Tending to AGAINST for this one. If we’re defining a term like this I’d want it to go far enough to support someone proposing a rule as simple as “Vecna is an NPC” - we’d expect that to mean something like “Vecna is like a player and has all the same stats as players, but probably can’t vote or affect quorum or win”, and to do it cleanly and unscammably.

This proposal just says that an NPC can track (some) gamestate in some way (possibly the same gamestate that players have, possibly not that at all), so still needs the additional definition of what that gamestate is and isn’t.

Per what Kevan said;  Also I’m not convinced that an NPC’s purpose is exclusively to track gamestate in a table, as opposed to, e.g., an agent which performs actions based on dice rolls.

[Bais] I see what you mean, but an NPC cannot perform actions. Only a player can perform actions. If the rule is something like “if the result of a roll is over 6 then [NPC name] removes 1 HP from a random player,” that’s still effectively an atomic action that either a player or the Emperor has to carry out, starting with the roll.

Fair;  thematically the NPC has performed the action, but at the BN level it is an actual player who performed it.

Looking back to see how we’ve handled NPC type entities from past dynasties, I’ve found:

* 48: “Some of the Monkeys are not controlled by anyone, but are instead NPCs (Non-player characters). They do not count as Monkeys when totaling quorum nor can they vote on proposals. However, they do appear in the GNDT and in the Monkey line.”
* 56: “All NPCs shall have a HP and Max Health statistic. [...] NPCs may take any action described in the Dynastic Rules that an Adventurer can take.”
* 83: “There are three non-Agent entities, the Imposters, who have a Codename, Description, Location and Allegiance as though they were Agents.”
* 87: “The queen counts as an ant for all dynastic rules unless the dynastic rule states otherwise, although she cannot take an action unless the ruleset indicates another ant may take the action on her behalf.”
* 117: “The Alien is an entity that is treated as an Infected for all purposes. The Alien may never be idled.”
* 122: “Proxies are considered to be Players for the purpose of other Dynastic Rules, except where they explicitly refer to non-Proxy players.”
* 123: “Proxies are considered to be Shuttles for the purpose of other Dynastic Rules, except where they explicitly refer to non-Proxy Shuttles.”
* 128: “The Military exists, and is considered to be a Kaiju for the purposes of dynastic rules only.”
* 136: “An Imaginary Friend counts as a Child for the purposes of voting and quorum on Proposals, but not on Calls for Judgement or Declarations of Victory.”
* 141: “Proxies are considered to be Scribes for the purpose of other Dynastic Rules, except where they explicitly refer to non-Proxy Scribes.”
* 174: “The Attendant is considered to be an Individual for the purposes of all dynastic rules. The Director may cause the Attendant to perform any action that it could perform as an Individual, but only if [...]”

(I assume the three identical Proxy definitions were from the same player using an informal and personal keyword - possibly Bucky?)

There was also some historical usage of an “NPC” field in the old GNDT to track some non-player data (usually overriding the column name and saying something like “the gostak is listed in the GNDT as if it were a dosh, but its distim column is instead used to track the number of glauds in the world”), but I can’t find any ruletext for it.

It’d be good to have a clear definition of “counts as a player for dynastic rules only” with clarification that the NPC can’t take actions of its own volition nor (as raised in a good point here) share a name with a player. But I don’t see that this proposal’s “NPCs are used to track some gamestate” gives us anything useful.