Stories of GMPCs

>>52122024
my GMPC was a walking parody of one
level 20 with epic boons, packed to the gills with artifacts, annoyingly polite to everyone

he never seemed to be able to help the PCs with their personal problems, he was always saving the world off-screen

>>52122040
Did you ever encounter one of the threats he fought? Sounds like one of the better GMPCs by the way.

>>52122024
Mine usually kept them as background characters.
My personal favorite was just a giant cleric of winter who was basically a fucking viking, and had a barrel of kittens he carried on his back to give to the hopeless people to raise spirits.

>>52122024
Only time I ever used one was a pissbaby priest who all but what his pants when fighting started, the party had to track him down after a fight if they wanted his heals and he was never able to combat heal. It was only because they absolutely refused to take no for an answer when they went to a church and demanded a member of the clergy essentially work as a mercenary for them. After around 15 real time minutes of me telling them it wasn't going to work I caved to keep the game moving.

>>52122239
one of the early quests was the party holding off several goblins while he beat the crap out of a dragon

later on the party was able to kill their own dragon without his help

>>52122024
My GMPC is basically just a walking emotional blackmail machine to keep the players from going too far off the alignment deep end.

It's actually working. She's effectively become the party's conscience without having any idea what it is they actually do.

>>52122795

Please teach me your ways

>>52122873
Make them doe-eyed and naive as fuck, but give them a really useful skillset and an extremely helpful attitude. Make them easily manipulated, but essentially innocent and attached to the party.

If you roleplay them well with those traits in mind, the party will probably attempt to exploit the DMPC, and will probably succeed, but you will likely have them talking to you post-session, and asking you to stop roleplaying them like that because it's making them feel like an asshole. Then you shrug, and ask them if they think they were being an asshole.

>>52122024
My DMPC is a vigilante in the supers game. He has a lot of resources that the party frequently calls on. He's not super powerful but I run him like he actually knows how to use his skills, resources, and abilities to the best of his ability. He hasn't killed anyone but has a reputation in the criminal underworld as being a ruthless murderer. Actually he's more of a NPC. He doesn't accomplish goals like the party does, he doesn't outshine anyone, and he is mostly in the background fighting small time criminals and mobsters, not really helping with the big stuff unless the PCs specifically come to him. He often fails where the PCs could have succeeded.

Hes still my self insert but he's not really a big deal in the games.

>>52122024
Every time I read one of these threads I think how fortunate I was to be a teenager when the Internet was still a baby.

>>52123095
You and me both.

My game has a DMPC. He's basically the party babysitter because everyone but the ranger is retarded. I know some of that is down to my own lack of experience as a DM and not managing things as well in the past as I do now, but all other things being equal, the ranger shouldn't be outperforming the druid. The players mostly like him. He's a paladin who mostly handles the undead and exorcisms and shit, but mostly wants to sit around playing his violin and writing music because he's getting old.

Gonna be a steep learning curve when I kill him off in a couple of sessions.

I've only played in one game with a GMPC, but boy howdy. Before I get started I want to let everyone know that this is tame by /tg/ standards, but I now understand the frustration.

The DM, because the game initially started with just one other player made a ranger, paladin, and a rogue to show DnD 5e to Player1. P1, getting very hyped at the idea of RPing, which he hadn't done before outside of chat rooms or Second Life, wanted to keep playing and invited Player2 and myself to the game. The DM decided that since we had a small party that we didn't need so much DMPC help, and decided to play the ranger.

The ranger was fine at first. I don't remember his build, but he didn't do too much in combat and mostly just did mundane things like handle animal, tracking, and foraging. And while I had been skeptical about having a bonafide DMPC in the party because of /tg/'s horror stories, I was thinking that this could work out and that it wasn't so bad to have someone else to RP with. It wasn't like he was the star of the game, he fired off 1 or 2 arrows a round in combat (only once dealing significant damage with a lucky critical) and just did mundane things. Then we fought the dragon.

The dragon was the boss at the end of an ice dungeon in a tropical rainforest. After several rounds of intense fighting with some sort of dragon cult leader and a shapeshifted dragon, another dragon roars in the distance and the dragon we were fighting shits his pants, transforms back into a (iirc) black dragon, and runs away, the cultist having been dispatched 1 or 2 rounds earlier. That's when we found the egg. It was a beautiful egg that had the color of a very clear or pale sapphire and was cold to the touch. The ranger reached out to touch it, and it hatched. In a motion almost too quick to see, the newly hatched creature leapt from the egg into the ranger’s cloak. Enter the ranger's animal companion, a baby silver dragon.

Continued from >>52123827

Things progressed much as they had from there, with the exception that occasionally a small dragon head would snatch meat or fish off the table from the ranger’s cloak. The ranger wasn’t a beastmaster so his combat role didn’t change and the dragon didn’t really do anything. The episode where the DMPC had gotten his pet dragon had renewed my trepidation, but it looked like things were going back to normal and the DM just wanted his ranger to be a little more unique. Then the dragon started to grow.

The baby dragon, it was revealed to us, had been rapidly growing under the ranger’s cloak and had reached a size where not even the largest and baggiest of cloaks would conceal her. Fortunately, she had recently learned a new trick: shapeshift. The small dragon took the form of a young girl appearing to be about 10 – 12 years old, a physical human form that matched her draconic intelligence. Now that she could hide in plain sight, she could help us fight and do other tasks the DM proudly explained. So now we had not one, but two DMPCs.

If the DM had planned on using his dragon loli to do the heavy lifting in fights, I’ll never know, because P1 had been playing a cleric and absolutely refused in character to allow a being so young to risk her life in direct attacks. So, dragon loli mostly just killed people off screen when asked to by the DMPC ranger or when she ran into bandits while scouting or standing guard, duties that P1 reluctantly let her do. As such the combat dynamic didn’t change, but now we had tracking, scouting, standing guard, flanking, foraging, and most arcane checks (anything dealing with dragons, which the campaign was at this point obviously focused around) handled by DMPCs.

Continued from >>52123848

It was around this time that I realized two things, first was that the ranger was a half dragon, second was that my role as information gatherer (pact warlock) was being eclipsed by both the DMPC ranger and P2, who was playing a wizard and had decided that blasting wasn’t as fun anymore. Truth be told, this is also where I became something of a bad player, spending more time reading the rulebook looking for a niche my character could fill so I could have fun again. From what I heard, the DM’s plot and story were good all things considered and there was plenty of time for roleplay, but more and more the PCs were handling combat while skill checks were more tailored to what the DMPCs could do, outside of the occasional knowledge: religion (me and P1) or arcana (me and P2) checks. This was upsetting for me because I had built my entire character around doing skill checks.

What got me really paying attention to the game again was when we joined the Adventures’ Guild and P1 was reunited with the DMPC paladin and rogue, whom he invited to join our merry band. They accepted unconditionally. For those of you keeping track at home, there were now more DMPCs in our party than there were players.

Continued from >>52123865

This is when I realized what had been happening for the entire game. The DM had been feeding us DMPCs with the required skills to feed us his plot. The rogue could find the hidden clues we would need to prove the villains’ guilt, the ranger could physically track the bad guys leading us to confrontations, the ranger and dragon knew the lore of dragons that we would need to understand what was going on, the paladin knew the ins and outs of the dragon cult and the ties they had to organized religions. The overarching plot was good, but it was being given to us by the DM through the DMPCs in a way that made it superficially appear that the DM was showing instead of telling, when he was in fact just telling us. Realizing that we players had no real agency beyond individual subplots killed the game for me, and I left shortly after.