Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 3180272" data-attributes="member: 6779">I dispute that a Mary Sue NPC and a DM-PC are the same thing -- I've seen them both.In both my regular game, and the regular game of the other DM in the group, there are NPC party members who share in the XP and treasure as if they were PCs, as well as get their occasional moments to shine. In his case, the NPC is a fighter who's dumb as a brick but we wouldn't want to adventure without him. In my case, the NPC is the party cleric, and his primary role is to pull the other players' fat out of the fire -- and they love him for it. (And he's been captured and rescued, taken below 0 hp and given emergency healing, etc., just like any PC.) I think of him as &quot;my character&quot; in the party, but he is just another member of the team.By contrast, I played in a convention game where the first part of the session was the players (all playing 3rd-level characters) coming upon a scantily-clad barbarian chick who was under assault by bandits. Fair enough, we went rushing to the rescue only to end up standing around watching as she hacked them to pieces, getting a minimum of two attacks per round -- three if she got to use Cleave. The rest of the session was devoted to us following her around as she took on a mission from a sorcerer and recruited us all to go along, wiped out the monsters that attacked us on the way, and of course got to all the neat stuff first.The DM in question was so clueless that I don't think he ever quite got why I started referring to her as &quot;Mary Sue, the Barbarian,&quot; but she was a clear example of the kind of thing that people get so riled up about. However, she was a very different creature from the our big dumb fighter or rescue cleric, respectively.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool&nbsp; &nbsp; :cool:"&nbsp; data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="The_Gneech, post: 3180272, member: 6779"] I dispute that a Mary Sue NPC and a DM-PC are the same thing -- I've seen them both. In both my regular game, and the regular game of the other DM in the group, there are NPC party members who share in the XP and treasure as if they were PCs, as well as get their occasional moments to shine. In his case, the NPC is a fighter who's dumb as a brick but we wouldn't want to adventure without him. In my case, the NPC is the party cleric, and his primary role is to pull the other players' fat out of the fire -- and they love him for it. (And he's been captured and rescued, taken below 0 hp and given emergency healing, etc., just like any PC.) I think of him as "my character" in the party, but he is just another member of the team. By contrast, I played in a convention game where the first part of the session was the players (all playing 3rd-level characters) coming upon a scantily-clad barbarian chick who was under assault by bandits. Fair enough, we went rushing to the rescue only to end up standing around watching as she hacked them to pieces, getting a minimum of two attacks per round -- three if she got to use Cleave. The rest of the session was devoted to us following her around as she took on a mission from a sorcerer and recruited us all to go along, wiped out the monsters that attacked us on the way, and of course got to all the neat stuff first. The DM in question was so clueless that I don't think he ever quite got why I started referring to her as "Mary Sue, the Barbarian," but she was a clear example of the kind of thing that people get so riled up about. However, she was a very different creature from the our big dumb fighter or rescue cleric, respectively. -The Gneech :cool: [/QUOTE]

Verification