Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Raddu76 Feb 05, 2011 20:33:50	So, the party in my game just got their butts handed to them as they tried to raid the villa of one Kargash, defiler/assassin of House Tsalaxa.  In my version he's got a villa/compound on the edge of the great Ivory Plain just east of Fort Kalvis.   IN most of the recent fights the party has let a combatant escape...or they didn't let them, but they escaped anyway.   So I was going to have all of these escapees who work for Kargash form up a party to hunt the heroes.  This bounty hunter party would be as follows:  A juvenile braxat, a kenku assassin, a tarek assassin, a human defiler, and gnoll defiler. As the party flees from Kargash villa and retreats into the verdant belt to lick their wounds I was going to have each of the PC's play one of these characters and depending on what their actual characters did, make a sort of a one shot adventure out of it.  I'll give each player a paragraph or so of the characters backstory.   I would go through Kargash assembling them and sending them on the mission.  I thought it would be a cool way for the characters to see more of the world from a different perspective and give some backstory.  At whatever point the bounty hunter party find the PC's, I'll take them over as NPCs and the PCs can have it out with them.   Also, during this, there are going to be Giants raiding the area and Gulgan soldiers trying to fend off the Giants.  I thought it would be cool if the bounty hunters found the PCs right in the middle of a conflict with the GIants and the Gulgans. So, my question really is, how should I handle the bounty hunter party? Should I make them full fledge PC's while the characters play them and switch them to mosters when they fight?  Should I make them "companion characters", or just let the players play them as "monster stats"?  Obviously it'd be easiest as monster stats since I have most of them already.  What do you think about the idea in general?  WOuld you like it if your DM did something like that?
#2 ritorix Feb 06, 2011 0:18:48	That sounds awesome.  I listened to a D&D podcast once where the DM did that with friendly NPCs.  It worked out very well, and did expand the world while making the PCs seem important since everyone was talking about them and reacting to their story.  Never seen it done with hostile NPCs, but I like the concept.  If your players are new to 4E and/or you plan more than 1 encounter, I would go with a full character sheet to let them play something different.  If you are keeping things simple or just doing roleplay or maybe 1 fight, monster stats may work better.  Either way, you dont want to do pvp with full character sheets on both side of the battle, that gets very lethal.  But I would do something a bit different, kill off the hunters right before or while the PCs show up. You could have the bounty hunters eventually track down the PCs, then have giants (or silt wyrms, a tembo, whatever) attack the hunters.  Hunters die but weaken the giants, who the PCs then fight.  You could make it a killer fight, say 5 levels above the bounty hunters, or constant waves of attackers to ensure the hunters die.  But they should be able to do enough damage first to let the PCs waltz in and clean up.