Elite NPCs

[kato13]

kcdusk 12-14-2005, 04:22 AM Theres been alot of talk in these threads, people saying they dont like munchkin or power gaming. But in my world, T2K, its a vicous one. And quite often there is conflict. Armed conflict.


How often though do your PC's come up against Elite type NPC/Units?


Because it would seem to me that most PC's are not overly powerful. Lets say they are somewhere between Experienced and perhaps veteran. Roleplaying is important. So how do you overcome these powerful NPC's?


Their skills and attributes are greater than yours. And if it comes down to role playing then i think a Spetznas unit or rouge Delta Unit would be difficult to negotiate against, so role playing against them would be difficult too.

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DeaconR 12-14-2005, 09:25 AM Well, I think this is more of a game master decision making process than anything else. First of all, you have to decide what role such NPCs are meant to play in your game.


1. Are you actually trying to simply have the PCs captured, forced to abandon a position or the like? In other words, are the elite NPCs being used as a goad? If so, that's fair enough. A good example of this is shown in "Enemy at the Gates" where a rather poorly coordinated Russian wave attack is driven back by the Germans.


2. Are they meant merely to pose a serious challenge? This one is a bit tricky, and you kind of then need to throw in other stuff happening. You can for instance have that the players simply know and use the local terrain better, that the elite opponents are exhausted and nearly out of ammo (like the Spetsnaz in Chechnya for instance, or the British paras at Arnhem) but here you have a mitigating factor that reduces the threat somewhat while it remains present.


3. They might also be used as a warning. Sometimes in rpgs I like to scare my players to remind them of the mortality of their characters. It's also happened to me btw; in one game my character woke up (following a roll which I later realizd must have been some kind of alertness roll) and noticed there was no one on watch. Those on watch were not actually sleeping though...they were dead, and we were under a silent deadly attack. My character was one of the few who escaped, largely because two of the other players panicked and created a diversion (during which they shot each other in their panic, while our remaining NPCs were killed by the combat engineer who set off our mines, which had been turned to face the group) The gm in this case had this attack happen because the group were acting like a target--really poor cooperation, stupid arguments about what to do, bad camp security--and had rejected any NPC advice to not be so dumb. I must emphasize that the players who died died because of their own actions, not because the gm had their throats silently slit. But the elite NPCs killing some NPCs who were with us created terror.

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