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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9679561" data-attributes="member: 18">I do agree that if you're just playing a "fill in" support character, so long as they have a personality which means they're a follower not a leader, and they don't have a paternalistic or patron-like relationship with the group, and generally aren't making stuff "about them", then that's not usually a big problem or a GMPC in a normal sense, rather they're a helpful NPC.But I would strongly question why you're playing them at all. Why not hand them over to the players? If they're refusing, but still want a healer or w/e and the system requires one (5E does not, of course), then I can see playing them in a very minimal sort of way. But if you never even asked... well, that's not a good look.I would argue that these kind of characters are potentially the road to hell, and it's absolutely paved with good intentions. You have to be really careful with how you design them, and how you play them, and again, to justify you playing them not the other players, I think that requires a very specific situation if they're an active, continuous party member.Well yes. Generally GMPC describes an NPC who has become a problem because the DM/GM is insisting on playing them like they were a full member of the party and maybe even started taking the lead and/or giving orders to the other PCs with them, and is probably thinking about centering the story of the campaign on them.Unfortunately this is a very common pattern, and a lot of GMs seem to think it's fine if they "just play a character", and then fine if that character is more powerful than the PCs (because they know the limits of what's okay, they're more sensible than the silly players), and it's fine if that character is in telling the party what to do (after all, the other PCs could do that), and it's fine if the story of the campaign centers around that GMPC, and so on.I'd go as far as to note there's actually an official 5E WotC campaign that basically makes this mistake (I leave identifying this campaign as an exercise to the reader).</blockquote>

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