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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 7944580" data-attributes="member: 59816">A quick story: Years ago (maybe as much as fifteen) I was running a game at my store (I own a comic and game store). It was an after-hours game, but I had over-invited people to play (or they had brought friends, I don't recall). At any rate, I had ten or eleven players show up. We could have split into two tables, but everyone wanted to play my game. To make a longish story short, I wound up running the game with all of them, but we did one interesting thing: One of the players (the one who had volunteered to run the potential extra table) played what we called the "Non-Player Player (NPP)". The NPP worked like this: At the beginning of every session (and a few times between, when he had questions), we talked about the general plot of the game. He role-played and ran the in-party NPCs. He gave me feedback (and sometimes played) either the main bad-guys or some of their underlings. He took half the monsters in a fight. (Often we made sure that his monsters fought the players at his end of the table. Sometimes we had stuff happening simultaneously, when it wasn't disruptive). He played a shopkeeper when a player went shopping (taking that player aside) while the other players were investigating the main plot with me. That sort of thing. It was a lot of fun, and worked very, very well.Play By Post: Probably the main issue with PBP is that players come-and-go, often without warning. I think that if we modified my NPP idea, it could help this out. The NPP could play NPCs, and maybe even some monsters or BBGs, but also could play missing players. I understand that often playing another person's character can feel like stepping on someone's toes, but it's not always easy or desirable to write characters in-and-out of a plot. It bothers me, anyway. I'm always happy to have the original player return (and I think most of us are pretty forgiving when it comes to that kind of absence) but the momentum of PBP can get lost fast when some players post often, and others less so, and others disappear completely. The Pinch-Hitter: Another way of looking at it, is to have a volunteer player who is willing to keep up with reading the game (maybe also playing an NPC or the occasional monster, to give them something to do while keeping up) who steps in to run a missing player's character until that player returns (or the GM can write them out of the story, and/or replace them with some new players).What do you think? I mean, I'd be willing to play NPP in someone else's game, and I'd sure love to have one in mine (I've got three. All of them could use it, IMO).</blockquote>

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