Uzzy said:
*sigh* For every 'Superheroic' Good Aligned NPC, there are about ten Supervillianous Evil Aligned NPC's.
No, there aren't. At least not in any of the FR books I've seen. Most of the "villainous" NPCs are far from superpowered, and most of them are severely inactive or "spiders in their web"-types.
I think your "Elminster should be level 35 if the PCs can reach 30!" idea shows that you don't, and are perhaps incapable of, understanding why a stat'd NPC is always worse than one without stats, if he's genuinely intended to be used for "flavour". I'll try though - if you take the stats out, the game only improves. That's all that happens. It gets better. You don't need those stats for anything.
No-one needs Elminster's stats. Seriously. You don't. If you're personally putting him an adventure in a position where he'll need stats beyond GM fiat, you and about three others have already told us that you're a "bad GM" for doing so, so clearly that's not a reason, and what, you can't MAKE UP the stats now?
Your example of "why the NPCs can't help" are limited, I'm afraid, because they're all cases of "they can't help at this precise moment, but could soon!", which has always been the problem - we need things that take the NPCs out for DECADES, not nine months. I mean, Elminister is screwed up, but how long is it going to take for him to "get over it"? Not freakin' long, I imagine. The Seven Sisters, several of who are psychopaths who have no right to have "G" anywhere in their alignment can all potentially get out of their complications within days, weeks, or months at the most.
The problem with the FR is not so much "individual adventures". Yeah, it's eaaaaasy to come up with an individual adventure where none of these jerks (and most of them actually
are jerks, to judge from the books/descriptions, even by PC standards) would have a reason to become involved, but as you continue to play in the Realms, two problems potentially emerge:
1) Sweeping epic campaigns become hard to do if you care about maintaining any kind of continuity with the extant FR.
2) Campaigns where anything genuinely important happens become hard-to-credit UNLESS the Unecessarily Overpowered NPCs (UONPCs) are "accounted for", and stuff like "oh lol shez runnign a university" isn't a good accounting or reason to not be involved, or are involved (in some ways this is the less painful option, if you use them indirectly).
3) The players are the heroes of the setting - this again can become "hard to credit" - you can repeat endlessly that you "don't see why" players want to be the heroes - that doesn't stop the vast majority of players wanting this, especially in the long-term.
Taking out the stats for "good" NPCs helps a great deal. I strongly suggest that whether the setting jumps 10 years or 100, that they DO NOT stat up good-aligned NPCs beyond "class/race/level", and if they can, avoid even that. No-one needs a freakin' stat-block for each of the Seven Psycho Sisters.
It's better to leave that to individual DMs to handle themselves. This way players are never going to feel directly overshadowed (because who knows what level this person is, eh?), the DM is less concerned with "NPC interference", because their power levels become vague and malleable without outright breaking with the setting, and a lot of time and space are saved in sourcebooks which otherwise had to be filled with stat blocks, spell lists, and details of extensive Kewl Powerz. It's only positive, and I'd really like to know if you oppose such a thing, and why?
As for "Elminster isn't a pet", those reasons sound almost as flaky as Elminster himself, to me. Just because someone consistently denies something that would reflect on them negatively, doesn't mean it ain't so. Similarly, just because he created Elminster when he was eight, doesn't mean it's a good idea for the character to stay in the setting. He's clearly been refined many times. In 1E/early 2E he WAS Gandalf only more interfering and arbitary. Later he's turned into this sort of "super-fit sexy older man" wanna-be Sean Connery creep, I see, which is even worse. His evolution needs to end, with any/all of de-statting, crippling, killing, or apotheosis.
It's not just the "big names" that are a problem though - I think you'll acknowledge that the FR has had a consistent problem in that the rulers of any given area, even on a small scale, tend to have an AWFUL lot of class levels, and should really be fighting a lot of threats directly. Settings like Eberron have leaders with 5-7 class levels, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.
This PERVASIVE use of "many PC-class levels for every npc!" (instead of making them Experts or the like) is more the reason that the setting needs to be advanced a handful of magic bastards I admit. Getting rid of the magic bastards would be a bonus, though.
PS - Before anyone attempts any lectures of how to remove the FR UONPCs from the setting - I know all this, and I've already spent time going through a lot of the books doing precisely that, but it's a tiresome chore, and unsuitable in a setting that's meant for general consumption.
BadMojo - I completely agree that the "Good" FR NPCs tend to be tempremental and flaky. In fact, they're
so tempremental and flaky, that labelling a lot of them as good, as WotC, like TSR before them, insists on doing, is very very very very questionable.
The fact that they're in the setting, and that the setting consistently portrays them as "good people" who players should "respect" produces immensive amounts of cognitive dissonance for me. It's downright mindbending. I mean, they tell me just exactly how giant a "crazy bitch" one of the Seven Sisters is (based on her murderous actions), then mark her NG and talk about how she's a wonderful person - most NG characters in the FR seem very NON-
self-sacrificing, too, though perhaps Elminister is going to finally change that a bit.
As a RPG DM and player, too, it's sick, because I know that it's "pet-ism" that causes them to be labelled as "good people". If this was a typical setting, the same NPC would be CN or the like, and there would be nothing about how wonderful they were, we would be left to judge on their own merit (indeed, they'd be detailed far more briefly per se). However, they're pets, because they're all either writer's pets (like Elminster - he's just not a pure Mary Sue - that doesn't make him a partial Mary Sue, or a pet), or worse, ex-PCs, as I am given to understand the Knights of Myth Drannor and possibly the Seven Sisters are. There's nothing more irksome than someone else's PCs slap-bang in the middle of a setting.