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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5397111" data-attributes="member: 3820">You don't really have to say that, though. Not that I'm advocating keeping things out of the hands of players -- I think it's interesting when you can word out ways to mechanically represent their training with NPCs who are built differently. But at the same time, there's a vast gulf of difference between "they achieved that with things you have no hope of ever acquiring" and "they achieved that over fifteen years of training in a different style than you learned; how much time are you willing to invest?"And because player characters are special, maybe they can pick up stuff in one-tenth the time it took someone else. Or they can learn a few tricks that turn out to look not unlike PC powers instead of the NPC abilities. Perhaps they're at 50-75% of the efficacy of the NPCs' powers, but if they're learning it in 10% of the time, that's an astoundingly good trade-off.You see it a lot in shonen manga/anime works, too. NPC X worked for fifty years to invent and master this one technique, and the PC learns it in three days because he just wants it that bad. It's kind of silly, but at the same time it suits the dramatic laws of protagonism, just like Elizabeth Swan somehow manages to become a remarkable swordswoman over the course of a couple of Pirates of the Caribbean movies.That's a very metagame way of looking at it, though. The players are able to tell "oh hey, we're the same level," but if the 29th level NPC fighter is a military man 20 years older than the PC, and the PC is a former pit-fighter who's honed his abilities fighting weird monsters in the Underdark, in-character it's entirely reasonable that the characters might assume they have very different fighting styles due to entire lifetimes spent in different fashion. The presumption that their abilities and statistics should be similar requires knowledge of how experience points, ability scores, classes, levels, hit points and attack bonuses work: all stuff that players know about, but none of which is really visible in-world unless you choose to rationalize a reason why.</blockquote>

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