Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6836973" data-attributes="member: 4937">I never had much use for the 3.X default NPC classes.  I understood where they were going with them, but I didn't see the point.  Commoner gave 3.X backwards compatibility with 1e '0th level' fighters.  Warrior and Adept gave 3.X backwards compatibility with 1e monstrous humanoids like goblins, lizardmen and orcs and their tribal shamans and witch doctors.  Noble was basically an admission that they'd screwed up the design of fighters so much, that the class couldn't even cover its most basic medieval stereotype, despite having ripped Mounted Combat from the 1e Cavalier, and Expert gave 3.X backwards compatibility with expert hirelings.Expert and was the only one I ever found myself much using - mostly for merchants and the like.  The rest seemed to be locked into a design I'd largely abandoned before 3e came out, having long sense started giving class levels to NPC goblins and hobgoblins and the like, and more or less doing away with the notion of 0th level fighters.However, I still liked the idea of classes that represented careers that the common, non-adventuring, average person might take and attain experience in.  And I liked classes that let NPCs be skilled without stealing protagonist status from the PCs.  But the question raised by the official versions was, "Why would anyone choose to go down this path?"  Obviously, one answer is lack of opportunity and another might be lack of aptitude, but these answers didn't ease my mind fully.  Wouldn't it make more sense if NPC classes were rational choices for NPCs given their situation.Thus my NPC classes were born, each offering a reasonable non-heroic but effective career for a person in a given situation and in some cases, a way to come back from that path and become a hero.I realize that not many people out there will find this useful, but I hope someone does.  I find the classes to be very useful for populating the world with interesting low level NPCs.  Some of the classes are actually quite fun at higher levels as well if you want a for a challenge to a mid-level party.  And there is always the possibility that if someone is playing 3.0e still, that these classes might make sense as a dip class in certain builds.One interesting variant might be to start play with all the characters members of the commoner class and even with several levels in it.  Indeed, for that player that wants to do character exploration and insists on verisimilitude, it might be interesting to let them start as a 50 year old 4th level commoner rather than the usual 1st level youth.   Certainly it won't be unbalancing to do so in the long run, but let's the player create something really weird without stealing spotlight from the other players.</blockquote>

Verification