In a "Star Trek"sort of setting you almost always have to have 1 or 2 NPCs to fill out the landing party that beams down to a planet.

 As the GM its always easy for me because they take orders from the player characters and are usually lower ranking officers or enlisted crewmen.

- Ed C.

I will often pad out the party, especially it it is small or missing crucial skills but never to outshine party members.  Henchmen and hirelings have served basically the same purpose since OD&D.  One of the reasons I dislike the skill packages in Mongoose Traveller is it robs the GM of the ability to add in some NPC crew members that might come in handy as informants or patrons at a later point.  It also undermines the character creation system.

Anyhow, Rolemaster has a reputation for deadliness and healing of serious wounds is high level magic so I'll generally make a higher level healer of some sort available.  Sometimes it's the friendly travelling necromancer Doctor Cthulhlinguis but sometimes I'll just inbed Choteth the Sibici in the party.  Choteth is a high priest of the death god of Bashan, sometimes a patron or the object of an escort mission or just sizing up potential trouble makers for his own schemes.  At any rate, it helps to have someone around who can cast Organ Repair once in a while.

I know I personally would prefer letting players have "hired help" or followers that they have some say in controlling rather than having me have a NPC or two to control, more of an agency for players kinda thing.  People might tend to think you're trying to "run the game and play in it too" if you have an NPC that you are controlling who joins the party.

But I also have a wargaming background and have no problem controlling like 6-12 characters all at once, and most RPG players these days don't have that kind of background, but I'm working on that....

I used to use those but IME players leaned one of two ways:

• Players sent the NPC(s) to confront anything dangerous first
• If an NPC succeeded at anything I was a bad GM torturing players with a GMPC

Over the last few years my NPCs are now of two types:

• Questgiver: provides a very brief overview of what's going on then leaves ASAP
• Villains: to help the players reach a satisfying TPK

Don't De-Protagonize the PCs. The GM's job is to enhance Player Agency, duh!




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Quote from: Theory of Games on February 04, 2025, 07:46:03 PMIf an NPC succeeded at anything I was a bad GM torturing players with a GMPC

Ditch these morons and get real players.