It's up to two things: how large your group is, and if you honestly believe you can pull it off. And I say this as someone who frequently uses GMPCs - but I seriously doubt I could handle three NPCs and a GMPC. I'd only be tempted to have one if the group was only two players.
That said, there IS a work-around - you could have the GMPC be someone who they rescue after having dropped off a couple of the NPCs (or if those NPCs died off). You have less time for the GMPC to have bonded with the group... but given that anyone can die and yet still bring in a potentially-mythic character leading up to the Wardstone attack, it's not that big of a problem.
In addition, the initial NPCs can also serve a role as of GMPCs of sorts.
Hey, guys. WotR is the campaign I have wanted to see and play in since I started playing D&D 10 years ago. My group and I are going to run it with me as the GM once we finish our Kingmaker campaign.
I am the de facto GM in the group, but I really want to run a PC for WotR. My group is okay with it as we often have GMPCs to make up for missing people. For those of you who have run this campaign, will it be too much going for me to GM the adventures and run a character? I have read through the first adventure already and there seems to be a lot going on. I feel like I can handle doing both, but thought I would seek the advice of the community. Thanks.
I'm doing this right now in WotR. This was the problem I had in wanting to play in this adventure not run it. What we are doing is rotating DMs for each part. We're just finishing up book 1 and I ran parts 1 and 4, 2 and 3 were handled by other DMs.
Having done this myself I would highly recommend that you play a supporting role (rogue, any primary caster, archer) not the "tank" (I'm playing a paladin of Sarenrae) or you will run into battles where its your GMPC against the bad guys until you clear the choke points.
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I recently killed the party cleric with a GIANT deus ex machina (or so it seems^^) and replaced it with a oracle of life. My players made it very plain to be, that they do not enjoy the cleric class and since the player of the inquisitor of Ragathiel left the group ....
The character looks like a league of legends champion (Soraka) with a horn and hooves, that should cause fun with the army of paladins.
It should be fun, especially since one of my players wants to "tank" and the healer will have substandard defensive abilties.
Depending on how important it is that you play YOUR character, I will point out that there are a bunch of NPC's that will be in the adventure for most of its run-time. Depending on your group, they can easily be converted to GMPC's, which allows it to easily fit into the story, and doesn't add as much to your plate, since you're essentially just increasing the impact of an already existing character, rather than trying to add an entirely new character on everything else.
All that said, it may be wise to run the first and second parts of adventure 1 as written. As others have said, you have 3 npcs to deal with the whole time. If you can handle that juggling okay, then you can easily insert a new character at that point, since you just reached the sandbox. If it is difficult to manage those npcs, it's probably only going to get tougher, so you should probably stick with DMing or upgrade an NPC to GMPC (I personally love Irabeth, so I'd recommend her, but to each their own).