D&D 5E Do NPCs in your game have PHB classes?

[pemerton]

It's the difference between situations which occur naturally within the world, and situations which are contrived against the PCs because they are PCs.

By and large, with caveats for certain specific games and genres, the PCs aren't important within the game world. There's no real in-game difference between a PC wizard and an NPC wizard, for example. That being the case, it's contrived if the PC wizard is constantly on the receiving end of personally-compelling situations for no good reason. It's just bad GMing. It's meta-gaming, by treating this one character different than another character, merely because it's a PC. (If someone is kidnapping the mother of every wizard, then that's a different story.)

I have no idea what your criteria are for "occur naturally within the world" vs "contrived . . for no good reason".

Given that the world is authored, hence - in that sense at least - a contrivance, and that what is "natural" within it is a function of that authorship, I am having trouble drawing any distinction. Unless you mean inconsistent, or at odds with verisimilitude.

In my personal experience, though, most players find it to be good GMing rather than bad GMing for interesting things to occur to, or in the vicinity of, or be stumbled upon by, their PCs.

If the world is set up in a certain way, such that interesting situations are naturally likely to happen due to how things are interconnected, then that's one thing. Worlds should be built in order to encourage interesting situations. It's only when the GM starts targeting that stuff at PCs where you've crossed the line. Anything that happens to a PC because it's a PC is meaningless.

Until you tell me what meaningful means here, I can't evaluate this claim.

A player writes into his/her PC's backstory some details about family. The GM decides that, when the PC is captured by goblins, a family member will be in the goblin cages also. This is a deliberate choice by the GM, designed to push the player and elicit some sort of ingame response, drawing upon elements of the fiction (ie family) that the player him-/herself chose to make salient.

How is this meaningless? What choices is it negating? Why would the game be any better if the NPC in the goblin prison was one that no PC (and hence no player) had any reason to care about?

In common parlance, the "path of least resistance" would be "grabbing the plot hook". The rough opposite of that is "taking initiative as a player".

As a player, there's no point in doing anything clever, if bypassing one obstacle means you are faced with another obstacle that you wouldn't have faced if you hadn't been clever in the first place.

I don't know what you mean by "plot hook" - unless you mean adventure-path play where the GM tells the players what the adventure is (eg who the enemy is, what their PC motivations are, etc). I don't know how you think that relates to scene-framing techniques, or to player-driven games.

I don't understand what you think the point of playing is. But if the PCs have no motivation to adventure, because there is nothing that they want that they don't already have or can trivially get, then the campaign is over.By talking about "cleverness" and "obstacles" you seem to be framing the goals of play in operational or puzzle-solving terms. That's not the general focus of my campaigns.

But even in an operationally-focused game (say, a classic Gygaxian dungeon-crawling game) looting room 1 last week doesn't become pointless because there are still traps and monsters in room 2. And this is so even if, had you failed at room 1, you would never have come to room 2 (eg because your PC is dead; or you're still trying to break into room 1).

Likewise, if the PCs kill Torog then they face the challenge of dealing with the consequences of unleashing things which hitherto were imprisoned. That is a challenge that wouldn't have arisen had they not killed Torog. How does that make killing Torog pointless?

 

[pemerton]

Same reason you can't cut off it's wings, hold one in each hand and flap them to fly. Exactly what it says. That a Dragon's hide is that much better at bouncing attacks than plate worn by a human. (But, size penalty, Touch AC, et al, actually laying a finger on the dragon is probably easier.)

Maybe I'm not getting my point across.

A natural armour bonus is about toughness. (It's not a speed or dodge or DEX or luck or . . . bonus.)

Why can the cleverest archmage in the world not make magical armour that is as tough as a dragon's hide? In fiction this is possible. (Frodo's mithril armour seems to be pretty comparable to the hide of Smaug in turning blades. In AD&D +5 plate mail is better armour than any dragon's hide.)

The +30 natural armour bonus is purely a mechanical device - intended to make the dragon hard to hit by high level PCs with their mechanical to hit bonuses - with a veneer of simulation over the top.

To put the point more bluntly: you don't successfully turn 4e into a process sim just by saying that everyone's level bonus to AC is a natural armour bonus! I mean, you can say that if you want to, but you haven't actually changed anything about the game, or the way the mechanics of the game generate a coherent fantasy fiction.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The whole reason this ludicrous argument about HP=Meat got any traction is because in 3e, virtually all healing was done magically, so, you were free to describe anything you wanted to. And, of course, people simply didn't bother to look at it too closely.

I don't recall any hp controversy in the 3e era. When there was a hp controversy in the past, it was over how silly D&D hps were ("your character gets more and more hps as he levels, what's happening, is he getting bigger? hurr hurr!"), and the defense of D&D was EGG's treatise in the 1e DMG, that hps weren't just physical, that the same attack doing the same damage to a higher-hp character resulted in a lesser wound or even no wound at all.

Why can the cleverest archmage in the world not make magical armour that is as tough as a dragon's hide? In fiction this is possible.

Because D&D isn't simulating that fiction (nor any fiction).

To put the point more bluntly: you don't successfully turn 4e into a process sim just by saying that everyone's level bonus to AC is a natural armour bonus!

4e doesn't have natural armor bonuses. Clearly we were talking about 3e.

I mean, you can say that if you want to, but you haven't actually changed anything about the game, or the way the mechanics of the game generate a coherent fantasy fiction.

If the game is generating the fiction rather than modeling it, it'd only be a simulation in the self-referent sense (that is, it wouldn't be a simulation, at all, it'd be rules-as-laws-of-physics). If the game is at all playable, it'll generate coherent fiction, too - maybe Terry Pratchet-esque, but consistent.

I have no idea what your criteria are for "occur naturally within the world" vs "contrived . . for no good reason".

Limiting ourselves to just the current thread, we could find examples. For instance:

"occur naturally within the world" would include "blunt-force trauma to the torso"

and "contrived . . for no good reason" would include "all other sorts of wounds - including hp damage not resulting in wounds, at all, and hp damage resulting in mortal wounds or instant death."

 

[Shasarak]

However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage,
our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts
and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.

I guess the main difference between 1e and 5e is that the same lordly fighter in 5e, having taken 40 hit points damage will be showing no appearant signs of damage. Which shows how much the "official" version has changed away from the original.

 

[Shasarak]

In my personal experience, though, most players find it to be good GMing rather than bad GMing for interesting things to occur to, or in the vicinity of, or be stumbled upon by, their PCs.

As long as it is interesting and not just "oh no, my family has been kidnapped again".

 

[Shasarak]

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s quote was from Gygax's DMG (p 82).

The previous page contains the following passage:

For those who wonder why poison does either killing damage (usually) or no harm whatsoever, recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the
saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

Perhaps a scratch. That is to say, hit point loss need not correlate to physical injury.

He was talking about poison damage, not hit point loss. And specifically why poison was either no damage or death. Of course if death then there must of been a scratch so at least contact with the body so no death by poion on a miss.

The only oddity of this system, in 1st ed AD&D, is that healing is not proportional, so the fighter who has lost "metaphysical" reserves needs a Cure Serious or Critical Wounds spell, while the dying MU can be restored to maximum hp (though not full health) with a Cure Light Wounds spell. 4e corrects this particular oddity with surge-based healing.

Healing should be proportional to the amount of power used rather then the person being healed. That never made any logical sense to have a 1st level acolyte healing almost as much as a Demi-God.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So, what wounds are potentially lethal yet entirely recoverable in 4 days?

Mostly bruises and scratches. High-level characters usually experience death by a thousand cuts, where low-level characters mostly just die outright so we don't need to worry about how fast they heal.

The whole reason this ludicrous argument about HP=Meat got any traction is because in 3e, virtually all healing was done magically, so, you were free to describe anything you wanted to. And, of course, people simply didn't bother to look at it too closely.

That probably contributed, and made it more widespread than it would otherwise be in 3E, but it can't be the whole reason since people were still using it back in the 2E days.

If the mechanics tell us what things should be, then, how does this work? If HP are HP and always the same, then three creatures of roughly the same size should be roughly the same no?

No, magical creatures aren't constrained by the natural laws of the world, nor do the assumptions of combat apply equally to people and giant monsters. For regular people, HP mostly reflect how their skill allows them to make the most of their meat; for giant monsters, they have a lot more meat to work with. Just as a barbarian can have more HP than a fighter or warrior, depending on skill and innate physical characteristics, so can a hill giant have more HP than an ogre.

OTOH, if you ignore the whole idea that D&D rules are some sort of bizarre physics engine, then having NPC's not be made the same as PC's makes perfect sense. In exactly the same way that monsters are made based on how much of a challenge they should be for the PC's, not out of some rather vague, confused notion that we are making worlds using D&D rules.

Sure, if you ignore the concept that the rules of the game reflect certain fundamental truths of that reality, in the light of certain assumptions, then that conclusion logically follows. But then, if that was the case, we would have no clues about how that world is supposed to actually work, at which point we have no idea how anything is supposed to play out. You go from a model that gives reasonable results about most things we care about, and less-reasonable results about corner cases we don't care about, to a model that can't tell us anything about how anything actually happens.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

A player writes into his/her PC's backstory some details about family. The GM decides that, when the PC is captured by goblins, a family member will be in the goblin cages also. This is a deliberate choice by the GM, designed to push the player and elicit some sort of ingame response, drawing upon elements of the fiction (ie family) that the player him-/herself chose to make salient.

When you make the decision about who all the goblins have captured, would you make the same decision to say that this particular mother-of-a-wizard is captured, if the wizard in question had been an NPC rather than a PC? Are you letting your out-of-game knowledge about which characters are PCs and which ones are NPCs affect the choices which your NPC goblins make?

Because if so, then that's meta-gaming, and protagonization. You're treating the characters as though they are fictional characters in a story, rather than real people in a real world. Real people, even in a fantasy world where the gods are real, wouldn't have to deal with the shenanigans of a malevolent outsider bent on making their lives interesting.

But even in an operationally-focused game (say, a classic Gygaxian dungeon-crawling game) looting room 1 last week doesn't become pointless because there are still traps and monsters in room 2. And this is so even if, had you failed at room 1, you would never have come to room 2 (eg because your PC is dead; or you're still trying to break into room 1).

As long as all of those traps and monsters existed in both rooms beforehand, then that's fine. When it becomes pointless is when you start changing things, after the fact, in order to mess with the players.

If the behir in room 1 dies in the first round due to a lucky critical hit, or if the hidden parchment detailing the Baron's nefarious dealings is incinerated before anyone can notice it; then adding in another monster in room 2 where there was previously none (whether or not that had yet been revealed to the players), or putting in additional evidence to implicate the Baron, specifically to negate the unexpected outcome of room 1, would be shenanigans.

Likewise, if the PCs kill Torog then they face the challenge of dealing with the consequences of unleashing things which hitherto were imprisoned. That is a challenge that wouldn't have arisen had they not killed Torog. How does that make killing Torog pointless?

Like I said, it goes back to intent. Do the consequences follow logically from the action? Could they have predicted that this would have been the outcome, by asking the right questions and possibly performing the right tests? Or does it only happen because the game must go on, and you need to provide content for your players?

Let me ask this another way: If the players had come to you before the Torog issue was resolved, and suggested that they're not interested in continuing this campaign much further, because they want to try some other system or they're moving to Mars or something, would that affect the aftermath of Torog's death? Would you make it so that the consequences were less severe, and did not need to be dealt with, since you no longer needed to provide content for your players? Or would you put the campaign on indefinite hiatus, because these consequence must logically follow from Torog's death, and that's how the world works whether or not the players want to deal with it?

 

[MechaPilot]

According to the quoted text, it sounds like 2E is suggesting a proportional wound system, so a hit for 9/90 would be the same scratch as someone getting hit for 1/10; and 3E is in line with that.

What I'm curious about is, how do you get from that model, to your model where HP damage can equate to a parried blow or clothing damage? Where do you make the jump to the idea that HP damage can correspond to no physical injury whatsoever? Because it doesn't say that in the books, and it's completely outside of my hypothesis space for ways that those words could possibly be interpreted.

It's simple extrapolation. If HP loss can represent making a wound less serious by making it into a small cut or scratch, then it can also represent making it even less serious than the cut or scratch. It's a simple straight-line progression.

 

[pemerton]

As long as it is interesting and not just "oh no, my family has been kidnapped again".

Upthread, [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] asserted that the GM metagaming, GM scene-framing, the GM deliberately establishing elements of the fiction so as to deliberately push the players (via their PCs expressed concerns and backstory), are all bad.

I denied that, and gave some examples. I don't think it's put any pressure on my denial to point out that it is bad GMing to negate player choices or to run a boring or repetitive game.