Oh man, I missed a lot! Sorry to jump in with stuff from five days ago (or whatever it is), but there's a lot of good stuff in here!
See, the thing is when you see a character in a world for the first time, they're not always going to be anywhere close to a novice. The latter will actually be the exception, not the rule.
I think one difference between us may be in how we conceive of 1st level characters.
In BECMI and 1e, pcs had level titles. A 1st level fighter's level title was "veteran"- so a first level character is not necessarily a novice, so much as one who hasn't had the experiences necessary to get above 1st level.
Does that mean I'm typically going to buy the notion of the 'veteran of dozens of wars, leader of men' as a pc background? Well... it depends. Do you mean you were a great warrior and now you've been retired for 30 years and your skills have atrophied? Sure, maybe I can buy that. Do you mean you're the general
right now who is the smiter of major npcs in the campaign? No, I don't think so.
Take any adventure you see, either on the screen, or read about in novels, and think about new characters introduced in that narrative long after it's begun who go on to become important allies or members of the protagonist's inner circle. How often are they some novice? They are usually in situations they are in because they have experience, not in spite of it. They've already been adventuring in the world, it's just that we're seeing their adventure's path cross that of the rest of the group for the first time.
Not saying people can't and shouldn't enjoy ES@1 games. But for many, it pulls us right out of the story itself to have new characters so utterly outclassed on so many levels all at once. It is actually, in my opinion, LESS cinematic, and pulls one out of the moment.
Well, you're hitting on a major difference between (at least my) ES@1 games and many other games- the whole notion of a narrative or story that the pcs should be following. And I don't think you can point to a book or a movie as an adequate analogy to a D&D game when you're talking about bringing in new characters unless you consider that
those characters might well be npcs.
Ok, thought experiment to put it in perspective: you are only applying this metric to PCs. Try doing it with NPCs and see how much sense it makes. Every NPC added to a campaign from now on gets to start at 1st level; ES@1 now applies to all characters in the narrative. How much sense does that end up making, and how does that play out? Because, and here's the rub, when a PC is introduced to the party, until they become a member of the party, their characters should make sense both lore-wise and mechanically as an NPC filling the same role in the world.
The same rules don't apply to pcs and npcs, and they never have. And, largely, I'd say that they shouldn't.
In 2e and earlier versions of D&D, the "Men" entry in the Monster Manual had things like bandits and berserkers, and none of them used pc rules. In 3e, there were plenty of weird npcs that you couldn't build by the rules. 4e was over-the-top when it came to customizing npcs, and no npc ever used pc type stats in my game. 5e npcs aren't built like pcs, either.
There's also a very different purpose for npcs than there is for pcs. Npcs are either background, allies, contacts, adversaries, or whatever, and a given npc needs to be able to fill its role.
That said, I do agree that, broadly speaking, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, but I apply it differently. I'd say that every npc
started at 1st level (or below, depending on the specific system) and that, for meaningful ones, you should have a good idea of their history. Npcs also have to abide by the rule of demographics (at least in my game). That is, there are pretty much always fewer npcs of level x+1 than there are of level x.
Finally, I'll disagree that pcs are npcs until they are pcs. Well, in most cases- if you take over an existing npc after you lose your character, sure, I'll agree, but otherwise, nah. But here's the rub: if they are first level- and if almost all npcs in the setting are first level- then it makes perfect narrative sense.
