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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deadstop" data-source="post: 9874539" data-attributes="member: 61557">This part of the conversation is with me, not Micah. And while Micah indeed does not like too much PC/NPC separation, even he has said that only some of his NPCs have the equivalent of class levels. What he seems to care about is that no ability is ultimately PC-only or NPC-only, not that every NPC has as much access to any such ability as a 1st-level PC.In 5e (including 5.5e and A5e), class levels and feats are building blocks for PC creation. The abilities they confer exist in the fiction, but outside of a LitRPG-based setting, the building blocks themselves are meta elements. You can build an NPC out of class levels and feats if you want, or just assign them NPC traits and actions that mimic those things for PC/NPC consistency, but unlike in 3e, none of the 5e rulesets recommend or illustrate doing so. Even in 3e, where NPCs had class levels and even monsters had a feat progression, there was a set of less capable classes for non-adventuring NPCs, so that not every soldier was a fighter and not every spellcaster was a wizard or cleric.It is impossible to conclude from the 5e ruleset that any particular percentage of the setting’s population must reasonably possess the abilities represented by the Magic Initiate feat. It’s not that kind of rulebook. There are no suggested percentages of people with a certain level in a certain class, as 3e had. There is no automatic or even suggested way for NPCs to gain feats. All the rules tell us is that it’s possible for someone to possess the knowledge of a couple of cantrips and a beginner spell without having even one full class level in a spellcasting class. By the rules alone, a designer or GM or group could build a world where every village baker is taught the warming and flavoring aspects of prestidigitation, or one in which a person has to have at least flunked out of magic school or an apprenticeship to know even that much.The hyperbole is unnecessary. A lower-magic setting does not require that PCs be narratively Chosen, nor that the common NPC be ignorant of basic facts. It just requires picking and choosing what is described and portrayed. And 5e makes that easier in some ways than 3e, because most of the characters in the setting are not even constructed of the same building blocks that make it easy for a low-level PC to pick up a handful of spells apart from their class. “Magic Initiate” is not a discrete thing that exists in the game world. Someone with preferences like Micah’s would presumably insist that the ability to cast a handful of minor magics without committing to magic as one’s vocation be available to NPCs as well. But how common it is, or whether it implies specific backstory events for both PCs with Magic Initiate and NPCs with similar capabilities, is a setting-specific, group-specific decision, not one with an answer mandated by the ruleset.</blockquote>

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