NPC Exchange

In light of the recent Joint event of Exiles and Wastelands, I think it's a good time to talk about NPC exchanges in Cross-Gaming.

This tactic was first brought to my attention when reading about Accelerant, a system with many games with very similar rule sets. A lot of these games run in close proximity to one another, so the player pool is somewhat limited.

While many people are willing to play both games, there is still a significant portion of players that simply don't have the time, money, or interest in playing in two LARPs. Additionally, fighting for these players could end up hurting both games, as one of the largest problems for LARPs is a lack of NPCs.

So they developed the NPC Exchange.

Basically, I can NPC for one of the games and use the experience from that on my character in the other game.

The real benefit of this is that players only have to get costuming and such for one character, but they can enjoy both games. This also gives built in NPCs that don't really PC, so the issues around limiting the NPC information to prevent metagaming are not really a problem. Not to mention you would get more NPCs for your games, because players who only want credit in one game will have to NPC the other in order to get credit.

This really only works for smaller, more independent games, but could be utilized in larger games with enough checks and balances, and could go a long way to fixing some NPC issues that people have.

Would you NPC a second game to get experience for your primary game? Do you think this would break the experience system? Drop your opinions in the comments!