How to play with NPCs (Guide)

Hofborg has both general guidelines and specific rules on the use of NPCs in role-play. Before you bring an NPC into your role-play you will want to check this guide on when to use NPCs for trivial issues verses problem solving issues, as well as how to introduce NPCs into DM ran events.

General

There are approximately 50 NPC Hofborg Villagers and 40 NPC oarsmen. Some of those NPCs are represented in game by ESO Houseguests which are detailed on our NPCs lore page.

NPCs can be used for all of our standard “trivial” needs such as bar tenders, cooks, store keeps, flavor pets, etc etc. You are welcome to role-play that you have a minion following you around clapping the coconuts together, but the minute they pull a sword its no longer trivial.

IC Leaders and DM's may use town NPCs to help facilitate scenes. Unless no other option exists, the in-game NPCs will be used. This is a literary device to allow an IC leader to include another player into a scene when the leader's own character is distracted.

Solving Problems

As a community we do not generally approve the use of NPCs to solve issues. We want to solve things with our player characters in role-play ... together.

Solving issues includes any Dungeon Master ran story arc or event, Hofborg story arcs, or (unnegotiated) player-to-player conflict. This means that the following scenarios are off page for our community:

• Using your pet, mount, companion, pocket ally, summoned pet, fictional guards, squires, body guards, etc in a free form or diced fight with another player. Player to player fights are between players only.
• Claiming you have ".. a contact who can help with ____" and that contact is not a player character.
• Claiming you have access to more resources than can be produced by a player character. Please do not be the Lord of some village populated only by NPCs and claim to have significant fictional resources to solve our problems. If we wanted to do that, we could do it ourselves.

Please recognize that solutions which happen in character at events with multiple player characters are worth a great deal more to a proposed problem. While some handwaving is necessary, we will, as DM's and lore masters, reduce the effective value of solutions which are hand waved vs those that had actual RP. If you choose to make an event of it then it's acceptable to use NPCs because you are including our players in the RP, not cutting them out of solving the problem in roleplay.

Please consider making the effort to DO the role-play with your player character contact. Be prepared to explain the "chain of evidence" for a solution, and have your role-play solution reduced enough that the player characters still have to solve the problem.

Guild Leaders

We want you to join us! We want to be part of your story and have shared solutions. However, we would love it much more if we did a shared event rather than getting a hand waved gift.

Defunct Guilds

We respect that your character may have many more years of role-play in ESO before you joined us, and that you have other player characters who are no longer active in the game. We respect that you want to keep their name alive and will support, within reason, the use of inactive players and defunct guilds as the solution for simple issues.

Player to Player

Just to restate the obvious, whatever you and another player negotiate between themselves on topics or issues that have nothing to do with the overall arc is none of our business.

DM Events

Our DM Events are for our player characters, but there are scenarios where having NPCs helping would be necessary. This rule ONLY applies to events being ran by a dungeon master.

For every person involved in the DM’d event, another 4 NPCs may be used to solve quest plot lines. If we have 6 players we can use 24 NPC oarsmen members. This means that anyone RPing as a ship’s captain may make use of 4 of their NPC oarsmen.

However, these NPCs can ONLY be used “off screen” of the main player action, and they can only be given one set of instructions per session. So we can send a ship or crew around to hold an entrance, or confront other DM NPCs, but after that instruction is given what happens and all of its details is now in the hands of the DM.

Disclaimer and Copyright

This page may contain a mix of ESO canon and Hofborg fanon. This guild project, including the player homes, the story arcs, the add-on and the wiki, is the combined effort of an entire team of incredibly talented writers, builders and programmers. ESO canon has been credited to its source site and Fanon contributors are on the Copyright page.