NPC vs NPC fights : Should I just fake them?

[Marcon]

So your PCs have a NPC ally with them or they happen to be involved in a fight between good guys and bad guys (Obviously taking one side or the other in the process).

Do you systematically roll every attack die, keep track of HPs, etc. for the allied NPCs? If you handwave it, do you bluff your PCs by rolling random dice behind the screen, taking fake notes, etc.? Do you instead narrate these parts of the fight, with the risk of having your PCs "get the idea" and do their own things, knowing they probably can't influence fights they are not directly involved in? Do you script the encounter ahead and if so, do you feel a bit guilty when one PC goes out of his way to try and help a NPC by casting Bull's Strength on him? Do you make adjustments on the fly based on "what would be cool at this time"?

-Marcon

 

[Hussar]

NPC on NPC fights with the PC's present - totally by the book. I track hits and hit points. Probably because I do all my die rolls in the open, so, it would be really, really obvious I was chea... fudging.

Now, if the PC's aren't present? NPC X wins. Next.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

I haven't been in that situation in quite a while, but if I ever were again, here's what I'd do: decide on the chance that each combatant has to win, taking into account their abilities. Roll to determine who wins ahead of time. Then script the fight so it comes to that outcome. For a significant fight that the PCs might be able to influence, keep track of the round-by-round stats within the script, so if they intervene you can go into "real time." As long as the players know that's the process, they can weigh their time at the table against their hopes for the outcome.

Just deciding based on what would make for a good story is not my style. To me, what's cool about D&D is that flukes of the dice can make things happen that don't follow conventional narrative tropes. Maybe the BBEG is supposed to sweep in, level the town, and leave the PCs wanting revenge, and maybe that might be best for the story you have in mind, but suppose you figure the NPC captain of the guard has a 2% chance to kill the BBEG with a few lucky shots... and your dice come up 02. Well, looks like that storyline just took an unexpected turn. That the story is what comes out of the decisions and the dice is one of the things that makes D&D great. In the short term, your preferred storyline is thwarted. In the long term, you've advanced the idea that "there's always a chance" and that the world has more internal reality than one where NPC guardsmen wear red shirts.

 

[DeusExMachina]

If the NPC is actually an ally and in the party so to speak, yes, I'll keep track, but if it's not an ally and the pc's don't influence it directly too much I just decide who wins based on factors like what is good for the story and what makes sense...

 

[Betote]

NPC on NPC fights with the PC's present - totally by the book. I track hits and hit points. Probably because I do all my die rolls in the open, so, it would be really, really obvious I was chea... fudging.

Now, if the PC's aren't present? NPC X wins. Next.

What he said

 

[fba827]

If the PCs are not present - I just pick one to win that would make the best plot development (or roll randomly 50/50 if i can't decide)

If the PCs are present but don't really have a way to affect the outcoe much (watching a gladiator fight from the area, for instance) then, same as if the PCs weren't there.

If the PCs are present and have the ability to affect the fight then I do the fight round by round, but fudge it (like roll to hit, but then they always do "average" damage output to each other, thus reducing the number of rolls I have to do). Depending on the situation, I'd probably also cut the combatant's HP in half to make the fight go faster.

Basically, the _players_ don't need to be spectators to the DM sitting there rolling a bunch of dice. So anything to speed past that part is the key.

 

[Merkuri]

In our current campaign (which Hussar is DMing) he stuck a quiet NPC cleric into our party. Like he says, he always rolls for NPC versus NPC in this case, and that's fine.

In the previous campaign before that with a different DM, though, there was one incident I can think of where I really wished he had handwaved the rolls.

The plot was that an enemy of ours had gotten to a neutral and previously unknown civilization before us, and their ruler had agreed to let said enemy search some ancient and possibly powerful ruins to look for something he wasn't specifying. Now, surrounded by currently neutral but possibly hostile soldiers we can't just attack this guy, so we insist on being let into the same set of ruins with our enemy so we can watch him. The ruler agrees, but says he wants no violence and forbids us from hurting each other.

The result is that we go on a dungeon crawl with a powerful enemy of ours and we can't touch him. This was a fun situation from a roleplaying point of view and I enjoyed it immensely, but for some reason the DM didn't anticipate that we would want to stick with the guy like glue. He thought we'd go explore the ruins on our own, so what happened was that we ended up with a more powerful NPC than he had planned for and we were walking all over the encounters - or rather his NPC was walking all over them.

So as we progressed into the ruins he decided to add a big baddie very much over our level to challenge the NPC that we were with. The idea was that the NPC would fight the big baddie and we'd fight the normal folks. Not a bad idea at first, but what ended up happening was that the big bad guy and our NPC each had multiple attacks per round and many abilities that it seemed to take him 20 minutes to resolve their rounds before he came back around to the PCs. This is the point I really wish he'd said something like, "Okay, those two go fight in a corner, we'll ignore them for now, I'll tell you how it turned out when you're done."

No offense to the DM, though. It was his first time in the big chair and I think he learned a lot of what to do and what not to do during that campaign.

 

[Lizard]

What he said

Yeah, me too.

Sometimes, I will say, "And meanwhile, off to your left, the City Watch is battling the Bugbear Invaders...looks like they're winning", or whatever. But if NPCs closely tied to the PCs are directly involved, it is By The Book.

 

[RefinedBean]

Yep! If an NPC is really a DMPC or working alongside the PCs for an extended period of time, definitely by the book.

If there's a situation like Lizard described where there's multiple battles going on at multiple times, I might have the PCs roll a d20 against a roll of my own at the end of certain rounds...depending on how the rolls go, the PCs' allies either "succeed" or "fail," and a failure usually means a small wave of enemies gets past the NPCs to engage the PCs.

But that doesn't come up too often. Hand-waving, when used right, is quite an awesome tool.

 

[Graybeard]

DMPCs or major NPCs traveling with the party have always been played out in the open in the games I've run or played in. Usually, one of the players will take over running the NPC while the DM runs the villains. Spells, HP, etc. are all tracked. There have been many NPCs over the years that died but at least the group can't blame the DM for cheating.