NPC Button On The Player's Desktop -WTF?

[dulux-oz]

Hi Guys,

I'm curious as to why the NPC Button is available to Players (in the CoreRPG) - can someone possibly explain the rational behind this, because for the life of me I can't see why the PCs would NEED to see an NPC's Sheet - thanks.

[Griogre]

Its for things like followers, familiars and summoned creatures that players typically control. It's obviously more important in some games than others.

[Nickademus]

The NPC button is there to encourage players to bring more creatures into the party for the GM to kill.

[Doswelk]

I suspect that if it works the way it does in the Savage Worlds ruleset, the GM controls which NPCs the players can see, the GM shares an NPC it is added to the player NPC list, of course in Savage Worlds the players get the play the Allied NPCs in combat to speed things up.

[Blacky]

The “new” (could be quite old, I don't use the D&D and variations so…) standard seems to display to everyone most of the sidebar. Of course that doesn't mean the players can access all the content, but any resource (a story, a map, a npc, an object, etc.) can be shared with the GM (with everyone or with only some players) if he whishes.

As far as I can understand the rationale, there's several reasons for this:

Window management: before, if the GM closed a window, it closed it for everyone. Now the players can manage their own windows. Some might want to display this map or that illustration at some point, without having to ask the GM each time.
This allows the players to have potentially access to more information, maybe look at old gaming aids for clues to their current situation and so on. I know several campaigns where the GM has to post online somewhere these aids after each game, now maybe he doesn't have to.
Some resources are meant to be shared. For your NPC example, this allow the players to handle familiars, followers and summoned creatures for example in a D&Dish game. But I could easily imagine a ruleset where the NPC have a public tab and a private tab; the public one having link to portrait and descriptions and the private ones with secrets and technical data. This could be a major feature for some type of game where the focus is on the people, and a select group of people (like an Amber or a Vampire city campaign).


This doesn't affect old ruleset, and of course a ruleset creator could choose not to follow this. But this seems like an improvement to me.