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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 7946146" data-attributes="member: 6704184">I'm lucky to be the most spotlight hungry person at the table when I'm a player, and being a DM who sometimes has very prominent NPCs has trained me to be very, very, aware of how much spotlight I've been taking compared to anyone else. I've had good and bad outcomes running so-called DMPCs. Usually because I'm not going to just have a person who is integral to the life of someone else, and a trusted and valuable member of their combat team, fade into the background for obviously forced reasons, and, well, we don't stop playing campaigns when a DM stops running them, in my group. Another DM just picks them up. All that said, it depends. Timing it involves trying to plug subjectives into an equation and expect a coherent result. Unlikely. Rather, I'd say that what you want here is a solid understanding of where the other PCs are, and to think about these scenes like a TV or movie. HOw long would a show-runner let this scene go on for, before cutting away to the other characters to see what they're doing? And it needn't be a whole long thing with the other PCs, just check in ans ask what they're doing. Maybe keep a sort of "initiative order" to help you track when it's time to jump back to the other PCs, and ask each of them in order. Maybe each jump goes to one PC, or to a group of two or 3, and the party is split into 3 groups. Great, each times it's a PC's turn, we return to the scene that they're in.That might mean spending 5 minutes talking about and rolling dice to resolve how they're stealing another PCs favorite camp blanket as a prank, or breifly discussing what the interesting book they're reading is about, or introducing something into the scene that will vex them but not endanger them, etc. If you are running a deep simulation game, the above may be of no use to you, of course.</blockquote>

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