I feel you. You want immersion. You want verisimilitude. You want your characters to be movers and shakers, but you want them to earn it, to feel it, to BELIEVE it. These players don't get that yet. All you can do is teach them slowly. Make them earn every copper. Make them feel the fear. Make them feel the exhilaration of success. Make them understand that they are as real people in this world as the fantasy world is real. They'll come around. After all, roleplaying games where you can truly influence the world put MMOGs (no such thing as MMORPGs as of 2017) to shame.If your players don't believe that, they're better off investing their time in WoW which they can play 24x7, not once a week.
Wow, way to get all holier-than-thou. You realize there's a middle ground between "hack-and-slash campaign" and "you start as a dirt farmer and you need to scrape together your party's entire life savings and haggle in character for three hours to get a sword", right?
Also, making the players miserable is a good way to not have friends anymore.
I won't concede holier than thou to you. This thread is filled mostly with the extreme of the opposite argument. This is the other opinion. You obviously are on the other side of it and taking this to your own extreme. No one mentioned dirt farmers, bud. I sympathize with this DM, not his players, and that's my opinion.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
This threat seems to be very active, thats pretty good!!
I lived a situation the other day that i want to tell to you, because i think it can be usefull.
I have been feeling bad about my group for a while. My problem? I was letting them discuss some of my decitions, believing that maybe if i explained to them some situations they will feel more valuated and all that stuff...
That was a mistake, our sessions turned in a "stop the game to talk about what we dont like" thing, and that was making me feel so bad about beeing their DM.
So i talked to them from heart to heart and they told me something pretty impressive. They didnt know about my feelings, they thougth that my bad humour or bad responses in the fights was something related to my girlfriend or something similar. Also, the didnt percieve the destroying critics they were doing to me. Sentences like "this make no sense at all we are in Narnia" or "I dont believe this NPC should act like this, this is stupid" for them was just comments, but for me that kind of expressions were realy hurting.
What i mean here is...you cant read your friend's minds, you need to talk to them, maybe that playing style is something they use because it make them feel secure and comfortable, maybe they are a bit shy to roleplay a character like if they were actors...dont know, it can be anything.
Dont bother about "how the game should be", the best thing of role playing is that you can make it however you want it to be! Your characters can be peasants with dreams of honor, valor and glory, or they can be goblins fighting just to live another day!. This is why this game is so damn great, because the only barrier to it is our imagination.
So, forget about all the comments here that tell you how the game should be, they are all for definition wrong, because we are not here to talk about something written in the books, are we? no, we are here to help you, to give you the tips or keys so you can have fun with your friends.
Seriously, man, talk to them, i'm sure you will find that treassure you are looking for.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There are two attitudes you can have as GM: give the players what they think they want, or give them what you think they need.
If you're going to be the second type of GM, you'd better be a damn good at it. Because if you try to force a style of game on someone, and you fail to make it enjoyable for them, all you're doing is making your preferred style look bad.
There are two attitudes you can have as GM: give the players what they think they want, or give them what you think they need.
If you're going to be the second type of GM, you'd better be a damn good at it. Because if you try to force a style of game on someone, and you fail to make it enjoyable for them, all you're doing is making your preferred style look bad.
I dont think he should reduce the possible solutions to just to options. Less if that options are make them like it or force them to like it.
It seems quite of a "black or white" argument for me.
I'm going to echo that the players are the protagonists of the story and should be made to feel like they are, but also that if they're 2nd level, talking with a Gargantuan Gold Dragon NPC, decide "LET'S KILL HIM AND LOOT HIS HOARD!", and are soundly defeated/die horribly, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Well, I have played a game where, at 1st level, the party met a dragon. While I hid, the rest of the party attacked and killed it. I'm not kidding. The GM had to have fudged a lot of things for this to happen. What's worse is that this was his plan all along.
Needless to say, I left that group. If we can beat dragons at first level, there's no more challenges left to do and advancing levels is meaningless.
Some users are reducing it now to just black or white so advocating for grey is like smoking shisha pipe even if it's the best solution.I dont think he should reduce the possible solutions to just to options. Less if that options are make them like it or force them to like it.
It seems quite of a "black or white" argument for me.
who cares? everyone can have an opinion! The best way to deal with rague, or reductio ad absurdum is to give solid arguments and reflexive solutions to the problems here exposed. ^^
Some users are reducing it now to just black or white so advocating for grey is like smoking shisha pipe even if it's the best solution.I dont think he should reduce the possible solutions to just to options. Less if that options are make them like it or force them to like it.
It seems quite of a "black or white" argument for me.
who cares? everyone can have an opinion! The best way to deal with rague, or reductio ad absurdum is to give solid arguments and reflexive solutions to the problems here exposed. ^^
Actually, without walking in his shoes, all we can do is offer advice. The OP is best qualified to determine which is good advice and which will just make matters worse. If your advice is different to others, great! it means he has more options to choose from. Maybe your advice is more relevant, maybe not - but only the OP can tell.
Let's not assume that there is only one answer to a complex issue. If that were so, the Arab/Israeli conflict would have been resolved years ago, along with the hundreds of brush wars now raging and we would know peace in our time. Unfortunately we are human beings, not machines, and are as such governed by emotion as by logic.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's important for me to be accommodating to my players who have Videogamer Syndrome. That's why when I GM, I periodically stutter and then freeze up. I turn blue and emit an incomprehensible hexadecimal error code. That's when they know I need to be patched.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Twists and Turns: Designing the Campaign Around the Characters (Part 3) by Monte Cook from Dungeon #123, June 2003, pages 92 – 94:
Both are fine films and either approach would make for a wonderful roleplaying campaign. In this Dungeoncraft installment, however, I thought I'd address The Empire Strikes Back style of campaign design. In other words, a campaign designed (at least in part), around the PCs.
A CAMPAIGN-CENTRIC CAMPAIGN
There's nothing wrong with having a campaign where the characters don't matter. Now, that may sound cold and heartless, but it's true. You can design a campaign where the PCs might be a dwarf fighter, an elf wizard and three human rogues, but it would be essentially no different than if the PCs were a half-orc fighter, a human wizard, a human cleric, and a halfling rogue. The encounters might go differently, but the plot-lines you set up, the opponents you create, and the environments you design all remain the same. And that's fine.
However, you can also design a campaign fundamentally altered by who the PCs are, or even one that only works with very specific characters involved. For example, you could create a campaign centered around the drow as villains where the PCs are drow-hating elves or those of other races who have been personally harmed by the drow in the past. Or, the PCs might represent the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy. One PC might be the long-lost heir to the throne. The PCs could even all be the results of a magical experiment gone awry. The village threatened by the oncoming hobgoblin army might be the very place one or more PC hails from. The PCs might all be wizards at a magical school at the heart of all the campaign's actions.
The advantage of a character-centric campaign is that the players feel special, and frankly, it's fun to be special. The challenges they face are more immediate, and the dangers are heightened because they relate directly to the PCs. The characters aren't just outsiders seeking glory or gold, they're involved. If they fail, the consequences directly affect them. The campaign won't feel like every other run-of-the-mill game that the players have been in before – it will be its own, unique experience.
And while I refer to this as a character-centric campaign, the truth is that it's only some of the adventures that are centered around the characters, usually, and the adventures have different hooks involving different characters or different aspects of the same character. A wizard character might seek to enter a special magical organization, but in order to do so, the secret headquarters must be found and tests must be passed. Later, another character in the same group learns that her adventurer father is missing and the PCs must track him down and rescue him from the trouble he's got himself into. Still later, the wizard character's old master contacts him to warn of a demon that secretly inhabits the staff he gave him when he was but an apprentice. After that, yet another character in the group falls in love but his impending nuptials might be ruined when an old foe shows up to enact revenge. Sprinkle in a few more straightforward adventures, and you've got a character-centric campaign.
The drawbacks to this approach, of course, are both serious and obvious. If one of the PCs is the secret heir to the throne, what happens if that PC dies? Or, taken a step further, with that PC being at the heart of the campaign's plot-line, are the players ever going to really believe that he (or they) are even in any real danger? Will their importance to the story take away any belief that they might fail? Special characters are too important to lose, right?
CHARACTER CAMPAIGNS VERSUS CAMPAIGN CHARACTERS
To make a campaign based around the PCs, the DM doesn't have to put the PCs at the heart of the setting. You can have a character-based campaign without having a campaign based around the characters. In other words, the PCs' “specialness” doesn't have to mean that they are kings, or lords of prophecy, or the saviors of the world. If one of the PCs is the son of a gambler with unpaid debts so that moneylenders and criminals are after the character to pay off his father's debts, the character is “special” in that some of the adventures surround this fact, but he really isn't all that special in terms of the entire setting. While it's fun to have characters that are important to the entire world they live in (so-called “campaign characters”), not every story is about such people, and the character-centric campaign could be designed around these smaller kinds of stories. Either way, the players will feel their characters are in the thick of the action, and that's the important thing.
As a side note, though, DMs should be aware that they can also make the PCs central figures in the campaign through events or actions, rather than heredity or destiny. For example, the DM might create a campaign in which the PCs have been entrusted with an ancient secret by a dying sage that leads them to undertake an important quest. Once the PCs have this secret, much of the campaign revolves directly around them – only they can go on the quest and only they possess the secret knowledge. Before they learned the secret, however, there was nothing intrinsically special about the characters.
SIDEBAR: THE PLAYERS HAVE TO PLAY ALONG
For a character-centric campaign to really work, the players must realize that they need to give the DM material to work with. This isn't a chore, though – it's a freedom. When the players realize that they are free to have their character have a past, to have interests beyond the next dungeon, to have relationships with NPCs other than those out to kill him, it opens up an infinite number of possibilities. Characters can fall in love. They can go into business. They can join organizations. They can get involved in the community – perhaps even in politics. These things are fodder for the character-centric campaign and they lead to well-rounded and interesting characters that go far beyond a set of stats and gear.
Players need to provide the DM with interesting backstories and possible NPCs related to what they have done, what they are doing, and what they plan on doing in the future. They need to tell the DM their future goals and what their character would eventually like to strive for. They need to be willing to interact with NPCs and the world around them on a personal level. It's a responsibility, but it's also really fun and very rewarding.
PLAYER GOALS
Past installments of this column have discussed the idea of a player-driven campaign. In such a campaign, the players drive at least some of the action by creating goals for themselves rather than having quests or missions given to them by some outside force. This method of running a campaign meshes nicely with the idea of centering the campaign around the players. In fact, you really can't have a player-driven campaign without centering everything on the PCs.
You don't have to let the players sit in the driver's seat to utilize this idea, however. You can do it on a smaller scale.
Say one PC's goal is to own his own home. That's not enough to drive a campaign, but it is enough to wrap an adventure or two around. Earning the money needed to buy or build the home, discovering the home is haunted, defending the home from thieves – the possibilities are numerous.
The only trick here is to find out what the PCs' goals and desires are, so that as the DM you can give them the proper hooks to play off of. This can be as simple as just asking the players for a list of goals. Or, the goals might develop over the course of the game. After the PCs defend the forested vale against invading orcs and trolls, they decide they want to live there, setting themselves up as the kingdom's officially sanctioned (and hopefully supported) Defenders of the Vale.
Sometimes, player goals come out when a player designs his character's background. Sometimes, they are the very reason a PC is in the campaign. For example, a PC barbarian's background suggests that he has come to the civilized lands to track down the slavers that attacked his tribe and kidnapped some of his people. This is an interesting background, and it's also a potential adventure hook. Now the DM can design entire adventures around tracking down the slavers, rescuing slaves, and returning them to the tribe.
SIDEBAR: Chicken or the Egg?
So, what should occur first: the players create their PCs for the campaign to be based around, or the DM creates his campaign and then requires the players to create characters within specific parameters?
The truth is, either is fine. There's nothing wrong with a DM mandating certain aspects of characters or their background to better fit them into the campaign. The DM could even go so far as to tell a player “your character is the son of a noble,” or “your character's family was wiped out by sahuagin.” Few players will rebel against those kinds of interesting hooks – most players want to fit into the setting and campaign you've developed. And of course, sometimes the players don't even have to know this kind of information beforehand. The fact that a character's mother was secretly an assassin that killed the grand wizard of the land can be a secret that is revealed only well into the campaign.
There's also a third option. The DM creates a basic outline for the campaign, the players create characters, and as the game progresses, the DM slowly wraps the campaign around the PCs.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
A PC's mother is a powerful sorceress with powerful enemies. One character's sister is kidnapped and the PCs are required to perform a quest for her release. A PC's crazy old uncle dies and leaves the character his reputedly haunted manor home in his will. A PC with mysterious parentage turns out to be the child of outsider visitors who left her behind by mistake. These are all just some of the possible adventure hooks a DM can use to create an adventure or series of adventures around the relatives of one or more PCs.
The NPCs involved don't have to be blood relations. Friends, teachers, old military buddies, childhood acquaintances and former business partners all work too, as do any possibly related NPCs. The whole idea is that the adventure in question is made more immediate because there is a direct connection to the PCs. It's not just the local farmers who are plagued by the appearance of ankhegs, it's a friend or relative of the PCs.
The danger of this approach is over-use. You don't want the players to think of their friends and relatives only as potential hostages and victims for their enemies. You don't want every ally tob e only a liability in the end.
CAUSES HAVE EFFECTS
Perhaps the most straightforwardly organic way to tailor the campaign around the PCs uses the “third option” mentioned in the Chicken or the Egg sidebar. The campaign goes fairly normally for a while, but something that the PCs do causes things to suddenly focus on them specifically.
When the PCs defeat the evil cult of the rat god, the surviving cultists hire mercenaries and assassins to slay the characters. When the PCs depose the evil tyrant, the formerly oppressed people of the land turn to them for leadership. When the PCs fail to stop the troll queen from stealing the helm of alacrity, the townsfolk take the characters' belongings and run them out of town.
If the comic book adage is, “with great power comes great responsibility,” then the RPG corollary is, “with great deeds comes great attention.” When the PCs act, whether it's as heroes, villains, or just gold-hungry mercenaries, they're going to become a part of things – part of the plot arc itself. It won't just be NPCs acting upon NPCs, but NPCs acting on PCs. NPCs will spy on them, attempt to outmaneuver or trick them, attempt to ally with them, attempt to bribe them attempt to steal from or betray them, and even attempt to kill them.
EQUAL TIME
It's important to make sure as you plan on how to put the PCs at the center of things that you don't make it so that the campaign favors one PC over the other. While books and movies often have a star or central character and a number of supporting roles, that's not the way RPGs work. Every PC is the star, and the group works as a team. It's not fun for everyone else if one PC is the sole focus of the campaign.
So that means even if you decide that one character is destined to be the new queen (whether she knows about it or not), while the other characters are “just” adventurers, you can still also focus plots and scenarios on them, using different kinds of hooks. The important thing is that all the characters get the same amount of attention, even if it is for different reasons. One of the future queen's friends might have a sister who needs help protecting a caravan from wyvern-riding bandits, while another might need to return to his people in their underground city to find the murderers who slew his mentor.
In a way, think of your game as an episodic television show with an ensemble cast. One week, the episode focuses on one character, but the next, attention is drawn to another, and the week after that the entire cast acts together with equal emphasis.
In short, the whole idea behind the character-centric campaign is to put the spotlight on the PCs as much as possible and make them feel connected to the events of the campaign. Just remember to divide the spotlight time equally and ensure that all players feel equally connected.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's important for me to be accommodating to my players who have Videogamer Syndrome. That's why when I GM, I periodically stutter and then freeze up. I turn blue and emit an incomprehensible hexadecimal error code. That's when they know I need to be patched.You should try running in 30FPS instead.
Yeah, the game is turn-based; it shouldn't affect the gameplay to run at 30.
Yeah, the game is turn-based; it shouldn't affect the gameplay to run at 30.It's important for me to be accommodating to my players who have Videogamer Syndrome. That's why when I GM, I periodically stutter and then freeze up. I turn blue and emit an incomprehensible hexadecimal error code. That's when they know I need to be patched.You should try running in 30FPS instead.
*debeverages; twice*
You all are the best.
I won't concede holier than thou to you. This thread is filled mostly with the extreme of the opposite argument. This is the other opinion. You obviously are on the other side of it and taking this to your own extreme. No one mentioned dirt farmers, bud. I sympathize with this DM, not his players, and that's my opinion.
I feel you. You want immersion. You want verisimilitude. You want your characters to be movers and shakers, but you want them to earn it, to feel it, to BELIEVE it. These players don't get that yet. All you can do is teach them slowly. Make them earn every copper. Make them feel the fear. Make them feel the exhilaration of success. Make them understand that they are as real people in this world as the fantasy world is real. They'll come around. After all, roleplaying games where you can truly influence the world put MMOGs (no such thing as MMORPGs as of 2017) to shame.If your players don't believe that, they're better off investing their time in WoW which they can play 24x7, not once a week.
Wow, way to get all holier-than-thou. You realize there's a middle ground between "hack-and-slash campaign" and "you start as a dirt farmer and you need to scrape together your party's entire life savings and haggle in character for three hours to get a sword", right?
Also, making the players miserable is a good way to not have friends anymore.
Did you miss the part where I excluded hack-and-slash as well as making the players miserable? Because a hack-and-slash type game is the "other side of it" that you're talking about, and that means I can't be on "the other side" of the argument. The discussion has more than two "sides" anyway.
What the OP should do is talk with their players and work with them to try to figure out how to run a game everyone is satisfied with. There's unfortunately no way to give specific advice without knowing the details of how the OP is running the game and specifically what the players are dissatisfied with (it's rather hard to convey those sorts of things to someone who wasn't present).
I like the Twists and Turns: Designing the Campaign Around the Characters suggestions that Mykull posted above. They directly answer RedDarius's post.
I also mused on RedDarius' first sentence, "Ok, so as a DM I love making an immersive world and giving detail that encourages the mindset that the PCs are important in the grand scheme of things only after a certain point." In campaigns that start at 1st level, the characters are too weak to be important in any scheme. Any importance would be because of their destiny not their present abilities.
The Elder Scrolls series of video games start the player character in humble circumstances, often as a prisoner, who soon gains a grand and vital mission. But the vital mission is well above the abilities of a beginner, so instead the beginner will join a guild for training. The Fighter's Guild sends him to clear dire rats out of a homeowner's basement for a pitiful fee that is still more money than the beginner has in his purse. Even the video games acknowledge the limits of a beginner.
The Paizo adventure paths also work hard to give some importance to 1st-level missions. In Rise of the Runelords, Sheriff Hemlock's regular guards are much better qualified to guard the town of Sandpoint than the PCs. But the PCs become popular heroes during a goblin raid, so he asks the PCs to help guard town to reassure the townspeople. In Serpent's Skull the party and a bunch of nearly useless people are shipwrecked, so the party leads the survival attempts. In Iron Gods the town sent several higher level people on an urgent mission and they did not return. The PCs' mission is not the urgent one; instead, they are to try to bring back the others. But, of course, after they do, they become the best people to finish the urgent mission. In Jade Regent--oh wait, a common complaint about that AP is that the NPCs are more important than the PCs. It was a good try despite its failure: the PCs help an NPC and discover a secret about the NPC's heritage that sends them, the NPC, and the NPC's caravaning friends on a mission around the world.
Yet how many of those follow-up missions after the beginner missions are grand in the scheme of things? Protecting a town from goblins is important only to the town. Uncovering the secrets of a shipwreck island is grander only than sitting on the beach praying for rescue. In Iron Gods the party could have said, hey, we rescued the experts and got paid, so let's quit while we are ahead, rather than undertake the urgent mission after they proved themselves. The lost heir in Jade Regent was grand and that was the problem, for it pulled in stronger NPCs. That is RedDarius's problem: truly grand schemes attract strong NPCs.
If the typical town guard or official is 3rd level, then the PCs won't stand out at 2nd or 3rd level. If the capital city has lots of 10th level special agents to the king, then that king won't hire 9th level PCs for his vital missions. RedDarius's immersive world apparently has lot of strong NPCs who care.
The Paizo adventure paths have another trick up their sleeves to keep the vital mission exclusive to the PCs: secrecy. In Iron Gods the powerful and evil Technic League is ready to pounce if the PCs let their discoveries be known. In Jade Regent the Jade Regent's assassins would kill any known lost heir. In Serpent's Skull the party trying to foil the serpentfolk's grand scheme was deep in the jungle away from civilized aid. In Rise of the Runelords the secret conspiracy was good at keeping itself secret. The authorities always thought it was a smaller problem that the PCs should handle alone, until the end of the 4th module, when the full secret was uncovered and only the PCs were powerful enough to stop it.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Make the campaign be about the PCs. But make the campaign setting have its own individual parts that run regardless of whether the PCs intervene or not.
Does anyone else find it strange that, more than a day after the original post, we are still spouting advice to an OP who has shown no sign that he is listening? for all we know, he read the first few responses and gave up in despair. Or he read a few more and gave up in confusion.
I say we ease up on the responses until RedDarius posts a response. Theres more than enough here for him to mull over for a while.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Does anyone else find it strange that, more than a day after the original post, we are still spouting advice to an OP who has shown no sign that he is listening? for all we know, he read the first few responses and gave up in despair. Or he read a few more and gave up in confusion.
I say we ease up on the responses until RedDarius posts a response. Theres more than enough here for him to mull over for a while.
It's a public forum; discussion doesn't "belong" to the original posters. This topic took off because he asked a genuinely interesting question, even if not everyone liked the tone of it.
How can a GM give players the feeling that there's a big picture going on that they're not ready to take on directly yet? And how does he do this in a way that still makes the PCs protagonists, not spectators waiting for their turn?
|
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm going to try to gather some strands from this discussion and come up with a coherent tapestry.
Protagonists
A crucial point of RPGs is that the players are the protagonists. They're not spectators. GMPCs shouldn't take the spotlight. Players shouldn't be sitting around waiting to level up so they can be important.
Perspective
Becoming a big player on the global stage is much more satisfying if you know that you weren't always. It's good for the players not to start out as the big stars in the world, but eventually become them. But while they're not world players from the start, they're still protagonists in the actual game.
That means we need to look at the world stage in a different way. We have to "move the camera" - we're not looking at it directly, we start by looking at what it means to the PCs local situation. If there's a big war for the crown of the kingdom and the town guard gets pulled off to fight for the rightful king, a local robber baron decides to raid the town. The PCs lead the defense of the town and they kick his ass. They're protagonists, but they saw that there was a bigger picture.
The PCs are protagonists here because the camera is focused on them. When the regular NPC functionaries are gone, they're they heroes that step up to the plate. And they're also protagonists because the camera shows why what they're doing is important: we see the suffering the robber baron inflicts and so stopping him really is a victory.
Failing NPCs
In any situation where the PCs end up as important heroes, it's because 1) they were willing to do it 2) nobody else was willing to do it first. In the case of the robber baron, normally the town guard would stop him, but they've been called away. Other possible reasons would be:
- They tried but failed, because they were underequipped, understaffed, undertrained, or incompetent.
- They've been bought off.
- The bad guy convinced them that he's got powerful magic and they're too scared to confront him.
- The bad guy used a legal trick to make them stand down.
And so on; lots of reasons why the NPCs aren't doing their job, and the PCs need to step in. Make sure not to use the same excuse too often because you do want to stay believable.
NPCs recruiting PCs
The flip side of this is having some useful NPCs who actualy succeed at their job; the sheriff who succesfully keep order. He helps the players out a couple of times, for example by taking on half the encounter while the PCs together handle the other half. Clearly, he's competent.
Of course, competent people get promoted up and away. So he needs to recruit successors; like the PCs. After all, they've shown they're good at the job. Now, the PCs can get quests and they can't say "why aren't the authorities handling this", because they are the ones responsible. (Make sure to also give them perks of the job.)
NPCs delegate important work
Apart from the promotion thing, an NPC might also reach out to the PCs because they've done something heroic that shows they're on the same side, just not as powerful (yet).
Thing is, the forces of evil always outnumber the good guys (ever see a fantasy universe where good has a comfortable majority all the time?). So while the good prince could easily take on this robber band, there are actually fifteen robber bands active all over the kingdom and there's also that big dragon. So he needs help to handle the workload.
Now here again, the PCs can see there's a bigger picture (dragon), but what they're doing is still important. When they go after robber baron #2, they're already starting to feel like they're quite something because they're now the prince's team of bruisers, not just village guys. And when the usurper's lieutenant comes to reinforce baron #2, they can see that what they're doing really matters to the bad guy (nibbling away at his power base one province at a time). And while there's this big good guy prince, he's too busy keeping the dragon in check to take away their protagonist role.
This part needs to be handled carefully as GM. While you're bringing them closer to the big picture and then pulling them away again ("deal with this baron while I deal with that dragon") you have to make sure they really see what they're doing as important too. Make it clear that if they don't get the baron under control the prince is going to have a knife in his back while he's fighting the dragon.
Mentors, doomed mentors
And let's be honest, most NPC mentors are doomed. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, quite doomed. Yoda chose exile cuz he saw the writing on the wall. Merlin tends to end up trapped in a cavern somewhere.
For a while, the NPC mentor stands as a shield between the PCs and the big picture bad guys. While the big guys occasionally try to put the PCs out of play, the mentor makes sure they can't bring their full weight to bear directly on the PCs. Meanwhile, the PCs have someone who can teach them about the big picture, explain what it's really about, who's dangerous and what long-term hope there is.
And then of course something goes wrong for the mentor, and the PCs need to take his place. If you time this well, it'll be when they feel competent doing what they're doing right now, but when they're not that sure yet about taking on all the enemies the mentor had.