NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dlsharrock" data-source="post: 4254799" data-attributes="member: 55833">[SBLOCK=OOC Dire Lemming, and anyone confused about extra characters]In my tabletop group we used to call these player NPCs (non-prominent-characters). Basically, it's an incidental character you can bring into a situation much as the DM brings in an NPC at opportune moments. Doctor LeGraid's wife would be a perfect example. If the group ever head over to the Doc's house, his wife will be a character he can roleplay at the same time as the Doctor and it isn't down to the Keeper to determine her actions or responses. It places a part of the player's background or immediate circle of friends and family firmly in the hands of the player. The Keeper can't arbitrarily kill the character, or have them do things the player might not like, because essentially, the character belongs to the player. Quite how the courtesan might be introduced into play would really depend on the situation or the adventure. You might decide Adam bumps into her in the bar, or she might be travelling on the same tram, that kind of thing. He might even have her over when the group unexpectedly call round his place <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> The nitty gritty of when and how remains to be seen. Player NPCs are incidental characters, for embellishing a scene or helping carry across some facet of the main PC's background which you'd like to explore in-game. They aren't alternate player characters to bring into adventures or play on a permanent basis at the same time as your original PC. For all intents and purposes, they're extras. The fact is, she  becomes *your* character, complete with stats and so on. I can't use her as part of a plot hook. I can't suddenly announce she's been killed off and I can't start moving her around, putting words in  her mouth or giving her roles in the game if she does crop up for some reason. It's the difference between player domain and Keeper domain.It's not quite the same thing as having an alternate player character, which is something else I've played with in the past. This is basically writing up a new investigator, complete with character sheet, then using him or her when you fancy a change of pace and letting the original character take a break from adventuring. Usually I'd insist character swaps of this sort only occur between adventures, or where appropriate, with one character being out of the picture entirely while the other is kept in play and vice versa. It can add interesting facets to a game, and keeps things interesting for players who like the character creation side of things as much as the roleplaying. It works particularly well in CoC because PCs often need to take time out to recover sanity (we're sometimes talking in-game months) and also because you don't have the same level of progression you might get in, say, D&D where you tend to stick with the same PC throughout because you want to increase levels, add classes, skills and so on.As previously mentioned, this is all up to individual players. Stick with what you feel comfortable with, would be the golden rule.[/SBLOCK]</blockquote>

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