@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
I disagree that TS is always irrelevant to story. Rping out sex can have an impact on the intimacy of characters that is very difficult to replicate through simple ftb. Any kind of story can be off camera, but there is always more room to maneuver and express where you actually rp versus where you offscreen. Whether you are off camming the boning or the torture or whatever else.
This is the only thing I really consider a valid counter-argument here, but I still think there's a fundamental difference between what most people are talking about when they say 'TS' and what you're describing.
TS itself can be a vague term. I played briefly on a game where my character owned a saloon/brothel, and he had several scenes hiring new employees (tangentially: lol, everyone wanted to be a hooker). I had no prior relationship with these players and so I always told them we could play with any level of explicitness they cared for, or could straight ftb. Some went straight for the TS. But I also had one scene that fell into the vague middle ground of this, where we RPed enought to indicate some of the traumatic elements that went with the job/setting but without posing, erm, juices and whatnot?
I'm not going to indict someone as ethically bankrupt because they have one scene in which their NPC and some PC bone, and they do 2-3 poses that summarize the activities, emotional involvement, etc.
I am going to sideeye any relationship between a staffer, their GM-PC puppet, and a player that involves ongoing, lengthy, descriptive TS to the point where it reaches textual mutual masturbation.