E6 - how does it change the feel of the game

[Gilladian]

Yeah, most of these folks don't really have statblocks, either. I just know what they'd BE if I wrote them up. Mainly because I needed to have a feel for how the campaign was developing, as my first E6 game.

In some ways, the town is "overpowered" but I figure the combination of wilderness nearby and dungeon next door helps explain that.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, I mean the point I was implying is that I guess I'm not of a simulationist to care overly about the impact of E6 on NPCs. NPCs to me are more like secondary characters in fiction. They don't really need stats, and I don't need to think about what their stats might be, either theoretically or otherwise.

 

[Yora]

If everything works as planned, yes.

But players have a habit of doing something completely different all the time. ^^

But supposed you have the situation that four 8th level PCs come into the throne room of a political antagonist and decide to take him hostage for some reason.
The players need to know "Can we just walz in and demand that everyone surrenders their weapons, or would we laughed at and impaled by the spears of the guards?". And to give them an answer, you have to make a descision what the levels of PCs mean in the relation to city watchmen, pirate sailors, palace guards, and the average village priest.
Not what precise stats every background character has, but what you would come up with on the fly if the PCs would chose to get into a fight with them or recruit them as support when it comes to defending the village against monsters or raiders.

 

[S'mon]

Most of the time, my NPCs don't have statblocks at all, so they don't have any levels either.

Yeah; for my Yggsburgh campaign that's also the case - frankly the levels I gave above for Castle Kallent were only firmed up for the post where I gave them!

I tend to find that stat blocks get in the way of portraying non-combat NPCs, especially. Dame Gertrude Kallent is a formidable old battlexe who inspires considerable trepidation in her son-in-law PC, she's based on the likes of Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest. But as an unclassed NPC, if I ever statted her up in 1e AD&D she'd look pretty pathetic and that would I think undermine the character.

 

[S'mon]

Well, I mean the point I was implying is that I guess I'm not of a simulationist to care overly about the impact of E6 on NPCs. NPCs to me are more like secondary characters in fiction. They don't really need stats, and I don't need to think about what their stats might be, either theoretically or otherwise.

I find I do need to think about what the stats of 'top dog' NPCs are like, especially BBEGs, other villains, and leading spellcasters. For presenting the world it helps a lot to have a solid idea of the power scale, and where certain characters fit in it. It often doesn't seem to matter much whether a well-known knight is F4 or F6, but it certainly matters whether the BBEG villain is M-U 6 or M-U 8, whether the Black Priest is C3 or C5. If he's C5 then (for instance) he can Animate Dead and raise hordes of skeletons & zombies at his command.

But for noncombat NPCs, I think statting can be postively harmful. Many of the ones in my online Yggsburgh game have a 'mystique' about them that could be badly undermined by a Level 0 (AD&D) or similar stat block.

 

[S'mon]

If everything works as planned, yes.

But players have a habit of doing something completely different all the time. ^^

But supposed you have the situation that four 8th level PCs come into the throne room of a political antagonist and decide to take him hostage for some reason.
The players need to know "Can we just walz in and demand that everyone surrenders their weapons, or would we laughed at and impaled by the spears of the guards?". And to give them an answer, you have to make a descision what the levels of PCs mean in the relation to city watchmen, pirate sailors, palace guards, and the average village priest.
Not what precise stats every background character has, but what you would come up with on the fly if the PCs would chose to get into a fight with them or recruit them as support when it comes to defending the village against monsters or raiders.

I agree, although I guess a lot of GMs don't think like this, they go more towards "do I want the throneroom to be a level-appropriate encounter?" and then stat it by keying off the PC levels.
My last 4e game, there was a battle in the courtroom, the 8th level PCs captured BBEG Boris, Bandit King of Llorkh. A player was sceptical when I said Boris had had the same stats (9th level Elite) for over a year, and that I'd never levelled him up.

 

[Desdichado]

If everything works as planned, yes.

But players have a habit of doing something completely different all the time. ^^

But supposed you have the situation that four 8th level PCs come into the throne room of a political antagonist and decide to take him hostage for some reason.
The players need to know "Can we just walz in and demand that everyone surrenders their weapons, or would we laughed at and impaled by the spears of the guards?". And to give them an answer, you have to make a descision what the levels of PCs mean in the relation to city watchmen, pirate sailors, palace guards, and the average village priest.
Not what precise stats every background character has, but what you would come up with on the fly if the PCs would chose to get into a fight with them or recruit them as support when it comes to defending the village against monsters or raiders.

I don't really think about that until it happens, though. Then I make something up depending on 1) how the flow of the game has gone so far, 2) what kind of mood I'm in, 3) subtle cues from the players about how they're reading the signals that they have (or not doing so, as the case may be), 4) and what sounds in the moment like it would be the most fun.

 

[Gilladian]

Just today I had a situation that made me glad I had an idea of what levels people in my campaign town were...

The evil venom cult on the 6th level of the dungeon has been gradually encroaching on the town. The PCs (wow, how coincidentally!) have also just reached that level of the dungeon. The PCs are now assaulting the temple in an attempt to rescue the kidnapped mayor and her two daughters.

Most of this whole scenario was off-the-cuff reaction to decisions by the players. I had to create armsmen for them to hire for their raid, had to decide if the mayor was a good kidnapping victim, etc... in just a few minutes time. Had I never thought about what an average caravan guard's level was, nor what the mayor was like, that would not have been possible (for me!). I need to have that sort of thing at least loosely conceived so I can rapidly build a scenario when necessary.

BUT I have to say, E6 makes even wild-ass-guesses MUCH easier. After all, there's only a six level spread to choose from!

 

[S'mon]

BUT I have to say, E6 makes even wild-ass-guesses MUCH easier. After all, there's only a six level spread to choose from!

Yep - I find that equally true of my typical E8/10 games, where almost everybody is 1st-8th but 9th-10th are available for 'epic' characters.

BTW I have a chart I use for NPC levels that is taken from GDW's Traveller: The New Era 'Initiative', which functioned like level in that game. I don't use it for every campaign, eg in my Willow Vale game 1st level PCs were already local heroes, but I find it a useful guide. The standard version goes:

1 - Novice
2 - Trained
3 - Experienced
4 - Veteran
5 - Elite
6+ - Heroic

So eg in my 1e or Pathfinder BB Yggsburgh games an experienced knight is F3, a veteran Knight is F4, an elite Knight is F5, a well-known hero is F6-F8.
I'd use that for individual named NPCs (eg there are only a dozen or so knights in Yggsburgh, all 'named' characters), while for D&D hordes of mooks are typically a level or two lower, so experienced Yggsburgh city guard are F1, trained but inexperienced are Warrior-1 (Pathfinder)/1 hit die (AD&D).

 

[Yora]

That was one of the very early questions that came up about E6. Does it mean that everything is cropped down to 6th level, or is everything scaled down so that 6th level is now as rare as 20th level used to be.
I guess in the end most people go with something inbetween, but it's still an interesting question.

My approach is to scale down everything by 1/2.