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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4847925" data-attributes="member: 22779">IME, in many campaigns, there is a bottleneck.  On one side, you have the campaign, all the backgrounds, the notes, and whatnot and on the other, you have the players.  In the middle of that, creating this nice, neat little choke point is the DM.  It falls to the DM to somehow disperse the information from the campaign to the players without overloading the players by infodumping and without being so stingy with information that the players don't know what's going on.And it's a very delicate balancing act.  As a DM, you don't want to give away too much information, because, well, that takes away all the surprise and suspense.  OTOH, you don't want your players getting frustrated and bored because they just can't figure out what's going on.  Getting that balance can be very, very tricky.Enter the Guide.  The Guide is an NPC who knows some of the plot of the campaign, knows some of the setting details and is willing to pass that on to the players.  Now, how much he or she knows is entirely up to the DM and may actually change from time to time.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  But, the Guide is an ally of the party, and while may be occasionally mistaken, is usually trying to help.So, how do we introduce this Guide.  What sort of NPC makes a good guide and what makes a bad one?  Well, (and take this with a grain of salt, cos this is just my opinion) here is a list of things to keep in mind when making your guide:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The guide should be less competent than the PC's.  If the guide is more competent, he stops being a guide and starts being a leader and that sucks when the NPC is the leader.  Choo choo!  Everyone on the Plot Train.  A guide who is weaker, less powerful, and possibly subservient in some way to the PC's makes a much better guide.  He can offer ideas, he can offer guidance, which is what you want, but, he can't actually really affect any outcome. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The guide should be reliable most of the time.  While it's fine to use the guide to chuck in the occasional red herring, if the guide is too unreliable, the players will just ditch him and rightfully so. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The guide needs some sort of hook.  If the guide is just a fount of knowledge, he'll quickly become very boring.  He needs something other than his knowledge to make him interesting.  Maybe he's like a Watcher from Buffy, or, in my case, a senile intelligent dagger forged by celestials and forgotten for millennia.  Something that you can use as the DM to give this guy a very specific "voice". </li> </ul>That's what I can think up for now.  What do you do with your guide type NPC's?  Do you use them?  What shouldn't a DM do with them?</blockquote>

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