And now we're back to no one being 1st level ever. Now a hunter is no longer a 1st level commoner? Good grief, who is?
In a system that posits twenty levels and a variety of classes, not many people.
I find the DMG guidelines on demographics ludicrous given the rest of the rules structure, and generally assume than any NPC gains several levels over the course of a lifetime. Thus, a 1st level commoner is generally limited to teenagers with no specific training or various forms of mendicant, addict, or people who otherwise don't do anything. An adult citizen is likely to have a few levels of commoner, even if no other class is appropriate. Why have all that granularity and not use it?
Sounds like a problem with your group then, not with the game. I find it stunningly hard to believe that people refuse to play any other RPG than D&D. Good grief, do you only play one video game or one sport? Ever?
If there were other realistic alternatives, things might be different. But what other game is well-known enough to recruit new players and well-developed enough to satisfy experienced rpg-ers? I don't know of any.
Well, considering the name on the box, I think that any purported D&D system that does not strongly handle dungeon crawl play is not really D&D anymore.
That is an interesting issue. My sense of things is that the concept of a dungeon is an anachronism and is generally not used any more (dragons are still quite relevant). Certainly I rarely use anything that even loosely meets that definition, and don't play anything close to the dungeon-crawling style. I see a lot of chatter around that issue. Maybe it's worth doing a poll on it or something.
I reject your notion of "advanced" players entirely.
My players don't.
Sorry, but, "routinely ignore the rules and just build their own classes" is something I've never seen done at any table I've played at.
Most tables call routinely ignoring rules cheating.
Really? You've never used alternate class features? More strangely, you've never had a player proudly present you their homemade class? Or just straight-up ask to change a class ability to something else?
If that's really true, you are indeed in some kind of alternate universe from where my games are played. I look at character creation as a collaborative process between player and DM, using the rules as a baseline. I gave up on using
any class as written years ago.
That you can ignore the rules is not a very good argument for keeping those rules.
Actually, it kind of is. That's called an "optional" or "modular" approach.
There is nothing inconsistent in allowing DM's to design NPC's outside of the class framework. There's an entire book of monsters that doesn't follow the class framework after all. Are you saying the Monster Manual is inconsistent?
Yes.
Why is a tailor different from, say, a wild boar? After all, that wild boar has abilities that PC's can never gain (ferocity) and the stats of the creature are entirely ad hoc.
A wild boar is a race, not a class. So the valid comparison is between a boar and a human. Obviously, a boar cannot advance by conventional classes because it lacks intelligence, and its ferocity, like elven immunities or gnomish cantrips, is a product of its race, not training.
That being said, all races should be considered in the same way (humanoid and otherwise) and all advancement should be considered in the same way.
