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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gryph" data-source="post: 6004432" data-attributes="member: 98071">I guess it's a style thing; but, the one player practice that irritates me to know end is trying to use knowledge of game mechanics to reverse engineer a monster or NPC.  There is a wide range of stories that could generate a master blacksmith. He could be a serf, effectively chained to his forge who was never allowed to swing his hammer in anger who eventually escaped and opened his own forge.  He could have been a traditional apprentice trained from a youth who engaged in a few youthful tussles but still has no meaningful combat skill.  Maybe he was a march lords retainer and spent some time manning the walls against particularly vicious attacks but mostly was too valuable to take from the forge repairing arms and parts for the seige engines.  He could have been the armorer for a mercenary company and fought in skirmishes and battles almost as much as he smithed until he left the troop.  He could even have been a Perrin Goldeneyes type who started as an apprentice and destiny forced him to adventurer for a time before he returned home to take up his hammer again. In which case he is much more dangerous than anyone would expect from a blacksmith. Any of those various smiths could now be at the anvil in the town where the adventurers meet him and I don't want the fact of his status as a master smith to imply anything else about him. If the players want to gauge whether he might be competent in combat they can explore the world and find out or they can take their chances and pick a fight. If they pick a fight assuming he's just a craftsman than a lot of times they will be right and sometimes they will be brutally disabused of their assumptions. I guess what I'm getting at is this: when the world follows a rigid sort of mechanical structure, one where the players can and should make conclusions from very small mechanical facts, there is very little incentive to discover the world around him. The effect at its simplest is Troll lets use fire and acid (at least rooted in legend). At its worst its, he can easily make masterwork weapons he must be a level 10 or 11 expert careful guys he can kick our asses. (not rooted in the fiction) I appreciate when a game allows me to easily create an npc who looks a lot like a character. I like using pc-like villains in my games. I don't care to have the game require me to build every npc and monster like it was a pc. The pc rules are good at building adventurers they get twisted and broken trying to build commoners.</blockquote>

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