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<blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 9172943" data-attributes="member: 27957">Yes and no.Yes, there's room in a campaign to have a story arc focusing on an NPC the players have grown to care about. Helping a friend, seeing them succeed at a major goal or resolve their issues, can be very fulfilling. No, it's not something a published adventure path can do easily, because of how bloody unpredictable it is which NPCs the players will decide to care about.Seriously, everyone has stories about the time the players decided they all hated a major plot NPC that was supposed to be an ally, and everyone has stories of the time the party universally agreed to adopt a random minor NPC that had a quirk that was endearing. Maybe a specific DM can get good at reading their particular group, but a published adventure has no way to predict or engineer which NPCs the party will care about enough to want to participate in an arc focused on them.Baldur's Gate 3 can pull the trick of having a team of writers spending years creating side plot for every major NPC, crammed inside a bottomless digital box so that the player can follow the ones they want and ignore the ones they don't. A published adventure doesn't have the budget or the page count to do that. Not as any more than short stubs. It isn't until you go out the other side to a DM creating it all as they go along that they can respond to the players directly enough to have appropriately tailored NPC sidequests.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Kurotowa, post: 9172943, member: 27957"] Yes and no. Yes, there's room in a campaign to have a story arc focusing on an NPC the players have grown to care about. Helping a friend, seeing them succeed at a major goal or resolve their issues, can be very fulfilling. No, it's not something a published adventure path can do easily, because of how bloody unpredictable it is [I]which[/I] NPCs the players will decide to care about. Seriously, everyone has stories about the time the players decided they all hated a major plot NPC that was supposed to be an ally, and everyone has stories of the time the party universally agreed to adopt a random minor NPC that had a quirk that was endearing. Maybe a specific DM can get good at reading their particular group, but a published adventure has no way to predict or engineer which NPCs the party will care about enough to want to participate in an arc focused on them. Baldur's Gate 3 can pull the trick of having a team of writers spending years creating side plot for every major NPC, crammed inside a bottomless digital box so that the player can follow the ones they want and ignore the ones they don't. A published adventure doesn't have the budget or the page count to do that. Not as any more than short stubs. It isn't until you go out the other side to a DM creating it all as they go along that they can respond to the players directly enough to have appropriately tailored NPC sidequests. [/QUOTE]

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