When I wrote about game shepherd NPCs on Monday, Lugh chimed in with several suggestions for keeping the game shepherd from taking up too much of the stage. The last of these was, instead of using an NPC to dispense the necessary exposition, using one of the PCs, particularly one built to know just about everything. (And I find myself realizing retroactively that I forgot to mention the other typical role of the game shepherd, from which I derived the term I used.) It’s an effective strategy, and aside from the occasional bad skill roll—which presupposes you’re willing to let the important stuff require a roll—pretty reliable. On the other hand, if your shepherd is going to be shepherding as well as expositing, guiding the PCs in the general direction of the plot and making sure their leaps to conclusions don’t take them too far afield, and what you want to use is one of the PCs, that adds a few additional challenges.

One of them is figuring out just how much control of the game’s direction to give the PC in question. Give them too much, and resentment builds, both in character and out of character. (Thing learned from personal experience: never, EVER give the newly added player who can’t think of a concept the role of the Person Who Holds the Leash if your players are for the moment supernaturally controlled, even if it would save you some trouble. Even if they don’t choose to use it beyond the minimum… they die quickly.) It’s hard to give them too little, if such a thing exists, though you do want to make sure you can get someone who can to some degree influence the game’s direction.

Another issue is how much wiggle room the game shepherd gets. I find the optimal situation is “ensure that this thing happens, but other than that, do what you want and respond how you want”; any stricter parameters and you lose your game shepherd’s player’s sense of agency. This is a useful trick if you’re dealing with a player who likes the idea of collaboration and reacts badly to being full-on railroaded; you can get the nifty scenes you like, and they’re less likely to resent it because there’s still a part of it that is, well, theirs. Besides, then you get the fun of the player creatively interpreting the instructions, or completely turning things around once the objective is met—something you wouldn’t necessarily get if you were dragging the story around yourself. As often as not, these end up being traitor PCs, though they really don’t have to.

One problem with the game shepherd as PC, though, is the potential appearance of favoritism. There are several tricks to avoiding this, though. One is to make the plots for which the shepherd is going to likely be an important directional element center on someone else’s character, so the star of the plotline isn’t the person who is managing your end of the steering. Another is to alternate between people deputized as shepherds, if you think you can manage multiples. If you’re likely to only end up with one (maybe it’s easier for her to get in contact with you outside of session than it is for the others), you might see if she’d be willing to make something of a bridge to the other players, giving you a sense of when your precious plot twist might not be so hot an idea for concept-deep reasons.

Another issue is how much the shepherd knows. If you’re prone to surprising people, it can be very difficult to keep secrets from the person who’s helping increase the odds that your ducks all end up in a row rather than scattered all over the place. In that case, you might want to get someone who really doesn’t care about the surprises—or use the shepherding sparingly and on events that aren’t necessarily going to directly hint at the conclusion you’re hoping for.

They’re tricky, but PCs can cover the shepherding part of being a game shepherd.