Too Many NPCs?

[ptolemy18]

Hello everybody,

I'm trying to run a balanced D&D game that's a mix between role-playing, with lots of interesting NPCs who aren't necessarily enemies, and good ol' dice-tossing slaughter.

However, after running a campaign in this style for a few months, I've noticed that what ends up happening (due to my own incompetence) is that the PCs have too many NPCs tagging along with them, and it makes it difficult for me to balance the battles. :/

What's the best way to incorporate NPCs into the campaign world without taking attention away from the PCs? On the one hand, I don't want *all* the NPCs to merely be hapless cannon fodder who run around screaming whenever monsters attack... but on the other hand, there is the risk of the NPCs helping out the PCs too much (due to my miscalculation of challenge levels), and making the encounters too easy, or "kill-stealing" and hogging the glory.

Maybe I need to "pull strings" a little more to keep the NPCs off-camera when fights start. For instance, recently the players needed to get some rangers to follow a trail for them... but I've established that the rangers are about a half-mile ahead of the PCs, so when the PCs get attacked by wandering monsters, the rangers are too far away to help.

I'm running a somewhat political game with no alignments, so I *want* the PCs to encounter a fair amount of NPCs, in some cases as allies, in other cases as foreshadowing so that they might fight them in the future. But (as I learned the hard way from being a player in some especially lame VAMPIRE campaigns) it's no fun playing in a game where the NPCs end up being cooler than the players. Maybe I'm just trying to incorporate too much role-playing? The players' reaction to most NPCs seems to fall on the side of either "This guy sucks, he's a wimp" or "This guy's annoying, he's too powerful, he's hogging all the attention."

At least there's one thing I know always works... the best thing about having lots of NPCs is that monsters can kill them to show how buff the monsters are...

Jason

 

[Sammael]

Question #1: How many PCs are there in the party?
Question #2: Why are the NPCs tagging along?
Question #3: Even if the NPCs are tagging along for a very good reason, is it really necessary for them to participate in combat?

 

[S'mon]

The experienced "there is no spoon" GM option is to recognise that Rules Are For Players - include the NPCs and have extra monsters to fight them, but freeform/arbitrarily determine the results of those battles, and just use the dice for the PC vs monster battles. This eliminates the balance & book-keeping issues.

 

[S'mon]

But (as I learned the hard way from being a player in some especially lame VAMPIRE campaigns) it's no fun playing in a game where the NPCs end up being cooler than the players. Maybe I'm just trying to incorporate too much role-playing? The players' reaction to most NPCs seems to fall on the side of either "This guy sucks, he's a wimp" or "This guy's annoying, he's too powerful, he's hogging all the attention."

This sounds like you shouldn't have NPCs accompanying the PCs. In my group the players are always trying to recruit NPC cannon-fodder, but you may be better off having NPCs avoid enlisting alongside the PCs. Have NPC vs NPC battles occur "off camera", even if on the same battlefield (& don't set down minis for them!)

 

[SweeneyTodd]

This is one of the reasons I like to have adventures take place outside of a "home base" that the PCs go back to fairly often. It makes it easier to have NPCs around when you want to have interaction, and out of the way when there's traveling and fighting going on.

The last time this came up, we had the PCs based out of a town and keep that were under danger of periodic raids out of the wilderness. The non-combat NPCs stayed holed up in the town most of the time, while the guys who were tougher than the PCs had their own sets of problems, like keeping up patrols and going on skirmishes to other places.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If the PC's are significantly stronger than the NPC's (e.g.: higher level), this won't often be a problem.

You could also make NPC's who avoid fighting. "sorry, mac, you're not payin' me to die, just to follow a trail!"

 

[cmanos]

I try not to have NPC's running along with the party. It becomes way to seasy for me to start treating them like my favorite characters and giving them all the good stuff.

If the players go out of their way to hire an NPC for a specific task, I'd run the NPC side of combat cinematically with no dice rolled. You set up the combat for the players, then add enough other stuff going on to keep the NPC out of the fight, while making it look like he's doing something.

 

[birdchili]

I'm currently running an urban campaign in a relatively dangerous city, and the PCs have been almost completely unsuccesful in recruiting people to truck about in monster-infested areas with them.

Why?

They're *full of monsters*

Almost everyone in town is a low-level npc class (experts, politicians, commoners, etc...) and while they're brave enough as far as it goes (they're living in a "frontier" town), they aren't suicidal. Mostly they're into "law and order" and having regulations to keep the populace safe and consider adventurers reckless (probably an understatement).

There have been many npcs on the fringes of adventures, and the urban location means that there are lots of people for the pcs to resource between monster-bashing sessions, but you couldn't pay most of these citizens enough to accompany some PC loons into the headquarters of a disease cult or to stick a sword into an otyugh in the dump - that's lunacy.

There are other adventurers, of course... but they're such a minority of the population that I feel justified in not having my party meet all of them right away. Most of the adventurers I've introduced are actually in a different party with their own motivations, and are considerably more capable than the pcs.

 

[The_Gneech]

The other DM in my group wanted to run Against the Giants/Liberation of Geoff ... so he loaded us up with NPCs so we'd have a fighting chance.

Every fight takes forever. 0.o And the loot and XP is spread so thin that he is introducing more just to beef us up a bit.

So yeah, culling NPCs from the adventuring party is nothing but good.

My main suggestion is give each NPC a specific goal, beyond "hanging out with these people." When their goal is reached, they say their goodbyes and go.

Also, have a beholder disintegrate some of them. That'll give the survivors a convincing reason to think twice about hanging around with these dangerous "adventurer" types.

-The Gneech

 

[DonTadow]

The experienced "there is no spoon" GM option is to recognise that Rules Are For Players - include the NPCs and have extra monsters to fight them, but freeform/arbitrarily determine the results of those battles, and just use the dice for the PC vs monster battles. This eliminates the balance & book-keeping issues.

I use this method. There are essentially two party's worth of pcs and npcs traveling together in my campaign. The "NPC" party usually fights in the background and I use percentage dice to determine the outcome, if someone was badly heart ect. I want to keep the focus on the pcs. In major battles I might pull a couple NPCs in there. The only complication comes when one of my pcs has a vested interest in one of the npcs. Then I'll pull that npc into the pc battle.