Plot Device Characters

[Cyronax]

I am normally a 'hard mode' 4e DM who tries to maintain a non-linear mixed combat and roleplaying environment with in-character immersion as well as side humor.

All that said, I was reading Mutant and Masterminds (2e) and I noticed a great sidebar on p. 210 called the Plot Device Character ("Cosmic Imp").

It basically laid out a concept of using a 'god' like NPC to bother your PCs. Obviously the PCs can't face this foe in real combat.

So .... I wanted to hear other ENWorlders experiences with this sort of element. Suggestions beyond 'use a skill challenge' would be most welcome.

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An Aside:
A long standing desire of mine was to run an adventure (in normal 4e D&D) based off of the classic Avengers storyline -- The Korvac Saga.

This sort of villain is basically a meddling cosmic entity with the somewhat noble desire to make the world a better place through his reality-altering powers.

The key thing I'm looking at is that a Plot Device Character isn't a god. It doesn't grant spells to the Divine Power Source. At most it might have a warlock or two under its authority. Its main thing is direct intervention.
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Think Q from Star Trek or Loki in Thor comics, but with good intentions.

C.I.D.

 

[The Shaman]

Annoying as hell, in my experience.

 

[Cyronax]

Annoying as hell, in my experience.

That'd be my own response as well, generally. BUT .... as an adventure type (and a suggestion from M&M), its new territory for me. Is their a way to make it fun for the players?

Are their any successful published examples?

C.I.D.

 

[fba827]

I did something similar (though not exactly the same) like this a couple times - both incidentally way back when as some of my first D&D experiences so you'll see a few old references like 'name level' in my explanation.

Situation 1:
The PCs had a friend, a wizard of course. He was innocent and helpful enough. But after a while it turned out that every time he cast a spell, the cosmic forces tried to balance itself out elsewhere. Whenever he cast a fly spell for the party, a nearby town next to the mountains had a high gravity field appear (which in turn caused a rockslide). When he cast haste, some person elsewhere was inexplicably slowed (one time it ended up being an important NPC who needed to get from A to B for a peace summit, another time was a random baker). Yes, the 'balance' effects were sometimes corny / humorous. Other times, since our campaign scope was limited at the time, it was very meaningful since all the cities were hometowns for the PCs... so it was people they knew, etc. who got the shaft (so to speak). And the look on the players' faces when they realized that the things they'd been dealing with were aftereffects from the help they got from the friend in the prior mission.


Situation 2:
An annoying alien entity who was always in the background and just causing people to do things for the sake of sitting back and watching the situation unfold. All these events were seemingly unrelated, and this entity stayed 100% in the background. But once the PCs hit name level, they started to puzzle out that the random events they'd been involved in were actually being puppeteered by this entity. This in turn caused the need to appeal to a dragon to confront the entity for them to get him to stop what he was doing (which served as the capstone for that campaign).

In situation 2, I -think- if the presence of the entity was revealed too early, it would have frustrated the players (why keep putting out fires when you know it's being done by someone else that you are powerless to stop, etc). But by saving said entity to be a near-end reveal, it served as a good 'tie everything together' and allowed for some "oh that's why" type moments, and also didn't frustrate the players since now they actually had a chance to do something about it (even if indirectly).


Again that's not -exactly- what you're asking about (because in both cases the PCs eventually had a way to confront or indirectly confront the entity causing the problem). but it's somewhat tangent to what you're asking about.

 

[Gilladian]

My response to a "Q" type situation when my character (and the party he was in) was put into it was to sit down and say "well, you're able to do anything - so do it. We're done."

We saw no reason to continue to be adventurers or even to try to live out our lives. We were like the folks on the peace planet in Serenity. We lay down and died. I think one character may have gone out, Reaver-style and committed suicide, but it was the same difference.

So my response is "don't do it!"

 

[S'mon]

I would generally advise strongly against this plotline in D&D or similar games. It may work in more structured formats like Trek or superheroes, though.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Yeah, going with the consensus so far. Any character designed specifically (or even tangentially) to annoy the PCs needs to be one that they can eventually beat the crap out of, or otherwise thwart. Working toward a goal can be fun, but flat-out frustration isn't.

And you also never want to give such a character too much power for the "Well, why don't we just lie down and let you handle it?" effect, as mentioned above. Challenging the PCs is one thing, but completely removing their personal agency? Pretty much always bad.

 

[Relique du Madde]

Expect your players to try to kill him and if they do, don't be afraid to TPK. Nothing annoys players like a GMPC that can do everything they can do but better, especially one that shows "mercy" on the players when he knocks them down to 1 hp after they try killing him.

 

[Leatherhead]

It's kind of hard to make an unkillable character in DnD and not have it look out of place. Even gods can be killed.

Now making something extremely hard to kill is a different story.

 

[Shayuri]

The Cosmic Imp works, and is funny, in genres like Star Trek and superhero comics because they exist pretty much for no reason other than to pants the heroes. Sometimes literally. I mean, lets face it... Picard and Superman are stuffy, frequently obnoxious, self-righteous...the list goes on. They fight for the right, and we love them for it, but by the same token sometimes it's just deliciously fun to see them taken down a peg.

But who can do that? See, it can't be a normal foe, because then it's not being taken down a peg, it's a legitimate Hero's Challenge, which is an entirely different thing that they are required to win (or lose, and then come back stronger and win later). So it has to be something that they have absolutely no chance against in a fight or real contest. Something arbitrarily powerful. And then, to soften that up a bit, it has to play by rules...rules that explain why it doesn't just do whatever it wants, whenever it wants to, and instead chooses to pants our hero. Finally, it has to have a sense of humor...something to let us know with a wink and a smile that yep...this is me, pantzing your hero. It's funny. Go ahead and laugh.

The trick is that, as has been said before and will be said again, a role-playing game does not really emulate popular culture fiction. Some tropes can carry over, but many simply can't. At it's dark, egotistic heart, every role playing game is a power fantasy. We play larger than life characters, with stupendous powers, on quests of magnificent import. We don't do this because we like to be pantzed. In fact, we don't like it. Or, to put it more simply:

It's fun to watch someone else get pantzed. It's not fun to be pantzed.

Watch Superman in a Myxlplik comic. Does he look like he's having fun? Uh huh. Now watch Picard and Q. He spends a lot of time shouting, and that vein in his temple looks awfully swollen. Of course they hate it, that's part of what makes it fun for us.

Remember, your players aren't -watching- the game happen. They're playing the characters. Now sure, a healthy psychological distance is VERY recommended, but even the most dedicated of hardcore roleplayers has a little shard of him/herself in those characters. That's what makes the magic work.

In game design parlance; the fun of a player depends almost entirely on the ability of his or her choices to affect outcomes during play. Like Mouseferatu said...agency. That's what it's all about. Every GM knows sometimes player choices don't mean anything. Sometimes, the PC's are GOING to be on that ship to the moon, and there's NOTHING that any die roll, or feeble attempt to delay, will change. Good GM's will make the players believe though. Or, even better, work the part where choices don't matter into a sort of pre-game cutscene, and begin once their choices DO matter.

But the Cosmic Imp scenario revolves around denying the characters enfranchisement. The whole reason it's entertaining is because these powerful people are having to do stupid and humiliating things at the whim of something far greater than they. And there's nothing they can do about it. And even if they CAN do something about it, it's still necessarily revolving entirely around this strange entity. When Supes is up against Myxlplik, only one thing Supes can do matters; get him to say his name backwards. That's it. Nothing else matters. He has no choices, no options, no enfranchisement.

Fun to read (in moderation)...sucky to be the one who has to yank his drawers back up off the floor when it's done.