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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brimshack" data-source="post: 3190282" data-attributes="member: 34694">Sorry I missed this quote. I was getting a little frustrated with the discussion to be honest, and I just got back from Gen-Con So-Cal. So, I haven't been keeping up.Your second paragraph gets to the heart of my concern. Screwing someone over isn't necessarily what I have in mind, but I do think a cohort ought to be considered a real person with a real life of his own and real preferences. The notion that one person's loyalty is settled and can be taken for granted is what I find objectionable in the use of cohorts. I am well aware that there is a rule for them and that it costs a feat to get them. This doesn't change the fact that the practice is prone to abuse by the players. Your comparison of the cohort to a wand is precisely the heart of my concern. I'm not interested in any world in which a person of any kind has the functional significance of a wand.Okay.No. A DMPC is not by definition a Mary Sue. That they tend to be is a noted fact. That regular NPCs can also become Mary Sues and Scene Stealers is also clearly true. The attempt to redefine a DMPC as a Mary Sue effectively turns an empirical question about how a DM actually manages the character in question into a matter of semantics. Just because a DM runs a PC and considers it his own doesn't mean he will run it as a scene stealer or create it as a Mary Sue. And just because you call somethign an NPC doesn't mean it won't be run as a scene stealer. Your concern is reasonable; your statement of that concern is not.As you've read my posts, I think it should be clear that I too think that is a bad thign. I also think that is one of the advantages of a declared DMPC. In my circles, a declared DMPC is rolled up at the level of the party and under the same constraints as the regular PCs (plus a couple metagaming restrictions on long term problem solving). The only times I have ever been part of where the DMs character was consistently scene stealing and well above the power level of the party the character in question was technically considered an NPC. Often they were introduced without the initial intent to keep them in the party. They helped us with a situation, then they helped again, and again, and again... until the DM is effectively running a character with all the emotional attachements of a regular PC. As the NPC inthese situations was not initially rolled up as the rest of the party, it was not subject  to the same restrictions and hence ended up several levels above the party.Now we can say that the characters in question (paragraph just above) is now effectively a DMPC, but that approach is misleading. It leads to the expectation that gradual continuum can be resolved with a simple categorical reference. It can't. The DMs screwed up in these instances not by making a single decision about the nature of the character, but in a series of distinctions in which the character gradually took center stage away from the PCs. This is a question about how the DM conducts himself, not a simple classificatory exercise of finding the right label for the right character. There was never a magic moment in which the character became a DMPC much less a moment ni which the DM decided to make the character a DMPC. What there was was a gradual evolution of the campaign into a situation in which a character technically classified as an NPC was in effect being run as a PC.</blockquote>

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