Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5497993" data-attributes="member: 2067">.....ooookay...The first level fighter is not perfect for describing an NPC with only a modicum of training. Actually, the first level fighter is a horrible way to describe an NPC with a modicum of training, I think.First of all, designers more skilled than I have already found this to be a problem and came up with solutions for it. This is part of the reason for NPC classes in 3e. Warriors and Commoners, not FIGHTERS. Fighters are special. Not unique, if you go according to 3e's town generation engine (which is a sort of kludge to determine this sort of thing), but certainly special. 4e STILL makes Fighters special, because anything that is not a PC is either statless, or a monster. In 4e, the NPC with only a modicum of training is not even worthy of monster stats most of the time. If the F1 PC wants to kill some NPC, they pretty much get to. Don't even need to roll, really. So the problem was seen and has been addressed in a few different ways. Secondly, this is just generally not a good way to describe such an NPC. D&D, as a role-playing game of fantasy heroism, has fantasy heroes as player characters (or else it is not a very good fantasy hero RPG). If some nameless militia member can equal your skill, you, my friend, are not a fantasy hero. Thirdly, mechanically, representing an NPC and a PC identically is problematic from a gameplay perspective. A player needs more in-play options than an individual DM's plaything to feel engaged. Similarly, DMs need to be able to whip up  and run a militia member more easily than a PC fighter can be generated, because there will be a lot more of them. Fourth, it doesn't actually matter what happened in the early days of TSR. "Daughter" can be reinterpreted as Com1 or a Level 1 Minion or not given stats or whatever. The idea is to provide the rules that best give you the experience you're looking for in the game. Presuming that you want to be a fantasy hero when you play a heroic fantasy game like D&D, using the same rules to represent a player's fantasy hero and some random soldier is not going to give you the experience of playing a fantasy hero. But was that the best design? I'd argue no, it wasn't.They don't have to be F1s. They can be Com1s. War1s. Level 1 Minions. Unstatted entities because their stats never affect the gameplay of fantasy heroism that you're presumably interested in playing if you're picking up D&D. In a game of heroic fantasy, horses, chainmail, and lances are not "serious gear," they are basic expectations that the fantasy hero then goes out and does better at than all those tens of thousands militia members and regular grunts, because they are a fantasy hero. You seem to be under the assumption that the writers under TSR decided to slap fighter levels on laborers because it was objectively the best way to model a laborer.I don't know who "Daughter" is, but a young laborer shouldn't have a level of fighter unless they're a fantasy hero, because fighter levels are for PC's, who are fantasy heroes, because D&D is a game of heroic fantasy roleplaying. NPC's can be challenges for those heroes (in which case they need some stats, but not necessarily or desirably equivalent PC stats) or scenery (in which case, they don't need stats). The best way to model a laborer is generally not to bother wasting page space modeling them unless they're going to challenge the PC's. And in that case, they should probably be weak and easily defeated, since being trumped by some goon off the street instantly makes you not fantasy hero material. In the cases where PC classes are given to random basic mundane NPC's, this is a mistake.Unless you're not playing heroic fantasy.In which case, no one gets to be Batman, no one gets to be Merlin, no one gets to be Conan, no one gets to be James Bond, no one gets to go into ancient dungeons and slay wicked dragons.You could maybe get an archeology degree and grab a government grant and take a long trip to delve into an old ruin and get an infection and die several years later? But if that's what D&D has been trying to be all these years, it is continuing to suck hard at being that. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification