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<blockquote data-quote="Brimshack" data-source="post: 3173768" data-attributes="member: 34694">It's interesting to see how different people weigh the judgement calls. Is it unthinkable that a DM could play a character and still mind his world? Improbable that a DM could play a character without stealing thunder? Perhaps, I just don't see any sense in which determining that the character is an NPC really helps that. If a DM doesn't have the discipline to handle these matters, he can be just as caught up in a character that is technically an NPC as any official PC. If anythig, I still think the disjunct - it's just an NPC - often provides a DM with an opportunity to deny the impact of his favoritism. Whereas declaring a character to be a PC puts the DM on the hotseat, so to speak, and calls attention to the problem in a way that I find helpful. My experience may be ideosyncratic, but the biggest scene stealers I have dealt with have in fact been overpowered NPCs, not DM PCs.For my own part, I am uncormfortable with the notion of a sort of second class character, Cohort. The notion that you have say 6 characters in the dungeon, all with their lives on the line, but 2 are naturally subservient to the rest is itself an odd skew. Sure evil characters could decide one character has less value than another, but the notion that there is a natural division there I find rather suspicious. As a DM I could and would be at least as likely to throw a wrench in the works from an NPC cohort as I would from a PC. The notion that some characters are just there to fill in the gaps and won't stir up the pot is at least as prone to abuse as the notion that there is a character on the table who is tied to the DM. Others are clearly more comfortable with that, but I don't see it as a resolution favourable to a DMPC.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Brimshack, post: 3173768, member: 34694"] It's interesting to see how different people weigh the judgement calls. Is it unthinkable that a DM could play a character and still mind his world? Improbable that a DM could play a character without stealing thunder? Perhaps, I just don't see any sense in which determining that the character is an NPC really helps that. If a DM doesn't have the discipline to handle these matters, he can be just as caught up in a character that is technically an NPC as any official PC. If anythig, I still think the disjunct - it's just an NPC - often provides a DM with an opportunity to deny the impact of his favoritism. Whereas declaring a character to be a PC puts the DM on the hotseat, so to speak, and calls attention to the problem in a way that I find helpful. My experience may be ideosyncratic, but the biggest scene stealers I have dealt with have in fact been overpowered NPCs, not DM PCs. For my own part, I am uncormfortable with the notion of a sort of second class character, Cohort. The notion that you have say 6 characters in the dungeon, all with their lives on the line, but 2 are naturally subservient to the rest is itself an odd skew. Sure evil characters could decide one character has less value than another, but the notion that there is a natural division there I find rather suspicious. As a DM I could and would be at least as likely to throw a wrench in the works from an NPC cohort as I would from a PC. The notion that some characters are just there to fill in the gaps and won't stir up the pot is at least as prone to abuse as the notion that there is a character on the table who is tied to the DM. Others are clearly more comfortable with that, but I don't see it as a resolution favourable to a DMPC. [/QUOTE]

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