Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 6732534" data-attributes="member: 12731">If you (or anyone else) can find a significant problem resulting from &quot;HD = effective level for levelling purposes&quot;, I'm all ears. But &quot;not being fair to the NPC&quot; is, by itself, not enough for me to consider using a more complex scheme.Instead of being stuck at this initial step, I would much rather proceed to explore the nuances of what my approach leads to. Meaning things like, how to handle special class-like features, such as spellcasting, sneak attack, and more.As for spellcasting, that looks to be pretty straightforward. 1 HD = 1 level of a spellcasting class.As for consequences, I agree this makes NPC spellcasters pretty valuable to a PC party.As for sneak attack, the MM seems to be fairly stingy with that, handing out sneak dice slower than the 1:2 progression for Rogues. I think I can understand that. Monsters are generally strong on defense but weak on offense (in order for PCs to have time to react to their foes before getting critically low on hp). The only reasonable progression that I can think of is 1:3, and so that is what I consider using for the Spy. Thoughts on that? Here's the extrapolated naive progression:Hit Dice Sneak Dice123 1d6456 2d6 (Spy)789 3d6101112 4d6 (Assassin)131415 5d6161718 6d6...This actually matches up with the only two MM entries using it, as indicated above.It generally works for other sources of &quot;extra&quot; damage too such as surprise attack and charge. Sometimes the damage is one die higher than indicated above, but that I'm willing to chalk up to the designer's &quot;artistic freedom&quot;.This specifically means that, if you, like me, are planning on granting Jimjar a third sneak die already at 7 HD, that would probably be completely okay.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="CapnZapp, post: 6732534, member: 12731"] If you (or anyone else) can find a significant problem resulting from "HD = effective level for levelling purposes", I'm all ears. But "not being fair to the NPC" is, by itself, not enough for me to consider using a more complex scheme. Instead of being stuck at this initial step, I would much rather proceed to explore the nuances of what my approach leads to. Meaning things like, how to handle special class-like features, such as spellcasting, sneak attack, and more. As for [B]spellcasting[/B], that looks to be pretty straightforward. 1 HD = 1 level of a spellcasting class. As for consequences, I agree this makes NPC spellcasters pretty valuable to a PC party. As for [B]sneak attack[/B], the MM seems to be fairly stingy with that, handing out sneak dice slower than the 1:2 progression for Rogues. I think I can understand that. Monsters are generally strong on defense but weak on offense (in order for PCs to have time to react to their foes before getting critically low on hp). The only reasonable progression that I can think of is 1:3, and so that is what I consider using for the Spy. Thoughts on that? Here's the extrapolated naive progression: Hit Dice Sneak Dice 1 2 3 1d6 4 5 6 2d6 (Spy) 7 8 9 3d6 10 11 12 4d6 (Assassin) 13 14 15 5d6 16 17 18 6d6 ... This actually matches up with the only two MM entries using it, as indicated above. It generally works for other sources of "extra" damage too such as surprise attack and charge. Sometimes the damage is one die higher than indicated above, but that I'm willing to chalk up to the designer's "artistic freedom". This specifically means that, if you, like me, are planning on granting Jimjar a third sneak die already at 7 HD, that would probably be completely okay. [/QUOTE]

Verification