Jade Regent NPC's as buff cards

[Glewistee]

A while back I posted my idea about using the Jade Regent NPC's as buff cards. I put it on the JR Forum, but i don't think there is much traffic through there.

For those not familiar, in JR the PC's are traveling for months with a caravan. they are accompanied by a large number of NPC's. The NPC's include not only a bunch of NPC-classed followers, but a large number of fairly powerful PC classed characters. These NPC's are important to the storyline and are one of the selling points of the AP.

The problem I'm having now is that in book 3, 90% of the encounters are outdoors, using the Caravan Combat Subsystem. We decided to not use Caravan Combat (the rules are broken and at higher levels guarantee failure). But doing so created some other problems. The NPC's are all present for all the combats. I am going to either ignore them and come up with reasons why the are not helping, or have someone else run them. This option will potentially double combat time, as either I will have to spend time running them as the players watch me fight myself, or have them running 2 characters each.

A couple people on the boards proposed having the players choose to have the NPC's give static buffs to the combat. My rough ideas are on the above forum.

Some non-spoilery background for the NPC's

Ameiko :

- Female Tian Bard/Rogue (Rake)/Aristocrat. The reason the PC's are in the caravan.

Sandru :

- Male Varisian Rogue (Swashbuckler). The owner of the caravan and older adopted brother of half the party.

Koya :

- old Varisian Cleric of Desna. Adopted mother of half the party.

Shalulu :

- Famale elf Ranger. Ameiko's best friend. She has archery and hunters companion. Her favored terrain are not helpful where the party is going.

Ulf -:

Male Ulfen Ranger. Owes his life to the PC's and is guiding them through the wilderness. Sword and Shield and Hunters Companion. His favored terrain is applicable (and the reason the PC's hired him)

Spivey:

- Female Lyrakien Azata Cleric of Desna. Befriended the caravan and is hanging around to help out.

[Errant_Epoch]

What I did in that game was essentially just have there be "double the size of the enemy force" and have the NPC's handle one "half" off board while the PC's handle the other "half" of the encounter which is the actual encounter.

The two "halves" are mirrored in tone, if the PC's are doing well the NPC's do well and vice versa. I made a rotating key that had the PC's and NPC's names on two separate components but would match them one for one and I would roll a d4 before combat and rotate the key that many positions to get the new results. This way when a PC was in peril, over in the "other half" of the battle the linked NPC was in peril and when a PC was greatly succeeding the linked NPC was similarly succeeding. So about every other round I would determine randomly two NPC's and I would give an "across the battlefield you see..." description of how those selected NPC's were doing.

This way you don't have to roll anything, the PC's and fights aren't over crowded, yet it still feels as though the NPC's are involved.

I will say that I only used this for on the road wilderness encounters, I never grabbed the players guide so we didn't use caravan encounters.

[Glewistee]

I thought about doing something like that, but wanted a little more direct interaction from the NPC's. I want them to be making a tangible effect on the encounters. We already scraped the relationship rules, and they are quickly falling more into the background than I'd like.

I want something like half way between your solution and actually running them as separate characters. Using the cards lets the players choose how they are helping, but only takes a couple of seconds of game time to make the effect felt.

I also planed to have the NPC's condition match that of the player controlling them, but I like your idea of using the key to randomize it a bit.