D&D General Should NPCs be built using the same rules as PCs?

[bloodtide]

Well, I'll point out three ways Players, and only players not DMs, have to follow rules that NPCs, and DMs, never do in most traditional games:

1. The player can not alter or control game reality. The DM can. A player can't just say "oh whatever my character kill 100 great wyrm dragons and loots all their treasure hordes! Ok, DM describe all my loot to me!" The player is free to try and do that, in the game play, but they can't just alter game reality. The same way a player can't say "oh...my rich dad npc gives me a million gold coins!", because the player does not control what the NPC does.....but the DM does.

2.The player can not create and add things to the game on a whim: they must do nearly all such things by the limit of their character. The DM can do anything on a whim. A player during the game can't see a dragon and say "My character has a +10 sword of all dragon slaying". A player playing a character in a game can not just 'wish' for everything at will....if they did so there would be no game. The player can have thier character look for and find a magic sword in the game play....if they have the right skills the character might even be able to make the magic sword. But that's it. The DM can just say an orc has a magic flaming sword or anything else on a whim.

3.The player can't control large groups of game characters. Sure there is a game style or two where a player has say five player characters or something like that. But most games the player has total control over just their single character. So a PC can't 'just say' they have five 'character allies' of the same level that follow them around and help them in all ways. Some games, like 3.5E D&D had Leadership where the player could follow all sorts of crunchy rules to get a small group of followers. A DM, of course, can 'just say' 11th level wizard Bob and 11th level cleric Joe are allies on a whim. And they can have any monster(s) in the book as allies, servants or whatever : basic adventure designee says so. .

So a player can play the game and go on an quest to find a moonblade and then their character can use it. But the DM just says "NPC Elor has a moonblade". And sure, the DM can chuckle and say "oh Elor went on a quest to find his moonblade too". Not that it matters....as it never happened.

The player could try to slay the great wyrm Fazootkii during game play. The DM can just say Dragnslayer Zombuo slayed the great wyrm Fazootkii.

And so on....

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@The Stray we simply have different idea of what the purpose of rules is. I think one function of the rules is to tell us something about the concepts they represent, you don't. This is a common difference of opinion, and a source of many disagreements on these boards. It is wisest for us to just agree to disagree.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

As a player, while I can and do happily play at tables without PC/NPC symmetry, it does drive me bonkers when an NPC has a monster ability thematically similar to my character's abilities, but implemented with incompatible mechanics. For example, I once played a Thief Rogue who spent lots of money buying the advanced poisons from the DMG, and dutifully using Fast Hands to apply those poisons to my weapons. It was maddening to fight against Drow who had monster abilities that let them deal massive poison damage with every attack without permitting saving throws, without needing to repoison their weapons, who weren't constrained by limited supplies, and whose leftover poison couldn't be looted.

Yeah, this is a perfect example of exactly the sort of situation I'd like to avoid.

 

[TwoSix]

Yeah, this is a perfect example of exactly the sort of situation I'd like to avoid.

Yea, even as someone firmly in the "custom NPC" camp, I don't make NPCs who wildly outclass PCs in their own area. Magical no-save poisons with no action economy costs at all are right up there with the stuff I don't like in 5e's NPC builds.

 

[Maxperson]

So a player can play the game and go on an quest to find a moonblade and then their character can use it. But the DM just says "NPC Elor has a moonblade". And sure, the DM can chuckle and say "oh Elor went on a quest to find his moonblade too". Not that it matters....as it never happened.

Sounds to me like that player's quest just got a whole lot shorter!

 

[Lanefan]

My argument here is that the elf has a different metafictional purpose depending on who is playing them. If this is a character that's being passed through the hands of different players (GM included), I can see the case for them having the same build as a PC, but absent that, having them go through the same generation process as a PC strikes me as a lot of unnecessary work.

The generation process can be whatever you like as long as the resulting character fits within the bounds of what a same-species PC can be.

Alrighty, I can see this perspective. I think the roles are different enough in game function to require a clear separation, though. We've all heard the sorts of horror stories that come from tables where the GM has decided to insert their own PC into a group. Clear boundaries between PC and NPC are a guard against this particular pitfall. This may or may not be a concern for you, depending on how cleanly you can separate yourself from your characters.

In our games in-party adventuring NPCs are so common we don't bat an eyelid, and never have. There's usually one or two in any party, having got there either because they've been recruited at some point by the PCs in order to fill a gap in their lineup (very common), or are an ex-hench who has been promoted to full-member status (uncommon but it happens), or have been inserted as a plot device (only happens once in a while). Sometimes those adventuring NPCs become beloved and valued long-term core members of the party, other times they come and go as needed, while yet others are one-hit wonders who either die or drift away fairly soon.

This doesn't include henches, or in-field recruits. My current party have been dealing with Orcs of late (en route to bigger things, Orcs alone are way beneath their pay grade these days), and some of the wiser of these Orcs have been surrendering to the PCs instead of dying to no purpose. Result: the PCs have been taking them in as de-facto party henches; and thus that party has been crawling with low-to-no-level NPC Orcs.

And yes, separating self from character is a baseline requirement here. That way, the characters can get up to all sorts of shenanigans against each other and it doesn't spill over to the table.

Can we at least agree that, as a time-saving tool, considering NPCs a subset of monster works as a time-saving shortcut for people who might not have the free time/mental bandwidth to keep track of an entire teeming population.

Sure. The detailing of all those NPCs isn't what I'm concerned about, as long as they fit within PC parameters.

But! You've already acknowledged you don't have an issue with treating monsters as monsters, and you don't have an issue with using approximations to get into a ballpark of equivalent PC abilities. Yes?

Yes, or close enough.

So the real core of the contention is: should NPCs have access to abilities PCs can't get? Is the fictional life of the character bound forever to a 1-to-1 translation to PC mechanics, or should the DM have the freedom to paint their NPCs with any mechanics they see fit?

Now we're getting to it. NPCs should not have access to abilities PCs can't get, nor should PCs have access to abilities NPCs can't get.

Well, the the thing is, if your goal is fictional purity, neither PC nor monster rules are pure. They're both abstractions. There's no such thing as a "6th level Elven Thief," there's only this guy, of Elven descent, who has skills and abilities he's gained from a life of larceny and petty crime. He never "earned levels," he picked pockets, opened locks, searched for traps, and so on. The whole process of assigning levels to him in the first place is artifical and imprecise. It will not and cannot capture his nuances -- something will get lost in the translation from pure fictional entity to impure mechanical game constuct that can be manipulated by a player.

Moreover, while PCs and the GM are playing a game together, they aren't playing the same game. It's a Player-vs-Environment system, and the GM is the Environment. So while the PC's mechanics are pencils and inks, the GM's mechanics are acrylics. They can both be used to depict the same character, but do so in vastly different ways and with different techniques.

While I get what you're saying, for me consistency is paramount; and if the GM uses those acrylics to paint something that the ink-and-pencil PCs can't do, that's inconsistent. And at the same time, probably unfair.

And this isn't even getting in to the sticky quandry of asking whether or not to consider monsters people. Because that, I think, is what the true crux of the issue is. Are the PC races the only people in the world, in an ontological or moral sense? The only beings with souls, minds, and free will?

That's a whole different discussion, I think, and likely unrelated to this one.

Hey, I've gone and made the same character in Mutants & Masterminds, FATE, Savage Worlds, Storyteller, ShadowRun, and a bunch of other systems. Some of the versions were closer to the conception than others, admittedly, but that was because the games the designers were trying to make were seeking to accomplish different goals and play outcomes. Fidelity to concept is more important than fidelity to a set of statistics.

Thing is, the statistics (at least in D&D) go a long way toward defining the character.

When I started playing 3e I very intentionally tried to reprise a couple of characters I'd had in 1e, in part simply as an experiment ot see if the then-newfangled game would allow it. One was a "heavy Ranger", i.e. a tank in the woods, and the other was an Illusionist.

Results: dubious at best. Though I ended up with two decent enough characters (of which one remains perhaps my all-time favourite), their fidelity to their earlier counterparts was in some ways rather fleeting in part because the 3e system was fighting me the whole way.

 

[Lanefan]

Whyever not, though? An NPC is not bound by their stats anymore than a PC is,

Errr...how is anyone not bound by their stats at least to some extent?

 

[Lanefan]

I find it strange that I can make a giant with 22 STR and nobody questions it, but I cannot make an orc with 22 STR without some seeming to argue that it is bad form since orcs which are monsters and can be a PC in some books cannot get a 22 STR if it was a PC, so I'm playing wrong. Or, at least, I need to tell them something as to why this orc can get a 22 STR.

You'd sure have to explain that Giant if Giants could be PCs in your game and were hard-capped at strength 20.

If Orcs can't be PCs in your game then there's much more freedom to decide what they've got going for them; but if they can be PCs then IMO you're either bound by the rules for PCs or have to expand the PC-allowable rules such that PC Orcs can be the same as their NPC cousins.

 

[TwoSix]

I find it strange that I can make a giant with 22 STR and nobody questions it, but I cannot make an orc with 22 STR without some seeming to argue that it is bad form since orcs which are monsters and can be a PC in some books cannot get a 22 STR if it was a PC, so I'm playing wrong. Or, at least, I need to tell them something as to why this orc can get a 22 STR.

Player: Why does that Orc have a 22 Strength? Orcs are PCs, and we can only go up to 20?!
DM: That Orc, the son of the chieftain, received a special blessing from Gruumsh.
Player: Well, why can't I get a blessing from Grummsh for my Orc?
DM: You totally can.
Player: Is it like a feat or something?
DM: Go ask the blessed Orc and maybe he'll tell you how he got it.

And thus the Player starts on the path of a long quest chain to get the blessing from Gruumsh, which is really only worth about an uncommon magic item. Hooray!

 

[cbwjm]

Player: Why does that Orc have a 22 Strength? Orcs are PCs, and we can only go up to 20?!
DM: That Orc, the son of the chieftain, received a special blessing from Gruumsh.
Player: Well, why can't I get a blessing from Grummsh for my Orc?
DM: You totally can.
Player: Is it like a feat or something?
DM: Go ask the blessed Orc and maybe he'll tell you how he got it.

And thus the Player starts on the path of a long quest chain to get the blessing from Gruumsh, which is really only worth about an uncommon magic item. Hooray!

I actually did have an orc with 22 strength who was the son of the chieftain. When he wasn't brutally crushing his enemies with his bare hands, he liked to spend his time chilling out in nature surrounded by flowers.