Awww. I have a soft spot for orange “tortoise shell” tabby himbos.

Rambling story time.

When I still lived with my parents they had one we called Gus. When he was a kitten he was a “greedy gus”, always trying to bump his siblings off the mama cat’s nipples so he could have all of it to himself. First one of the litter to start hissing too. About his siblings being on his favorite nipple no less. Grew faster than the others and was a bit of a bully while he was young. One thing that never grew though was his meow. He always had the tiniest little baby kitten mew.

After we had him neutered he chilled out a little bit. My mother was a lot more laid back about the cats than I was, and she would let him come out with her when she did gardening because he would just find a spot in the sun near her and chill out.

One day he saw something and took off. Showed back up a day later and was suddenly the sweetest little clingy boy. Still the largest of them too.

So now they had a big muscular chunk of an orange tortoise shell cat, who would cry when none of his people or siblings were within eyesight, with the cutest little high pitched kitten mew. Such a himbo too, always grooming and cuddling his sisters, interacting with photos of people like they were people (nuzzling and mewing at them), never left an open lap in the house when he could lay in it and get scritches.

When one of his siblings started crying for something (food, attention) he would find them, nuzzle them, then start crying with them in solidarity. One of his brothers would lead the crying cat to us, maybe try and lead us to the “problem” (food bowl empty, that sort of thing).

Not Gus. He’d just sit there with the other cat crying in solidarity.

He would regularly cry at the water dish because if it was too still and the water was too clean, he thought there was none there.

He passed of old age a while back. Miss him still.

“Grown ass adult finally learns about engaging with a creation as separate from its creator, more at 11”

I could see a party abandoning the quest to try and go after the DMPC’s stuff, if it’s cooler/more valuable than the quest reward.

Maybe have it be an old soldier that lives in the town, and the townspeople are trying to get him to stop trying to handle all the problems nearby alone because he’s getting old. So his gear would just be his old military stuff. Good, but not worth diving into a river for. He’s grumbly about having to sheperd some runt adventurers so everyone will stop pestering him, and insists on scouting ahead so the youngins don’t just stumble into an ambush and get their heads cleaved off.

Cue rope bridge.

That also gets you potential hooks with the town not trusting the party since the guy didn’t make it back, or being understanding and throwing a wake/funeral.

Or hell, if the party succeeds some checks and keeps him off the rickety bridge, you don’t need to worry about him hanging around past the first “quest” messing with balance. Him missing the signs of the rickety bridge gets through to him and he decides to retire.

I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.

Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.

The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.

A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.