NPCs in combat
Depending on your story and your players, you may wind up with NPCs hanging around during combat scenes. How you handle them determines if they get in the way or add to the flavor and excitement of the scene.
My chief piece of advice is not to make any combat rolls for NPCs in a fight. With the enemies rolling to attack the PCs and the players rolling to attack the enemies, there’s already a lot of dice rolling going on. Most combat scenes are the longest and slowest parts of any RPG and rolling for NPCs will just slow things down further. The players are only going to be bored while they watch you roll against yourself.
NPCs are secondary characters and what they do in combat can be dictated just as you would script their actions or speech in a social scene. So if you’re not going to roll for them, what can you do with NPCs in combat?
I’ve experimented with a lot of different things. One option is to tell the players that the NPCs will be holding up their end of the fight off-camera and focus on the player characters. It keeps the combat centered on your players and keeps the scene moving more quickly.
Pushing the NPCs off-camera can end up weakening their personalities, however. If they’re going to be around for a fight, why should they suddenly fall silent? Another option is to narrate the NPCs engaging their own enemies, perhaps between each combat round. The metaphorical camera remains on the player characters most of the time, but occasionally cuts away to remind everyone that your NPCs are present.
So far though, my best results have come from a more active NPC presence. Use them to shake up the combat scenes or introduce new elements. Maybe one of the NPCs gets wounded during the fight. It then becomes the job of a player character to administer emergency medical attention or take a round out of fighting to drag them away to safety.
It doesn’t sound like much, but when most of combat consists of a single action — I hit the bad guy — repeated over and over each round until victory or death, having something else to do can keep things interesting.
For the NPCs’ actions within combat itself, I give them limited participation. I place the NPCs at the bottom of initiative — I don’t even roll for them. But when it comes to their turn, I give each NPC a simple ability, which they use without a roll. Sometimes abilities or powers from the game can be adapted into NPC bonuses, or you can make up little extras like the ability to knock an enemy prone, reduce their armor or defensive abilities, provide covering fire so the players can make some extra movement, or grant them a small bonus to a roll, like an attack or skill.
NPC perks may be bonuses for the players or penalties on the enemies. It’s important to create NPC abilities that are useful, but weaker than the player characters’ abilities. As the main characters of the game, the spotlight should be on the PCs most of the time. How you create these abilities will depend on the system you use, but I suggest that the NPCs not actually inflict any damage. Their abilities should complement the players, either by strengthening them or weakening their enemies.
For instance, Simon Stone the gunslinger provides covering fire for his friends, allowing one character extra movement each round. Jaden the assassin strikes the enemies’ pressure points, crippling them and penalizing their attack rolls each round. The NPCs stay present and active, but it’s still the PCs that have to win the fight.
Giving the NPCs something tangible to do keeps them present and useful, and it also gives the players another level of strategy. Which character needs Simon’s covering fire to help close on an enemy or get clear of them? Which enemy do they need Jaden to paralyze with his wicked mantis strike? How can they best use the NPC abilities to maximum advantage?
Also, getting the players used to those little NPC abilities and then taking them away can make the combats seem more challenging without significantly rebalancing the enemies. Let your players grow to need the NPCs, then snatch them away. But using a small NPC bonus instead of giving them a full character sheet adds mere seconds to the combat round and my players have enjoyed it immensely.
The content of this post originally appeared in My Guide to RPG Storytelling.
