won't) help, or have to send the PCs off without them. "I'll translate this tablet here, you guys go explore deeper into the tomb." "Go down there? And get my shoes wet? I think not! I hired you lot for a reason, now go fetch the artifact!" etc..

>The DMPC has damsel syndrome, so they can be integral to the party, without personally being involved as often. Hang out with the party during off-time, but often get kidnapped by big bads as a hostage for the PCs to rescue.


The biggest thing to avoid is making them a snowflake, or perfect. It's one thing for your DMPC to "accidentally" get all the credit for the party or something, it's completely another for them to actually do everything themselves. PCs don't want to sit around and watch you play tabletop with yourself, they came to play the game. Even if the DMPC participates in combat, make sure they only compare to an average party member at the DMPC's strongest.

No shit. Way to post the "Depends on the setting" of any DM advice thread. You contribute absolutely nothing to the thread except basic common sense.

>Hey guys, what's a new take on playing a Steampunk campaign?
MAYBE YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR PLAYERS IF THEY EVEN WANT TO PLAY A STEAMPUNK GAME, STOP ASSUMING MY GENRE!

Try the "Whose hat is this?" ploy.
Your party are highly specialized engines of death, but you need to balance with a rouge for doors. NPC is the rouge.
Your party is traveling in a war torn area with checkpoints preventing freedom of movement. The NPC is a merchant with travel papers for himself and a guard retinue.
Archmage and madman Mac Guffin has left items of power across the land that threaten an Apocalypse. The NPC is a wizard who can gate to the needed locations and has the ritual to seal the Pieces of Mac Guffen.

The name of the ploy come from a Gritish comedy skit. Goes like so.
Whose hat is this?
Your hat.
What kind of hat is it?
A captain's hat.
And the boat, whose boat did we come here on?
Your boat.
I see. So if I'm the captain, and its my boat, then we'll call this land what I damn well please won't we.
Yes sir.
Good man.

>How
Depends on the setting

Have the players control the NPC in a "Everyone is John" kind of way. That way he's a bumbling oaf, not a DMPC, and the player's get invested in him.

As a GM roll for NPC employees to see how hard they fucked up, then PC retainers roll to undo the mess their masters created

I've this idea for a long time (long story short: would be for Fading Suns, I want to have a noble but I'm possibly the most knowleadagable one for that in my country and it's pretty clear I should be the GM)

Problem is, I can't do a cool hotshot Al Malik space pilot and make the players babysit her. Nor could I make her steal the spotlight (and THAT would certainly be a temptation).

>inb4ing your own post

I ran a Doctor Who game for a while where the Doctor was an NPC and the players were his companions. Part of this was helped along by the system, where players can be "Literally Unkillable Time Warrior" or "Average Teenager from 60's London" and both participate in the story about evenly, but the main thing I did was have an understanding with the players that the Doctor would spend most of his time unconscious/captured by the enemy/working on some sort of science mcguffin that he needed the players to help him assemble or to buy him enough time to complete. Basically, the Doctor might accomplish certain plot bits on his own, but the players would go through the real heart of the story. It was great fun, the Doctor still showed up in important scenes to help out, but the players were definitely the stars of the show.
If I was to give advice, I'd say focus on the NPC getting himself into trouble a lot, or being busy with something else and needing the heroes to help him from another location. He can essentially be their permanent "quest giver", while also being their backup in times of dire need and a damsel for them to rescue from time to time too.

Ignore the "make the NPC suck at everything" advice so many people are giving. That's a great way of alienating players from the NPC. Eventually, someone is gonna ask why they're always stuck babysitting this dipshit. The number of people asking that goes up as time goes on. Eventually it reaches a boiling point and once you get there the players will change the paradigm and the premise is effectively broken.

Construct the NPC as someone the players have a legitimate reason for helping. My best advice is selling your players on a game where they are retainers, allies, and sworn men for some kind of lord. This allows for flexibility in character types and gives them all a reason for being together. Maybe they're only mid or even low level with only the barest interaction with Lord NPC. Interaction increases as they become more and more useful. It also allows the players time to warm up to him. Starting the game off with some asshole they know only through your notes ordering them around will bother them.

Above all though, remember the game is about your PLAYERS, not the NPC. He's merely a vehicle for their growth as characters. Even if mechanically they're secondary to him, narratively they are the protagonists and he's the supporting character.

He's a ridiculously wealthy fat guy that hired them to take him on their adventures, hoping to lose weight.

As they get more powerful, he gets skinnier, and so their success is reflected visibly in him.

Plot twist: He's actually the spirit of adventure, immensely weakened and reduced to mortal form by an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. His wealth is ancient treasures that were thought lost to time.

He still remembers where a lot of loot caches are, but knows that if he leads them directly there, it won't put the thrill of discovery into their hearts, which he really, really needs right now.

I like this a lot. It seems... too clever to have been randomly suggested though. Where did this come from?

Exactly this. It's like people are allergic to the topic around here.

Was gonna post this.

To distill this idea further, the DMPC shouldn't be doing things the other players would want to do, and especially not as well or better than their characters would. He can be powerful and competent, just at a narrow range of things not really related to what the characters do on a daily basis. Introduce this character to them before they make characters of their own.

If he's a rich big game hunter on an alien planet, make sure he's not a nature expert, a local culture expert, or particularly athletic or heroic. He knows the most about the legendary and myth surrounding the game, and can tell a lot of useful stuff about it. He can be good with a sniper rifle and even better at buying stocks, but not the muscle of the operation. Just the guy who wants to shoot a pseudo-dino.

Take the Dark Heresy approach. The NPC is their direct superior (Inquisitor in the case of the DH games.) but while he will be instructing them. The information he gives them will be need-to-know at best and extremely shady at worst, so they'll have to fill in the dots as they go and use their own initiative.

The problem with NPC's being amazingly powerful and becoming DMPC's isn't their power. It's their consistent proximity to the players. The story can revolve around the NPC as long as the players are instrumental in the NPC's success, and know it. Whatever the NPC is up to just happens to be more than a single man can handle. Thus he requires a cell of confidants that he can rely on.

It's not good advice. Players--at least creative ones--have low tolerance for bullshit. The novelty of some nonce constantly stealing credit for your deeds loses its novelty pretty fast both IC and OOC. I know I would lose my patience for this pretty quick and so would most people I've gamed with.

And no, "but you just need to engage with the story!" isn't a very good justification. Players aren't a captive audience. If the story isn't good or interesting then why should the players appreciate and respect it?

>Ignoring everything this hard

He pays them enough to be there. He's royalty, and also pays them. He's a very important child.

Listen, as much as I hate exclusively comedy roleplaying, I hate no-fun-allowed roleplaying. You sound like an absolute bore to play with.

The NPC is going to die. As in, they're guarding someone who is going to end up a sacrifice for the greater good.

So the NPC might be the one making the sacrifice, but the PCs are his / her guardians and protectors. Sort of like Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship.

Or I Am Setsuna

>PCs do all the legwork (even better if the NPC is completely oblivous or ungrateful about it)
How lucky, squire, you give me a protective amulet and the day after we encounter a medusa.

>PCs don't attack directly but buff/debuff and aggro to make the battle flow in the way they want
And then the apprentice said "you are no match for my mistress, foul necromancer". To which the necromancer answered with a fireball that marred lady Miria's face, triggering lord Borgos battlerage.
warning: needs a lot of homebrewing

>NPC is completely inept at something/unable to do something
A blind paladin grand master helped by his choir boys, a legendary barbarian that is intelligent but completely uneducated and therefore unable to read or grasp etiquette the first time, the captain of a spaceship needing constant life support and being incapable of leaving his healing vat, BOLO AI and infantry,...

>NPC has deep seated issues and need mental support to continue.
Not for everyone, and I hope you're a very good GM if you try to pull that up, but can be very satisfying to play.


Btw, even if the "you should ask your players" comment above was stupid, you should definitely ask your player about what kind of game they want to play. A game about the legendary barbarian and his savants and another about a child prophetess and her bodyguards converting the wasteland won't play the same at all; you're amputating a part of the gameplay and focusing on another.

The thing I would suggest would be to have the players actually rather separated from the NPC, like them being soldiers and him being the general of the army. Have a lot of other NPCs tbat also work under him, so the players don't feel like they're being singled out when they're ordered to do stuff.

Pirate campaign. Make them a hands off captain. They provide transport, a supply of jobs and semi-regular attacks from the local military. Don't make them godlike or useless, just give them a reason to need the players, but not to the level where the players can't do their own thing e.g Captain is steering in a naval battle, do you go to the cannons, try to help with sailing or try to board the enemy ship?

Here's a silly example Idea my and some friends came up with in a discord chat.

All your PCs are playing some kind of undead and the NPC is a whimpy teen mage trying to figure out necromancy. He is doing his best to be an adventurer to make his village/neglectful parents proud, but he's not very good and is very inexperienced. He threw a lot of magic around in a graveyard, woke up some already undead creatures and former adventurers and set off some curses, and thinks that for once, just once, he succeeded at something he tried really hard at and he's so excited to have his own undead minions.

So they all pretend to be his undead minions out of pity and look after him the way his family never did.

The kid isn't completely useless, but is more like the mascot and sidekick of the party, but most quests revolve around helping him to do something he signed up to do, so sometimes he needs to be the one to finish it and the undead PCs have to help him do it.

The party could include a lich who was the boss of the dungeon labyrinth under that graveyard, former adventurers who died is that dungeon, or others who were buried in the gravyard or catacombs.

How do you make your players understand the role of the NPC and not try to remplace him as the star of the show? It seems to make for a particularly easy to derail premise.

>Suppose that PCs are taking place of "support casts" of an established story, and/or servants/slaves of a NPC. I think a good example would be that PCs are being Sancho Panza from .
>Well, how should I make a story not boring for the players, while avoiding the NPC (who will be a center of the party and/or the plot) becoming a notorious DMPC? And how should I make the PCs be more "active" in this situation?
Just have the NPC act as the guy in the background, who's basically questgiver No 1.

He pays them, doesn't go on adventure themselves, and lets them have a lot of free reign. But he trusts the party implicitly, and will always have their back.

It makes him getting killed off and the party framed for his murder even better.

If we go by DnD rules, necromancy (and undead) are evil, so the former adventurers are gonna be pissed off.

You can also make him the ship-owner, keeping a close eye on his investments. It also helps that ship-owners were often former captains.

>if and only if