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

[Mercule]

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

That works for the wizened sage who makes unique magic items or the BBEG. That does not work for a non-boss foe who is a single member of a CR5 encounter. It feels very contrived and is extremely poor design. Even knowing it was balanced for the group, it left a bad taste in my mouth. That's about as far as I can go without starting an edition war, though. The best I can do for 4E is "damning by faint praise".

 

[pemerton]

It feels very contrived and is extremely poor design.

I don't understand how it is poor design.

It is quite acceptable for a NPC to have wealth that a PC of that same level/mechanical capability is not entitled to have. For instance, there is nothing wrong with statting up a princess who is (say) 2nd level and yet has wealth (or magic items, or servitors, or whatever) comparable to a name-level PC.

So why is it problematic to give that princess some other capability that is off-limits to PCs? In both cases, the reason it's off-limits isn't because in the fiction it would make no sense for such a person to be adventuring, but because it would upset game balance.

It's possible to design all your NPCs (and antagonists more generally) in such a way that they satisfy the balance requirements for PCs, but that is an extremely significant constraint on NPC and monster design. (3E doesn't fully aspire to this, but leans the furthest in this direction of any edition of D&D; HARP - a Rolemaster variant - has similar aspirations; in both cases it causes needless distortion in the design of monsters - eg hippos either end up having too few hit points, ludicrous CON scores, or too many skills).

by the time 3E came around it was probably assumed that most evil humanoids would eventually need to be playable as PCs, so they just avoided handing out abilities that would be broken for the PCs to have.

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They never entertained the idea that it would be okay for an NPC to have a spell or ability, but that the same individual would lack that ability merely by virtue of becoming a PC. That would be ridiculous.

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And so you end up with shiny abilities at each level, and at-will magic, and fast-healing; heedless of the costs associated with these, in making NPCs too complicated to play

Just as I don't see why it is inherently superior design to constrain NPC and monster building by reference to what makes for a balanced PC build, so I don't see why the design and build of PCs should be constrained by considerations of what makes for an easily playable NPC.

GMing and playing are different game functions. They don't need to use the same tools.

If you expect the DM not to think of the game as a game, I'm not sure how that would work.

For a start, you might get NPC and PC build rules treated as ends in themselves, rather than means to the end of playing a game!

 

[Jester David]

That works for the wizened sage who makes unique magic items or the BBEG. That does not work for a non-boss foe who is a single member of a CR5 encounter. It feels very contrived and is extremely poor design. Even knowing it was balanced for the group, it left a bad taste in my mouth. That's about as far as I can go without starting an edition war, though. The best I can do for 4E is "damning by faint praise".

A lot of gamers would say designing monster powers as PC abilities is also poor design. Or limiting the balance of monster abilities to what you would permit to a player is also poor design.

4e's NPCs are "poor design" when the audience is 3e fans who expect to be able to do or learn anything their opponent can do. If you don't walk into it with that mindset it's different.

After all, we've all played video games where the human enemies can do things the hero can't. And who can forget those RPGs where you fight someone and they are balls-to-the-wall amazing, and when you beat them they join your team and get just average. (Yuffie in FF7 is iconic of this to me.)
We've all seen movies where the villains know different sword techniques or types of magic.

(Personally, I like a middle road design where NPCs are designed like monsters and don't use the PC rules... but are inspired by them. The monsters use a variation of the PC abilities, streamlined for simplicity and tracking.)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

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.

I can't think of a more significant, iconic wizard NPC from D&D's history than Mordenkainen, and yet Curse of Strahd makes him... an Archmage.

What's especially absurd about this is that Mordenkainen, like most named wizards in the PHB, was originally a PC. If anyone at all is going to be built as a regular NPC with class levels and everything, it should be ex-PCs!

And to add insult to injury, the MM Archmage has the worst of all 9th level spells in his spellbook: Time Stop. I mean, really? They couldn't give him Foresight or Shapechange or Meteor Swarm or something? You can tell they're going out of their way to make the Archmage bad, which just makes it a more inappropriate way to model Mordenkainen.

 

[S'mon]

That works for the wizened sage who makes unique magic items or the BBEG. That does not work for a non-boss foe who is a single member of a CR5 encounter. It feels very contrived and is extremely poor design.

Works for me - esoteric knowledge ought to take a long time to master. It seems far less
contrived than 3e easy multiclassing - "Lidda was looking over Mialee's shoulder as she studied her spellbook, Lidda is now multiclassed into Wizard". I wouldn't call it 'design', but I
completely disagree with you that PCs should have easy access to any power a NPC displays.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I don't understand how it is poor design.

It is quite acceptable for a NPC to have wealth that a PC of that same level/mechanical capability is not entitled to have. For instance, there is nothing wrong with statting up a princess who is (say) 2nd level and yet has wealth (or magic items, or servitors, or whatever) comparable to a name-level PC.

So why is it problematic to give that princess some other capability that is off-limits to PCs? In both cases, the reason it's off-limits isn't because in the fiction it would make no sense for such a person to be adventuring, but because it would upset game balance.

I've had a low-level PC be a prince of the realm before. Didn't noticeably upset game balance.

It might be relevant to mention that I tend to run dynamic campaigns. The kingdom in question was under massive attack and had just lost its entire military force save for the PCs and a couple companies of soldiers they managed to extract, in the very first scene of the campaign. The fact that he was a prince carried some benefits (he had plate armor from level one, and he was at one point able to just ask his dad the king for a 1000 gp gem that he needed for reasons) and some obligations (he felt that he couldn't afford to run away from the dragon attacking a city; he had to face it down and negotiate with it, which course of action came within an eyelash of getting him perma-killed).

 

[S'mon]

I can't think of a more significant, iconic wizard NPC from D&D's history than Mordenkainen, and yet Curse of Strahd makes him... an Archmage.

Yeah, that seems silly to me. 5e Archmage is fine for a generic guy like one of the thousand-strong Alphatian Grand Council, but Mordenkainen should look like a min-maxed Wizard PC.

 

[GlassJaw]

Why are people equating class levels with something tangible in the world itself? A class level is purely mechanical. They have no real-world analogue. A player at the table doesn't "see" whether an NPC has class levels or not - it simply doesn't matter.

Perhaps this an extension (or pollution) of the idea that a class level is a direct correlation of a character's "job" or training, which also fuels the anti-multi-classing camp.

Whether an NPC has class levels or not only affects the stat block, nothing else.

I can take the Bandit NPC in the MM and give him +2d6 sneak attack. Will the player think he has rogue levels? Maybe. Good for them. Whether I went through the process of actually statting out 3 levels of Rogue on top of the Bandit stat block - or any other NPC in the world - is completely irrelevant or arbitrary.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It is quite acceptable for a NPC to have wealth that a PC of that same level/mechanical capability is not entitled to have. For instance, there is nothing wrong with statting up a princess who is (say) 2nd level and yet has wealth (or magic items, or servitors, or whatever) comparable to a name-level PC.

Unless you are specifically playing 3E or 4E, nobody is entitled to any level of wealth just based on level. Even in those editions, they're more like guidelines (though 4E is fairly insistent about the importance of adhering to their guideline).

Each character possesses an amount of wealth which makes sense for their position within the world. It is possible to acquire vast wealth regardless of level. Wealth is a thing which exists within the game world. It behaves like any other object. It doesn't care who possesses it, or what level they are.

Just as I don't see why it is inherently superior design to constrain NPC and monster building by reference to what makes for a balanced PC build, so I don't see why the design and build of PCs should be constrained by considerations of what makes for an easily playable NPC.

An RPG system exists to objectively describe things, including all of the characters, for the purposes of impartial resolution. It can only represent real differences that actually exist between individuals within the game world, and there's no inherent difference between a PC and an NPC within the game world.

If an NPC has a cool ability, then the players will want that ability for their own characters (just as their characters will want that ability for themselves). If they can't get that ability, then there needs to be a reason why they can't get it. The reason can't be that it's an NPC, because that doesn't make sense in terms of how the world works; the reality which the system mechanics are modeling does not make a distinction between PC and NPC. It needs to be a legitimate in-game reason, or else the players will call shenanigans.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

...the reality which the system mechanics are modeling...

Game rules are not inherently reality models, nor is it a flaw of a set of game rules to not be intended for use as a reality model.