I make pretty potent NPCs for my campaigns. I notice this in particular with Psi-Wars (hence my commentary on “But can you make a 1000 point NPC?”), but it’s been true of most settings I run. I cut my teeth on settings like Exalted and chambara games which draw heavily on the overwrought aesthetics of anime and comics and thus favor high octane one-v-one fights, and thus demand high power characters.
But I also run games whose style I term “Secret Agent Games” or sometimes “Strategic Games” rather than the more tactical games often used by D&D game masters and games inspired by them (of course, very veteran DMs, especiall OSR DMs, will note that what I describe as “secret agent play” very much applies to them, and the more “tactical” game is more of a 3e-ism, but I digress. I just want to forestall inevitable “but actually” comments that are perfectly legitimate).
The problem is that in a tactical game, you will use the cool NPCs you create for a fight. As the players progress from encounter to encounter, they will face each set of opponents, who will typically scale worse and worse with each encounter, giving the players a sense of what they will face as they move forward. This is good game design, because this escalation teaches the players what the encounters will look like going forward, and help teach them what they need to do, so the final boss encounter feels like a culmination of the previous encounters. To use a Psi-Wars example, if players fight the Empire, they might face a squad of imperial troopers, then they might face a lone, apprentice Imperial Knight, then they might face a full Imperial knight backed by a squad of Imperial Troopers. The first two encounters prepare them for the final encounter, and they have a sense of what they will face and what tactics they need to use to win. It feels fair and logical.
Strategic play, or “Secret Agent” play doesn’t work like that. In such a game, the faction exists and it has its dragons and forces, like the Imperial Troopers and the Imperial Knight, and likely a variety of other agents, such as a minister that commands these forces, a security agent that investigates intrusions, etc. The players may or may not fight against them. They might join them, they might negotiate with them, they might sneak up on them. The fact that the Empire has a dangerous imperial knight or a secret psychic agent or whatever is a factor in PC strategic calculations. An opposing faction that lacks a powerful champion and lethal forces tends to encourage the players to see a violent encounter with them, as this is more likely to result in success, while a faction who has the Psi-Wars equivalent of Darth Vader and elite Death Troopers at their disposal will tend to encourage negotiation or a stealthy approach, as a direct head-to-head confrontation will result in defeat. Thus, players need to know how dangerous an opposing faction is, and they generally don’t do it with a sequence of small, tactical encounters.
This creates the problem of the sheathed sword. The enemy opposition has their champion who is presumably highly lethal, but that lethality is contained and unused, because to use that lethality invites reprisal and ends the possibility of negotiation. But if that lethality is not advertised, the faction loses out on some of its negotiation leverage. More importantly, as a GM, you need to communicate that lethality to the players without necessarily having the character fight them, especially if the character is supposed to be so lethal. Thus, the point of this post: how do you communicate the lethality of an NPC without, you know, killing the PCS?
Continue reading “Meditations on the Sheathed Sword”