Quote Originally Posted by Spo View Post
I have had bad luck being in games where different DM's create NPC's that become the "star" of the show.

In a homebrew campaign, the DNPC was an edge-lord something that brooded around and made the kill shots on a lot of the big baddies (and always the same "cool ass" way - "he takes out his daggers and stabs him in the eyes with them." (yawn). Mercifully that campaigned ended when the DM lost interest in the game.

And just last night we wrapped up Frostmaiden. where our party somehow got this dog that was cute and smart and strong and magical and special and blah blah blah. OMG!!! If the DM said it once he said it 100 times how he created "Fred" in other campaigns and people just LOVED him. Fred would solve the mysteries, find the secret doors, attack the main monster. Basically, if you wanted to stay alive in the game you stayed near Fred the AC400 plot armor dog. By the final battle, I was opening commenting on how powerful deus ex machina dog and questioning if our presence was needed. It was a good thing that show is over.

In other games I have seen NPC's run by GM's wonderfully. I think the secret to that pleasant experience was that they had a memorable personality and were background characters, never stepping into the spotlight. Me good memories of them involved rescuing them as opposed to watching them kill steal from the players.

Has anyone else experienced this and why are some DMs in love with their NPC's?
I haven't, but apart from DMs who aren't quite through making the mental transition from "being a player" to "being a DM", you can have them running away with their own success when they have an NPC that the party really takes to. Looks like maybe that happened with your own campaign's Scrappy Doo, I mean "Fred"?

Apropos of the tangent...

Quote Originally Posted by Magicspook View Post
Your DM is simply not a good DM and they would probably be a bad player as well, because of the simple reason that they didn't understand the basic premise of DnD.
DnD is a COLLABORATIVE storytelling game first and foremost, and only then is it a roleplaying game, a fantasy combat game or whatever you want it to be. The entire game is about working together to create a story. If one of the players (including the DM) doesn't understand that, they will invariably fall into one of the multitude of 'that guy' tropes.
D&D doesn't have any mechanics that structure gameplay to match a story structure or flow, nor any mechanics that encourage or enforce other conventions typical of stories. The lack of such mechanics suggests to me the lack of comparable design intent. As such, I can't agree at all that you can call it a "collaborative storytelling game" in any strict sense. Say rather that it is usually a game where collaborative storytelling happens simply because a bunch of people are sitting around the gaming table (literal or figurative) taking it in turns to narrate the goings-on of fictional characters in a fictional world and then narrating the goings-on after the fact (the way one might talk about things they did or that happened to them). And in fact conflict can arise if any of the players (but especially the DM) have it in mind to make the game be "about" a story when the other players do not agree. There is nothing stopping the game from being used as a storytelling game in a stricter sense, of course.

Tying this back to the topic of the OP ("Has anyone else experienced this and why are some DMs in love with their NPC's?"), insisting on a stricter view of D&D-as-storytelling-game strikes me as misdiagnosing the "why" of the thing. The basic premise of the game that the DM is not understanding is their role in the game. For instance, the 5e DMG summarises what the DM is about thusly (on page 4): "[Y]our goal isn't to slaughter the [player character] adventurers but to create a campaign world that revolves around their actions and decisions, and to keep your players coming back for more!" [Emphasis mine.] When an NPC, DMPC or otherwise starts running the show, the DM is now making the campaign world revolve around that NPC's actions and decisions, instead of those of the players' PCs (around whom such revolution is meant to happen). That is where things are going wrong.