Dependents

[flyingwombat]

I have GMed GURPS for years. I know that Dependents are NPCs. Until now, I haven't had to deal with Dependents. For an upcoming game, one of my players wants to run both his character and its Dependent.

Has GURPS GMs out there faced this situation? Advice sought.

[weby]

A few things:
-Dependents are NPCs so it is the GM that controls them like any NPC.
-The frequency of appearance is an important factor, a too high such basically means that the whole campaign turns into a "help the dependent"

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by weby

A few things:
-Dependents are NPCs so it is the GM that controls them like any NPC.
-The frequency of appearance is an important factor, a too high such basically means that the whole campaign turns into a "help the dependent"

I agree wholeheartedly about this.

In my experience, any Dependent with a Frequency of Appearance of 12 or 15 makes the entire campaign ultimately about them. Even an appearance of 9 can sometimes make the campaign feel like, "Dawn's in trouble; it must be Tuesday."

To counteract this effect, ask him if he's also planning to take the Dependent as an Ally. This way, when the NPC shows up, the players won't be groaning with "we'll have to get this character out of trouble again, will we?"

[khorboth]

I've had the arrangement work out well. Once. With a trusted player, I let her play her character's dependent (little sister). The understanding was that I was temporarily offloading GM duty to her, but could take it back at any time. When I did so, there was no argument. The rest of the players understood what was going on as well.

The net result was a dependent who had a deeper personality than I had time to develop. The other PCs grew attached as well. There were no hard feelings anywhere. When it was time for the little girl to be threatened, no players were put out, because everyone knew that was her game purpose. And, with her being a deeper character, everybody cared more.

If you're missing any link in this chain, it won't work. You need a trusted player who won't object when you suddenly take control back. That player ALSO needs to be a strong enough player to make the other players like the dependent. All the other players need to understand ans appreciate the situation. If the other characters resent the dependent, that's not necessarily a problem.

It even led to a good plot point once. The dependent was mind-controlled at one juncture. When I had her do something odd, the player respectfully mentioned that this went against the established character. I agreed and had her do it anyway. This intimate familiarity was a good thing.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by khorboth

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.)

[flyingwombat]

Thanks guys! I have been in communication with the player. Turns out he left out the Dependent is a loved one. That changed things considerably.

[Rigil_Kent]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

To counteract this effect, ask him if he's also planning to take the Dependent as an Ally. This way, when the NPC shows up, the players won't be groaning with "we'll have to get this character out of trouble again, will we?"

I'm in a Space game where I do exactly this with my PC's girlfriend. The GM allowed me to create the Ally/Dependent and when I built her, I did so with the expectation that she would be an adventure magnet. In fact, my PC actually calls her "Trouble" because of this fact. The way we do it is that, when the Ally frequency comes up, she's useful to the adventure (with her being a fantastic social operator), but when the Dependent frequency pops, she's the source of trouble, whether it's because she's gotten kidnapped or just needs help and so on. This works well for the game and I recommend it.

[mikeejimbo]

One method we've used in a game I'm in is to have another player run the PC's Dependent, at least in an "extended scene". Mostly this was so that the GM could run a number of NPCs who were unsure of the PCs (and the Dependent) while the player could run the regular PC and no one would have to be talking to themselves.

We also fairly often have PCs run other NPCs for similar situations.

[sir_pudding]

In my Madness Dossier game one of the characters is a Golden Child, and I have struggled a bit with the Dependents as I blogged here. Currently my solution is to only occasionally have a Dependent roll actually result in an NPC in the field, but alternate these appearances with problems involving the cohort back at Granite Peak, that somehow result in the involvement of the PC, either during the predeployment stage of the mission, or somehow indirectly in the field. It seems to be working thus far.

I always play associated NPCs though, including Dependants, Allies, Patrons, Friends, Pets, Contacts, and Enemies.

[whswhs]

My players hardly ever create Dependents. But when I ran Whispers, my first Transhuman Space campaign, trooper6 created one:

Dependent (Daughter: Loved One: 1-25 points: 9 or less) [-24]

Constanza Fiori was around 11 or 12, just coming up on puberty. I didn't actually play her as getting kidnapped by criminals or entangled in cases the PCs were investigating (they were a private detective agency); it mostly didn't make sense for criminals to seek her out as a target when they were being investigated. That model is designed for "adventuring parties" who go into dungeons, or travel to remote countries, or otherwise leave a home location, and may take a friend or family member along—and I wasn't running that. Instead, I had a strong "slice of life" element in the campaign, and Constanza actually showed up in more than the regulation 1/3 of sessions, often just to offer comments on the PCs' actions or relationships, though we also had "slice of life" type problems: Her father looking for a more advanced dance school for her, and attending her first recital, or his being sent streetcam images of his daughter smoking (and clearly not the first time) and wanting to find out why her AI implant hadn't told him (he had set it to respect her privacy!).

I always play those NPCs. When things go well, one of them will come to life and acquire a recognizable personality.

If your player wants to have a Dependent in a more classic sense—the girlfriend or younger brother or child who goes along on adventures—I think what you need is to ask for the story. "Why is this person coming along when X goes into dungeons, again? Why does X take them there?" Once you have a story that makes sense, you can think about what point build represents that story. But do remember that 6 represents "once in a while" and 9 represents "a regular presence, and recurrently gets into trouble." Anything above that is only suited for a story that's ABOUT that NPC for more or less everyone—say, safeguarding the Emperor's naive son on a tour of border fortresses.