Exchange of Realities

I went out on a bit of a limb with the Powerful Characters riffs (I’m almost surprised I haven’t been buried in people calling my approach to NPCs crazy, honestly). But I’m not the type to push ideas like that without having put the theories to the test, and I have a lot of practice in powerful but nonthreatening characters. Let’s take a look.

On the one hand, we have the everpresent Ruby. She’s actually about even with the group, but unlike many of the others, she shines in a fight just as much as the PCs do. To avoid conflict, I gave her two specialties that the rest of the group didn’t get much use out of: grappling and combat sorcery. What this means is that she tends to serve one of two purposes in a fight: either she’s holding a foe still for the rest of the group to take out, or she’s tanked and off distracting the little fish. (Okay, those are the group purposes; I also use her as a power barometer sometimes, since anyone familiar with her kind of fighting knows how dangerous she can be. If the opponent nearly one-shots Ruby, the group knows they’re in trouble.) She also benefits from a relationship, established onstage, with the quirky crafter Luath, and the fact that she can serve as arcane transport.

In contrast, there’s Kiara, another long-running NPC. Unlike Ruby, she doesn’t tend to be too involved in the group’s exploits these days; hers is an “I’ll be working to my strengths over here” sort of power. Also unlike Ruby, she’s been around a lot longer. Her advantages are working in the rules of the world around her, information gathering, and arcane experimentation; while these are usually done offstage, she’s occasionally been known to attempt to reconstruct a scene while the rest of the group is discussing what to do next or being shocked at what they’ve found.

And then we have Amaya (and Shizuyo) and Tehane. Now, conventional wisdom would tell me it’s impossible to make those two ladies functional as one-shot NPCs, let alone running ones; along with being more powerful than the group, and having slightly overlapping areas of specialty, they’re both cameos of former PC concepts. So what I do with them is pretty simple. First, I make sure that the things they can claim to do were all things that they did when I was playing them (trying to keep it “real” in this timestream). Yes, this includes the god-wrestling ferret. Second, I give them distance so I can avoid temptation to overplay them; last we saw Tehane, she had taken up residence in a formerly abandoned city and was trying to renovate one of the old buildings, while Amaya was on a deep-cover infiltration in the Underworld. Third—what’s to say everything has to be completely peachy with that kind of NPC? According to this ferret, there’s something going on with Amaya…

The really powerful sorts (and in this setting, there are a lot), I deal with similarly, giving them other things to do. These three are active in politics. This one has assignments. This one hasn’t been seen in a while. This one practically never leaves home, and can you blame her? Either way, they can be asked for favors (though they’ll probably refuse), hit up for information, generally chatted with, and asked after, but they’re not doing the group’s jobs for them, and there are reasons why the group are the ones who are doing what the group’s doing.

Powerful characters. Reasonable impact on the world. Nobody landing too hard on the PCs’ toes. All good, right?