D&D 5E (2024) NPCs, and the poverty of the core books

[Umbran]

... I am not being apologetic for my rudeness earlier, it was deliberate.

Mod note:

Rule #1 of this site is "keep it civil".
Violating it is a dicey proposition.
Publicly admitting to deliberately violating it is... well, a thing you do when you don't want to leave the moderators a lot of wiggle room in dealing with you.

Please find some other discussion to take part in, and do so politely, please and thanks.

 

[Maxperson]

Thank you for accepting my denigration of something you held dearly and clearly care for. I am not being sarcastic despite your clear sarcam and I am not being apologetic for my rudeness earlier, it was deliberate.

Wow. Deliberate rudeness to someone because they have a different opinion than yours. Classy! If you can't respond without rudeness, don't respond to me. I don't want to interact with people who are like that and I loathe the block button.

Edit: I hadn't refreshed my screen and didn't see that Umbran saw and responded to you alread.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Rules to me are, fundamentally, mental toys--the reason for each existing is that both create a different gameplay experience on the table and in char-building. They're there to also inspire players to create an in-fiction construct of themes and aesthetic they're into, but that's a secondary concern. I'm very much not a fiction first kinda guy, and certainly not someone that finds verisimilitude anything but a nice bonus AT BEST.

Then our values are diametrically opposite and I find your approach sufficiently alien that it is unlikely that we would reach any common ground.

 

[pawsplay]

Exactly one edition of D&D did this. Most of them did not. Basic and AD&D (1e and 2e) had entries in the MM for generic elves, dwarves and (hu)men. 4e used monster stat blocks for NPCs and 5e has generic NPC "monster" style blocks for any humanoid. Only 3e and it's offshoots demanded NPCs use PC logic and that came with costs in ease of use, time to create, and power level. The idea that an NPC designed to be fought would use PC rules is only been true for exactly 8 years, but people treat it like 5e was the first time in history you can't fight a bona fide PC wizard...

1e and 2e used PC rules for NPCs. Even those MM elves were led by NPCs of higher character level. Up until 3e, NPC meant "a character built like a PC but controlled by the DM." Roving gangs of adventurers, which were a type of encounter in AD&D as well as BECMI D&D, consisted entirely of a group of NPCs with PC classes, abilities, and gear.

Just to put this to rest, here's a snipped from the AD&D MM:

In OD&D, the situation is actually that PCs used NPC rules. PCs were just "heroes or "superheroes" or "magic-users" or other specialized units. Standard units typically acted as a group.

 

[ECMO3]

You asserted that every caster who can have the spell does.

What I said is "almost all" and I believe that is true. I know it is most of them in the hundreds (or thousands?) of 5E games I've played with players from all over the world since the spell was first published in POTA.

Your experience is just different than mine and apparently different than some others on this forum.

 

[ECMO3]

There aren't any design norms for deadly encounters.

You are wrong. The guidlines for creating high difficulty encounters in the 2024 DMG state specifically:

"Spend as much of your xp as possible without going over"

A high difficulty encounter is anything more than a medium difficulty encounter, up until the limit which is the number noted as "high difficulty".

In the 2014 rules it also provides guidlines in two places, first in the commentary about budgeting XP:

"You can build an encounter if you know its desired difficulty. The party’s XP thresholds give you an XP budget that you can spend on monsters to build easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounters."

and second in the guidelines on daily xp budget:

"For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring day. "

You can claim this should not be used or that the high difficulty number should be the floor for high difficulty, or that the 2014 math and monsters are not well aligned in practice and don't actually work as intended (and I would agree). But it is flat incorrect to say there are not any design norms.