Playing With Your Party

I am very happy to say that I will be playing DnD for the first time since college this week. I'm the DM and my party consists of two people who have played, but are out of practice, and someone who is entirely new to the game. For the next few weeks, I'll be posting things that directly relate to my current experiences at the table. Today, for instance, I want to talk about DMs also controlling a player character.

If your party is a little sparse and/or missing a vital role, you may consider building a character to tag along for the adventure. If you enjoy playing, there are some pretty obvious benefits to rolling up your own adventurer. In addition to fortifying the lineup and rounding out the tactical options, you get to share in the glory of the adventure. Your well-built encounters may still crumble, but at least you'll be doing some of the crumbling.

There are drawbacks and potential pitfalls when joining the party's ranks, however. The most difficult issues involve the problem of "Meta-Gaming." For those unfamiliar with the term, "meta-gaming" is when a player uses knowledge that their character would not or could not know. This includes an enemy's stats or the habits/origins of a particular beastie. When the DM plays a character, they not only know everything about every enemy, but also the entire planned campaign arch. Also, a DM-controlled character has a habit of dominating the action and hogging moments that the players should be a much bigger part of.

If the advantages outweigh the drawbacks for you, there are three basic levels of DM participation:

Full Character Participation
A DM engaging in full character participation has created a complete character. They have built everything from their skills to their equipment to their power selections. Full character participants are involved with the party not only during combat, but also when the party engages in skill challenges or talks to NPCs. In this way, the DM is both fully a DM and fully a player.

Pros: Full character participation lets you experience everything you love about playing DnD while still serving as DM. It allows you and the players to be partners as well as adversaries. It can also be an incredibly effective way to ensure that the players see and do everything that you intend them to.

Cons: Meta-gaming is a huge problem for this kind of participation. Not only will your character know everything about the world and the campaign, your monsters will also know exactly what your character is doing. Also, trying to manage both a full character and the workings of an entire campaign is a lot of work.


Limited Character Participation
When participating with a limited character, a DM still puts together a full character sheet. This includes picking skills, powers, and equipment. This character participates in combat, but has some reason to be useless when you need to play as NPCs. The easiest way to achieve this is to have your character be unable or unwilling to speak. This can be by design (a Warforged built without a mouth), trauma (a Drow raid survivor whose tongue has been cut out), or by choice (a priest who has taken an oath of silence).

Pro: The major advantage this has over full character participation is that you don't have to juggle your character and NPCs while the party is out of combat. You also hog less of the party's spotlight, becoming more of a tagalong than a full member. The story of how your character got their limitation can be a great way to drop quest hooks, too!

Con: Your ability to use your character to give the party information is severely, well, limited. A mute character cannot explain the history of a battlefield or share suspicions about the local clergy. In addition, you still have to juggle all the combat actions of your character along with your monsters.

Partial Character Participation
A partial character has the complexity of your average monster in terms of stats (in fact, you can use most standard monsters as is). The best way to create one is to follow the steps in the Dungeon Master's Guide 2 for converting monsters to companion characters. A partial character has no more than one of the basic, At-Will, and Encounter attacks and only two or three trained skills.

Pros: A partial character is very easy to keep track of, even when running multiple monsters in a combat. Depending on what monster you use, your character may also be unable to speak/not allowed to enter settlements, allowing you to be fully a DM when the party talks with NPCs.

Cons: A partial character is so limited that you may wonder why you've even bothered to have a character at all. Since your character is a monster, they will have limited healing surges and are unlikely to survive challenging combat. A partial character's skills also tend to be somewhat sub-par meaning the the party is more likely to fail in skill challenges that call for a group check.