Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesonCourage" data-source="post: 6037638" data-attributes="member: 6668292">You know, even in the sentence you emphasized, it seems to be clear that it's not your "average" blacksmith by his use of the word "master" (and that's not counting his original description, much less the title of "The Royal Blacksmith").He was presenting a "typical" "master" "Royal Blacksmith". I think it's okay for him to be above average.Indeed.I've always run towns as outfitting most guards (many towns allow guards to augment their own equipment if they pay for it, but this varies by setting / region with that setting). When it comes to arms and armor, there's a lot of stuff leftover from dead people. That last town guard (or bandit/invader) died, and his arms/armor gets passed onto the next guard (after repairs, if it's necessary). It's an investment, sure, but between looting enemies / upkeeping old weapons and armor, it's never really popped out as me as breaking my suspension of disbelief.And Weapon Focus can be explained a number of ways; natural leaning or skill (which may be why he cut it as a town guard), training (I imagine that people might learn from town guard as children if they have a knack for it [stats for it] and the town wants a defender), etc. Again, never really killed my sense of verisimilitude.This is where "averages" differ, I agree. I'm not even sure 3e agreed with your take on it (not that it should dictate your world to you; I used Fighters as town guard, not Warriors). But I also pretty vehemently hated the Commoner class, so meh. I could see your guy being the stock rabble during conscription in most games, but it wouldn't be that way in mine.To me, this is something you can do regardless of whether or not there's a guideline for building NPCs; you'd just ignore the guideline. I'd rather they do what I did for my RPG: do all the math for you, and give a guideline for levels. It doesn't need to map exactly to my game, but for example:Then, you'd have a handy chart for what bonuses might look like depending on focus at various levels. For example, skills from levels 1-4:So, then you can say "well, he's not just starting out, but probably not an average settled adult yet", decide on level 2-3 (depending on which one he's closer to), decide on how much he's focused on the skill, and give him an appropriate bonus.I got all these numbers by running the numbers for my system. My players routinely build characters and see how they rank up against these guidelines -even though there's no reason to- and are happy with how they stack up ("I'm professionally skilled at attack bonus for my hit die <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />").Now, I also have loose rules on how to make an NPC with these guidelines (which takes about 5 minutes), and it'll give you a set of stats for them (attack bonuses, HP, saves, initiative, skills, etc.). Or, you can just use what's convenient on the fly; did the party just run into the Royal Blacksmith? Use your best judgment for his hit die (based off of the descriptions given every 4 levels, which are easy to learn with use), estimate how focused he is on his craft, and then look at his bonus. Done. You can write it down, flesh him out later, or forget it, your call.But the numbers are all derived from the system. There's no real reason not to have both, here. The objections (tons of HP for high level noncombatants?!) are fair; let's make it so that PCs are shoehorned into that, too. Make it opt-out (not default), of course, since most people will want high HP characters. But I've had players want low HP to help fit their character concept of a non-combatant. And yeah, I'm still in support of non-combat classes / feats (or the equivalent), too.Regardless, if it's too much trouble, ignore the guidelines and say "Bob the Blacksmith, Smithing +X" and be done with it! No skin off my nose. For people that want a compromise, I think the charts like I've used in my RPG are a good compromise. Still, people can make full-fledged characters if they want (sometimes I just get the urge to completely stat someone out, but not most of the time).But yeah, just my feelings on it. As always, play what you like <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification