Follow Her? I Don't even Know Her.

Running an NPC is a DM's best means of fucking with a party's head, pushing a party this way or that, and indoctrinating players to believe what we want them to think.  An NPC by definition knows everything the DM knows, so unless the DM wishes it, there need be no restraint on the NPC's ability to fortell the future, solve problems, know what other NPCs know and say it all to the players in a careful, dissembling tone that suggests the NPC is as innocent as a little girl fetching a unicorn.  In fact, the most evil NPC may look just like that.

If the players are wary of this, and most of the time they are, we can count on having anything the NPC says be completely ignored or deliberately tested.  Players will do this so openly and candidly that we don't have to guess that they don't trust our NPC.  There are two ways to play this.  The first is to have the NPC tell the party everything, so that when -- ironically -- the NPC proves to be 100% accurate, the DM can smugly say, "The NPC told you so."

The other is to gently poke and prod and wind the players up by having the NPC tell the party to do everything we don't want them to do.  Done in small bits, the party will never guess that it's a case of almost pathetically juvenile reverse-psychology, so ham-handed at times that although any of our players would roll their eyes if they saw it on television, they'll walk right into the trap we set.  Honestly, some times I wonder just where it is that players come from.  Aren't these the trust lessons we learned in junior high school, when we were all still dumb enough to trust our parents?

In any case, because NPCs can be dangerous weapons in the hands of the wrong DMs, there need to be rules that master them.

The standard tactic (5th edition included) is to create a set of tables that tell you the NPC's personality, usually revolving around the NPC's alignment.  Of course, a character with a good alignment can be every bit as manipulative, insistent and threatening as a bad character (since the first thing a "good" character is always ready to do is judge everyone else's "goodness"), but this is never discussed.  The subject material almost always discusses a willingness of the NPC to help the players ... which is exactly the argument I started this post with.  NPCs help players do what what they're supposed to.

5th edition hardly addresses the player's responsibility or respect for the NPC at all.  Certainly, we don't expect the players to respect them.  And yet, as a DM for 40+ years, if there is one thing I can count on, it's players getting attached to NPCs that they like.  If an NPC is good to them, backs them up, acts bravely, makes sacrifices ... then I've always found that players were ready to make sacrifices for them.

In my mind, I began to separate the difference between a "retainer" -- an NPC who appears because a player has reached Name Level -- and a "follower," being someone who wants to join the party because they like the party.  Of course, this depends on the party being likeable.  I challenge anyone to find any word in the 5e DMG that suggests the party be "likeable" with NPCs.  I couldn't find it.

I wrote these rules on followers today, this being the first time I put these rules into words.  The rest of the page can be read here.