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

[Maxperson]

He was talking about poison damage, not hit point loss. And specifically why poison was either no damage or death. Of course if death then there must of been a scratch so at least contact with the body so no death by poion on a miss.

No. He was talking about hit point loss causing poison death. There can be no poison save without there first being hit point damage, at least not the kind of poison that he was talking about.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

It's not hard, as long as you avoid meta-gaming. Don't let anyone make a decision based on information they don't have.

The real kicker there is that most of the time someone is being told "You can't do that, it is meta-gaming!" they are being forced to use information the character doesn't have to decide on doing something else, rather than be allowed to actually have the character guess at something without the player's knowledge being brought into the matter.

And, in a general sense: Meta-gaming is an illusion. There is only playing the game (including treating the characters encounter as if they are characters, using the game information as representation of things the character would know but the player can't otherwise see, and most other things to which people use the phrase "meta-game" to refer to), and cheating at the game (a very rare and specific set of things which people commonly refer to as "meta-gaming" that are actually not just playing the game, including but not limited to having characters do things which actually do require information that not only does the character not have, but cannot possibly guess at - which is so rare a thing I can't even think of an example at the moment).

As for why this illusion was created, one need look no further than the contemporary idea at the time that the players are always trying to get one over on the DM or find some unfair advantage so the DM must act as stern adversary and keep them in their proper place - an idea which even the originators of the game didn't fully embrace, judging by other portions of text which coached DMs on not being overly harsh toward their players for fear they would cease playing.

 

[Maxperson]

Mostly bruises and scratches. High-level characters usually experience death by a thousand cuts, where low-level characters mostly just die outright so we don't need to worry about how fast they heal.

Not a thousand cuts. 998 minor cuts that do very little physical damage and a lot of metaphysical damage, and two big ones that rip the fighter in half and kill him.

 

[Hussar]

No, NPCs are perfectly allowed to make decisions based on what they know about the world, even if that includes the PCs; they just can't make decisions that take into consideration that the PCs are PCs.

Again, no, you're looking at this in entirely the wrong direction. Characters can engage with each other as individuals, based on what they do know. Some particular group of adventurers can be sent off to explore a certain region, or complete a specific quest, based on the estimated difficulty of the task at hand at hand; you don't send a bunch of rookies out to map Dragon Island, but maybe you send them to get rid of a goblin infestation.

As a DM, what you cannot do is to replace all of the dragons on Dragon Island with kobolds, just so you can send the rookies there, because that would be meta-gaming.

It's not hard, as long as you avoid meta-gaming. Don't let anyone make a decision based on information they don't have.

The PCs in my current game are world-saving heroes. Almost everyone has heard of them. Sometimes they get requests, based on their reputation. Sometimes they get assassins. It works out just fine.

Yet, somehow, NPC's quest givers can magically work out that the party is 5th level and not 8th, despite there really being no outward difference. And, again, funnily enough, the assassins that come after the PC's are just high enough level to be a challenge, but, not so high level that they mop the floor with the PC's. And there is no meta gaming going on there at all.

Look, it's pretty simple to prove just how wrong you are. What is the second sentence, just below the title, of every single module for D&D ever produced? Doesn't matter edition, time period, or even company. That second line is exactly the same every time - An adventure for X number of characters of Levels Y to Z. Every.. Single... Time.

So, the producers of the game create adventures based entirely on meta-game considerations. So, I guess every single module producer, DM and player in the history of the game isn't really role playing? Tens of thousands of RPGA, then Encounters and Pathfinder Society players all fooling themselves that they are roleplaying. Just because [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] says so.

Yeah, not so much.

 

[Maxperson]

When a goblin decides to kidnap the PCs mom instead of some unrelated person, or even to attack the PC's home village instead of some other village, that is a meta-game decision which the DM is not allowed to make.

But I am allowed to have the goblins "randomly" pick a person that they have no idea is the PC's mom, but just happens to be. The goblin made no decision based on knowledge that it didn't have, and I did. I the DM decided to have the mother being kidnapped be a good story line.

 

[Hussar]

But I am allowed to have the goblins "randomly" pick a person that they have no idea is the PC's mom, but just happens to be. The goblin made decision based on knowledge that it didn't have, but I did. I the DM decided to have the mother being kidnapped be a good story line.

And, of course, that's the kicker right there. Was the decision to "randomly" kidnap the mom an in-character decision or a metagame one? Well, the honest answer has to be "both". It's an action that makes sense for the goblin, so, it satisfies believability, while, OTOH, the DM's motivation is 100% meta-game - making a good story line. The idea that it has to be all one and none of the other is just not how the game is played.

It would be just as unsatisfying to go 100% the other way. I'm choosing stuff without any eye for the in-game reality and simply using whatever I think might be "fun". While it's perfectly understandable for the goblin to kidnap the mom, it's a bit of a stretch to have a bear do the same thing, even though a bear might be a more interesting combat encounter than a goblin.

Ok, that was a bad example, but, I think you get my point.

To me, the issue lies in the lines that get drawn in the sand. Trying to separate NPC decisions from the DM's role as the person who makes interesting adventures, is, IMO, impossible. For one, NPC's can't make decisions, thus the "N" in the NPC. Any decisions that an NPC makes will always be driven by the DM and the DM has multiple criteria for choosing which action an NPC takes. After all, it makes the most sense for NPCs to always coup de gras (or attack a helpless) PC. In a D&D world, healing is pretty common, and any healing brings you back on your feet. So, every time a PC goes down, the NPC's should dog pile that PC and make sure he stays dead. Every time.

Thing is, that makes for sucky games. I certainly don't want to play that way. It's mechanics driving narrative and even I'm not that big of a fan of that. The NPC's are killing the PC, not because it makes in game sense for them to do so, but, because of the mechanics of the game. And it makes for bad games. IMO, of course. So, by and large, DM's don't deliberately target downed PC's, even though it would make more sense, if we follow the idea that the mechanics are the "physics of the world" that any intelligent enemy would do so.

Reminds me of an excellent short story by Ferrett Steinmetz, My Father's Wounds (found here at BCS #75) Here's a quote that I just love and it really does fit with the idea of D&D healing:

The seventeen real Blacksmiths move quickly among the wounded. The survivors are bloody tatters. Both sides have learned if they don’t kill their opponent outright, the Blacksmiths will return them, refreshed, to the battlefield the next morning—so instead of running someone through and moving on, they have twisted the blade, cleaved their enemy open to the spine, gouged out their heart.

Bloody fantastic story.

 

[S'mon]

So, every time a PC goes down, the NPC's should dog pile that PC and make sure he stays dead. Every time.

Thing is, that makes for sucky games.

It doesn't make for sucky games. You just need to treat 0 hp as equivalent to death, and try to keep it rare (if you're a player), or balance around the threat of 0 hp to the extent you'd balance around the threat of death otherwise. Personally I don't much like PCs constantly popping back up and I'd rather they were rarely taken to 0, and scared when they do hit 0.

 

[pemerton]

When you make the decision about who all the goblins have captured, would you make the same decision to say that this particular mother-of-a-wizard is captured, if the wizard in question had been an NPC rather than a PC?

Of course not! The mother is of no interest as a topic of the fiction except in her capacity as a mother of the PC.

If all of the PCs was an orphan, I wouldn't worry about whose parents the goblins might have kidnapped. I'd write goblins with other sorts of motivations do to other sorts of things relevant to the PCs (and hence the players, and hence the game).

Are you letting your out-of-game knowledge about which characters are PCs and which ones are NPCs affect the choices which your NPC goblins make?

Well, I'm letting it affect the motivations and actions I author for the goblins. The effect is not on the goblins (they are imaginary, and are only affected by imaginary things). The effect is on me - it makes me author the goblins in a certain way.

NPCs are perfectly allowed to make decisions based on what they know about the world, even if that includes the PCs; they just can't make decisions that take into consideration that the PCs are PCs.

It's meta-gaming whenever any character (PC or NPC) makes use of knowledge which it should not otherwise possess

<snip>
When a goblin decides to kidnap the PCs mom instead of some unrelated person, or even to attack the PC's home village instead of some other village, that is a meta-game decision which the DM is not allowed to make.

The goblin doesn't make use of knowledge it doesn't possess (in the fiction).

But I, as GM, use information that I possess in real life.

Hence, I can easily write into the fiction a goblin who has some reason or other to kidnap the PC's mother. (In my campaign, the goblins had kidnapped a whole lot of villagers and townsfolk, and the mother happened to be one of them.)

Sometimes I don't even work out the details of the fiction in advance. Rather, I follow Paul Czege's practice:

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

For instance, if it seems like it might be interesting to have the goblin notice the family resemblance; or, in some other way, to have or use knowledge about the relationship between the NPC and the PC; then I might do that. If not, then not.

Do the consequences follow logically from the action? Could they have predicted that this would have been the outcome, by asking the right questions and possibly performing the right tests?

To the fist question, yes. To the second, dunno. That's not very important in the way I run the game. It's not mostly an investigation game; it's a game in which it has turned out that the main issue confronting the players is how to react to the pending Dusk War, and the different choices as to whom to support (primordials, the Raven Queen, other gods who want to build the Lattice of Heaven, no gods at all, some sort of balance of forces, etc).

Given that this choice can't even be posed unless most of the information is on the table, the notion of "asking the right questions" or "performing the right tests" doesn't have much work to do.

As long as all of those traps and monsters existed in both rooms beforehand, then that's fine. When it becomes pointless is when you start changing things, after the fact, in order to mess with the players.

After what fact? Before what? Gygax - who was a pioneer of the "skilled play" paradigm - didn't write all his dungeons before starting the campaign! (I mean, how could he?)

He wrote ToH deliberately to test certain players. He wrote the Fraz-Urb'luu room in Castle Greyhawk because he thought a particular player would find it fun.

If the behir in room 1 dies in the first round due to a lucky critical hit, or if the hidden parchment detailing the Baron's nefarious dealings is incinerated before anyone can notice it; then adding in another monster in room 2 where there was previously none (whether or not that had yet been revealed to the players), or putting in additional evidence to implicate the Baron, specifically to negate the unexpected outcome of room 1, would be shenanigans.

With the monster example - it depends entirely on what the "unit of play" is. If it's one dungeon expedition, then introducing the new monsters after the PCs withdraw is fair. If plotting changes in the dungeon population is itself a part of the game, then making such changes because they're "fun" would be an issue. This might depend on such things as what sort of detection magic, or conventions around scouting and rumour gathering, are in play - hence it will be highly campaign- or table-specific.

As far as the baron example goes - that is so far from how I run my game I can't really comment.

Some particular group of adventurers can be sent off to explore a certain region, or complete a specific quest, based on the estimated difficulty of the task at hand at hand; you don't send a bunch of rookies out to map Dragon Island, but maybe you send them to get rid of a goblin infestation.

As a DM, what you cannot do is to replace all of the dragons on Dragon Island with kobolds, just so you can send the rookies there, because that would be meta-gaming.

I don't understand. Where in Plato's heaven do I look to find the true nature of Dragon Island?

In my 4e campaign, I had planned to run the Demon of the Red Grove scenario the first time the PCs went to the Feywild, because I thought it was interesting in itself and it would drive home certain aspects of relevant campaign story around Corellon, Lolth and the Raven Queen. I first wrote it up for low-paragon tier PCs (with the demon somewhere around 13th level). By the time I actually got a chance to run it, the PCs were mid-epic, and I reworked the level and capabilities of the demon appropriately.

I think that counts as GM meta-gaming.

I don't understand why I can't do it: the Red Grove and its Demon have no existence or nature outside of my authorship of them as part of the campaign backstory, and when I introduced them into the shared fiction they were what they were.

I also don't understand why I shouldn't do it. It produced interesting and somewhat important play - besides fun colour, like the sorcerer getting to show off his bardic skills by singing a song to defeat the evil cries of the demon, it forced the PCs (and thereby the players) to consider whether and how to bargain with a demon. The meaning of all this is not any less because it occurred when the PCs were 10 levels higher than they might have been.

If the point of play was to explore some imaginary world pre-authored by the GM, then there might be an issue (given that I have not pre-authored any such world). But that's not why my group plays RPGs.

 

[pemerton]

If the players had come to you before the Torog issue was resolved, and suggested that they're not interested in continuing this campaign much further, because they want to try some other system or they're moving to Mars or something, would that affect the aftermath of Torog's death?

Almost certainly, yes.

 

[CapnZapp]

I would love to use PC levels for NPCs.

However, as long as I must manually create them, I view this as a time trap: any time it takes me longer to create a monster than it takes the heroes to kill it, something is seriously wrong.

Until WotC gives us an electronic character builder (with the full PHB options, PLUS the ability to homebrew at every stage) I will settle for NPC stats.