Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2312630" data-attributes="member: 4937">That was the theory at least.  That is one of the places where things started breaking down.  In published adventures, NPC's consistantly had attributes that would come out to 40+ point buy in today's terms.   Part of that was that in 1st edition, you didn't even get a bonus for your attributes until you hit 15+.   I can remember having several characters with 'good stats' - 13 or 14 in just about everything, that didn't really obtain much tangible advantage from that.   Between DM's 'competing' with the PC's by making thier NPC's uber-characters, and PC's receiving no advantage from slightly above average attributes, there was alot of upperward stat inflation in first edition.   Remember the Unearthed Arcana table for generating high level NPC's?This solved one problem in that NPC's got to be people too, but it didn't solve the problem that attributes in the 12-14 range generally provided you no significant advantage.  Also, whether 4d6 choose 3 or 3d6, luck meant you could end up with something barely playable or something fantastically good.  There was alot of cheating.I think that on one hand it is a really good thing to assume that NPC's are people too, and therefore must have stats and levels.  It was never really satisfying (or good for balance) to assume that NPC's of every sort were mere monsters.  But I do not think that NPC's have to be equal to PC's in every way.I think 25 PB is pretty decent, but I almost immediately inflated to 28 PB and now I'm probably more comfortable with the PC's at 32 PB.  I think that's absolutely as far as I'd go though.   I want the PC's to be built as well as I'd ever need to build an NPC.   Except for your Elimenster type characters, I don't see the point of going beyond 32 PB in building an NPC.   As the above 'ordinary' arrays show, you can get pretty much every concept out of a 15 PB provided you are just trying to build a character compotent at what he does and not someone designed to directly compete with the NPC's.  I've got to the point where its really rare for me to produce NPC's built with more than 20 PB.  I think that is ridiculous.   I know very few people IRL with what I think are 15 14 13 12 10 8 (or better) attribute arrays.  Sure, I've met some people that seem like they are just extraordinarly talented, atheletic, charismatic and gifted in everything that they do, but those people are really rare.   Most people that I know are rather intelligent, but that's to be expected because that's just the social class I've ended up in.   But most of the people I know who are rather intelligent are not also atheleticly and socially gifted as well.  Likewise, when I've done my blue collar stints, I've met various people who are gifted in some other fashion or another.   But most people tend to have gapping holes in there ability that forces them to rely on someone else, or have merely ordinary (though valuable) talents.   And that is what attributes 10-11 mean.   If 'average' people had and average stats of 12 instead of 10.5, then 12 would provide +0 bonus instead of +1.  I think DM's are mostly to blame for this - whether we are talking average DM's running tables or the sort of professional DM's publishing products.  It's easy to blame the players for stat inflation because player are always demanding more and more stuff, but I don't think players would be unsatisfied with 25 PB if they didn't feel like the weakest NPC that they met had 25 PB and most of the ones they were expected to compete against had higher (sometimes much higher) PB's.   DM's simply should stop trying to make NPC's with are 'cooler' than the player's PC's.   A good NPC is good because of the life you breath into it, not because its so uber-good at everything.   DM's should just let thier PC's be the protagonists in the story.Once DM's start believing that giving thier NPC's large PB's reflects badly on them rather than well on them, the problem of stat inflation goes away.   It is possible I think to be a munchkin DM who only runs NPC twinks.  At some level this is less mature than being a power gamer.</blockquote>

Verification