D&D 5E adventurers in your world: common or rare?

[Cap'n Kobold]

Interesting. I'm not aware of that bring a thing in Eberron though.

Its . . . not really. The closest thing is the Speaker for the Flame who receives the abilities of an 18th level cleric while in Flamekeep, but is a 3rd level cleric on her own. I'd generally assume that that includes spellcasting capabilities and such, but not actually becoming a higher-level character, with 15 more levels worth of hit points for example.

There are a couple of national rulers who are actually experienced combatants in their own right. Most are quite low-tier however. They are the ruler because of their family line, or other capabilities, rather than their ability to fight their way to the top.

Of course, in a particularly chaotic thieves guild, position might be more dependent upon being able to beat up the previous incumbent, and anyone else who wants the position.

I give xp for non-violent resolution of adventuring situations IMC. However, a ruler is unlikely to be placed in such situations. They have people to delegate those types of tasks to. It's silly to me that administrating a kingdom for several years would make you a master swordsman, but to each his own.

Milestone XP.

 

[S'mon]

Well, in that case official published 5e FR material can go jump in a lake. I'll explain why in a moment...

Why not? As long as you take the stance that there's always a (school of) bigger fish, there's no reason at all* not to use a party of PC-class NPCs as opponents.

* - well, except one: those battles are a blaming fitch to run.

I hear that lake calling again...

Now, to explain my response to the very first line here:

You've got a party of PCs. In most normal campaigns one or more of those PCs is going to at some point die and not come back, requiring a replacement. So, another PC is brought in. All's good so far, right?

But consider this: that PC that was just brought in as a replacement has, in the game world, always been out there somewhere waiting for her turn on stage; she didn't just grow a class and levels overnight. Which immediately means that by default the active PCs in the party are not the only classed and levelled people in the game world, if only to account for any replacements - or party NPCs, or henches - the party might require later. Not an issue, of course, if one doesn't care about internal consistency in the game world...but some of us do.

Further, consider this: if you're using training rules, who or what is providing the training if not other classed and levelled people who are better at what they do than the PCs are?

Well, I would hope this rules-as-physics approach died with 3e*. Not just because PC-class NPCs are a female dog to run in combat in 3e, 4e (the worst) or 5e. The whole approach is just horribly constraining and leads to all those Silver Age Dragon "NPC Classes", replacing the older (eg 1e DMG) approach of just saying
"OK he's a Sage/Thug/Whatever, here's what he needs to fulfil his role".
I don't use mentored-training-to-level in any of my games. but of course there are lots of NPCs who identify as Paladins, Rangers (99% non-casting!), Wizards etc in my game and likely have some elements in common with the PC classes (except the Rangers!)
If I've detailed their combat stats at all, in 99.5% of cases that's not going to be using extremely finickety PC-build rules that (a) are designed to reward players for levelling (b) are a pain to record and use
and (c) often include stuff I actively DO NOT WANT most NPCs of that in-world role to have, such as Druid Wildshaping & Ranger spellcasting.

Of course there are advantages in pre-3e to statting NPCs as PCs, back when it was practical to do so.
Most notably a Retainer/Henchman NPC can easily transition to being a full PC. I think 5e complexity is just about low enough that players could run PC-class Retainers who could become replacement PCs, I
think that is the only case where I'd consider using PC rules for NPCs (I think I've once statted out an nPC using PC Champion Fighter rules as she was a fellow adventurer & peer of the PCs operating alongside
them. Still felt like wasted effort when she died at level 3).

I don't find consistency to be an issue at all. The rules - any rules - are already only a very partial representation of the game world, there to facilitate player interaction with the world. In-world, wounds don't magically
heal overnight, whereas people do get sucking chest wounds and die slowly and painfully over hours, or get crippled and maimed in combat, losing limbs etc. The rules don't simulate that, and nor should they IMO.

*Except of course for a certain poster on this thread, but I keep him on IL so I'm only seeing the quotes...

 

[S'mon]

Further, consider this: if you're using training rules, who or what is providing the training if not other classed and levelled people who are better at what they do than the PCs are?

In case this is a serious question - the Eldritch Knight PC in my Wilderlands game was trained (pre-campaign) by a senior Eldritch Knight of his Order, the Bright Seraphim of Valon, whose combat stats look like
this:

Seraphim Eldritch Knight
Male or Female Avalonian
Armor Class: 18 or 20 (Full Plate Armor, & Shield), +5 with Shield spell.
Hit Points: 52 (8d8 +16)
Speed: 30ft (9m / 6 sqr)
Proficiency: +2
STR
16 (+3)
DEX
11 (+0)
CON
14 (+2)
INT
15 (+2)
WIS
12 (+1)
CHA
12 (+1)
Skills: Religion +4 Athletics +5 Arcana +4
Challenge: 4 (1100 XP)
Racial Features

Ability Modifiers: +1 to all
Languages: speaks Common and one extra.
5th level Eldritch Knight

Cantrips: 2 Spells Known: 4 Spell Slots: 3 1st level

Spells Known (1) Comprehend Languages, Shield, Thunderwave, Witch Bolt
Cantrips: Blade Ward (res BPS eont), Light (object sheds light 20/20 1 hr)

SA: Bonded Weapon - sword. War Magic - may cast cantrip + make 1 weapon attack bonus action
Actions

Multiattack. The Seraphim Knight makes two weapon melee attacks or two ranged attacks. Doffing or donning a shield takes 1 action.
+1 Greatsword or +1 Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack +6 to hit, reach 5 ft, one target. Hit: 14 (3d6+4) slashing damage (Greatsword Style) or 10 (1d8+6 ) slashing damage (Duelist Style)
Properties: Heavy, Two-handed,
Warbow. Ranged Weapon Attack +5 to hit, range 150/600, one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 +3 ) piercing damage.
Properties: Ammunition: range 150/600, Heavy, Two-handed

Oh, another reason not to stat as PC is that most 5e PC classes are eggshell-with-hammer. Rather
than give Fighter-type NPCs a massive nova with Action Surge and Battlemaster points I would much
rather just increase their weapon damage the way the MM does.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It's coming from your previous post, where you said, "But why should we assume there isn't a difference? That seems like we'd be shooting our imagination in the foot."

We're shooting our imagination in the foot because we're actually inventing a way for the possibility space in our world to be narrower than the rules imply. Since, as you say, it doesn't take a significant amount of imagination to posit the lack of an ability, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to take the NPC stat blocks at face value. And yet here we are, trying to fit these NPCs into pigeonholes which the text gives no indication they were intended for.

Your implication throughout this discussion seems to have been that if a PC encountered a "wizard" who didn't know the trick of Arcane Recovery, their in-character reaction would be something along the lines of "What?! That's impossible! How can you cast wizard magic without knowing that? My confidence in the metaphysical consistency of our reality is forever shattered!" This seems frankly absurd to me. It indicates a level of metagame knowledge of the rules that the characters are unlikely to possess -- and what's worse, bad metagame knowledge, since the actual rules are clearly just fine with featureless mages. The more likely response is "Huh, guess I'm just cleverer than you. Moving on." The class system is not "how the world works"; it's only how the very small subset of the population that is hardcore enough to make a living hunting dragons works.

 

[clearstream]

We're shooting our imagination in the foot because we're actually inventing a way for the possibility space in our world to be narrower than the rules imply. Since, as you say, it doesn't take a significant amount of imagination to posit the lack of an ability, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to take the NPC stat blocks at face value. And yet here we are, trying to fit these NPCs into pigeonholes which the text gives no indication they were intended for.

Your implication throughout this discussion seems to have been that if a PC encountered a "wizard" who didn't know the trick of Arcane Recovery, their in-character reaction would be something along the lines of "What?! That's impossible! How can you cast wizard magic without knowing that? My confidence in the metaphysical consistency of our reality is forever shattered!" This seems frankly absurd to me. It indicates a level of metagame knowledge of the rules that the characters are unlikely to possess -- and what's worse, bad metagame knowledge, since the actual rules are clearly just fine with featureless mages. The more likely response is "Huh, guess I'm just cleverer than you. Moving on." The class system is not "how the world works"; it's only how the very small subset of the population that is hardcore enough to make a living hunting dragons works.

It's presented as a conclusion but so far as I can tell, logically everything after the final semicolon is a separate argument? Let's say we think that Druid in the MM is intended to be a different Druid than Druid in the PHB. (I don't see how we know that, but let's say it's true.) There could still be any number of PHB Druids at all levels. Notwithstanding, it feels shaky to say that the stat block in the MM is compelling or constraining: why would we imagine that all NPC Druids are born into the world at CR2 and stay at that CR *forever*, all with STR10 and CHA11. Sounds weird! There shall never be a stronger Druid, nor a weaker one

Apologies if I wrongly understand you to be saying that the MM NPC <classname> stat blocks are not simply a convenience for lazy DMs, but rather are a concrete statement about the distribution of character class entities in the baseline game world. For me, they represent character class individuals. In principle, every character class and level combination including multiclass can have such a condensed stat block.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The class system is not "how the world works"; it's only how the very small subset of the population that is hardcore enough to make a living hunting dragons works.

That seems like an unnecessarily limited way of viewing the world. If we can discern small details in the area around us, but can only make out large features at a distance, it makes more sense to assume some sort of consistency based on our observations than to assume that there are no details to observe if we moved closer to that distant location.

There's an old joke, which can apparently be attributed to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon:
[sblock]There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician.

And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don't know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train).

And the economist says, 'Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.' And the logician says, 'No. There are cows in Scotland of which at least one is brown.' And the mathematician says, 'No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.'[/sblock]
As a PHB-style wizard, or wizard-adjacent adventurer, we can observe that every scholarly magician that we know well has some things in common, and one of those things is that any of them capable of casting a second level spell will have the ability to recover spell slots during (the local equivalent of) a short rest. If we then observe another scholarly magician casting a second level spell, and we don't know them very well because we only encounter them from the other side of a pitched battle, then it stands to reason that they can probably also recover spell slots.

Assuming that they can't - assuming that they are only capable of doing what we explicitly observe them to be doing - would be like assuming a cow has no backside based on the fact that we can't currently observe it.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I would hope this rules-as-physics approach died with 3e*.

Where I see the rules as nothing but physics, in that if element x works in a particular way here then for consistency reasons it must also work in that way here, there, and everywhere else unless there is some factor forcing it not to.

Not just because PC-class NPCs are a female dog to run in combat in 3e, 4e (the worst) or 5e. The whole approach is just horribly constraining and leads to all those Silver Age Dragon "NPC Classes", replacing the older (eg 1e DMG) approach of just saying "OK he's a Sage/Thug/Whatever, here's what he needs to fulfil his role".

Except that "what he needs to fulfill his role" can almost always be mapped to either adventuring-PC class abilities or to a very few archetypal non-adventuring NPC "classes" (of which Sage is one) that are pretty easy to design - and only have to be designed once. I've done it this way since forever and I don't find it constraining at all...or if it is I've successfully managed to avoid noticing such for all these years.

That said, I don't subscribe to the 3e line of thought where essentially everyone has a class of some sort - 5th-level commoner, 4th-level merchant, etc.

I don't use mentored-training-to-level in any of my games. but of course there are lots of NPCs who identify as Paladins, Rangers (99% non-casting!), Wizards etc in my game and likely have some elements in common with the PC classes (except the Rangers!)
If I've detailed their combat stats at all, in 99.5% of cases that's not going to be using extremely finickety PC-build rules that (a) are designed to reward players for levelling (b) are a pain to record and use
and (c) often include stuff I actively DO NOT WANT most NPCs of that in-world role to have, such as Druid Wildshaping & Ranger spellcasting.

Where I just assume that such things come with the territory. If a Druid gets high enough level to wildshape then it can wildshape; ditto Rangers and casting (though in both cases 5e as written gives these abilities much sooner than I do). And very rarely do I actually have to fully stat out these NPCs...in fact, the only times it's really needed are when one or more of the following is true:
- the NPC is joining the party as an adventurer
- the NPC is joining the party as a hench
- the NPC is intended to be (or already is) a direct foe of the PCs to the point where I'll need to run it in combat (e.g. one adventuring party vs. another)
- the NPC is integral to the plot e.g. someone found in a dungeon cell where it's uncertain what the interaction will be with the PCs (these stats are usually given in the adventure module)

Otherwise, just a vague idea will do. As an example, in my current campaign there's been something of a mentor figure hovering around for ages. I know his race (vampire, was human), his class (necromancer), a fair bit about his history, and have rough ideas on his stats (very high int and cha, so-so wis and dex, etc.) and spells - but despite his having interacted with PCs several dozen times now I've never fully statted him out, because I haven't needed to.

Now if for some reason the PCs decide to attack him someday I'll have to stat him out as at that point I'll need a much more granular level of knowledge about what makes him tick. Till then, however? Not gonna bother.

Most notably a Retainer/Henchman NPC can easily transition to being a full PC. I think 5e complexity is just about low enough that players could run PC-class Retainers who could become replacement PCs, I
think that is the only case where I'd consider using PC rules for NPCs (I think I've once statted out an nPC using PC Champion Fighter rules as she was a fellow adventurer & peer of the PCs operating alongside
them. Still felt like wasted effort when she died at level 3).

I thought char-gen in 5e was supposed to be simple...?

I don't find consistency to be an issue at all. The rules - any rules - are already only a very partial representation of the game world, there to facilitate player interaction with the world. In-world, wounds don't magically heal overnight, whereas people do get sucking chest wounds and die slowly and painfully over hours, or get crippled and maimed in combat, losing limbs etc. The rules don't simulate that, and nor should they IMO.

Actually, yes they should - lingering disease, lingering wound, and slow death rules are sadly lacking not just from 5e but from all editions of D&D, and I see this as a bug rather than a feature. I've once or twice tried coming up with my own versions, but haven't ever managed anything I'd be happy with. The only things we do have that work are tables for lingering scars, which - if severe enough - can affect one's base stats (usually dex or cha), and something we call 'incurability' where if you get hurt badly enough (go below 0, we have death at -10) healing of any sort beyond what's needed to get you above 0 has extremely limited if any effect until some time has passed - how much time is based on how far below 0 you went.

I would never have anything like 5e's all-wounds-heal-overnight in any game I run, even for the PCs. In my game an overnight rest gets you back 1/10 of your total h.p. rounding any fractions up (thus if your full h.p. is 52 a good night's rest will get you back 6); which means you either bring a healer, or you take it slow and easy and do a lot of resting between battles.

Lan-"glad to give more details on how our incurability system works if asked"-efan

 

[S'mon]

I thought char-gen in 5e was supposed to be simple...?

Actually, yes they should - lingering disease, lingering wound, and slow death rules are sadly lacking not just from 5e but from all editions of D&D, and I see this as a bug rather than a feature.

Chargen in 5e is simple enough most players can manage it (ie not 4e or high level 3e), not simple like 0e-2e.

Realistic injury rules - great idea for Game of Thrones RPG, terrible idea for D&D IMO. I can see we're in a different universe here. I really can't imagine why anyone would choose D&D for that kind of game.

BTW are you saying you're posting in this thread but you're not actually familiar with 5e D&D? Or am I misreading?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

There's an old joke, which can apparently be attributed to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon:
[sblock]There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician.

And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don't know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train).

And the economist says, 'Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.' And the logician says, 'No. There are cows in Scotland of which at least one is brown.' And the mathematician says, 'No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.'[/sblock]

Your point would be a lot more convincing if it weren't for the fact that there are non-brown cows in Scotland.

As a PHB-style wizard, or wizard-adjacent adventurer, we can observe that every scholarly magician that we know well has some things in common, and one of those things is that any of them capable of casting a second level spell will have the ability to recover spell slots during (the local equivalent of) a short rest.

You appear to be assuming as a premise that which you seek to conclude. Nowhere in any D&D rulebook I'm aware of does it say that all the close acquaintances of a PC wizard must have Arcane Recovery. And if the DM happens to use the NPC mage stat block for any of the PC wizard's acquaintances, then by the rules as written, at least one of them does not.

Assuming that they can't - assuming that they are only capable of doing what we explicitly observe them to be doing - would be like assuming a cow has no backside based on the fact that we can't currently observe it.

What on earth does observation have to do with an MM statblock? Players never see most statblocks. They're there to tell DMs what monsters and characters are capable of. For them to leave out a capability would be contrary to their purpose.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Apologies if I wrongly understand you to be saying that the MM NPC <classname> stat blocks are not simply a convenience for lazy DMs, but rather are a concrete statement about the distribution of character class entities in the baseline game world. For me, they represent character class individuals. In principle, every character class and level combination including multiclass can have such a condensed stat block.

Sure. And not every character is necessarily going to learn every feature of the class they're in. You can have a 12th level druid with nothing but the spellcasting, a 6th-level druid with everything except wildshape, or a 9th-level druid built exactly like a PC. You can have a 5th-level druid with extra HD, or a 15th-level druid that borrowed some barbarian class features. None of these are outside the realm of imagination. None of these would seem bizarre to characters in universe who have no idea what a "character class" is.