Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6784237" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure! In fact that's how I have interpreted my own campaign world. In days of yore, going all the way back to Holmes Basic when it first was born, I never liked the idea of hierarchies of levels of NPCs that was sometimes implied. Honestly, I didn't say to myself back then "nothing but the PCs uses a class", but I always considered it shorthand for what existed, not laws of nature that generated every individual that was more than a 'commoner' like cookies.So, when I revisited it after 4e came out, it had been a number of years, I simply generated a stat block for each NPC that it was relevant for, and concluded that really only PCs were strictly speaking members of a class. Now, there are in that campaign world MANY NPCs that are "like a ranger" or "like a paladin" or whatever, and may even be called by the kinds of names and titles that a PC of those classes might command. At the same time, its a world with a lot of detail, you're not typically going to find an NPC that is JUST a "Ranger of Otillis", he's probably also a member of the Welda family, has an estate, was once the Constable of The Hill, and is married to the Duke's Cousin. Whatever his abilities are is going to be a logical outgrowth of these details. If its a minor NPC, then obviously things will be sketchier, but I try to invent 2 very simple elements for an NPC that fit with where it is encountered in some way and give it its signature ability. Clearly there are also plenty of 'mooks' out there, but those are covered by standard monster stat blocks and usually come in multiples, like monsters in any edition. The upshot being, the PC rogue is the only character that is exactly a 'member of the rogue class'. Its a very flexible system in any case, so even if there are several PCs with the same class (at once or over time) they're not likely to be visibly close copies of each other, which might be more of a problem in say 1e, where every thief is pretty close to the same and there's no real way to diversify them except gear or exceptional non-rules-based stuff.Truthfully I think the breaking out of the 'everyone has a class' mould is MORE important in AD&D than in 4e in terms of its impact on the world, but 4e gives us many other reasons to use statblocks and good tools for it, so it makes sense to do it there. IF I was to run 2e again, which I won't, I'd make NPCs ala 4e there too nowadays.</blockquote>

Verification