NPCs

I've got a similar problem in one of my games in progress - which I intend to handle via a bidding mechanism. Making this work requires that players have some visbility of the likely near future advantages controlling the NPC will confer.

If such visbilitiy extends suffiently far into the future, you can make players bid to control a future turn of the NPC, such that a succesful bid cannot be acted upon until a turn or few into the future, requiring careful planning ahead.

You can take this scheme in two directions - have all bids open such that players currently controlling the NPC can act to thwart the value of future controlling actions, or have all bids hidden, with bids revealed on the turn they take effect with the winnin gplayer immediately taking control of the NPC.

In the latter case there is more record keeping required but the benefit of the hidden information _might_ add something to your game.

Either one player is set up to be the "bad guys" and plays the NPCs.

Or every player is allowed to move or affect what the NPCs do. Sometimes this is as small as the robber in Settlers of Catan, or the zombies in Zombies!!!. Other times its a bit more complex with special moves, orders, cards, and subsystems that add a lot of complexity to controlling NPCs. In the end the same result happens. The players all try and use the NPCs to there advantage just like any other part of the game. NPCs just become mutually controlled game piece(s).

Lastly you can have the game system itself control the NPCs. This "programmed" a.i. is usually very simple and mindless. The NPCs won't be making decisions. They'll just be randomly acting scenery.

Boardgames are about the players at the table. They don't emulate things very well. What they do well is prompting interaction between the players. Boardgames, card games, role-playing games, and every other tabletop game is about the people that gather at that table. Tabletop games take those players and give them something to collectively mutate, argue over, contribute to, and generally interact with each other.

With that said. NPCs will never be more than just another part of the game engine. You don't need to concentrate on them any more than you would any other game mechanic. NPCs are no different than a boat, dinosaur, or any other mechanic in the game.

Is there something specific you needed to do with the NPCs?

The trouble with giving all the players the opportunity to control the NPC is that the NPC acts in a very inconsistent manner, according to which player controls it at the moment. If it is important to the theme to have the NPC act as an intelligent adversary, I think you're better off having one of the players control it all the time, either by promoting it to a player character with a different goal, or by giving the other players some compensating advantage.

This is a good point which cannot be completely solved. However one way to address the 'split personality' NPC problem is to have players bid for control of the NPC, but give the NPC a default action (perhaps determined by the NPC's current location on the board) which has it's own bid strength. If no players bid high enough then the NPC takes the default action.

The default actions and associated bid strength can be varied according to position etc (for example, when a 'thief' NPC nears a potential robbery site the NPC is overwhelmingly likely to move into the robbery site and apply his professional skills).

The bidding scheme could be augumented or supplanted by a scheme more tailored to the game theme itself (such that players wishing to prevent an NPC default action can only do so by playing a card which makes sense in the game context). To continue the thief example, playing a 'watchman' card on the location that would otherwise have been robbed prevents the thief from moving there, and possibly transfers control of the NPC to the player who placed the appropriate card.

One problem with bidding for control of the NPC is that it basically means the NPC will be controlled by whomever is most desperate to control it. This will often be a player whose goals are at odds with the goals that the NPC should have. For example, if an NPC thief is heading for my unguarded art museum, I might bid like mad to control him and move him away -- a very unlikely behavior for a thief.

I think, if the players are going to control an NPC, the method of selecting which player takes control when should be based on which player's goals are most likely to align with those of the NPC. A very simple example of this is the way that Makhno's anarchists are handled in Ted Racier's wargame of the Russian Civil War, "Reds!". Makhno's forces, being anarchists, fought against both the Reds and the Whites, and never cooperated with either. To simulate this, the game gives control of his troops to the player whose forces are currently farthest away from them. This means Makhno always end up attacking whomever is closest.

-- Matt