Giving Your Players Some NPCs
There’s a technique I use in my main 5e campaign that I want to share with you. While I’m sure I’m not the first GM to use it, I haven’t seen anyone else discuss doing quite the same thing, nor have I seen it used in livestreams, so I think it is worth writing out.
Source: Maggie A-Day at flic.kr/p/9Fikua
In my campaign, one player’s PC has the sailor background and the ship he serves on, Valkur’s Cutlass, featured heavily in his backstory. This ship is sufficiently important to the character that I felt I needed to find a way to integrate it into the campaign I had planned, so after some initial adventuring while the PC was on shore leave, I introduced an adventure hook: the Cutlass had been stolen by pirates and her captain, a halfling named Milo Tosscobble with elaborately-braided muttonchops, asked the party to get it back. This would eventually culminate in the party receiving use of the Cutlass as a reward. (Technically the queen owns the Cutlass now, but she has granted use of it to the party, since they are adventuring in her name.)
As the party tried to find and recover the Cutlass aboard a much smaller vessel called the Firebrat, they were accompanied by the Firebrat’s captain and three of the sailor PC’s shipmates, each of whom had some class levels (but fewer than the PCs). This meant that, when merrow attacked them at sea, there were a lot of NPCs running around; it got even worse when they picked up a passenger a little while later. As any GM knows, NPCs fighting on the party’s side can be an interesting change to the dynamic and will allow you to make more challenging encounters, but it also slows down combat, giving the GM a lot more work and making each player wait longer for their turn. I knew I was eventually going to give the players a whole ship, so the problem was not going to go away with time.
My solution was to give each of the players one of the three crewmate NPCs to control while in combat. I was clear that I would still handle all roleplay for those characters but, starting with initiative and ending when we leave turn order, the players will play the NPC they have been assigned as a second character. That experiment was very successful, so I have used it again repeatedly where appropriate.
This solution has a few advantages:
- It doubles the number of turns each player has per round, meaning each player spends less time each round waiting (assuming, of course, that the total number of NPCs would remain the same).
- It reduces the amount of strategizing I have to do, allowing me to run smoother combat. This is particularly valuable to me because I feel combat is not my strongest area as a GM.
- It lets the players use abilities their PC doesn’t have access to. In the case of the Firebrat, this meant swashbuckler rogue stuff for the fighter’s player, battle master fighter stuff for the paladin’s player, and storm sorcery stuff for the bard’s player. Because the NPCs change from encounter to encounter, the new abilities also change, keeping the game fresh.
- It gives tactically-minded players extra options, particularly if the NPC they control can set up advantages their PC can exploit, or vice versa.
- It provides more opportunities for the players to emotionally invest in those NPCs.
- It can sometimes provide a way to deliver more information about the campaign setting or political situation to your players.
Of course there are potential downsides.
- Learning a new character sheet or stat block can be daunting for a player, especially if the first time they are seeing it is during an important combat encounter. I mitigate this by trying to keep the characters simpler than the PCs: if I build the NPCs like player characters, I keep them a few levels behind the party, but since the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything I have also preferred to use sidekick class levels instead.
- My players have sometimes seemed unsure about how to roleplay the new characters through combat; even if they aren’t talking, they still look for guidelines about how to fight as these people and not just as these character sheets. To mitigate this I have started including roleplaying notes (often bonds, ideals, and/or alignments) on the character sheet or stat block.
- There is a chance that the NPCs can upstage the party. Keeping the NPCs a lower level than the party helps mitigate this risk but it is still a risk, and one I have not yet figured out how to reduce as much as I’d like. However, it is still better if an NPC under the players’ control kills a climactic villain than if that NPC killed the villain while under the GM’s control.
For some players, one or more of these problems might be insurmountable. When I offered this solution on reddit once, the other GM said one of their players flat-out refuses to play NPCs in this way; apparently she finds playing even one character daunting enough. I suppose that’s fair, and certainly I won’t suggest that you should force a reluctant player to control an extra character. However, I think most of these problems can be mitigated to a degree acceptable to most tables.
My players eagerly try to recruit as many allies as they can, especially when the enemy appears daunting. I try to keep the number of NPCs in an encounter manageable, often by peeling them off to deal with urgent off-screen threats or lumping them into swarms, but it is still often the case that the PCs bring extra people into the fight with them. If it’s something the players really want to do, I don’t intend to stop it by GM fiat. Fortunately, by now my players are quite accustomed to piloting an NPC alongside their PC and I can continue giving them control over their recruits, at least once we roll for initiative. If you find yourself in a similar situation, you might want to consider using this technique.
Originally published 26 February 2024.