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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5503951" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, in my post about the minutiae of 1st ed AD&D NPC rules I deliberately avoided addressing this more controversial question!My feeling is that way back in the day there were probably different approaches to play, in relation to this issue, just as there are now. That some groups regarded PCs as special - not just in the metagame sense of needing more rigid and complete mechanical definition, but as occupying some special place in the gameworld - from the get go. But that others didn't.I find it hard to be much more precise in part because "special" can cover such a wide range of possibilities. Predestined? Mentioned in prophecy? Or just, like the Hardy Boys and Dr Who, always and only the ones at the centre of the most salient interesting happenings in the gameworld?But I think we can probably stake out two extremes. When a player takes a group of first level classed characters and mercenaries through a dungeon, all but one is killed, and the one character that emerges has enough XP to be second level, plus all the loot - and simply in virtue of this fact goes on to become that players primary PC - I think we can say that the PC didn't start out as very special. (On the other hand, Crazy Jerome either on this or one of its sister threads posted the interesting notion that this eliminiation-by-dungeon-of-potential-PCs-superfluous-to-requirement can actually be seen as part of the PC creation process - resembling the survival rolls in Traveller, only actually playing them out! Under this reading, the PC is the special one who survived to second level.)Conversely, when a PC is introduced as an above-first level character, who is already understood to have some sort of significance in the gameworld (and I think Mordenkainen fits this description, although perhaps I'm wrong about that - and I think some henchmen can also fit this description even though they're technically NPCs) then I think the PC clearly has started as special in some fashion.Of published D&D material, one of the earlier examples that comes to mind of applying the second outlook to PCs introduced as 1st level characters is Dragonlance. And, because of the unforgiving nature of AD&D to 1st level characters, special death rules were required to make it work.I don't know that any general moral flows from all this, except that AD&D was played in a variety of ways, with a variety of tweakings of the mechanics to help out. If some people played using the approach of the first of my two extremes, except that instead of the elimination pool consisting of mercenaries and classed characters it consisted of turnip farmers, then Hussar would be definitively refuted. As it is, I'm sympathetic to what I take to be the general thrust of his point - that mainstream AD&D play tended to assume that even if PCs weren't special from the get-go, and were to earn their specialness by being culled from a low-level elimination pool, turnip farmers really weren't on the radar as singificant participants in the elimination pool.I think that turnip farmers turned fighters are more likely to turn up in Dragonlance-ish play, where the turnip farming is part of the backstory of a PC who is understood to be destined for greater things. Of course, absent the adoption of a Dragonlance-style death override, that destiny might be cut short by a goblin's shortsword. But in most cases - not all - I would hypothesis that this tells us more about the clash between desired feel of play and the grim mechanical reality of 1st level AD&D play than about the relationship between the specialness of PCs and NPCs in those players' gameworlds.</blockquote>

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