"Oddities" in fantasy settings - the case against "consistency"

TwoSix said:

Honestly, this just boils down to the fact that classes are terrible for any sort of realistic simulation of gaining abilities, and if you want to have the idea of class exist in the fiction, you're going to have do a lot of contortion to make realistic NPCs. Or just accept that NPCs with a thief skill on the side, or any other sort of realistic NPC, aren't going to exist.

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Yes, which is why I think they work better when understood as a conceit of character creation

Sepulchrave II said:

Yes, Phoebus - he was a reincarnated human fighter.

How about the hundreds of meticulously detailed characters - fighters, paladins, rangers, thieves, clerics, magic users, illusionists, druids and assassins - which don't represent corner cases?

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I mean, I wasn't playing during the OD&D/1e time period, so grain of salt and all that.

But I have to imagine the tension between the viewpoints of "All PCs are just a representative sample of the NPCs in the world, so PCs and NPCs are mechanically identical" and "I need some 1 HD mooks fast, and I'll just skin them as human bandits" was already present in 1980. Different authors and different products probably just leaned in to one viewpoint or the other.

TwoSix said:

My players know that when I'm the DM, the character building rules are at best a suggestion. I'm willing to entertain almost any idea as long as the player is rooting it in concept first. Any complaint rooted in "This player got X, so I should get Y" isn't going to get any traction with me. I

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I generally cleave to the rules. But if I do deviate from them for a player, I am open to any concerns other players raise. For me the goal is building trust and balancing the expectations people may have at the table. In some groups such exceptions will make no difference, but I also play with players who could take issue and I am happy to listen to them and talk about the fairest solution as a group if there is a genuine concern

TwoSix said:

Sure, but there's always going to be a cost associated with any powerful ability that isn't rooted in the standard class progressions, unless the ability is gained through the normal play mode of "find cool loot".

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Depends on the ability or development we are talking about. And the cost, if there is one, isn’t going to necessarily satisfy balance concerns other players may have. So I find talking to them is

TwoSix said:

I mean, I wasn't playing during the OD&D/1e time period, so grain of salt and all that.

But I have to imagine the tension between the viewpoints of "All PCs are just a representative sample of the NPCs in the world, so PCs and NPCs are mechanically identical" and "I need some 1 HD mooks fast, and I'll just skin them as human bandits" was already present in 1980.

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I doubt the division was articulated in those terms. I don't think there were "1HD mooks" - but there were bandits, brigands, men-at-arms etc. And brief rules for sedentary and active commoners, if you found yourself in a bar room brawl. No reskinning required.

The existence of Rogues Gallery - considering its preamble and the long, detailed lists of lots of NPCs of various levels - suggests to me that the standard practice when devising a classed NPC was to build it using the PHB rules (&DMG rules for personality traits and magic items). The whole point of the supplement was to ease the burden of work on the DM.

And it was an early supplement. In 1980, if you had the DMG, PHB, MM, DM Screen, the Greyhawk Folio and Rogues Gallery you had everything except the modules. The early modules do seem to represent a kind of transitional period - in terms of the consistency of detail presented.

[Edit] By 1980 there were also Non Player Character Record Sheets, which looked like this:

Bedrockgames said:

I generally cleave to the rules. But if I do deviate from them for a player, I am open to any concerns other players raise. For me the goal is building trust and balancing the expectations people may have at the table. In some groups such exceptions will make no difference, but I also play with players who could take issue and I am happy to listen to them and talk about the fairest solution as a group if there is a genuine concern

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Probably different table logistics. Players who want to try different ideas generally reach out to me, and we have 1-on-1 discussion over email/text to discuss their ideas, and might formalize it on game day before the session starts. If there's any inquiry as to what a certain character can do, the player generally says "The DM and I are trying some wacky homebrew idea" and that's the extent of the issue. I've literally never had anyone complain.

It helps that most of my tables are with players that also DM, so they're quite flexible and generally story-oriented over mechanics-oriented.

Bedrockgames said:

Depends on the ability or development we are talking about. And the cost, if there is one, isn’t going to necessarily satisfy balance concerns other players may have. So I find talking to them is

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Again, I've never had anyone complain about balance, so this is outside my frame of reference.

Lanefan said:

Simple, in my game anyway: there's no way said Fighter could learn pick-pocketing to that extent without either a) formal training (pretty much only available from Thieves' guilds) or b) becoming old and gray with all the many years it would take him to self-train. And no guild would train him in picking pockets without also training him in the other Thiefly skills, thus making him a double-class F-T.

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Why not? Guilds are in the business of making money and pretty much any guild would take the tens of thousands of gold pieces that I'm paying and just teach me to pick pockets.

Bedrockgames said:

But this isn't how life works. People learnt to pick pocket that well all the time in life (even kids can learn this skill) and they can learn it without formally joining an organization. Some people just get good at it on their own without. Again, not saying you need to let a player do this. They can't for balance reasons. But people populating the world ought to be able to achieve something like this without going through the channels of character creation

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Well, at least in 5e it is trivially easy to make a fighter who is good at pick pocketing.

As for the person who can only cast fireball and nothing else, I'd say that's like wanting to know calculus without knowing arithmetic; it's just not how that stuff works. Now magic being fiction, we of course can decide how it works, but personally I prefer if the rules and fiction are aligned. If every bloody PC class learns their spells level by level, having to go through lower ones first, then I kinda want to have the setting metaphysics to reflect that.

I like when the rule elements tell us about something more interesting about the character than just boring numbers and mechanics. When I started to plan my current D&D setting, I went through every class and subclass, decided which to include (which was most) and made sure I had a place in the setting for them. I know where eldritch knights and arcane tricksters originate, I have animistic cultures for druids, rangers and totem barbarians, I have ancestor worshipping culture for ancestral guardian barbarians and so forth. Then these things are not just mechanics, they will actually help to anchor the character into the setting, make them feel like part of it.

TwoSix said:

But I have to imagine the tension between the viewpoints of "All PCs are just a representative sample of the NPCs in the world, so PCs and NPCs are mechanically identical" and "I need some 1 HD mooks fast, and I'll just skin them as human bandits" was already present in 1980. Different authors and different products probably just leaned in to one viewpoint or the other.

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To be charitable to Gygax and crew in a way I’m usually not, I find it very easy to believe that they had clear boundaries in mind when it comes to which population PCs are meant to represent. I mean, I have myself had the experience of feeling that something was clear and straightforward in my mind, then tried writing it down and discovered it was both too vague and too tangled to be any use after all.

(This does happen to others, right?)

When you’re busy on a zillion fronts, a lot of assumptions have to go unexamined. There’s just no time to wrestle with any one topic very long, so you lay down some generalizations and move on. Quite likely you make a mental note to revise it in some supplement or corrected printing or something, a day which may or may not ever come.

It was like that time and again in my RPG writing days, and we had vastly superior circumstances than those guys, in a lot of way. Throw in things like Gygaxian circumlocution, and you’re planting a rich crop of malice-free but nonetheless tenacious problems big and small alike.

Crimson Longinus said:

I like when the rule elements tell us about something more interesting about the character than just boring numbers and mechanics. When I started to plan my current D&D setting, I went through every class and subclass, decided which to include (which was most) and made sure I had a place in the setting for them. I know where eldritch knights and arcane tricksters originate, I have animistic cultures for druids, rangers and totem barbarians, I have ancestor worshipping culture for ancestral guardian barbarians and so forth. Then these things are not just mechanics, they will actually help to anchor the character into the setting, make them feel like part of it.

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I think it would be a fascinating design challenge to make a setting where every PC option is fully immersed in the setting fiction. Every class is a particular group or faction or specific embodied methodology of learning. I've actually been noodling around with that idea the past few months, mostly because it's so different from my normal "class-as-metagame" approach.

I just wouldn't do that with the existing PHB classes, mostly because they have so much baggage around them already.

Autumnal said:

When you’re busy on a zillion fronts, a lot of assumptions have to go unexamined. There’s just no time to wrestle with any one topic very long, so you lay down some generalizations and move on. Quite likely you make a mental note to revise it in some supplement or corrected printing or something, a day which may or may not ever come.

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Also, since we've been in the internet era for a quarter-century plus now, it's easy to forget that most of our ideas couldn't be analyzed and dissected by hundreds of people in a few days simply by posting or blogging about them somewhere. Unexamined assumptions, especially on more niche topics, just tended to persist for much longer periods of time.