Followers & NPCs

It is likely (perhaps even inevitable) that during your adventures on the CHAT channel you will need to create NPCs (Non-playable characters) to act in a variety of roles in order to progress your story. These characters often take the role of villains, minions, allies, and masters on the CHAT channel. Each serves a definitive function towards storytelling and this article hopes to establish a number of guidelines and rules for introducing these characters. Some of these rules and guidelines can be bent, or exceptions may be made with the expressed permission of the ADMIN staff.

Followers

A follower is a specific type of NPC that is closely integrated into your character's journey or backstory. These are allies which may assist you and which have stories of their own to tell. These characters are in essence extensions of your character. They generally are more well-rounded and established than other NPCs that are likely to persist over many roleplay "arcs" and are fleshed out characters in their own right. Because these types of NPCs are more narratively rich and relevant to your stories, there is a cost associated with obtaining them and giving them narrative power detailed below.
The advantage to having a follower is that these characters hold the same narrative license as your player character. They are extensions of your hero. We will work towards even being able to track their RPEnergy separately in the future.

Guidelines for Followers

• You may only have two Followers.
• To purchase a follower you must contact a roleplay admin and pay a cost of 75 RPP.
• Followers can have RP Tiers equal to half your RP Tier rounded down (so the strongest followers can be T3)
• Followers can only use skills from the RPFreebies HFILE, they do not have access to their own master slot techniques, but you can flavor their free abilities in way that you like (Destructive Wave, for instance may take the form of a Kamehemeha).
• Followers can assist you in combat against other NPCs, but cannot assist you in fighting another Player Character without their expressed permission (Think of this in the function of how many of the Z Warriors will wait on the sidelines while Goku fights a villain instead of lobbing ki-blasts).
• All rules that apply to Player Characters also apply to Followers. Example: If your Follower is killed, you would need to spend RPP to purchase the 'Back from the Dead' reward if you wish for them to survive or be returned from the Otherworld.
• Similar to the death of Player Characters, the Admin staff encourages you not to kill Followers without just cause.

Masters

Another common type of NPCs that appear on the CHAT channel are Masters. These NPCs have far fewer restrictions than other types because their purpose is to add obstacles to your story or assist you in progressing your narrative. However, there are a number of guidelines we encourage you to follow regarding them.

Guidelines for Masters

• A 'Master' NPC can assist your character in training, learning new RP techniques, or overcoming a challenge.
• Generally speaking a Master NPC can be as powerful as you deem necessary but they should -never- assist you in overcoming an obstacle or a defeating a villain in a direct way (I.E. A Master should never fight alongside you).
• While Masters can be of any strength or "Tier" as you wish, we discourage players from creating Master NPCs who are wildly beyond their own power, or who have access to information, technology, magic or any other resource that trivializes threats you may encounter on the CHAT channel (For instance, Goku trained beneath Master Roshi, then King Kai, and eventually Whis but he did not begin his training with Whis).

Villains and Minions

There are two types of enemies which you are likely to encounter on the CHAT channel. The 'Minion' and the 'Villain'. Villains represent a category of NPCs more powerful than a Minion. These are the true threats you will often face either collectively with other players or individually as an overwhelming force or obstacle. Minions on the other hand, are enemies which can pose a threat to your character but who are very often merely speedbumps along the path as you progress towards the true Villain of your story. The words Villain and Minion are not meant to represent a moral ideaology, they're simply terms to easily associate their role in the narrative (the villain of an evil character's story is a Hero and vice versa).
Any NPCs who are not followers, masters or villains categorically fall into the realm of "minion". This could represent a wide variety of NPC types otherwise unlisted. Minions may fight alongside you, but as listed in the guidelines below, a player-character or their follower will likely 'tear through' them with relative ease if they're included in a battle. Minions do not hold any narrative power or serious license to the story. Even if they are introduced as more powerful than a hero or their followers, they simply don't have what it takes to clash head on with a protagonist.

Guidelines for Minions

• Generally speaking the strength of minions should never reach beyond T2. Transformations and ascended powers associated with them are not easily obtained and multiple nameless characters performing such astounding feats cheapens the ability overall (Some long-term roleplayers have spent years writing on the CHAT channel and never achieved their first transformation).
• Be careful about introducing large organizations of minions such as the Red Ribbon Army, or the Frieza Force. While individually or in small squads minions can pose a significant threat to multiple characters on CHAT, an army of them would be capable of overwhelming entire planetary defenses and the sheer scale of this type of invasion has wide-spread consequences.
• Minions should generally not have unique master-slots of their own. Simple ki-blasts and RPFreebie abilities are more than enough for them to challenge or fight player characters without introducing powers and abilities better left for genuine villains.
• It is not unusual for player-characters to tear through minions with little effort and we encourage players to not spend significant amounts of RPEnergy to overcome such foes. These enemies are not the true threat, and narratively pose far less challenge to our heroes.

Guidelines for Villains

• We encourage players to introduce a Villains to a narrative prior to their engagement with other players. These characters represent genuine obstacles and challenges that far exceed a minion and deserve to be highlighted and fleshed out.
• Villains created by player-characters should generally not exceed their own Tier, or the Tier of another player they are NPCing for by a wide margin. Introducing enemies wildly beyond the capabilities of the heroes present has historically lead to disasterous plots.
• A Villain should have a clear and transparant goal and their machinations to reach it should never feel as if the player-characters on the channel can do nothing to thwart it. While they may have scenes that occur in-between roleplays where they further their schemes or change their tactics, they should never come across as untouchable or omniscient.
• Villains should not be cosmic entities or deities of any shape or form (I.E. Do not create a Villain was once a Kaioshin of a Quadrant, or a student of the God of Destruction).

Admin NPCs

While these rules and guidelines apply to players, they do not apply to Admin NPCs and Villains. While this may seem contradictory, many Admin NPCs and Villains operate under the idea of "Tier X" when they appear on the CHAT channel, nor do they have an RPEnergy pool that they spend during combat.

Tier X and RPXenergy

"Tier X" and "RPXenergy" is the principle that a Villain for a roleplay event hosted by Admin should be as powerful as necessary to challenge all of the characters involved in that roleplay. If an Adminstrator is operating as the major Villain for a roleplay arc and sets a defined Tier to that character, sheer overwhelming odds from the player-characters and 'action economy' would often leave these encounters either extremely anti-climatic or would require the Villain to be substantially more powerful than all of the heroes present. This can lead to arguments or discussion such as "How many T2 characters can combat a T7?" or "How much energy has the Villain spent fighting multiple opponents?" In truth, these questions and discussions cannot be solved by simple calculations. These characters need the ability to be larger than life and pose a significant threat to whomever they cross paths with. It is not unusual for a major roleplay event to have player character 'drop out' or be unable to attend them for their completion and strict math in these cases would cause the heroes to foreit any hope of defeating a villain they were previously struggling with now that they're missing one or even multiple allies.
If an Admin creates a Villain that seems to be overwhelmingly beyond the capabilities of the player-characters, or who intervenes/interrupts an on-going story in a way that upsets you, contact the ADMIN staff or Rendo directly regarding your concerns.

Regarding Red RPP and Followers / NPCs: While it is possible to earn Red RPP for roleplaying your follower or NPCs with other characters on the CHAT channel, the amount of Red Points possible to earn are significantly reduced or may not be earned at all. This is to prevent a character from roleplaying in relative 'safety' through their follower and becoming stronger without training or overcoming obstacles of their own.