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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8119889" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I've had an unusual experience with this one. I've only run two campaigns, one very short-lived, the other ongoing with at least 16 months of weekly sessions (and that's excluding various breaks we had to take!) In that second game, technically see in the same setting as the first but a couple years later and with a whole different crew, I included two NPCs as useful allies: Hafsa el-Alam, an up-and-coming artificer and Waziri mage, and Tenryu Shen, a mysterious Dragonborn priest summoned by the local Safiqi priesthood to deal with some problem or other. The latter was in part inspired by a character I played in a 13th Age PBP game, and thus theoretically qualifies as a DMPC, even though he doesn't normally adventure with the party.I was hesitant to make use of these characters at first, especially Shen, because they could be seen as manipulative or controlling the narrative or the like. Shen warrants particular note because he is in truth a gold dragon, hunting a black dragon that fled their homeland and which is trying to turn the main city, Al-Rakkah, into its "hoard." My fears ended up being off base...but not for the reason you'd expect. The party LOVES Shen and Hafsa (who happen to be engaged to be married). Finding out he was actually a gold dragon masquerading as "just" a dragonborn made them like him even more, in fact. But this meant the party, very rationally, asked if they could call on his aid. I found my players almost wanting a DMPC in the game! So we had a sit-down and I laid out my reasons for not wanting to fully grant their request, but also not wanting to fully dismiss it either. We worked out a compromise that made sense in the fiction and was satisfactory to the players without making it "we call up our gold dragon buddy to solve the problem."</blockquote>

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