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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7274856" data-attributes="member: 42582">Being a PC or a NPC is not a property of a character in the gameworld, so all of the above is pretty strange. (And really,  [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] made this point upthread already. EDIT - including in a ninja post just above this one!)Not to mention: if there is an NPC in play, and a player wants to take it over as a PC for whatever reason, presumably no rule prevents that if everyone at the table is amenable. (They may not be amenable if the stats are completely broken, but this would be a time for ad hoc rulings rather then applying the default PC-generation rules.)And as  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] points out, no PC can start the game as a wealthy person, or a poor person, or a king, or a shop-owner or farm-owner, etc; yet presumably the gameworld contains plenty of such people who are in-principle amenable to an adventuring life.The rule that PCs must be built within certain mechanical parameters for stats is no different from the same rule vis-a-vis wealth, or race (why can't I play an adventuring hill giant?), or inherited magic items (why can't I play an adventurer whose grandma bequeathed me a vorpal sword?). It's a rule intended to achieve balance across participants in the game.Why?I've never played a D&D game where (i) the GM has rolled up every inhabitant of the gameworld, then (ii) the players dice to see which one of those inhabitants they get to play.But if I did, I can easily imagine the GM saying "Well, these ones are off-limts" (the kings, the merchant princes, the inheritors of vorpal swords, the super-strong heal giants and super-magical liches); "These ones aren't really viable" (the maimed, the very old, the very young, the dirt poor, etc); and so on - until we get a list of eligible characters for play who could be constructed using point buy.Point buy just cuts out the needless busy-work for the GM!(By the way, there is an excellent fantasy RPG in which a starting PC can be a prince of the royal blood; or a merchant prince; or maimed; or dirt poor (it also has rules that would support a king or a lich as a PC, though to actually start with such a character would require a deliberate departure from the default PC-build rules). That game is Burning Wheel; but it adopts a very different approach to "balance" across player characters from the D&D approach.)</blockquote>

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