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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5188907" data-attributes="member: 61155">Except I think you are the one making that equation, not Noonan. The attitude of "five rounds later, they're done" is explicitly a discussion of what abilities are relevant in the stat-block in the context of how many actions a creature will take. It is not in any way a claim that NPCs don't exist outside of combat. Noonan never claimed that - you made the correlation, not him, and not any of us.   "Nothing" happening outside of combat? Ok, Keep on the Shadowfell was a slugfest, but not every 4E module is the same. There are indeed scenes and opportunities to interact with NPCs outside of combat. To gather information, socialize, get involved in intrigue, chase after bad guys, sneak into dangerous places, find your way through labyrinths of madness...  Are they as common as the combat? No, but that is an issue with adventure design more than something fundamentally tied to what monsters are capable of.  Every time I've pointed out that monsters still have relevant stats, skills and abilities that a DM can use to have them interact out of combat, you've chosen to respond to some other point entirely. And more than that - most relevant information for interacting out of combat isn't what a monster can do, but instead how it acts. We need to know motivations, personality and approaches. It doesn't hurt to have some options beyond the norm, sure, but they aren't necessary. You pointed out that Detect Thoughts can be really useful if the fortress goes on alert and the enemy needs to find the PCs. But in what way is Detect Thoughts required for that scene? It remains a non-combat situation if the PCs are sneaking about, bluffing their way past guards, sneaking through the corridors, scaling the walls, while the enemy hunts down their tracks and tries to seal them in. Can Detect Thoughts enhance such a scene? Sure, probably. (Unless, say, it bypasses everything the PCs are doing and forces combat to happen anyway.) But regardless of what it does, it is never required for that scene, and is tangential to it at best.   Because this ties back to a faulty premise. No one thinks NPCs don't exist outside of combat. Every time you claim that is the core of the opposing side's argument, you are missing the entire point of the discussion to begin with.    He never said that! He said they live about 5 rounds in combat, and don't need a stat block with 30 different choices for the DM to make every round! He also said that we don't need mechanics detailing how they interact with other NPCs out of combat.  Neither of those is a claim that they do not exist out of combat, nor that we don't need rules detailing how they interact with PCs out of combat!  Ah, fair enough, I missed the "average" mention in that quote.   Note the bolded part above. That's the real problem here.  Because yes, absolutely, the focus is on combat. At least 90% of the time, combat is how most monsters will interact with PCs. And so the "is this ability useful in combat" is indeed given higher weight - possibly higher than it should be, in some things.  The problem is, you have somehow leaped from that scenario... to claiming that by prioritizing combat relevance, we are outright exiling non-combat interaction from the game. Which isn't true. Which isn't a goal of the designers, isn't inherent in the system, nor the experiences of the people playing the game.</blockquote>

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