My players have become fond of an NPC and are trying to train them up as a sort of member of the party.
So far I’ve been kinda fudging their stats, but I’d like to come up with something more concrete. I’ve got the D&D 5e book Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, but unfortunately that’s a super slim set of rules that mostly focuses on “at this level, they get this specific ability”, so doesn’t provide a lot of help in translating to Pathfinder.
Does anyone know some good variant or homebrew rules for giving the party a Sidekick in PF2? Or alternatively, have any advice?
If the NPC is expected to see combat, you can use the Archives of Nethys NPC database as a starting point or you can use the Monster creation rules to start from scratch.
In PF1, you’d just slap NPC classes on them until they hit somewhere near the Average Party Level. When I ran PF1 games, the sidekick would start around APL, and then start gaining XP with the party on their way to their first level of a PC class. Ricky the Redeemed Bugbear War3/Bar1 type stuff.
In D&D5E, specifically in TCE, it looks like they brought back a simplified version of NPC classes (Expert, Spellcaster, Warrior). I haven’t used these rules - all my players have adopted are magical beasts which scale differently.
Both of these systems are doing the same thing:
- Nerf a player class
- apply that class until they have parity with the players in terms of HP/Level
- make sure they can’t outshine the actual PCs.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with just building a PC and saying “Their level is the average party level minus 2” and don’t factor them into awarding XP or treasure gen.
For generating GMPCs and stuff like that, I use the NPC Index books on PFInfinite. To actually run them…
I had been planning on converting the Sunlesa Citadel for my home game, but things have evolved past that on me. I was toying with having Meepo act like a lacky using someting similar to controlling summon or an animal companion. Meepo, as cowardly kobold, would spend all 3 of his actions cowering unless someone spent an action telling him what to do. Those commands could be general (“attack that dire rat!”) or specific (“give PC2 a healing potion” or “use your breath weapon on this goblin!”), but Meepo would then use all of his actions doing what’s requested of him and then running back to the fringe.
I haven’t gotten a chance to play it, though. There are obvious issues with turn order and who gets to command Meepo and things like that that I haven’t worked out.
Reflavor a Skeleton companion into a person and let them use equipment. And maybe scrub the minion trait if you want control of them as the GM. I’d personally let the PC’s control them in combat and let them use the Minion trait.
