"Thanks for making your attitude clear. Welcome to my ignore list..."
He makes that sound like a punishment. *sigh*
CobaltGrC: I really don't think any of your facts are central to the arguement, so I don't think it really matters whether I fully agree to them or not, but OK, I'll concede all your facts save as follows:
"An adventurers job is more intense then a commoners job, so an adventurer will recieve more experience surviving."
I understand what you are trying to say, but I don't think you've quite worded it right. Adventurers recieve more experience surviving certain kinds of challenges. Asked to survive the challenge of founding a new homestead in the wilderness, the commoner is better equipped to handle 9 challenges in 10. The one challenge the average adventurer is better equipped to handle is the threat of violence. More on that latter.
"The reason farms are formed close togther is for security. The closer people are, the easier the community can defend."
Well, this may be true, but it ignores other reasons why community are formed like social oppurtunities, oppurtunities to specialize in production, and so forth. However, we can safely ignore all these other reasons because it really doesn't matter why the community was formed for the purpose of the arguement.
"NPC's who were first farmers, then go off to kill Orcs, and find themselves down another path of adventure become Adventurers."
Sometimes. It is not necessarily a linear or one way path.
"most people don't want to die."
And this includes the PC's.
"most people want to be rich."
And while this may include the PC's, as a class of people, heroes are much less likely to be motivated by becoming rich than the average person.
To a large extent, I have to add to all of this, "So what." We are loosing track of what is important. We have raised so many issues now that we could argue forever simply by changing the focus of the debate.
I'd like to stick to the consequences of increasing average NPC level. The debate originally began when the first poster made the assertion that the D&D world has a certain unexpected characteristics because of an arbitrary assumption on how fast XP is awarded to NPC's. I, and several other posters, noted that the reasoning was based on bad logic. Of course your world is different because you've drastically changed the starting assumptions. I went on to say, not only are your results unexpected, but they are undesirable.
The undesirablity of assumptions that lead you to conclude that average NPC's are between 5th and 10th level (depending on race) is what I want to defend. If it also means that I am defending against the notion that what makes the PC's special is that they are cold blooded sociopaths (which has become apparantly a necessary assumption of assuming that average NPC's are above 5th level), then so much the better.
Now, before I construct my arguement, let me defend myself on at least one issue. First, I did not say 'exceptional' meant 'best'. It only means 'better than the average'. I would argue that all RPG's historically make this assumption and that it is a useful assumption for telling heroic fantasy and indeed most any other sort of RPG story. First edition D&D assumed that the vast majority of NPC's were 0 level, and that people obtaining 1st level were exceptionally rare and powerful. I always disliked this assumption for a variaty of reasons, the most notable being that it treated NPC's and PC's differently. As you put it both are people. GURPS says that starting player characters are '100 point characters' were as average characters are built on 20-25 points. The reason is to allow characters to begin with 'the stuff of heroes' right from the start, so that there first adventure can just as enjoyable, epic, and personally significant as thier last. Third edition continues this, both by giving PC's above average stats and providing NPC classes with less capability.
This is desirable for storytelling. Protaganists are almost never average beings. They are almost always different and special in some way. By making them above average, it gives the person who is setting the story alot more room to tell interesting stories. By doing it right from the start, you avoid to some extent the trouble of slogging through stories which are somewhat less heroic, less interesting, and less satisfying in order to 'get to the good stuff'.
And besides, most people who come to the gaming table want to identify with thier character. The character becomes thier own little avatar of a possible self with attributes that they feel are, for lack of a better word, 'cool'. Most people want to be, if not heroes, then at least 'heroic' in scale. They don't want to be trivial.
Even more importantly, the assumption that PC's begin as below average characters has forced the supporters of that assumption into alot of artificial assumptions to keep suspension of disbelief from being blown all to Hades and back. To name just a few, the assumption is that PC's aren't afraid of death, that they don't mind being a casualty, that they are fearless, that they are bloodthirsty, that they are sociopaths(!?!?!?), that the leaders of the society don't want to lead, that the game is based on killing things and taking thier stuff, that the heroes are enherently nasty, that the players are foreordained to survive to tell the story, and that monsters are not characters themselves and can be treated differently. While some of these assumptions might be true some of the time, most of these assumptions are bad for the game, and if all of them are true the game gets to be a rather shallow thing involving rather unreal events, unreal societies, and shallow personalitiless characters.
If my players PC's aren't afraid of death, I'm somewhat worried about the quality of thier role play. BESIDES, I as a DM _make_ my characters afraid when they are in situations that involve, well, death and other severe harm. If I didn't, I wouldn't be doing my job well.
Bloodthirsty characters aren't likely to do well in my campaigns. For an example of first level adventures I admire, consider U1-3 and UK1. In either, a blood thirsty sociopathic character is going to be wipe out quickly.
A typical 1st level adventure I would write might look something like this:
The whole village is astir when news arrives that an elderly widower has been murdered on his homestead. Evidence at the scene points to the work of a Kobold warband. A tribe of Kobolds is known to live in the mountains south of town. The villagers are afraid and hot for blood. The commander of the local militia (a 5th level fighter) sends for a detachment of troops from the nearest garrison to quell the trouble. He then takes the characters aside because he trusts them. He tells them that he only has 12 regular soldiers (2nd - 3rd level), and none to spare, as the citizen militia will have to be organized, and the villagers will need to be reassured by seeing him making rounds and checking on everyone. The detachment of regulars will not arrive for three days or so, and even then it will be at least a day or two before a decision is made on how to proceed. What he really needs is more information. He tells the characters that the Kobolds are normally cowards, and so something must have happened to stir them up. Perhaps there hunting grounds have been invaded and they are feeling pressure. Perhaps they've just become overpopulated and need 'culling'. He will ask some discrete questions amonst the outlying farms to see if some villager has caused trouble. But what he really needs is someone to spy on the Kobolds directly and gather as much information as they can. There is no one else capable of doing the job who he can spare at the moment.
To me, the critical thing at this point is that the PC's believe that they are special and that by comparison, there are only a handful of people more capable than they are - which is true. Average citizens are 2-3rd level commoners and experts. There are a few veterens but not many, and thier hands are tied. But if average people are 4-5th level, this assumption is highly threatened - just as it would be if you made that assumption when writing U1-3 or UK1. How much more so would my story be threatened if average Kobolds were 3rd level or higher?
Anyway, to continue my example, the PC's - because they are heroes - would normally accept this dangerous mission. They might not. IF they don't, I have backup plans. I'm not going to railroad them. I'll even let them do something really disruptive like pack up and leave town. But most of the time, PC's are fairly ammendable if you treat them well.
BUT, any player that thinks he is going to solve this adventure by ruthlessly slaying all the Kobolds is in for almost certain death - even if I don't assume the need for 3rd level Kobolds balancing the 5th level humans. Backed into a corner, hundred plus Kobolds will eventually organize and despite great losses hunt the players down. And to make matters worse, the Kobolds aren't the villains. Well, at least not all of them. And in any event, I would look askance at any group of adventures claiming goodness that would smash eggs, slaughter non-combatants, and commit genocide here. They might well recieve the accolades of the townsfolk for doing so, but there would be consequences down the line.
The real villain is the local guildmaster. You see, it seems 40 years ago there really was a war between the townsfolk and the Kobold tribes. A group of adventurers was called in, and not being stupid opted for a clever solution of thier own. They made a treaty. The treaty went like this, we agree to leave you alone if you agree to stop raiding chickens, and stealing things from the farmers. As a mark of this agreement, every year at harvest, we will leave in the guild hall a dozen barrels of beer, and you will leave two dozen mink pelts and a dozen carnelian stones (both things the Kobolds produce for trade with the goblin tribe on the other side of the mountain). The adventurers went back and claimed they slaughtered the Kobolds and that they figured it would be some time before the few survivors ever thought of troubling the humans again. They were richly rewarded and toasted. To keep the treaty going, the party threw in with a then young guildmaster and secretly told him of the treaty. The Kobolds abided by the treaty because they were cowards and because they loved beer - which was difficult to acquire otherwise. Stealing the twelve barrels of beer in secret from the barn on the edge of town was the highlight of thier year. The young guildmaster kept the treaty going and secret until he was old and finally died, but he left sealed instructions for his successor. His successor however was a greedy and unscrupulous man, and after doing some figuring realized that the realitive exchange rate of beer and mink pelts had changed such that he would be losing money every year. He decided that was not something he was going to do for some filthy kobolds.
The result was predictable. The Kobolds panicked, and a young ambitious hunter who always chaffed at the territorial restrictions used the chaos to establish himself in a bid for chieftain. It was he and his followers who murdered the well liked widower.
Anyway, I hope maybe you can better understand why I find it pointless to argue with someone whose campaign is clearly so very different from the way I run things.
If average characters are high level, PC's aren't involved. They are just spectators, and someone more capable does the work. I would have a very hard time writing stories that avoided that, as it is already difficult to write them if ANYONE is more capable than they are. PC's and NPC's are both people.
