K wrote:Ripley has an entire movie worth of backstory, the first Alien film, even before it's established that she's the expert on xenos who has to be bribed to go on this mission because of her expertise snd this come up later.
While Ripley does indeed have an entire movie that she was previously in, precisely none of that movie is actually necessary to watching Aliens. For real, I saw Aliens
before Alien and I understood it just fine (although it helps that I know what xenomorphs look like and thus understood why Ridley freaked out at the cat). Aliens does have a whole other movie, but that's actually kind of incidental. The sum total of Ridley's backstory is having had a previous run-in with the Alien, details unimportant, and "previously encountered xenomorph" is not actually anymore of an involved backstory than "is a colonial marine who thinks he's seen everything, but hasn't" or "is a completely unprepared officer who's done this exactly once before" or "works for Weyland-Yutani, is accidentally responsible for xenomorph attack on colony."
I've watched Saving Private Ryan like five times and I can't tell you what the translator's backstory is other than he is a translator. The other guys have a backstory that consists entirely of a home town and nothing more
As opposed to captain guy, who has the one scene where he admits he's a school teacher after pretending to be a mysterious man with no past for a while.
Also, every game I have ever run has had most if not all PCs with less fleshed out backstories than the major NPCs. Typically I'll explicitly ask for PC backstories to try and integrate into the plot, and invariably I get nothing except from the guys who were making backstories already. And it's weird that you're pretending to be unaware of this problem since you helped write mechanics to solve it.
Affecting plot points means making decisions that affect how the story plays out.
I guess I should probably go inform one of my players that his character is actually an NPC, then? It is
extremely common for groups to end up with a party leader like Ripley who makes basically all the decisions on her own, and it's not uncommon for that leader to be someone who is actually completely unqualified to actually lead (also like Ripley).
Also, Bishop's decision to wait for Ripley instead of taking off with Hicks is pretty damn significant. As is his decision to go and establish the uplink with the communicator. As is Hicks' decision to switch sides from Burke to Ripley. And none of these things are actually the things that make Hicks or Bishop good models for PCs (because Bishop actually
isn't a good model for a PC), but they do fit your crazy and bizarre definition of what a PC is.
Your definition for who counts as a PC or an NPC do not line up
at all with how PCs or NPCs actually function separately from one another in play. You can make a strong case that Bishop and the lieutenant aren't PCs because they're out of the action for basically the whole game, but you can't claim that Hudson isn't a PC because he doesn't have things that
most actual PCs also do not have.