Game Wish 56: Friends and Associates

Game Wish 56 asks about Friends and Associates

Do your characters have friends and associates who play a regular role in the game? What about henchmen and hirelings in the old D&D sense or Champions-style DNPCs? How does your group handle playing them? What sorts of things are they used for in the game? Is their influence good, bad, or indifferent?

In on-line games I like to give my characters friends and relations, as much to give the GM a few plot hooks to play with as much as anything else. Of course, when I'm playing in a game where 99.8% of the population dies from a plague, the same GM will kill them all of slowly and painfully while watching how my character reacts emotionally. Similarly, the first incarnation of goth-metal guitarist Karl Tolhurst came complete with the rest of the band (one of whom was dead and another undead), as well as several members of his family.

The long-running AD&D game I played years ago had a large cast of henchbeings of assorted, considerably outnumbering the actual player characters, and a major reason why combats tended to go on all night.

As a rule, I dislike henchpeople when I'm GMing, because I have a tendency to forget them and let them fade into the background. Character's friends and family are another matter entirely; they're a valuable source of plot hooks. I always try to make them individuals in their own right that have lives of their own.

One character that gave me real problems was when the player character was the bodyguard to a powerful mage. The mage a character of a much higher power level than the mostly "street level" PCs, and whenever she was around she tended to dominate things. I eventually had her kidnapped by bad guys (using a teleportation machine) just to take her out of the picture for a while, and force her bodyguard PC to take the initiative.