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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5194237" data-attributes="member: 2067">I am fond of this guideline, actually. Hadn't thought of it before. It does bring up the question of "what should it be doing, then?", but I like the idea that just because something makes you bleed or loose morale doesn't mean it deals HP damage, because HP damage kills you. I think that stats are useful in a variety of contexts. To my mind, the idea that "only combat needs stats" is a sort of absurd D&Dism. I think you need stats for anything you want to spend significant game time on. If the PC's only have to talk to the queen once, a skill challenge (or other DM fiat) might work fine, but if the party needs to do that, and similar things, over and over again, in the course of a highly political campaign, raw fiat isn't interesting, consistent, or variable enough. Messiness is a *virtue* in things you're going to be doing a lot of, because messiness is also the same as "variation." Messiness is just variation you don't want.But that's kind of an orthogonal convo, I think. They could provide the same thing, but 4e, and, as far as I'm aware, 1e, don't.This is because they don't present NPC's in terms of their relative strength.So whether or not a town can marshall some militia members and go clear out a local goblin warren boils down to "I dunno, does the DM want that to happen?" Same thing with our theoretical mythical Queen Victoria seeing through the Incubus in her court. As a DM, I don't want to answer that question -- I want the rules to tell me: can they do it? How, specifically, might the PC's unique skills aid them? What can do it handily, without any help, and what might struggle a bit, and what would be totally out classed? What's the context, here?I get that rules like that are way too sim for some people, and I do absolutely think they should be able to be ignored, but I think they should exist for people who want them. I won't even always want them, but a player or DM like Wicht (who seems to go farther into sim territory than I go) really might. And someone who might develop a little Java program for rolling those dice for me along the lines of some of the 3e town or dungeon generators? Yes, please, absolutely.And it's totally possible that 4e can provide this. The exception-based design means you can tack on a complex NPC and Town Generation schema pretty well, I'd bet. Hell, one might me coming in the DMG4 (or so) for all I know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> That's the idea behind E6, too, and it's really solid. It also, I think, explains part of why some DM's take issue with the things high level D&D characters are typically capable of (like teleportation, scrying, death magic, etc.): they believe the party never leaves that 1-5 level range, even after they do, so the DMs who don't change their game are caught by surprise by game-changing abilities.</blockquote>

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