OOC chat

If people are against it then it's fine I won't

Personally, a DM PC is a red flag, especially a homebrew version. Historically it is often open for abuse as that PC seems to become more of the focus than the rest of the party or the story.

I don't know how you run your games, though, so for all I know you can pull it off exceptionally well and there would be no problem.

No it's totally fine, I can see the issues with a GM PC and since its my first time properly GMing and there's going to be a few NPCs anyway, just wish it was brought up earlier than now

Cool, that's much appreciated.

As people before have said, it can be done, but it's very difficult. I've known one DM to ever pull off the feat and it required a lot of trust between him and the party.

Thanks for accepting the feedback. :)

I think in regards to why it wasn't brought it earlier, we might have been more focused on the homebrew races and classes themselves, and missed the part where you yourself was going to play it. I certainly was.

I was also unaware

If you make the character and want him to level up with the rest of the group, run him as an NPC. Having an NPC in the party is fine, and is often helpful to provide story hooks for either bringing the party together or providing adventure motivation. But the key to running an NPC is to use the character as a supporting character, not a primary character. In other words, use the character to nudge the party in the right direction, but don't use him to drive the plot/conversations/etc.

On the other hand, here on GP you will likely end up running one or more PCs as NPCs because players get sick, drop out, or otherwise stop posting for periods of time. I've only run three games on the site, but every one of them has had players disappear and I've ended up running PCs as NPCs at least some of the time. Of the couple dozen games I've played on the site, this has been the norm (1). So even if you don't start out with a character to play, you'll likely end up with one or more sooner or later!

For myself as a GM, I make a loose policy known in advance with my players for posting frequency. I set the expectation that, if just one player is unable to post within 24 hours (my arbitrary posting frequency), I will run them as NPCs in order to not hold up the action. I invite my players to provide "default character behavior" for me to use as a guideline for such play. For the most part, however, I haven't had to do this. Either people post within 24 hours so we continue normally, a majority of players don't post within 24 hours so I don't continue, or the action doesn't require action from that PC and we continue without it. But in every game I have also had players just drop out for extended periods - one person left the site without explanation, one kid had his internet privileges rescinded, one person has had family health issues that have eclipsed play on GP, and a personal friend of mine registered for the site, the game, and created/submitted a character and has never logged on again. In such cases I run the PC as an NPC until such time as I can phase out the character and then, if I feel that that many players are desirable, I invite others to take the place in the Games Tavern thread.

1 - Play-by-post works for many people because there's less time needed to fit into a schedule; each game only needs a few minutes a day. The trade-off, however, is that play-by-post is a long commitment: you aren't playing a game in one day, one week, or even one month. It's more likely to be measured in seasons or even years. Since I joined last Fall, I've only completed two games - both brief one-shots, and both with periods of high activity, with multiple posts per day. That's clearly the exception; most games take much longer. Life happens, and circumstances change for people such that they can't manage to post for a few minutes a day per game. So over the course of a given game, GMs should expect that some player or another - at least one - is going to drop out, either just disappearing, or because of known life circumstances (moving, changing jobs, birth of a child, etc).

And for every GM with one policy, you will meet another with a different one. I avoid GM PCs as much as possible (and I avoid having persistent NPCs in the party as well; if an NPC does join a party I operate on a 'don't speak until spoke to' policy). I avoid GM PCs and party NPCs because I've seen players become distracted by the idea that the NPC in the party is controlled by the GM, and so may have all the answers to their problems (players can do this without meaning to as well, it can just happen naturally of an NPC or GM PC starts playing an active role in directing the story and solving problems). I also don't like to control player's characters unless I absolutely have to.

So, my absent character policy is to have the character 'fade into the background' - if a player vanishes without a word, their character simply stops being referred to (as casually and quietly as possible). Then, I never have to take over a PC, and, if the player does come back (as has just happened with one of my ongoing games), they can pick up their PC and jump right back into the game as if they never left.

Which (if any) of the optional Combat Options from the DMG are you implementing, SirRockNRolla?
*Disarm – DMG 271:
*Mark – DMG 271
*Overrun – DMG 272:
*Shove aside – DMG 272:
*Overrun – DMG 272
*Shove aside – DMG 272
*Cleaving through creatures – DMG 272
*Tumble – DMG 272

Disarm - I'm fine with, it's some what wasting you're turn in order to help you're team, if you disarm someone and it's there turn next they can just simply pick it up but if there down the line then sure, since I don't know where I read but I think it's advantage
Mark - I don't fully understand it but I think I grasped it a little bit, don't know if it will really effect battle so I don't know how I feel
Shove aside - This is fine
Cleaving through creatures - Totally fine with this

Tumble & Overrun - Both technically the same but I feel like tumble should be smaller than the creature and overrun larger than the creature

You missed out climbing onto a creature and hitting cover, climbing a creature is fine but I feel like hitting cover is like redundant

I'm down for other people's views on this also

Disarm - more useful than it appears. Disarm someone and then use your free interaction to kick it out of reach, especially in a crowded melee situation.

Hitting Cover is specifically for situations where someone is trying to fire into melee and you want there to be a risk of hitting an ally, or just anyone who's in the way. That way if you miss your target then the ammo doesn't just disappear.

Absolutely. As I said, NPCs should be passive if they're members of the party, whether or not they are characters created by the DM or characters created by absent players. I've had somewhat different experience than Candi, it seems, with absent PCs "fading out:" in my experience, the players who are present dearly LOVE to mess with other players' PCs if they're present but not being mentioned. They'll engage the absent players' PCs in conversation ("You'll want to ask Mikey about that, sir. Mikey is our expert on elven-dwarven treaty history, let alone mating rituals!"), they'll volunteer the absent players' PCs for various tasks ("Have Mikey try it! Mikey'll eat anything!"), they'll play practical jokes on the absent players' PCs ("When he's not looking, I swap Mikey's potion of fire-breathing with that moonshine we got from the gnome!"), and so on. But that, in my limited experience, doesn't happen when the DM is running the PCs, albeit passively. I run the absent players' PCs as supporting NPCs, and the players don't give them grief. Then, if the players don't reappear, I work out a story way to remove them from the action (we're getting to that point in both of the games I'm currently running here on GP). That way they don't just vanish, and they aren't present to be the butts of players' jokes.

The difference between Candi's experience and mine is probably due to the maturity of our players, though. My players have always been eager for any opportunity to have a little fun at someone's expense, whether the DM or another player. I realized recently, while listening to Critical Role (a D&D5 Twitch stream that I convert to audio for listening), that I am myself incredibly immature, unlike all the players in that game. I can't believe how little crap the players give the DM of that show for all the gaffes he makes. If anybody I play with was in his game, they'd be ribbing the DM constantly with running gags about all kinds of stuff ("Duragar? What are those? Are they maybe distantly related to...Duergar?"), and I'm no different. I would do it, too...and have, in other DMs' games! So far, here on GP, most GMs have been good about explaining how/why absent players' PCs have left the party. But it's a running gag in at least a couple of the games here where the PCs have just vanished, and all the other player characters are completely spooked out by it (For example, our characters in the End of the World game keep talking to "Andrew," thinking he's gone invisible when he's actually just been disappeared from one moment to the next by the GM).

One time in my group, the party threw a player's character into a pit full of angry goblins while he was out for a session. I wasn't with that group at the time, but I was actually pretty upset to hear that they did that, and that the DM actually allowed it was terrible. In my in-person games, I usually come up with a reason for the character to drop out if they're gone for a session. That said, PbP is a little bit more RP heavy that my in-person sessions, so I prefer that there be some reason they disappear, just for continuity's sake.

I'd like to think that, in that situation, as a DM I would have described how the absent player's PC conquered or evaded the goblins and emerged, mightily pissed off at the rest of the party. The encounter thus destroyed (all treasure, clues, and XP inattainable), the absent player's PC would then have justifiably left the party, heading to town in a foul mood.

I wish it had played out that way. The DM just had him die with no possible recourse.

I run a bi-weekly game with 10 players (between 4 and 6 show up every game, there's 2-3 that are always there and the rest are variable attendance). Providing a story reason for characters to drop out or drop back in, especially when we often pause midway through a dungeon, quickly became tiresome. Everyone just accepts that absent PCs are 'helping but not directly', they are searching rooms the group has been through or watching over captives, or keeping an eye on the parties flank, etc...

Yeah, that's probably a bit out of the norm, so I understand why you don't come up with a reason every time lol

Heh, I listen to Critical Role, too. I admit my creation of Stalkhlijan is primarily influenced from Grog.

I have nothing to contribute as far as PCs dropping out, but I find my best "work" tends to come in groups where it's a cooperative effort, rather than each person trying to be the best. So if there's a convenient and somewhat logical reason, I am more than happy to run with it.