Change how NPC characters work
I know that there is already a suggestion to: "Allow narrators to pick NPC characters for scenes without making them obstacles." But I don't think this goes far enough. Right now, characters are identical to obstacles and in many cases that does not make sense.
How this game handles NPCs as obstacles makes no sense, even when they are supposed to be hostile. When you write an NPC card, you naturally want to write a description of who they are. However, when you play such a card, your players have no idea how he/she is an obstacle. When you play Vampira, the sexy vampire queen, you then have to add extra clarification somewhere to specify if she is attacking the party or trying to seduce them or if the party must interact with her in some way to try and get something.
Even if we forget the fact that this does not allow for helpfull friendly NPCs, it is still a stupid system, because everytime you play the same NPC in a story, you have to write an additional clarification explaining what he/she is doing this time.
WHAT I SUGGEST INSTEAD.
NPC's can be attached to places and obstacles. They do not have Challenge points, but are instead classified as helpfull, harmfull or neutral.
Attaching an NPC to a place has no effect, as they are simply flavor text. Attaching an NPC to an obstacle however, does have an effect. Helpfull NPCs count essentially as a strength card, while harmfull NPCs count as a weakness card. However, NPC's do not influence how many cards players need to play. A 3 point obstacle with a harmfull NPC attached to it is resolved as a 4 point obstacle with one weakness card played on it.
To ensure that players can always sway the outcome on an obstacle, the challenge points of an obstacle must always be larger than the number of characters attached to it. A 2 point obstacle can have one character, a 3 point can have 2 etc.
REASON
This system allows the same NPC to be played in multiple scenes without the need to rewrite the card everytime. Instead, you simply attach him/her to an obstacle and specify if she is helping or harming. You can then leave the card description for describing the character.
-
Meurlorg
commented
All I have to say is any player in a game should have the option to turn any passive situation into combat and any combat situation into passive etc.. hopefully what you are suggesting isn't locking any potential interaction by limiting the way in which you interact but instead making the npc intent more obvious so that a player by choice can act accordingly.
-
Stella
commented
I like this idea, though it isn't the simplest solution to the problem presented, it gives characters some depth and distinction from other card types.
I also like that you can get the same effect as the old system: Just place the character on the obstacle as a neutral, and you have it.
I would like though to also allow narrators to give one character multiple points - for example, if you're going to be fighting the Dark Lord Mardulion, he can count as three weaknesses to be a bigger threat than the Wimpy Minion Fred you fought earlier. 100% agreed that the challenge should always be at least one more than the number of imbalanced points on it (that is, if we have three weakness points from the Dark Lord but one strength from the police chief, the narrator COULD make it only a three-point challenge.
Although maybe there should be some distinction between a character being part of a challenge and influencing the challenge? Hmm. Not sure what that would do mechanically but I think having a distinction made between the two visually would be good.
-
Wolf
commented
I think it's a pretty good idea to expand upon the concept of NPC cards. Seeing as they really don't exist as a separate function yet, it might be worth it to structure this as a system that would work conjointly with hostile NPC cards, and leave any further dissection of its possibilties to the narrator, spliting scenes well and when best required.
-
Anonymous commented
Isn't the detailing of how the character is an obstacle part of the scene text? I agree that the outcomes need to change for every time you use a character, which still makes sense of attaching them to an obstacle card, but I don't think the rest of the system around that is needed.