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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6838442" data-attributes="member: 4937">Notes on the classesThat's it: five classes.  I don't foresee any need for anymore, as the above for me fully covers the spectrum of mundane human endeavor, and I feel pretty comfortable putting any NPC I imagine in one of the above classes.  Anyone that doesn't fit in the above, is an NPC with a PC class.   Originally, I had a sixth NPC class, the Explorer, but that one was so capable that I just put it with PC classes.  (For those that are interested, there is a separate thread on that class around here.)My main goals should be observable from the design,  but to be explicit, I'm addressing the following issues from a simulation perspective:a) If NPC's are often more experienced than PC's, then why are PC's important even from 1st level?   Specifically, is it the case that the PC's are just special, and most NPC's can't gain levels or take PC's classes as was assumed in 1e AD&D?b) How do NPC's cope with problems in the absence of PC's?c) Is it really necessary to have extraordinary combat ability in order to have extraordinary ability? d) If NPC's could gain levels in PC classes, why don't they do so?e) If NPC's pursue NPC classes as a matter of choice, why do they do so?Each of the NPC classes is designed to be a rational choice for the characters that take the class, offering to that character equal or even greater ability to cope with daily mundane challenges than PC classes - particularly for someone without a PC's naturally broad or deep potential owed from an elite set of ability scores.  If you want to make a living and not risk your life daily, the NPC classes are very rational career choices.  In particular, most have called out a special ability to earn XP without doing things that are overtly dangerous.  Presumably this is also true of PC classes, after all not every hedge wizard is gaining experience by dragon slaying, but whatever training that a PC class can take to up their XP slowly is probably more expensive and harder to come by.  The NPC classes explicitly get better at what they do simply by doing ordinary labor.I run a fairly low level gritty campaign world.  An NPC with a PC class who is 10th level is often the highest level NPC with a PC class in a whole nation.  In general, if you took typical Forgotten Realms demographics and divided every thing by two, you'd be much closer to where my campaign typically runs.  But because the NPC classes below are in my opinion no more than half as effective as a PC class at being heroes, I don't feel bad sprinkling the world with 6th level, 9th, level or even higher commoners, experts, and scholars.  A 9th level commoner, representing some aged matron who has lived a long and productive but ordinary life, probably doesn't have more than a CR of 1 between the inherent weakness of the class and physical ability scores of 5-7.  But they can still be as mechanically well rounded and respectable characters as they are intended to be by color.  A 10th level scholar with modest ability scores (something like an start array of 16 11 10 8 8 7) and no magic items of note or power, and no feats geared to combat, is probably at best no more effective delving into dangerous situations than a 2nd or 3rd level PC, and certainly is no threat to any PC party.  Yet this same character in his knowledge vastly exceeds what most PC's will know even at fairly high level.  So again, the color of being respectable and worthy of esteem doesn't clash with the mechanical implementation, and does so without creating problems with regard to why PC's have spotlight and narrative importance.And further, one of the things this avoids is a problem I see so much in many campaign worlds which is an ability score of 10-11 isn't actually average, because in practice no character seems to have any ability score below 10.   For many NPC's, I apply the Civilized trait and the Noncombatant disadvantage, which ramps down the combat ability even further while generating exceptionally skillful characters at even very low level with very low ability scores.  Thus, there is no need at all to load down NPCs with a bunch of combat abilities in order to make them very effective at what they do.Brute: This began as an Expert variant, but it was easier to write up the mechanics by spinning it off as its own class.  The Brute is an extraordinarily useful NPC class for urban adventuring at low levels, and I've used this class a lot to create foils and mooks for the PCs.  The ability to create high skill but low intelligence characters without fudging it is just awesome.  Brute 1/Rogue 1 makes a great mugger or tough for a thieves guild.  A Brute 3 makes a great bar room brawler or pit fighter.  Another great use I see for the class is as a henchmen for a smaller PC party, as the class has Nodwick like ability to tote stuff (indeed Nodwick could be a 20th level Brute and it would make perfect sense).  The combat ability of the Brute is not that bad, about equivalent to a fighter of half its class level, and they are reasonably durable.  I can easily see the Brute in an party henchmen role where the henchmen is beloved and valued without drawing spotlight from the PCs.  Commoner: The commoner looks a lot like the standard commoner from the RAW.  But it addresses several major issues with the class.  First, if you are a common, the Salt of the Earth ability ensures that you aren't permanently gimped by having that background.  A commoner can always, if they get the opportunity, be retrained into something else.  This addresses for me a major narrative issue that D&D has had for a long time.  A very famous example would be the character Tika from the Dragonlance series, who has to portrayed as a barmaid who somehow became a midlevel fighter before becoming an adventurer to fit into the story.  Making her a midlevel commoner that transitions into midlevel fighter as she is trained and becomes more experienced makes a lot more sense.  The other issue addressed by the class is why anyone would ever become a commoner, as the 3.X RAW commoner has the terrible problem of not even being very good at facing the challenges of a common life.   The class keeps the bad saving throws, but with the Simple Living class ability is not facing disease without at least ordinary advantages.   You could always make reasonably effective professionals from commoners, but now it makes sense why the person involved never sought more training if they had the wherewithal to do so.  While I've never had a 20th level commoner in my campaign, the comparatively minor capstone ability lets me imagine one in the role of legendary folk hero.Expert: Of all the 3.X NPC classes, I felt Expert was the best designed and most useful.  One thing I immediately wanted to do with the class when I saw it was tweak it towards being a viable dip class or even core class for a PC.  In particular, I thought it would be cool to elevate the class up to the level you could play it as a Sherlock Holmes inspired PC.  I've never quite succeeded at that, and I don't think you can quite get to where a pure skill monkey class is viable as a PC class in most campaigns, even with my upgrades to the usefulness of D20 skills, but the class in its current form is still pretty darn capable and certainly potentially more capable at everything outside of combat than anything but a high level spell caster.  And certainly, experts of 1st to 4th level are hyper-competent at ordinary tasks without stepping on the PC's role as protagonists.  They can match fairly high level characters in social skills, avoiding the problem of PC's trying to con merchants that can potentially lead to degenerate time wasting play if you have a large group.  (If you have a small group, and they signal they want to play criminals, that's a different matter.)  They also work really well in the role of expert hirelings without needing to be especially high level, while a mid to high level expert can be truly extraordinary craftsmen.  If you want to throw in a 13th level expert as an acrobat, you have a character with amazing almost mindblowing movement skills, that doesn't necessarily have the combat skills to beat down a PC.  This is great for when you want NPC's more as foils than straight up antagonists.  You get a lot of variety in potential NPCs and I find it nicely provokes creativity to think about what you could build with this class.  I also tend to build a lot of the important NPCs of a realm as mixed PC class experts.  I like having NPCs be competent rather than helpless, but still needing the PCs.   So you can have that clr6/exp6 leader of the church in an non-adventuring role, or that ftr6/exp6 in the role of noble leader and it still makes sense that they don't do the job for the PC's because the job would be trivial for a 12th level character or that the PC's can't just run to them as soon as they figure out what the problem is and expect the NPC to take care of it.Warrior: This is probably the NPC class I get the least use out of.  The vast majority of combatant NPCs in my game are simply fighters.  This had been true even before 3e came along, as I'd long before started treating the monsters as people too.  Not only does that make more sense to me in terms of world building, but its simply easier to challenge PCs with fighters than warriors without recourse to loading the NPC down with treasure or above average stat arrays.  In general, keeping humanoids challenging is a much bigger problem than making them too challenging, especially if you enforce low level demographics on NPCs generally.  However, I can still see some limited usage for the class and kept it in for those rare occasions I want to use it.  Probably the main reason I kept it in is so that 'Hillbillies', 'Mountainfolk', 'Rednecks' or their cultural equivalents, can legitimately pound for pound and person for person kick the butts of 'cityfolk'.  If that tells you something about my own culture background, give yourself a pat on the back for your perceptiveness.  Like the commoner, the only real adjustment to the class was to make sure if you had the background of a warrior, you weren't permanently gimped by that.  And note, the class is not straight up better than a commoner if you are living the commoner lifestyle.  The only reason to take it is if you do have to fight something off once a year or so.Scholar: Like the Brute, this started out as an Expert archetype, but it was just easier to spin it off as its own class.  The primary impetus behind this class was to largely replicate the Sage NPC expert hireling in 1e.  The Sage for me had long been the most interesting of the expert hirelings and the one that saw the most screen time in play.   Like the other NPC classes, even a 2nd level Scholar is a mighty expert in his field, but lacks the ability to easily step into the role of traditional hero.  One area I haven't gotten around to describing well is just what a subfield of knowledge looks like.  It's not an issue because as an NPC class I just fiat decide that when it comes up, but eventually I'd like to have a well integrated set of book, library, research, and field of knowledge rules.Dropped from the list of NPC classes are Adepts and Aristocrats.  There is nothing particularly wrong with those NPC classes, I just literally never need them or use them.  Adept like Warrior is a pure backwards compatibility class meant to recreate the witch doctor concept from the 1e MM/DMG.  I'm perfectly happy however to use PC classed spellcasters in this role, and indeed had long before 3e been doing so.  It's generally much more my problem that I need a worthy antagonist for a PC than it is that I find I need to nerf humanoid antagonists to keep them from being over powering.   And anything I could do with an Aristocrat NPC class, I can do using other chargen resources, either with strait up expert, or multiclassing expert with whatever class or role is associated with the region's aristocracy, or by using straight up fighter and chargen options that add skills useful for a noble leader.  As I said before, if your fighter class can't do a noble born knight, something is wrong with your fighter class.  A fighter need not and should not necessarily imply stupid thug.</blockquote>

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