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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8827073" data-attributes="member: 29398">Indeed, though I still think they made the wrong decision here.Perhaps, but I really try to avoid this if I can - once the campaign starts, the rules in place at that point are (as far as possible) locked in for the duration.&nbsp; Any later changes that affect anything currently or previously seen in the campaign need some sort of explanation in the fiction, which can sometimes be tough if not impossible to pull off and other times trivially easy.There's always monsters out there nobody's heard of; and there's also many monsters in the MM that in almost 40 years have yet to see the light of day in my games.&nbsp; There's always new spells being researched and developed, and maybe one could use that same rationale to explain the appearance of new abilities for non-casters.&nbsp; But none of this explains why a PC [pick a class] works one way and an otherwise-equal (i.e. same species, same general degree of competence, etc.) NPC works differently.Put another way, isn't it better to assume that any NPC in the game world could someday become a PC?Consider my example above, though, with the recruited NPC Fighter.&nbsp; Nothing new has been published, yet in the fiction before she joins the party she has NPC abilities a PC can't have and doesn't have some PC abilities.&nbsp; Then she becomes a PC.&nbsp; What happens next, and how do you plausibly explain it in the fiction?Does she stay exactly as she was, thus forever working differently in her mechanics than any other PC Fighter? (and if yes, then in the interests of fairness I then have to allow every Fighter access to those same mechanics, as I've just set a precedent) Or does she snap-change to mirror the mechanics and abilities of PCs, without any training or in-game reason or rationale behind it?&nbsp; Remember, in the fiction the PCs already know what she can and can't do; that's probably why they recruited her! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 8827073, member: 29398"] Indeed, though I still think they made the wrong decision here. Perhaps, but I really try to avoid this if I can - once the campaign starts, the rules in place at that point are (as far as possible) locked in for the duration. Any later changes that affect anything currently or previously seen in the campaign need some sort of explanation in the fiction, which can sometimes be tough if not impossible to pull off and other times trivially easy. There's always monsters out there nobody's heard of; and there's also many monsters in the MM that in almost 40 years have yet to see the light of day in my games. There's always new spells being researched and developed, and maybe one could use that same rationale to explain the appearance of new abilities for non-casters. But none of this explains why a PC [pick a class] works one way and an otherwise-equal (i.e. same species, same general degree of competence, etc.) NPC works differently. Put another way, isn't it better to assume that any NPC in the game world could someday become a PC? Consider my example above, though, with the recruited NPC Fighter. Nothing new has been published, yet in the fiction before she joins the party she has NPC abilities a PC can't have and doesn't have some PC abilities. Then she becomes a PC. What happens next, and how do you plausibly explain it in the fiction? Does she stay exactly as she was, thus forever working differently in her mechanics than any other PC Fighter? (and if yes, then in the interests of fairness I then have to allow every Fighter access to those same mechanics, as I've just set a precedent) Or does she snap-change to mirror the mechanics and abilities of PCs, without any training or in-game reason or rationale behind it? Remember, in the fiction the PCs already know what she can and can't do; that's probably why they recruited her! :) [/QUOTE]

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