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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5575473" data-attributes="member: 2067">IIRC, the NPC generation section of the 3e DMG was basically: "90% or so of people in existence are Level 1 Commoners. This is the baseline human being in the game. Some smaller proportion, in bigger cities or rougher areas, may have a handful of levels, and/or some specialization (Expert 2's or Warrior 3's or Aristocrats, or even a few PC-classed folk). There might be 3-4 Level 20 people in your entire game world at any one time, maybe."This pretty much made 1st level PC's bang-out better than nearly everyone else in the world, but still kept them as schlubs in comparison to the most powerful folks in the world. So you might have some mythic warrior of legend -- Hercules or Harry Potter In-The-Flesh -- somewhere off doing something for some reason in the world, and their exploits might be known, and you'd feel (justifiably) like clearing out the warren of goblins was no great shakes in comparison. Still, it was quite a sight better than any of the Level 1 Commoners in the town can do (or the Level 2 Aristocrat Mayor), so you're heroes to them, even if you're less of a hero (for now) than the famous paladin Arthur, who impeccably rules a nation. 4e's default of "Everyone is useless unless they're not" does an adequate job, I think, of capturing what that was like in play. I do wish there was some more explicit rules on what a normal person could be expected to do, though. There's no way to judge the context of what the heroes do at low levels. Kill a goblin, and are you saving a town from certain doom, or just saving the local guards a few minutes work? 4e's non-answer of "The DM decides!" just gives me more work to do. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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