Mooks and Extras in Combats and Other Challenges

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

Today I'm going to ask you about your stance on Mooks and Extras. That is, NPCs who are very, very inferior to the PCs in terms of competence, usually presenting only a negligible threat, and usually presented without emphasizing/describing distinguishing traits like faces and names and the like. While the term 'Mooks' is usually applied to combat encounters, similarly low-threat low-competence opponents can be employed in noncombat scenes, such as crowds that are easily swayed by Glorious Talkative Protagonists, a bunch of players at a card table who fold early and leave the two worthy opponents to their duel of wits, or faceless enemy engineers who have trouble reverse-engineering the protagonist's invention.

Over the course of the most of my recent GMing, I did not have many situations where use of Mooks/Extras was appropriate: either the campaigns had little place for big confrontations, or the PCs were the underdogs.

But what about you? Do you use Mooks/Extras? What are the typical impressions of their use? The GM in a non-network tabletop campaign I played in (and the campaign before it) seems to be opposed to the concept of Mooks/Extras on principle, while my play-over-Internet GM used to have a style closer to my own (with few big confrontations and many situations where the opposition is equal or somewhat better than the PCs), only lately moving towards a more mooky style.

Thanks in advance for your answers!