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Who's your Gandalf now, baby?
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<blockquote data-quote="Darth Shoju" data-source="post: 2968062" data-attributes="member: 11397"><p>I had one in my previous campaign. He was a lvl 20+ mage who was cursed by a death goddess to be perpetually stuck in the last moment of his life. As such he could not memorize new spells and those he cast were gone. I had him travel with the party (level 10-12 ) and basically used him to provide plot information and save the party's bacon when they didn't think things through or I accidentally over-powered them. </p><p></p><p>It was possibly the stupidest thing I did in that campaign. The party grew to resent him as they didn't trust him and didn't like the meta-game idea of someone always being there to bail them out. Whenever I wasn't using him to shoe-horn the party back onto my railroad of a plot I forgot about him. Too many times one of the players would stop in the middle of combat and ask what this NPC was doing because I hadn't had him act the whole time. Usually I would say something stupid like "you don't see him" and then he would re-appear after the combat. :\ This would cause the party to dislike him even more. </p><p></p><p>*sigh* I will never pull that crap again. If I do have an NPC travel with the party he will fill a specific need and be of equal or lower level, and will have a personality (and I won't forget him). I'm also going to avoid railroading so I won't need an NPC to get them back on track. And if they need info that is important to the plot they will have to seek out someone who knows, and that person will likely be an Expert or something. </p><p></p><p>Blarg. "Gandalf" characters are best left to novels IMO.</p><p></p><p> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad :mad:" data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Darth Shoju, post: 2968062, member: 11397"] I had one in my previous campaign. He was a lvl 20+ mage who was cursed by a death goddess to be perpetually stuck in the last moment of his life. As such he could not memorize new spells and those he cast were gone. I had him travel with the party (level 10-12 ) and basically used him to provide plot information and save the party's bacon when they didn't think things through or I accidentally over-powered them. It was possibly the stupidest thing I did in that campaign. The party grew to resent him as they didn't trust him and didn't like the meta-game idea of someone always being there to bail them out. Whenever I wasn't using him to shoe-horn the party back onto my railroad of a plot I forgot about him. Too many times one of the players would stop in the middle of combat and ask what this NPC was doing because I hadn't had him act the whole time. Usually I would say something stupid like "you don't see him" and then he would re-appear after the combat. :\ This would cause the party to dislike him even more. *sigh* I will never pull that crap again. If I do have an NPC travel with the party he will fill a specific need and be of equal or lower level, and will have a personality (and I won't forget him). I'm also going to avoid railroading so I won't need an NPC to get them back on track. And if they need info that is important to the plot they will have to seek out someone who knows, and that person will likely be an Expert or something. Blarg. "Gandalf" characters are best left to novels IMO. :mad: [/QUOTE]
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