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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5889282" data-attributes="member: 42582">The question was meant (on its rhetorical reading) to illustrate that, in PC build, there are constraints (which may take the form of tradeoffs). In a points buy game, if I have the same points as every other play, and I want to be incredibly rich, I'm going to have to make sacrifices elsewhere. Whereas NPCs don't have to make the same sacrifices, because they have more points to spend.How does one answer a D&D player who asks a GM how it is that the 3HD orc has whirlwind attack when a PC has to be 4th level? The same way one answers the points-buy player who asks "Why can't I be a prodigy with heaps of points but no age penalties?" or "Why can't I start with more points than everyone else, because my character concept is for a prodigy who is better than his/her peers?"What does "level appropriate" mean here?In a points buy game, of course you can just keep piling on the points. If you then jack levels on (so every X points adds +1 level - HARP is a little bit like this) you can say that the young, inexperienced but incredibly wealthy king is just an Nth level character who spent all his build points on money.But what does this tell us? It certainly doesn't tell us that that king will make a good encounter for PCs of level N, or of any other level for that matter. It's a noticeable feature of HARP, for example, that in order to work out whether or not some opponent will make for a good encounter, you don't look at level at all - you have to compare the numbers of the NPC/monster/trap/whatever directly to the PCs' numbers.In the context of D&D, there are many features of a monster that affect its suitability in an encounter. These include its hp, its defence, its attack bonus, its number of attacks, its damage, etc. 4e has an interesting system for describing these: attack, defence and damage are defined primarily by level, but modified by role; hit points is defined primarily by level, but modified by role, and also by status (elite or solo); number of attacks is defined primarily by status (elites and solos get more attacks to fit the action economy). And then there are minions, which have special rules for damage and hit points.In short, because there are multipe dimensions of a monster that affect its suitability as an encounter, 4e uses mulitple dimensions of classification: level, role and status. These dimensions don't have any ingame significance. In the game, it's not as if a dragon and a purple worm have something in common (both solo) and a dragon and an have something in common (both 10th level) and an ogre and a goristro demon have something in common (both brutes, although the goristro is elite). These are metagame notions, for guiding encounter design. In the fiction, the purple worm is arguably tougher than the 10th level dragon (depending on exactly how much of the level scaling one treats just as metagame escalation), the 10th level dragon is definitely tougher than the 10th level ogre, and the goristro is probably about as tough as the purple worm (again, there is a fair bit of wriggle room here for metagame scaling).PCs are not governed by these same considerations. Furthermore, the general approach of D&D is to balance them all in a single dimension - level. (In AD&D balance was notionally by XP rather than level, although I think that level was often used as a rough-and-ready proxy for XP.)This straight away tells us that any attempt to build D&D monsters using the same build mechanics as D&D PCs is likely to produce odd results. (Or, as was noted above, arbitrary granting of racial abilities - the Orc is now a "Gruumsh-touched Orc" who has the racial ability to learn whirlwind attack with 3HD.)Now if you want to convert all this stuff into a uniform currency scale a la points buy, be my guest. I think it will be hard - disintegrating stone, for example, is worth more for PCs than NPCs because PCs are more likely than NPCs to be engaged in situations (ie adventures) in which breaking into or out of stone buildings is a big advantage - but maybe it can be done.But even if it were done, what would we have achieved? To design encounters you'd still have to do what HARP recommends - compare the numbers - which 4e regularises through its dimensions of classification for monsters. An insistence that monsters/NPCs be built with classes, or that buidling monsters/NPCs should follow the same rules as building PCs, strikes me as radically unmotivated, unless one thinks that levels, hit dice, "points (in a points buy game), etc are really existing things in the world. But does anyone think that?Especially once points are being used not only to buy personal abilities, but external assets like money, status, relationships etc?</blockquote>

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