How do you have a mentor travel with a group of PC's and NOT steal their spotlight?

[Felix]

Think of the blind seer in Krull; he's powerful, he can tell the future, but he needs PC to get him places, needs to be in specific locations for his power to work, and is rubbish in a fight.

Just because the PCs lay the smackdown in a fight doesn't mean that every powerful character can do the same thing; the venerable elven wizard with a con of 4 might have once been a combat machine, but he's so low on HP now that he'd be wise to stay out of a fight and rely on his divinations.

 

[Psion]

Think of the blind seer in Krull;

That's the first thing I thought of when I read the thread...

he's powerful, he can tell the future, but he needs PC to get him places, needs to be in specific locations for his power to work, and is rubbish in a fight.

And gets gakked and replaced by a doppleganger assassin...

 

[Felix]

And gets gakked and replaced by a doppleganger assassin...

One of the best NPC gakkings in cinema.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I liked one of the Dragonlance adventures involving Fizban. In this case they guy's actually a god, but he needs his strength to face the BBEG at the end of the adventure. He will help out the PCs as needed, but he wants to conserve his strength. If he has to help out too much , the the party gets wiped in the final encounter. Adapt as needed.

 

[lukelightning]

And gets gakked and replaced by a doppleganger assassin...

Nah, he'll get gakked by my character who is tired of leading this blind old fool around.

 

[sniffles]

I'm involved in a campaign currently that started out with all the PCs as students/wards/relatives of high-level mentors. The mentors were an adventuring group themselves who had got back together to go on a major quest. One of the mentors was the father of one of the other PCs. My own PC's mentor was his wife.

In our campaign the mentors quickly disappeared after getting the PCs started on the adventuring path. But I could see keeping the mentors around. LOTR is a good example of that. Gandalf has to leave periodically; he can't stay with the hobbits all the time. Aragorn is way more powerful than the hobbits, as are Legolas and Gimli, but they still can't defend the hobbits against everything they run up against. They're frequently outnumbered.

If the mentor is a fighter then whenever the PCs run into something magical the mentor will be mostly useless, especially if you don't equip him with a lot of magic items of his own.

The mentor could also be a cleric who's more interested in providing spiritual growth than in casting spells. A cleric of a god of knowledge or healing could focus on something other than offensive or buff spells. Just because all those spells are on the cleric list doesn't mean you have to let the cleric prepare them. You can severely limit what spells he has access to.

If you want to keep the party alive, let the cleric mentor heal them after combat is over, but don't have him do anything but pray during the fight. If you're not interested in using him to keep the party alive, then perhaps he only gives healing to those who follow the same deity he does, or he may charge them for healing.

 

[humble minion]

D&D gives you all sorts of out-of-the-box options.

Cursed mentor has been mentioned (mark of justice could also be handy...), and I suppose crippling/laming/blinding/amputating limbs is also a possibility, though you'll have to explain why the mentor has never been able to get this magically fixed.

Other than that, someone mentioned the mentor being a ghost (though you'd want to be a bit careful there - it could be even more overpowering). How about the mentor being an intelligent magic item? A brain in a jar? A really off-the-wall one could be to make the mentor an evil creature that's infected with 'good' lycanthropy - the mentor will only be helpful during the full moon in its hybrid/animal form, and could well be working actively against the PCs the rest of the time.

But is sounds like you've already developed the mentor character and would find it hard to apply any of these ideas retrospectively. So how about making the mentor do all the drudge work? Perhaps the location the mentor wants to explore is hideously dangerous and magically unstable - random magic manifestations, planar rifts, etc, etc. If the mentor has to spend most of his spells warding the party with things like dimensional anchor, protection from energy, and the like just so they can survive, he'll be a lot less dominating (especially if you don't give him too much in the way of destructive magic items). Perhaps he wants to cast a time-intensive and draining spell like vision, legend lore or the like, and the PCs will have to guard him while he does it. Or you could even have him cast Contact Other Plane, cheat so that he fails his save, and then make the PCs protect their catatonic/insane mentor in the wilderness for a while...

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

If the NPC in question is really a mentor, and not an employer, you could just make him a total bastard.

We don't need your advice. We can make money and collect fame our own way. Bye.

People rarely put up with bad bosses if they can find a job elsewhere, unless they're dating someone at work or something like that. That's a great way to run a terrible DMPC.

1. Mentor can only be in one place at a time and whatever he's doing needs at least two pair of hands.

Do you mean some place where the PCs aren't?

Basically, he's field artillery and needs someone to get him where he needs to go.

That's still stealing a PC's role. And as a higher level wizard, he'll be doing a heck of a lot of damage. Even if a PC spellcaster doesn't use direct damage, the mentor NPC still steals the "magic as offense" role, takes away kills from the fighter-types, etc.

He might be able to use a few spell trigger items, or low level spells in the PC's spellbooks, but as is, he is very vulnerable to his enemies (which also might have the "lay low" implication... his enemies might know he is weak and are on the lookout for him).

He can still cast those spells better than the PC mage. I can see why he would want protection, but isn't going spelunking in the "Cave of the Horrendous Weretiger/Illithids" really going to make him safer?

Give the group a magic item that somehow communicates with the mentor.

Good constructive advice that avoids problems. A+!

I like using an Expert as well. Make them higher level, give them a great skill score in a few skills and most of their feats are Skill Focus (Knowledge [arcana]) and stuff like that. Oh and lots of languages, unless maybe they 're not an arcane scholar. Make sure they have skills PCs don't have so they're not stealing the spotlight. Give them really strict narrow skills that no adventurer would want to take but is still important to the storyline.

"Almost no one knows about the Old Ones but me." He has ranks in Knowledge (Cthulhu) and has somehow kept his sanity. We think. Probably.

I think using an Expert isn't as good as the magical communication device, however. Isn't it odd how the NPCs (almost) never target him in combat? (And if they do, they're wasting actions they could have used to challenge the PCs instead.) And look, the guy never seems to fall into those pit traps during combat the fiendish kobolds keep setting up. Etc.*

*I ran into a similar problem the last time I used an NPC who was sort of like a GMPC. It was Modern, so no loot. He didn't get a share of XP. He had Treat Injury, a skill none of the PCs had (and was very important, but wasn't the incredibly narrow only-useful-for-plot skill I mentioned earlier). He was lower level and an Ordinary (basically d20 Modern's version of the Expert). And I gave the PCs control of him.

In one battle, he stood in a great place to get cover. That's where the NPCs had set up the "flaming logs falling from the ceiling trap". (The NPCs were in a room. As soon as the PCs entered the room, combat broke out, so there was no time to search for traps.) He got burned. If I were controlling him, I don't know if he would have avoided the spot. Subconsciously I might have directed him to another spot that would give him cover, like the one he ran towards as soon as he put the fire out!

 

[Kurotowa]

Escort missions are very hard to pull off right. It gets twice as hard when the person to be escorted is more powerful than the escort, because the situation just plain doesn't make sense. A contrived solution is just that, contrived, so it's best to change the situation so that the mentor needs an escort.

One solution to to make him a Wizard 3/Expert 5 or the like. It gives him the Knowledge ranks to remain mentorly but without the arcane firepower that overshadows the PCs. Another is to make the mentor location dependent. Perhaps he's lame and can't travel, or has duties elsewhere that he can't ditch to go exploring. The PCs get sent on the exploration in his place, thus eliminating the escort portion.

 

[Psion]

He can still cast those spells better than the PC mage. I can see why he would want protection, but isn't going spelunking in the "Cave of the Horrendous Weretiger/Illithids" really going to make him safer?

I'm giving the GM here enough credit to come up with a scenario that makes sense in context.

If, as I said, this cave has his replacement spellbooks, then it just might. And the weretigers might be pussycats compared to his enemies...