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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4294059" data-attributes="member: 2067">The absurd examples aren't too drastically different from the kind of things that regularly happen in my games. "Really Likes Cheese" is an interesting bit of flavor to have on an NPC (or even a monster!), and I'd want a way to mechanically represent that so that its not just empty fluff, so that the PC party can reliably and effectively use "really likes cheese" as a tool for interaction with this NPC, however they decide to interact with him. The problem grows when they do things like try to tame the terrasque and have the magical and skill-based powers to actually pull it off so I feel like I should give them SOMETHING for their balls-out wackiness and adding fun to the game, if nothing else.But that's perhaps just overstating the core point, which is that I really don't know how to and cannot (and do not want to try to) plan for what my PC's have in store for the hapless residents of my campaign world. So 4e's "Design for their Purpose!" strategy is useless to me. I can only give the players props, the way they use it is sometimes straightforward, but usually, its not. I want to be able to give my players complete props in 4e that can respond to a range of actions.It gets a little sticky, there. If I use something as a baseline, I would need to be consistent with my baseline. If Bill isn't supposed to be an exceptional blacksmith except in the fact that he has this cheese fixation, and I use a given orc for him, the PC's are going to expect that other blacksmiths in the world have vaguely the same capabilities. And when they decide to go fight the orcs, they might be wondering why none of them have taken up blacksmithing, since they're eerily similar...Basically, good plan, though I would need a baseline that would be good for "unexceptional folk" that I can modify...perhaps I'll re-do the NPC classes from 3e, just 4thify them so that I have an "everyone else" baseline?.....hm....maybe.Hey, maybe we're getting somewhere!I'll check that out, it sounds like it could be a big help. While it might not help in cases of Terrasque-taming, for the cheese-loving blacksmiths and joggling bards of the world, that might do fine.I wonder how I could deal with monsters in the same way?If the lazer troll had stats (and they were fair stats), then that would be less fiat, to me, then wiggling around trained skills on the spur of the moment.It's pretty important to my sense of fair play and also my sense of fun to not have to do that much, if at all. It's also important that if my PC's meet a troll, I don't make it into a troll sage just because they try to get information out of it. It is what it is, and the PC's use it however their imaginations and abilties let them. I don't provide narrative devices, I provide characters, y'know?</blockquote>

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