Thread: Dependents
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Old 04-29-2017, 07:18 AM   #6
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Dependents

Quote:
Originally Posted by khorboth View Post
With a trusted player... I was temporarily offloading GM duty to her, but could take it back at any time.
This description matches my thoughts. You can let the player handle most of the routine activity for a Dependent or Ally, but there has to be that understanding that even if the player is often choosing their actions, the GM can always overrule that.

One practical reason is that the GM knows things that the NPC knows, but that the player doesn't. There will often be actions that the NPC would take that the player can't really choose. That's not railroading; it's just the fact that the player and GM are working with different sets of information.

The player doesn't control their dependent. They have temporary delegation of the workload. They may often have that delegated to them, but that responsibility ultimately lies with the GM, and will just as often be resumed by the GM.

Design is also the GM's province. Munchkin players designing Allies and Dependents can treat them as extensions of their PC, carefully interlocking two sets of traits to cover deliberate holes in each other, assuming they can always act together, two halves of one whole. Using the Ally math, this is basically a fistful of free character points, with a free level of ATR thrown in as a bonus, so it can be tremendously abusive. Separately designed characters will have a lot of redundancies and overlap, as each need to exist as viable independent entities.

(If you really do want to build a character that's some sort of inseperable multiple meld person, Mercedes Lackey animal companion style, then consider building that with just one set of CP. Take a look at Duplication and variants.)
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