The Full Party
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe this is the first time we’ve ever shown the full Heroes party on a single panel. And as you may have surmised from today’s alt text, there’s a very good reason why. Oddly enough, it’s the same reason familiars and porters tend to disappear from games.
Working the extended party into your game is straight up hard. It’s tough enough to hold your own PC in your mind’s eye, allowing them to react to situations naturally and in-character. Start tacking on all the squires and animal companions and escort quests you’ve picked up along the way and your attention fractures. There are of course logistics issues with a big party, but the real bugger lies in spotlight distribution.
You see, there’s only so much time in a session. Everyone wants their moment at center stage, but those moments get smaller and smaller when “the party” becomes “the party + the help.” And while a big group can make for a rich living world, it also risks taking attention away from the real stars of the show. Someone is going to get slighted, and that’s a great big feels-bad.
For example, I remember one long-running game where our GM asked everyone to invent a free cohort. It was late in the campaign, and by that time we were very important people. It only made sense that hangers-on would seek us out. The intent was to provide more of a manager than a battle buddy, allowing us to make progress on our various side hustles while we were out adventuring. But wouldn’t you know it, the I-want-to-write-your-biography bard needed to witness our exploits first-hand. The aasimar’s long-lost angelic sibling needed to smite evil alongside the rest of us. That left the various craft-potion helpers and kindly old spymaster grandmas idling away back in town, consigned to the background while narrative attention focused on the actually-present members of the party.
You know how DMPCs are universally abhorred? If you’re not careful, a large party can become the same kind of distraction, shoving some PC / NPC relationships to the fore while others are left to languish. For that reason, I tend to favor a “one NPC per party” model. It allows a GM to provide a little in-character commentary, but doesn’t detract too much attention from the campaign’s headliners.
What about the rest of you guys though? What’s the largest party you’ve ever traveled with, NPCs included? Did you find that the extra bodies got in the way of the PCs, or did you enjoy the rich cast of characters? Tell us all about your convoluted party dynamics down in the comments!
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I think my personal high water mark for most characters in a game on scene was a game where there was my character (a beastmaster who controlled a summoned creature of varying type as their primary class feature, a nightmare mount, and a familiar), the necromancer (who controlled two undead at all times plus their familiar), and the three other PCs one of which I believe also had a familiar.
But I’ve come pretty close to that number various other times due to myself or someone else taking the Retainers background feature or having mounts and the like.
I guess that good oral hygiene is important, but it strikes me as a bit niche for a background feature.
You jest, but that in a medieval setting would probably add at least a decade of life expectancy to your character. =P
Heh. My next cleric will be a dentist.
When I was younger, just a bad little kid,
My momma noticed funny things I did
Like shooting flumphs with my old hand crossbow.
I’d poison fairies, and then I would go
Find a tressym so I could bash in its head.
That’s when my momma said…
Our largest party was our Hackmaster one. The game actively encourages you to bring along hirelings, proteges, and henchmen (with special rules for each of those three classes), and our DM was old-school hardcore on combat encounters, so passing on an extra warm body was putting us at a disadvantage from the off.
If I remember correctly, our full party at its heaviest was:
The Real Heroes: My Wizard, the Rogue, the Cleric, and the Fighter
The Protege’s: My Wild Mage Apprentice, My Bard second apprentice (an unusual magical effect ressurection brought the Wild Mage back after I had hired his replacement), the Rogues Samurai Best Friend, the Clerics Paladin companion, and the Fighters Knight Errant war buddy.
The Henchmen: My Wizards Fighter psionic-twin (I rolled this really rare trait in character creation, so of course she came along for easy intra-party walkie-talkie), the pirate-carpenter (I believe he was the Rogue’s, but not sure).
The Hirelings: The moralless Fighter (who was the guy we always ‘accidentally’ left alone with captives), and back-up Cleric / part-time bugler.
And Theres More: My Pseudodragon Familiar, the Paladin’s Steed, and the Rogue’s rage-filled Intelligent Sword.
So in all, 16 if you count the sword, and I am fairly sure I have still missed one. It certainly turned dungeon delves into more like battlegrounds, but there were definitely times we needed every one of them
I don’t know Hackmaster. Did that huge caste of characters cause combat to drag out, or did you guys manage to get through the fighty bits in under an eon?
Hackmaster was originally a parody of 2E AD&D, which is to say that combat moves much more quickly than in 3.X/PF.
To be fair we were playing the campaign as very RP-light, and more dungeon bash, so while the combat could sometimes drag (in particular the time the DM emptied an entire dungeon level on our heads in one pitched battle, and the time the annoying NPC who escaped corralled every monster that ever successfully escaped during the entire dungeon into one mega grudge-army), we were in it for the fights, so it didn’t really matter (plus it was a time in our lives when we could all commit to an all-saturday session, so we had the time). Plus, as Lord Torath says, it was a parody version of AD&D, so with all the fighter-classes it was a lot of “roll, hit or miss, next turn”.
That sounds like the script for a D&D parody in general. Or also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3m5z-MO-is
The most NPCs we’ve had on the battlefield was when almost all of the PCs got captured, with the one remaining player retrieving NPC reinforcements in the form of whoever he could find; most had different stat blocks. And when he initiated his assault on the prison, we began our breakout, with us also bringing our NPC inmates into the combat. I think that total size of our two parties combined was ~18 characters? To make matters worse, the guards had a variety of statblocks as well; there ended up being seventeen different creatures on the initiative order, and that’s not even counting multiples of creatures with different stat blocks.
Some say they are still in initiative, even to this day.
Definitely the group I’m currently dm-ing for:
The elven wizard, her centaur cohort, and her half elf daughter is one of the higher-level followers.
The ratfolk alchemist/witch and her gnome alchemist cohort/girlfriend
The human cavalier and their (dire) wolf companion
the kobold oracle and her 3 adopted kobold inquisitor kids/apprentices
the nagaji paladin and her pet giant shrimp
the drow slayer and her nagaji girlfriend who’s keeping tabs on the party for a crime lord
and the goblin chao-kineticist who pops in and out of reality intermittedly.
and that’s not even getting into the ally npcs they can bring along should they so choose.
Do you ever struggle to give all those relationships screen time?
This is all over discord, so the non-adventuring stuff happens pbp style between sessions.
This is what I meant by differing styles in my conversation with
CasuallyChallenged further down the page. There are so many assumptions in RP about what a “typical game” looks like. I don’t think of Discord as a primary campaign location, but you’re right. The technological format goes a long way to shaping these interactions.
We had 5 party members, a familiar, the zombified corpse of a party member, 2 other zombies, and an npc we found scurrying around in a ruin that I later had to raise as a zombie. Tomb of Annihilation was wild.
I hope you guys had enough Survival expertise to set the zombie half of camp downwind.
So, in my current campaign, my party consists of (all level 12) a monk, a light cleric, the light cleric’s pet wisp, an arcana cleric, a skull that the arcana cleric can chat to on a long rest with a kindly old former demigod spirit living in it, a rogue, a level 3 shadow sorcerer ghost NPC that the rogue let posses him, they sorta swap personalities when they need to, a kenku rogue…
…and a score of npc villains. an npc werewolf alchemist who was supposed to be a villain until they befriended him and convinced him to join the group, the alchemist’s father, an npc fallen paladin who was supposed to be a villain, an npc warlock supposed to be a villain, an npc nature cleric who was supposed to be a villain, and a diviner who was supposed to be a villain.
I didn’t WANT the party to be more dmpc than player, given the fact I know the stereotypes on dmpcs, but they REALLY love my villains.
They seem to have fallen in love with EVERY villain with a sympathetic backstory. In fact, the only villain they HAVEN’T tried to convince to join their cause is the BBEG, a hag. Want to know why? Because she DARED to harm their beloved reformed villains!
Ultimately, it makes encounter balance a nightmare, and it is a lot of hassle for me, and I am REALLY worried about them outshining the party. Usually I have some excuse for them not being in combat, the warlock’s patron demands his attention, the alchemist is brewing plot relevant potions, the diviner has been in a coma for ages courtesy of the hag casting imprison, hence why the party is out for blood.
It is a little annoying on my end to make it work, but in the end I am DMing for them, and want them to be happy, and have fun; if that means my villains are going to redeem themselves, then so be it.
You could always have the villains form their own party that goes on occasionally-intersects-with-the-PCs adventures.
For my megadungeon, I tell the PCs that they can bring along as many of their cohorts as they like, but that they will increase the APL and decrease XP rewards accordingly. That’s usually enough to keep things reasonable.
Back in highschool, I once ran a D&D 3.5 campaign with twenty people (it was an expedition into the lower planes to rescue a hero, I don’t recall how many NPCs the player’s had with them, but I know a couple of people had the leadership feat by the end of the campaign); Ofcourse, combat would’ve been a nightmare, if I hadn’t had the foresight to assign additional people as Co-GMs; Whenever combat would take place, everyone would be split up into groups of 3 to 5, depending upon who was closest to each other (monsters would also be grouped up together).
Each Co-GM would be handed a stack of stats, and preferred tactics written out, but otherwise would be given free reign on how to run the encounter.
At the end of each turn, the Co-GMs would give me a summary of what happened during the round (such as X monster died or Y party member is knocked unconscious). I would then go to each table and allow a free Spot check from the party to find out how the other teams were doing. After which, the Co-GMs would take over again for the next round. This would continue like this until combat was finished. Players were also allowed to switch tables between rounds (but no more than 5 people to a table).
After combat, I would take back over, and handle all the non-combat and plot-stuff for all groups involved.
This gaming setup would not have been possible, if I had not been granted a fully furnished unused classroom in the school library with a conference table in the center of the room (which could seat all twenty-some players), and 4 other tables at each of the four corners of the room (for when combat erupted). The room also had a built in projector, and each wall had at least one white-board; one of the sides had 3. As a prior library-aid, I also had free reign use of the copier and laminator.
Cool setup.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had the chance to do the Co-GM thing. I honestly find the combat less intimidating than the plot stuff. Did the players have to nominate an old school “caller” to declare their actions?
Well, it was highschool, so most of my players were more into combat than intrigue or problem-solving; so the plot stuff wasn’t all that difficult.
I mean, most of the non-combat scenarios were merely movement obstacles (cliffs, cave-ins, and broken bridges), NPCs (merchants and quest givers), and puzzles (I did not really bother with traps, instead I would just rotate between the 4 or 5 rogue-like characters and say that player X found Y trap and bypassed/disarmed it using Z method, gaining W amount of bonus XP).
When it came down to players wanting to do actions out of combat, I had numbered laminated index cards each with a number; If multiple players wanted to take actions, I would have each player take a card and I would handle their actions in order, rotating among them.
The most complicated part of the game actually was deciding when the PCs got to rest. Ofcourse we had multiple healers, including 2 dragon shamans w/ the aura of vigor, so when we decided to rest was less about hit points and more about how many spell slots, bardic music, or rage uses the party had left.
Pendragon being what it is, you are always expected to have a retinue. All players are usually knights, and those have, depending upon station and wealth, from one to three squires, and sometimes valets, minstrels, chaplains and other hangers-on. My current party of six players has two squires apiece, one of the players has a minstrel group of five minstrels with him, and another one usually brings his chaplain, for spiritual guidance, with him. So anywhere between 18 and 25 persons in the party when adventuring. When they travel in stule, for this diplomatic mission to another king, they take even more people with them, just to impress that king. Most of these people are not GMPC’s, as much as “necessarry, and usual” servants and apprentises (squires). I did use the whole Knight-Squire setup to ease my kids into RPGing. They were about nine and seven, and they saw me and the group having fun, so they wanted to join in. And they joined in as the squires of the player knights, doing a lot of squiring stuff, and so getting familiar with the whole RPG thing. They were eventually knighted, and joined the group as knights, with their own NPC squires.
Another large froup that we had was the crew of our Pirate ship, in Castle Falkenstein. As our whole group more or less thought about all the outragoius crews that you can have as pirates, and we all had a few that were either dear to our heart, or had plot or backstories links with us, we ended up with about 15 semi-GM\NPC’s and the three orientals under this large winecasks that had a laundry in there (you just left your dirty laundry in the deck, the cask would wander over it, and later you would find your laundry freshly washed, starched and ironed somewhere else on desk. Needless to say that this was a rather silly campaign)
I love it. I love it so much.
Do your sessions ever devolve into Pythonesque moments with the retinues? I’m thinking of Brother Maynard in M.P. & the Holy Grail showing up with all the head-slapping, flagellant monks singing “Pie Jesu Domine. Dona Eis Requiem…
Clearly, the NPCs aren’t the focus, nor should they be. But when you’ve got that very-large retinue, do you ever feel like the focus slips a bit? That is a lot of moving parts to track in terms of RP.
The contrast/synergy between accompanying text from the Patreon preview and mouse-over gives me life.
I can’t believe she forgot to draw Goldie and Mr. Stabby and Skitters and Scabby. It’s supposed to the “full party,” and– Ow! My face and head again! Why is that stylus so sharp!?
When I run games I tend not to include too many NPCs. The largest recent party I’ve dealt with was 9, 5 of them NPCs. It was a journey style quest so it wasn’t exactly difficult. 4 of the 5 were henchman style NPCs and the 5th was a quiet old man who’d offer advise while they traveled.
The largest I personally have dealt with was 10; all of them PCs. That was a mess. t was a Werewolf the Apocalypse game and it stretched my GMing skills to the max. By the end we had 7 as people dropped out or couldn’t keep up due to college.
Beyond that, I once played in a game where the GM liked to have us make NPCs and play them for scenes, to keep us interested when we weren’t on scene. What this meant thought is that I had 7 PC/NPCs to manage at any given time and another friend had closer to 20. The newer PCs had much less. The groups rarely got together so we could avoid talking to ourselves, so I don’t know how much it counts.
School games are weird. The idea of “overbooking” them isn’t too bad, since so many people will have to unexpectedly drop out. I think that 7 is more likely to get you an ideal table than 10 though. :/
It started with 6 and then 2 more people joined and then another person came along and finally another guy asked to join. Combat was a nightmare but it did meant if I gave them a puzzle thing they could spend hours just RPing the discussion.
When your party is already 7 players plus the DM, adding more just seems ridiculous, but that doesn’t mane pets don’t get left out. I think that is probably one of the many reasons that some editions (5e included) did away with have to keep track of your familiars and paladin mounts and even made it possible to make the “poof” away and back when you need to.
As to hirelings and henchmen and additional companions, I think that was an old school thought that never died off in some people’s games. I never understood the idea of even having a keep or fort in a game let alone the staff to take care of it. In the typical adventuring life, when are you really “home” anyway?
But if you do have “extras” along for the ride, it is easy to say they are literally extras and not deal with them (depending on how you do it and what the level of attachment is to them).
I recently got a pet owl and the general rule is that the owl is smart enough to fly away in bad situations and come back when it is safe, so for a non-combat pet, that could be an option.
Ignore is sometimes the better solution… or just never try to add the extras in the first place.
The longer I hang out on the forums, the more I realize that “the typical adventuring life” is a myth. Megadungeons usually have a “town” that you can retreat to at the end of the day. Pirate games have a convenient floating base. War campaigns have “the army” and “the scouting mission.” Urban campaigns are all about factions and NPCs.
I think you’re talking about the overland journey, as in LotR style gaming. That’s a popular style, but it definitely isn’t the only one possible.
I have never actually done anything but the constant overland journey RP, so I guess it all depends on perspective 🙂
(Aside from playing Diablo, but that doesn’t count)
No worries. I keep finding myself confronted by the proliferation of digital RP, which messes with a lot of my own assumptions.
For purposes of this conversation though, I think one of the easiest things to do with a proliferation of NPCs is to put them “back at base” until they become important. The nature of “the base” changes from game to game, and may not be possible in certain styles.
Off the top of my head, the largest true-NPC party supplement in a game I’ve played, counting only named characters, is probably one magician and three awakened (but silent) plants. Oh, and my cleric’s trusty steed and the pack-horses dragging the wagon.
That said, there are a few times when the party traveled with NPCs who were divvied up among the party, and those don’t spring to mind…partly because my group tends to treat such NPCs like tools rather than letting them claim the spotlight. We tend to try and leave story-relevant NPCs out of the core party and party-relevant NPCs out of the story, with very limited exceptions.
Well now you’ve got me curious. When have you had a characterful NPC join the party successfully?
Not quite what I meant. I meant that the NPCs who joined the core party (ie, traveled around with the party so their abilities could be useful) usually didn’t matter to the story, and the NPCs who matter to the story usually didn’t stick with the party after their bit of the story was over.
The exception on my mind when I wrote that was the aforementioned magician, who was introduced as a utility caster for the party but turned out to tie into one of the PC’s backstories. He was a member of the “core adventuring party” and also mattered to the story.
Plenty of experience with this. Minor spoilers for Mummy’s Mask and Dawn of Flame.
In Return of the Runelords, we were just us and my Wizards mount. Said mount stopped being relevant outside of small references when we hit phantom chariot and teleport levels.
In Starfinder’s Dawn of Flame, we acquired two NPCs, a Salamander mechanic we redeemed (and waifu-fied into an anime monstergirl because reasons), and a NPC that we paid off a massive casino debt off and sent on the path to curing gambling addiction. Both are now ship crew.
In Mummy’s Mask, we have a silly large party. Us four PCs, an NPC cat-who-can-turn-human from one PCs backstory, a NPC clockwork robot / C3PO expy, a sphinx we rescued (following us into combat currently). We also met a pair of NPCs ww cured from petrification but they went their own paths.
We acquire a lot of anime waifus/harems in our games in general.
If we ever game together, you’re not allowed any custom spells. O_O
It’s the rest of the party that voted for it :p
I blame it all on my party and DM being weebs and thinking the canon art for Salamanders wasn’t waifu enough.
Today’s comic sponsored by Colin’s raise dead bills!
blargh. i am slain
Today’s comic is one of those elaborate puzzles, right?
If the ship can hold only four medium humanoids (ferryman included), how many trips can you make without Drow Priestess killing the others, LE killing Drow Priestess, or the NPCs you stuff into a Bag of Holding suffocating?
Also, where are the familiar(s)?
I’m pretty sure the correct answer involves a fox eating a cabbage.
So Kitsune and Druid are on the other shore making out?
Oh, geez, that’s, like, another 5 boat trips right there.
Wait! Who are those non-core party members and where were they featured?
Thankee!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/press-ganged
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/watch-the-horses
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-01
The largest party I’ve ever run as DM was all made up of single characters. I was the only game on base and I had 12 players for a few months. Finally got one of the players to split off and run his own game, which brought me down to 7 players. I had a kitchen timer and everyone knew they had 10 minutes in the spotlight until I moved on to the next player. Only in smaller groups (2-3 players) will I allow NPC’s or second characters and they get the same attention the PC’s get.
Is this with PC-initiated roleplay scenes? Or are you talking about combat turns?
Currently, one party in my game consists of three PCs and seven fully fleshed-out NPCs who play a substantial role. Notably, though, this is part of a politically-focussed campaign and long lists of characters are very much par for the course. I know I’ve said so before, but the total list of PCs in the world had been hovering at 30 for a while before some recent deaths and additions.
I wonder if that number of characters has anything to do with Dunbar’s number?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
How curious! I’d never thought of that before…
That is not the whole party!!! Where are the familiars? Where is Goldie and Mr. Stabby? 😛
Cleric pose remind me of an NPC on a game of us:
NPC: Check this out! A robe of solid gold! I can’t turn my head, my back is killing me and each glass of water is a pros vs cons war relative to the nearest bathroom! But i look AMAZING!!! 😛
Careful. Laurel might get stabby again.
Figured she’d be a Glaive user.
https://aonprd.com/FeatDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Bladed%20Brush
Thanks to you now i think of Laurel wielding a Glaive Prime… and it actually fit her 🙂
…Or maybe she could use a Pathocyst for extra nastiness with Colin 😀
Hey, Colin which would you prefer for Laurel to use on you, Glaive Prime or Pathocyst? 😛
I believe her best polearm was shaping the entirety of the labyrinth into a spear and then throwing that at a Creation-eating machine.
Nice, but the ones i am asking are more chakram like 🙂
Best I can do is an angry frisbee made out of Autochthon’s left butt cheek. Take it or leave it.
I leave it. We all know that Autochthon’s right butt cheek is the good one 😛
Hence the well-known expression, “Shinier than Autochthon’s right butt cheek.”
XD
Does a stylus to the eye hurt? Lucky me, isn’t mine 😀
At least the eyepatch looks cool. 🙁
You need one less prop for a pirate game 😛
Or to roleplay Iorveth 😀
I remember a couple of failed campaigns where our dm tried to incorporate a tagalong character who may have eventually become a plot point for a dungeon, but we simply forgot about him while shenanigans occurred.
As a side note, I read this comic on my phone and am thus incapable of checking out the mouse over text. Normally I don’t mind this since mouseover usually just contains an added gag, but you reference it often enough where I sometimes feel that I’m missing something mildly important. This could just be me, though I wouldn’t mind if a small “click to expand” box containing the mouseover text were to be added below the comic panel, at least for the mobile version of the site. It isn’t necessary, but I figured you might appreciate the feedback. 🙂
On my phone, holding over the image as if you’re going to copy it gives access to the scrollover. Is that not the case for you?
In any case, todays text says, “Oh hey, Laurel! I just thought of another couple of characters that ought to be in this scene. Wouldn’t it be fun if you also had to draw—Ow! My face and head! Please stop beating me with your stylus!”
It does not do that, no. It might be a difference in our browsers. I use the default Samsung internet app on an android galaxy s7.
That might be it. I use an iphone, and I get the same thing Colin gets (though only on the current comic — if I try it on any previous comic, I just get a link to the next one).
Out of the Abyss and its frankly insane amount of NPCs come to mind, which will trail behind the characters creating a goddamn caravan of escaped slaves. No matter the size of your group, you add 9 NPCs at the start of the game (granted, some of those will flee or die, but only at specific plot stops, until which they trail behind).
And while my group had no intention to play the second part of OotA, I read through it and boy, it gets even dumber. Should the PCs succeed at sucking up to the five factions in Gauntlgrym, which isn’t hard at all and probably something they would like to achieve, then they start out with 28 NPCs (1x shield guardian, 5x veterans, 3x scouts, 3x giant lizards, 5x guards, 3x spies, 8 thugs).
Not included in this expedition corps are: 1x giant lizard per player, any of the previous 9 NPCs which decided to stay with the group and of course the actual player characters. Also, every single one of those NPCs is a named character (with the exception of the shield guardian and the lizards).
Our starting NPCs died off quickly. We only had two or three by the time we hit the evil dorf city.
The fungus, the dwarf and the quaggoth prince stayed with my group until the surface. The drow exploded into spores, the derro tried to murder them, the were-rats ran off and the rest were killed by Demogorgon/A fat dragon/An irate party member/Spiders
Biggest (and most conflicted) was recently. In a game where I was playing an elf cleric/ranger absolutely devoted to destroying undead in its entirety, one player joined and REALLY wanted to play a necromancer of the dread variety.
Yeah… that was tough, because I suddenly had to start playing the undead-hunter as a “not all undead” character. The large cast was the created undead that were accompanying us everywhere, I think there were like, 10 of them.
Most players I’ve seen in a game was 10, and that was just yikes! We ended up splitting into two groups shortly thereafter, but for a while it was chaos. Everyone basically spent their turns trying to NOVA as hard as they could to seem like they did something.
Because the battlefield was so cluttered with just-barely-enough enemies to challenge you all? Oof.
I once DM’d a game where the PCs were part of a posse of about 50 formed in a forest village to chase down a mysterious killer that was stalking local youngsters. They went further and further into the woods and the idea was that the peasants would all gradually fall prey to the werewolf pack behind it all. You know, “It’s under the fog! Ru-BLAARGH” Also, they were a pool to pick reserve PC:s from if the first ones should die (as some did).
As I recall, the horror setting worked well (It was shaping up to be a game in Ravenloft setting, even if I didn’t tell the players that) but the fights took centuries. We had a custom combat system that was time consuming even in a normal party but this was just unworkable. The peasants died, though. In droves. The were basically level 1 Commoners.
I keep hearing about 0th level “funnel” games, but I’ve never had the opportunity to try one myself. Gonna have to cross it off the bucket list one day….
Let’s see, the biggest party I’ve ever been a part of had 20 named, player-controlled characters, divided over 5 players. It was a sadly short-lived game of play-by-post DnD 3.5 using a mecha homebrew overhaul. I was by far the worst sinner in that group, as I had 8 named characters. I as the captain of the big carrier that everyone else was based on, and just from the class (battleship captain) I got three characters in total, being the captain and her second and third in command. Then I got the leadership feat and picked up a mecha mook cohort, which was really a full 5-man squad as a single class, who, despite their supposedly disposable nature, all had names, backgrounds and personalities.
Overall, things went pretty smoothly imho, at least untill the GM disappeared. The play-by-post format meant everyone got spotlight time proportional to the amount of time they where willing to put into actually making posts, irrespective of how many character sheets they had, and the DM was smart enough to give each player a single initiative score, rather than having them roll separately for each character they had.
Smart stuff. I tend to think of the “five players around a table, one GM behind a screen” as my default game. Cool to see how other styles turn unwieldy into workable.
We don’t have any trouble with our DMPCs. The most recent one has been a source of good humor all around.
“I’ll distract the guards, you guys make for the gate.”
Minute later a stable explodes in fire (sans horses) and we pick her up on the opposite side of the wall.
Also she stopped my guy from bleeding out TWICE after two separate crits almost merc’d him… Sam is not the most prevalent fighter…
Learning how to do “NPC that accompanies the party” well is a skill worth picking up. I think the key is for them to act as a supporting player rather than a spotlight hog. “I’ll help you guys with your plan offscreen” is exactly the kind of trick you want to pull.
I have told you of my party’s adventures with the rowboat that was too small for all of them. That party just finished a few days ago the challenge of fitting 8 characters (5 PCs, an NPC, a Phantom and a skeleton minion) onto 3 horses that can hold 2 people a piece. (The vine leshy PC turned into a vine and became a scarf, while the Phantom is weightless and so just hung onto the horse’s tail. Everyone else doubled up.) So that was fun. Fortunately, the NPC was kidnapped before they had to ride back. (I’ve actually bent the rules about Animate Dead to let the Spiritualist spend gems to buff his one skeleton minion with class levels rather than making tons and tons of small, weak skeletons that take up everyone’s time.)
The largest party I’ve dealt with had 5 PCs (including a Witch and a Druid, so add a Compsognathus familiar and a Large Amargasaurus animal companion) and 3 wimpy NPCs (Steve, Steven and Stephan the random sailors). Led to this fun scenario when we had to end a session mid-battle: https://i.imgur.com/IKlxcZk.jpg
I’ve found that it’s good to outsource the NPCs to the players a bit. Have them make some decisions about what the NPCs are going to do, at least in combat. (The three Steves basically ended up as a class feature of Wushi the chef Alchemist, since he was the one burning Polypurpose Panacea extracts to make beer, which he shared.) In the campaigns where I’ve run DMPCs, I tend to ask the players “what would you like Monsi to do?” in combat, which both keeps them from being bored on the DMPC’s turn and reduces the mental strain on the DM. A particularly extreme example of that is the campaign where two PCs’ player is gone, leaving two players and me the DM to run a total of 5 characters. So three of the PCs are basically communal property, with whoever isn’t busy that turn making decisions for them. It probably helps that that game isn’t so much a “deep character arc roleplaying experience” as it is “wander into insane situations and try to get out of them” campaign, which makes it easier to share characters (since the decision is “how are we taking down this foe” rather than “what does this character want in life?”).
The one DM I had was a bit of a hack. He had fun concepts, but he was a bit too fast to ramp up the power; he’d offer broken magic items to players and have to create absurdly powerful natural disaster level entities to make the players still feel outclassed. (which usually required NPC’s crashing ships into them to deal with, as there wasn’t really any sensible way for the players to confront them directly, which in turn led to handing out more broken loot to make the players feel like they still got something out of it)
He also apparently had MCU aspirations, as any oneshot idea that he ran was canonically in the same world, so players would then take those characters and have them shuttle off to where the main campaign was taking place. When I first joined everyone had some 2-4 characters they ran (which made it very hard to tell who was who over voip) Even I wound up with a 2nd PC by the big climax. Getting kicked from the group for my character wanting to dabble in necromancy was probably a blessing.
So, the necromancer was thwarted by a blessing?
In Pathfinder I had the pleasure of DMing an Oracle of bone with his 2-5 summoned minions (+whatever he happened to raise in each battle), a halfling summoner, and an aasimar bard who also liked summon spells. Oh, and a packhorse. All of which I painted.
Can’t really blame my players though, since I tend to throw some very large combats at them, and it’s easier to fight an army when you’ve got one of your own.
The only DMPC that was there because the party insisted that they needed a tank or even better a healer for 4 sessions in a row (they are a large party that will be splittin after the first ark.
HOWEVER I was really pissed that they were so much of a crybabies for their decision even though I gave them things like less price on potions + more gold, so I made NPC that had certain flaws and rolled a d4 to choose which one will they have, after the roll the character was a really violent desth cleric that hated undead and and necromancers. Well one of the PCs decided to pick on him while the rest of the party tries to stop the bloodshed by persuasion