Whether NPCs pull their weight has always been a matter of pure chance.
After all, in most role-playing games, NPCs have an utterly unscientific "reckless-or-cowardly duality."
When the story needs them to shine, they're all unbelievably fierce. But when it's someone else's story, they're so fragile they can get attacked by ghouls while stepping outside to pee, then killed by a farmer with a pitchfork.
That sort of awful situation was less common in the cursed game True Otherworld.
The NPCs who were tough stayed tough. Take Lord Murphy, protector of the foreigners. As a high-ranking main-story NPC, Governor Murphy had yet to suffer a humiliating defeat in the story so far, so no player had ever seen Lord Murphy's "defeated portrait."
But there were also NPCs who could be both "strong and weak," with Grand Duke Triss as the most typical example.
This widely known drunken grand duke rarely took part in any battle of her own accord. She looked like a dried-out vampire—a salted fish left in the sun—who would never stand when she could lie down.
And yet, the few times Grand Duke Triss had joined a battle, she'd achieved "dominant" results, giving everyone a glimpse of the super-strong character hidden beneath that lazy exterior.
The problem was that getting Grand Duke Triss onto the battlefield was difficult.
Back when the game had just started, a player had tried to kite an elite ghoul over to Grand Duke Triss. But when the mighty Triss saw the ghoul, she shrieked and immediately called her grand ducal guards to protect her.
All in all, players rarely entrusted the outcome of a battle to NPCs. But in a situation like last night's, they couldn't afford to be choosy.
As it turned out, Maxim was one tough NPC. He and Leonia