D&D 5E (2014) Do NPCs in your game have PHB classes?

[FormerlyHemlock]

That fine. Think of it this way mike the pally is questing after tom the evil merc. Creation wise tom is a martial warrior who if i felt was important enough, i might stat him as a fighter. Or if he is just some mook, i might just use the guardsmen and maybe upgrade if needed. Now if im using a dragon, im going to use him as a major boss or npc for a group. Im never gonna stat him as a fighter.

I can (potentially) imagine statting an unusual dragon as a fighter at my table. Usually I make them dragon sorcs, but a freakishly weird dragon might have spent all his time training physically and neglecting his innate magic... in which case, yes, this dragon has Action Surge and Extra Attack on his bite weapon. Ditto Extra Attack on his weapons when he shapeshifts into demihuman form.

He'd probably be a bit of a pariah among dragons though, given all the schmoozing with humans that he's presumably done to pick up weapons tricks. He's the dragon equivalent of a human who spends all his time hanging out with cows and sheep, or a crazy cat lady.

 

[Jediking]

~double post~

 

[Jediking]

He'd probably be a bit of a pariah among dragons though, given all the schmoozing with humans that he's presumably done to pick up weapons tricks. He's the dragon equivalent of a human who spends all his time hanging out with cows and sheep, or a crazy cat lady.

"Have you heard about that weirdo, Draxus? All he does is sharpen his claws and 'chase the wind'. What does that even mean?"
"Yeah, dude refuses to even breath lightning. Says it 'interferes with his breathing rate'. Guy was watching a hawk hunt the other day, saying he wanted to learn how to use his natural weapons. Like, we are dragons! We can breathe elements. Some dragons just don't want to watch the world burn..."

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

I'd say "rare".

I actually made a big demographics table for my campaign world so I could know things like "how many people able to cast X spell should there be in this city?" and "at what level are the PCs likely to be the most powerful people in the town/barony/city/kingdom/continent?"

Overall something like 1% of people have class levels. Fewer in calm rural areas; more in frontier areas, both because more people are pushed towards learning those kinds of skills for defense and because the kind of people who seek adventure migrate from calm to frontier areas.

Fighter and rogue are the most common classes.

There are more really powerful monsters than high-level characters; most of my campaign world is wilderness or occupied by monsters. The areas occupied by the PC races are large, but small on a planetary scale - maybe the size of Russia or US + Canada.

 

[MechaPilot]

I can (potentially) imagine statting an unusual dragon as a fighter at my table. Usually I make them dragon sorcs, but a freakishly weird dragon might have spent all his time training physically and neglecting his innate magic... in which case, yes, this dragon has Action Surge and Extra Attack on his bite weapon. Ditto Extra Attack on his weapons when he shapeshifts into demihuman form.

He'd probably be a bit of a pariah among dragons though, given all the schmoozing with humans that he's presumably done to pick up weapons tricks. He's the dragon equivalent of a human who spends all his time hanging out with cows and sheep, or a crazy cat lady.

That's interesting. The different way people opt to use and treat things in RPGs is always a subject of fascination for me. I have to confess that I almost never give dragons class levels, or spellcasting abilities.

I have two primary homebrew worlds: Tenesia, and Wildwood.

In Tenesia, dragons are beasts. They are cunning, wicked creatures that hibernate for decades only to rise, shake off their slumber, gorge themselves on humanoids and animals, mate, and destroy everything they see as a potential threat to their territory. They cannot speak any formal language, but they are capable of learning to understand the languages of others. Being smart enough to understand worldly changes with the passage of time, they may eat or destroy all the settlements and fields within a day's flight of their lair just to prevent unwanted expansion near their lair before they wake again. These dragons are not greedy. They do not amass treasure hoards. However, many of them have learned that magic and metal are humanoids' greatest weapons against them, and they will seek to destroy or eliminate magic and metal when they see it. If a dragon knocks the roof off a building (or part of the roof) and sees books inside, it will burn the place to ashes so no spellbooks or scrolls can survive to be used against it. If that same dragon tears open a building and finds an anvil present, it will either melt it, hurl it into a nearby body of water (if present), or grab it and hurl it at buildings and people from a great height to turn their metal against them.

In Wildwood, dragons are manifestations of nature. Nature is the impersonal over-deity of that world, and those who don't keep the balance of nature earn her wrath. When a settlement has offended her dearly enough, she will send natural disasters to ruin and destroy them. Sometimes, these disasters are dragons. The dragons sleep within the forests, volcanoes, swamps, etc. and they rise only at nature's call, destroying those who've offended her before returning to their rest.

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

I mean, did you notice how the NPC archmage has a lower save DCs than its spell slots and Intelligence would suggest, because spell access is tied to hit dice but proficiency bonus is tied to challenge rating? At least 4E was honest with its shenanigans - it didn't try to pretend that PCs and NPCs were following the same rules at different granularity!

Thank you for explaining that! I stared at that stat block for a while a few days ago, trying to figure that out... "yep, it really says 20 intelligence... "

EDIT: in case I misunderstood/mis-answered the original question... I see the MM-style NPC stat blocks as simplifications. A 'normal' NPC would just use those stats even if he's "really" an X level whatever, but a more 'significant' NPC would have more.

 

[Valetudo]

I think we have all seen that CRS are not as reliable as wizards thought they would be. I'm am one of the dms that make the npc or baddy first and then see what the credit is.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I think we have all seen that CRS are not as reliable as wizards thought they would be.

Not quite the case, considering what wizards have made CR mean in this edition - they are plenty reliable for their stated function; it's just that there stated function isn't what most people think it is or should be.

 

[S'mon]

Meta-gaming in an RPG is bad. It is always bad. Sometimes it is the lesser of two evils.

Treating NPCs differently from PCs is meta-gaming, and therefore bad. It is always bad. Sometimes it is the lesser of two evils.

Funny, I thought meta-gaming was a bad thing players did, not DMs. If you expect
the DM not to think of the game as a game, I'm not sure how that would work.

I'm running Mentzer Classic D&D and have PCs and NPCs be interchangeable - I even
developed simple 3e-style NPC Classes 'Aristocrat' and 'Commoner'.
This definitely has advantages; I can put NPCs onto 1-page PC sheets and they
adventure together interchangeably. The PCs feel like part of the same world as the NPCs, it definitely helps immersion.

The 5e (& 4e even moreso) approach has other advantages though, it is less immersive
but gives the PCs a Big Damn Heroes feel which is perfect for my swords & sorcery campaign, which I wanted to have a pulp novel feel. My Paizo Shattered Star 5e campaign also has a
somewhat pulp feel (in the more modern style) and it works ok there, but I'd be more inclined in that campaign to stat antagonists with the actual PC rules.

 

[S'mon]

The "whatever goes" NPC builds for 4E killed that edition for my group. The coup de grace was an Eberron adventure from Dragon that had an agent of the Aurum who could control PC actions with ridiculous frequency (either high recharge or at-will); when a player asked how he could get that ability and I had to answer, "You can't, no matter level or focus" it really soured things.

I just answer "Years of study" - that works.