I happen to be the GM’s wife. It works well for me to run a PC. I started with this PC when my husband started with his, back at the very beginning when neither one of us was the GM, and didn’t want to stop gaming just because my husband became the GM. My PC does not get special treatment. But then, both he and I have been gaming for about 30 years. I have played in other games he has GM’d including convention games, and never receive or expect any special treatment because I happen to be his wife.

We are about to start a D&D 4e campaign where the original GM will GM and my husband will be a regular PC. We are trying hard to convince the GM that we will not need him to play a cleric; we have all four party roles covered, with me being a striker, my husband being a leader (warlord), our friend being a controller, and our other friend being a defender. I expect that the GM will get tired of GMing again and just wind up being a player. Meanwhile, my husband’s PC will already be an established part of our regular party with a key role. I don’t know what will happen.

Now in the last two years we’ve done something a bit different because I’m in group with two other DM’s.

The keys with them are to allow the PCs to have the spotlight and control and the other is to make them real. They will also make mistakes or give bad advice cuz they are also human… or elf.. or dwarf… or whatever. I had a dwarf GMPC in one game I had, to fill out a fighter type role, and he always looked at events through his dwarf eyes. Sometimes he was wrong in his advice (well, how was I to know there was a dead end, dwarves don’t build passages like that) but that was how he worked. Another time, a mage (a glorified NPC that only temporarily attached himself to a party) was very controlling, loud, and always told others what to do. It wasn’t me as much as the personality of the NPC, and after a period of time, the group dumped the mage. Whenever the party went to a town, they went to a tavern and listened for news of this mage; if he was nearby, they went a different direction. He was “real” and it wasn’t me taking control as much as the personality of that particular NPC. It is always important to have a personality for the GMPC; they shouldn’t be automatons.

I suspect we could see more of GMPCs in 4e as it seems designed to have 4 specific roles and team playing in mind. If a group only has three players, a GMPC might be called upon to fulfill the missing role.

In any case, you are correct. I didn’t mean to say that “GMPC by rotating GM” was the ONLY legitate method — I just felt it was the best choice for ‘fairness’. Guess I got interesting in a social rules based system for protecting the GM from himself.

But as you point out very well, the GM can certainly always mess over the players in a million ways, so what’s the point of calling it a GMPC vs NPC — its just a character that the GM runs. A good GM does good things, a bad GM does bad things. And a GM that plays (excessive?) favorites to the GM’s PC (to be used later as a PC, not NPC) is a bad GM.

Very well, on to the next hot topic…. We’ve beaten this horse dead.

Is it only a non-NPC to you when there’s a “form of balance?” That’s an interesting distinction to make, but I don’t understand it and would enjoy hearing more, if you don’t mind. Why is the balancing factor the make-or-break decision? IMO as DM I can favor any character I want, in any circumstance, for whatever reason. There’s no safety just because a character is or isn’t mine.

If you’ll forgive me for playing armchair-psychologist for just a moment, you seem awfully focused on DMs who might be tempted to cheat (“fudge”) or unfairly have the “kick butt player” and thus need to be balanced by multiple DMs. I think that speaks far more to specific instances of bad DMing than a fundamental flaw in DMPCs. I wasn’t joking, exactly, when I said earlier that the danger to the game of a badly run DMPC is no different than the danger from badly run kobolds. We don’t say kobolds aren’t legitimate, or even hard to come by, we just roll our eyes if we hear about a DM who uber’ed some kobolds unnecessarily and TPKed his players’ band of 15th level characters. There’s nothing wrong with kobolds, it was just a bad DM.

I suspect a fair litmus test, if a hard to administer one, would be: “does the player of the DMPC (the DM, iow) experience the fun of the DMPC in largely the same way that the other players experience the fun of their characters?” The DM will never be able to participate fairly in, say, puzzle solving or riddle answering, but does the DMPC get to participate substantially in roleplaying? Do the other characters have a relationship with the DMPC beyond the DMPC’s function and abilities?

I’ll say this – I didn’t understand why this was a “hot button” before, but at least now I see how different the opinions on this subject can be. I won’t claim to understand them, but I see them.

~ John

The only real legitimate GMPC I’ve heard here is the rotating GM situation. This at least has a form of balance and checks on the GM — even though GM A’s GMPC may be the “kick butt player” while running the game, the next rotating in GM B can opt to give GM A a taste of the same power abuse.

And its the small stuff as well as the big stuff. Even a well reasoned GM might just be more tempted to fudge (a common GMing tool) on his own character’s rolls especially when nearing death.

For some reason, every other GMPC I have attempted to bring in to a game since has been killed in the session they showed up.

I used to (many moons ago) play in a Shadowrun campaign with multiple, rotating GMs. In that campaign sometimes my PCs would end up getting roping into adventure that I was GMing for but I tried to minimize their impact. Going so far in one game to insuring that my character was the first one taken down by the big bad.

So, they can have a place, just not in the spotlight (unless the PCs want to push them into it).