How is the Wizard vs Warrior Balance Problem Handled in Fantasy Literature?

[pemerton]

Not really.

Yes really. You are quoting from the henchmen rules. I don't have my DMG here, but if you go to the pages which have the tables for determining NPC personalities etc (a bunch of d8, d10 and in one case at least d24 rolls) you will see what I am talking about.

The bottom line is that trying to construct a coherent treatment of NPCs relative to PCs from the 1st ed DMG is a fruitless task.

NPC mercenaries and sailors are in many cases statted up as fighters, but unable to gain levels. Nothing is said about how to generate their stats. (Do these fighters who are unable to level nevertheless get a share of the XP for fights in which they participate, which then dissipates into the aether? I think the implication is probably yes, but the rules don't actually say).

NPC henchmen are presumably generated and gain levels as PCs (subject to the half-experience rule). This is consistent with my impression of how single player but mutiple character play worked in the early days (eg Gygax GMing Kuntz's PC + henchmen).

NPC assassins, monks, thieves and the like, who are attracted as followers by high level PCs, presumably gain levels normally - there are references to this under the relevant PHB class entries, but no indication is given as to whether or not they are burdened by the half XP rule.

Fighter followers are a tricky thing. The DMG tables suggest that some of the followers attracted are standard 0-level mercenaries, but some are levelled fighters. Whether those levelled fighters are able to gain further levels (as are monk, thief and assassin followers) or whether they are fixed in level (as are the mercenary officers discussed in the hireling rules) is left unstated.

Exactly which NPCs the rules I referred to upthread - ie the rules which set variant stat minimums and/or stat modifier - are meant to apply to is not stated. Presumably not henchmen, but it is all left as an exercise for the reader.

Even 0-level humans aren't treated consistently across the rules. The Monster Manual entries tend to imply that hit points for a 0-level human are 1d6, but the DMG gives a varying range, with women having fewer hit points than men and both sexes having their hit point range depend upon how sedentary their occupation is. And according to the DMG mercenary hirelings have hit points of 1d4+3 (4 to 7), not 1d6.

And then we have sages (which have been mentioned upthread) who (I think) have their own rules for stat generation, have (I think) 8d4 hit points, and have access to a mix of clerical and magic-user spells depending on their fields of knowledge, but get spell slots at a rate that don't correspond to any PC class spell tables (they're closer to the way that 1st ed AD&D allocates spells to dragons).

And none of this tackles the issue of how all the above-mentioned rules are meant to fit into the design of NPC random encounters discussed in Appendix C, some of which are with adventuring parties, some with the soldiers of NPC landholders, etc.

What should we infer from all this? Well, one fairly clear conclusion seems to be that Gygax et al didn't feel especially constrained by any pre-given ruleset in statting up NPCs; that they sometime were prepared to use PC class mechanics, or elements thereof, as a device for statting up NPCs, but were happy to treat the relationship between stat minimums, class abilities, earning of XP and level progression, etc as all pretty flexible; and that trying to state in some definitive sense what it means, mechanically, to be an NPC in 1st ed AD&D is - as I said at the outset of this post - a fruitless task.

Actually, other than addressing some alternatives for adjusting ability scores on p.11, 1e has no special rules for NPCS at all, outside of rules specific to hirelings, mercenaries, etc. Unless you found some section of rules of which I am unaware.

Apparently I have. I can't give you the page, because my book isn't ready to hand, but as I said earlier in this post it's in the same section of the book as that setting out the many tables for NPC personality etc.

I can't remember everything that's there, but it says that NPC fighers, clerics, thieves and wizards be given a +2 to their prime stat (which presumably has been rolled on 3d6, although I think this is not expressly stated), preserves the 17 minimum CHA for NPC paladins but I think reduces some of the other stat requirements, and reduces the stat requirements for druids and ranges (for PCs these are 12 WIs + 15 CHA, and (I think) 13/13/14/14 STR/INT/WIS/CON for rangers - for NPCs these are lessened, maybe 13 or 14 CHA for druids? maybe 12/12/13/13 for rangers? I don't have it all memorised anymore.)

Let's not forget how often a henchman or hireling might become a PC when a player's character dies or becomes incapacitated.

Yes. And what happens if a player wants to pick up an NPC mercenary officer as a PC. Can that NPC suddenly start gaining levels? The rules don't say, although presumably the intended answer to the question would be Yes.

 

[Raven Crowking]

To counter the "Fighters were mundane pre-4e" argument, someone mundane would simply be squished under a boot when facing someone who is 26' tall, especially a 26' tall trained combatant, not someone who can take a full-blown hit and say "That all ya got?!"

And, indeed, some were squished under-boot.

A 1st level 1e Ftr facing a 26-foot tall giant had what chance of survival, exactly?

i.e., the argument is not "ALL fighters were mundane" but that fighters, at the start of the careers, could reasonably be considered so.

 

[Raven Crowking]

What should we infer from all this? Well, one fairly clear conclusion seems to be that Gygax et al didn't feel especially constrained by any pre-given ruleset in statting up NPCs; that they sometime were prepared to use PC class mechanics, or elements thereof, as a device for statting up NPCs, but were happy to treat the relationship between stat minimums, class abilities, earning of XP and level progression, etc as all pretty flexible; and that trying to state in some definitive sense what it means, mechanically, to be an NPC in 1st ed AD&D is - as I said at the outset of this post - a fruitless task.

This hews so close to the truth as to be largely indistinguishable.

The statistics, progression, etc. for an NPC is always what makes sense to the DM in terms of the overall fictional space. PCs require rules (including constraints that NPCs do not have) because they are focused on in game play, and because they are the "avatars" if you will of the players in the game.

IOW, we need to know more about the PCs than we do about NPCs. And we need the rules for PCs to be at least somewhat consistent, so as to allow the players to rationally contribute to the game.

NPC normal people can be the same as the PCs, worse than the PCs, better than the PCs.....whatever the campaign milieu demands. To claim that this makes the PCs special (with regards to the campaign milieu, as opposed to the needs of the metagame) is.........well, adjectives fail me. I am sure you can think of your own.


RC

 

[pemerton]

What I have a problem with is the notion that "leveling up" is assumed to have some kind of in-game reality; that NPCs choose to "take" a level of warrior or "choose" a particular feat.

Fully fully agreed.

Of various level-based games, I think Rolemaster comes closest to making the ultra-simulationist reading of levels workable. But even Rolemaster doesn't take the view that spending development points (RM's equivalent of choosing skills and feats) reflects an ingame choice by the character in question. Of course, it might on some occasions for some DP expenditure reflect training, or some other chosen course of self-cultivation. But sometimes it just reflects what the character happened to get better at.

And of course, you still have to squint a bit and look at RM's XP rules from a funny angle for them to make perfect sense. Subject to that proviso, however, they can be seen as suggesting that the principal method of gaining experience - at least for adventurers - is "hard field training" ie using what you know in real conditions. How excatly we should conceive of farmers, blacksmiths etc levelling is left unstated. But I have participated in threads on the ICE forums where (i) it is presumed that some alternative XP system, like story/roleplaying XP, is in use, and (ii) it is suggestd non-ironically that NPCs should get plenty of XP because they never stray out of character! So even Rolemaster has managed to create a community of players who can't grasp the difference beteen game and metagame when it comes to XP gain and level advancement.

But at least what Rolemaster has going for it is that the power differential between low and high levels is relatively modest compared to D&D, so that a simulationist reading of the improvements in fighting skill, hit points etc is half-tenable. For practically any version of D&D I think this doesn't work (and Gygax's tortured discussion of hit point in the DMG (or is it the PHB) where he compares a 10th level fighter to multiple warhorses is evidence for this). Level in that game has always, in my view, had a metagame as well as an ingame significance (as reflected by the fact that in the 1st ed DMG there are signficant NPCs, like sages and mercenary officers, who have levels but can't gain levels).

The other reason I agree with you about rejecting the "choice" notion is that it makes it hard to develop a character - PC or NPC - whose 5 levels in cleric or warlock represent not a choice but (for example) an ensnarement by a dark power. I remember this issue coming up in a practical way back in the early days of the 4e debates, when it was suggested that a warlock PC must tend towards evil because every level s/he chooses to reinforce her warlock-ism. For some posters, at least, the notion that the gaining of levels might not represent a choice being made by the character wasn't even on the table.

Why? That's how the game models skills & experience.

Sometimes, although not always (cf the AD&D 1st ed sage). But anyway, the use of levels to model skills and experience is distinct from the questions of (i) whether level can change - for some 1st ed NPCs, like mercenary officers, it can't change except via GM fiat - and (ii) whether the consequences of level acquistion (which in 3E include class, skill and sometimes feat selection) are to be understood as choices made in the gameworld by the character who is gaining the level.

 

[pemerton]

To claim that this makes the PCs special (with regards to the campaign milieu, as opposed to the needs of the metagame) is.........well, adjectives fail me. I am sure you can think of your own.

Well, in my post about the minutiae of 1st ed AD&D NPC rules I deliberately avoided addressing this more controversial question!

My feeling is that way back in the day there were probably different approaches to play, in relation to this issue, just as there are now. That some groups regarded PCs as special - not just in the metagame sense of needing more rigid and complete mechanical definition, but as occupying some special place in the gameworld - from the get go. But that others didn't.

I find it hard to be much more precise in part because "special" can cover such a wide range of possibilities. Predestined? Mentioned in prophecy? Or just, like the Hardy Boys and Dr Who, always and only the ones at the centre of the most salient interesting happenings in the gameworld?

But I think we can probably stake out two extremes. When a player takes a group of first level classed characters and mercenaries through a dungeon, all but one is killed, and the one character that emerges has enough XP to be second level, plus all the loot - and simply in virtue of this fact goes on to become that players primary PC - I think we can say that the PC didn't start out as very special. (On the other hand, Crazy Jerome either on this or one of its sister threads posted the interesting notion that this eliminiation-by-dungeon-of-potential-PCs-superfluous-to-requirement can actually be seen as part of the PC creation process - resembling the survival rolls in Traveller, only actually playing them out! Under this reading, the PC is the special one who survived to second level.)

Conversely, when a PC is introduced as an above-first level character, who is already understood to have some sort of significance in the gameworld (and I think Mordenkainen fits this description, although perhaps I'm wrong about that - and I think some henchmen can also fit this description even though they're technically NPCs) then I think the PC clearly has started as special in some fashion.

Of published D&D material, one of the earlier examples that comes to mind of applying the second outlook to PCs introduced as 1st level characters is Dragonlance. And, because of the unforgiving nature of AD&D to 1st level characters, special death rules were required to make it work.

I don't know that any general moral flows from all this, except that AD&D was played in a variety of ways, with a variety of tweakings of the mechanics to help out. If some people played using the approach of the first of my two extremes, except that instead of the elimination pool consisting of mercenaries and classed characters it consisted of turnip farmers, then Hussar would be definitively refuted. As it is, I'm sympathetic to what I take to be the general thrust of his point - that mainstream AD&D play tended to assume that even if PCs weren't special from the get-go, and were to earn their specialness by being culled from a low-level elimination pool, turnip farmers really weren't on the radar as singificant participants in the elimination pool.

I think that turnip farmers turned fighters are more likely to turn up in Dragonlance-ish play, where the turnip farming is part of the backstory of a PC who is understood to be destined for greater things. Of course, absent the adoption of a Dragonlance-style death override, that destiny might be cut short by a goblin's shortsword. But in most cases - not all - I would hypothesis that this tells us more about the clash between desired feel of play and the grim mechanical reality of 1st level AD&D play than about the relationship between the specialness of PCs and NPCs in those players' gameworlds.

 

[FireLance]

To counter the "Fighters were mundane pre-4e" argument, someone mundane would simply be squished under a boot when facing someone who is 26' tall, especially a 26' tall trained combatant, not someone who can take a full-blown hit and say "That all ya got?!"

Well, arguably, given the way that hit points were defined from the earliest days of the game, even a high-level fighter wouldn't have survived a direct hit from a giant's weapon. The loss of hit points simply means that he managed to dodge, twist aside, or otherwise evade the full force of the blow at the last second, and converted a fatal injury into a minor cut or a mild bruise.

I think a lot of the confusion in this thread has arisen from the fact that there seem to be two definitions of "normal" floating around. There is, as Dannyalcatraz puts it, the "statistical" normal - the mode (what the largest number of humans are) or possibly the mean (what the statistical average human is) or the median (what the human at the 50th percentile of all humanity is). This type of "normal" is "not exceptional". Then, there is "normal" as in "not supernatural".

Most humans with class levels are not "normal" in the statistical sense. Depending on game assumptions about how many people even have class levels in the first place, they could be superior to 99% of the population. Furthermore, PCs (and elite NPCs) also tend to have above-average ability scores. They are thus exceptional.

However, "martial" PCs (to use a 4E term), especially low-level ones, are usually still "normal" in the "non-supernatual" sense. They might hit harder, dodge faster and endure more than a "normal" (non-exceptional) human, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.

To illustrate:

A 0-level human, "normal" in both senses of the word, gets hit by a giant and dies.

A high-level fighter, exceptional but not supernatural, loses hit points to the blow, but this is supposed to represent the fighter evading it or minimizing its effects at the last second through skill or luck.

A demigod such as Hercules, or someone endowed with a magical ability such as Achilles, is both exceptional and supernatural. The giant could indeed have landed a solid blow on them, but their supernatural nature allows them to survive what a normal human, or even an exceptional one, could not.

 

[GSHamster]

It doesn't matter how much mythic history there is supporting it, nor does it matter how much genre support there is. Some people don't like to play that way. Some guys want to play a fighter that fights, who is a bad ass with a sword and wears bitchin' +5 plate mail once he's high level. But who doesn't jump across the Grand Canyon, leap up and hit the dragon flying 100' above his head, hurl a weapon thirty miles or wrestle a river.

I completely agree with this. But the question is: can you balance that mundane fighter against a D&D magic-user?

I think you can't. You have to give the fighter extra control of the story, or reduce the power of magic, or give the magic-user a fatal weakness, or give the fighter magic is some manner in order to balance.

Traditionally, D&D has gone with making the magic-users physically weaker than normal and giving the fighter magic via items. But it hasn't always worked out.

 

[KahnyaGnorc]

And, indeed, some were squished under-boot.

A 1st level 1e Ftr facing a 26-foot tall giant had what chance of survival, exactly?

i.e., the argument is not "ALL fighters were mundane" but that fighters, at the start of the careers, could reasonably be considered so.

True, low level fighters were fairly mundane, but also typically much more powerful than low-level mages (cast one spell, then use crossbow, hoping that the monsters don't even sneeze in their direction). By the time magic-using characters started becoming more powerful than fighters, those fighters have advanced beyond "mundane." Maybe not taunting a 26-footer, but substituting a 12-footer works. (or even a 9-footer, pre-4e ogres were typically fairly low level)

 

[Sepulchrave II]

(All of the above...)

I'd xp you if I could. I'm also grateful that you expressed it so eloquently; my brain is shot.

Fundamentally, levels and xp are a poor way of modeling the way real humans acquire experience; to be constrained in understanding the game world in this way can - for me - be detrimental to creativity.

That is not to say that I don't strive to have mechanics which consistently represent a particular NPC - I'm actually extraordinarily anal about this - but it is not the same as saying that the NPC took a level in this and then gained this feat and then multiclassed to this, as if these metagame categories had some independent existence.

Aging is a similar problematic mechanic in 3.x. Of course, heroes become wiser and deeper and more profound as they age; they're heroes, and this models a particular archetype - Senex or the Crone.

But real humans sometimes lose their memory, suffer strokes and poop themselves - detrimentally affecting their Charisma score. To extend the aging rules to NPCs is absurd - sometimes I do it, but I know damn well it's absurd. I do it because it satisfies an internal aesthetic which requires achieving a balance between the RAW and what I'm trying to describe. To find a "solution" in mechanical terms to the problem of "what am I trying to represent?" is fascinating to me; it is in no way indicative of the way the game world actually works, however.

Why? That's how the game models skills & experience. That there is more than one way to model a particular set of skills & experience is a sign of the system's strengths.

Because it leads to the absurdity of the 20th-level commoner above:

• This character is as good with a hoe as a 6th-level fighter is with a +1 longsword, Weapon Focus and 15 Str. That's even without Weapon Focus (hoe). Why?
• This character can fall any distance with no risk of dying. Why?
• A blasphemy spoken by a pit fiend cannot harm this character. Why?

etc. etc.

Now, you can state that the character is supernaturally lucky, protected by deities or whatever in order to justify it. But as soon as you do that, he is heroic - and you should be using a PC class, anyway. IMHO.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The 1st ed AD&D DMG treats stats for NPCs with PC classes differently. In some cases NPCs have lower minimums. In other cases they have stat adjustments rather than minimums.

Not really.

Yes really. You are quoting from the henchmen rules. I don't have my DMG here, but if you go to the pages which have the tables for determining NPC personalities etc (a bunch of d8, d10 and in one case at least d24 rolls) you will see what I am talking about.

Before I turn to those pages- because I do have my DMG on hand- I'll point out that literally just above the quote regarding Henchmen (quoted in particular to point out that NPCs with PC class levels don't get screwed vis a vis their class level) is the paragraphs dealing with general NPC stats:

1Ed DMG p11
Non-Player Characters: You should, of course, set the ability scores of those NPCs you will use as parts of the milieu, particularly those of high level and power. Scores for hight level NPCs must be high- how else could these figures have risen so high? Determine the ability scores of other non-player characters as follows:

General Characters: Roll 3d6 for each ability as usual, but use average scoring by considering any 1 as a 3 and any 6 as a 4.

The next paragraph is what I quoted previously regarding henchmen.

So, while normal, presumably non-PC classed NPCs aren't getting any 18s, any stat from 6-15 is perfectly possible, even all 15s, before modification. This is a far cry from other posters' assertions that they had "no stats" or had "all 10s." Those assertions seem to be derived from HRs or an incomplete reading of the rules.

Now, onto the NPC traits charts you mentioned. They start on p.100.

There are no rules here that do away with what was presented on page 11. What is supplied is a list of adjustments to those rolls by race and by class- the PC classes are listed with minimums, just as for PCs on the characteristic charts in the PHC- or occupation (Laborer, Mercenary, or Merchant/Trader). With them, you can get plain, ordinary NPCs with stats as high as 18.

Sages get their own separate stat generation rules on page 32, designed to ensure that NPCs of that ilk were extremely competent. In that, they presaged (*ahem*) the introduction of class-specific stat generation rules for all classes by Unearthed Arcana.