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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesonCourage" data-source="post: 6037952" data-attributes="member: 6668292">This varies, but is often true (as I'll imply at the beginning of my next paragraph). Sometimes his stats will come up. I've had many NPCs end up spending a lot more time around or with the PCs than I thought they would. One was recently in the party for 4-5 months real time (and years game time), and only left when another PC did. I had no plans for this to happen; they met him, liked his personality, arranged to meet up, and convinced him to follow them. His stats came in handy (though I didn't need them right away).Though, you can be sure I didn't have them when they met him. I just wing stuff (as I outlined how: estimate hit die based on description, give him relevant skill levels based on focus in those skills). This might come in handy if, say, they decided that they didn't like a particular antagonistic NPC, and decided to persuade / lie to / attack him, or the like. Now his stats are handy, and those charts have been amazingly convenient for me when these types of situations have come up.This is advocating the "no system" approach, which is fine. But if that's what you want to do, why not just ignore the guidelines and do that? Why buck against them being there for people that want them?And then there's the middle, which is what I talked about.It breaks my players' verisimilitude when they used to investigate it, and find out "you can't do that, because [contrived reason]." The same way forced plots or heavy-handed NPCs break their suspension of disbelief. When everything works the same, and it's intuitive, they don't really question it; "oh, that's how that works." When it's "he used GM device X to do it" then it hurts their fun. It hurts my fun. It's just how we're wired.So, to answer your first paragraph to me, "why bother with the steps?" Well, they help us enjoy the game. They make sense, it's more intuitive for us (looking at rules as physics), and with proper guidelines (like my charts) you can get a good feel for someone is at other skills as well ("well, he has a hobby in fighting, but he's not really focused on it... He's hit die 10, so I'll give him +4").You always have the option to say, "Bob the Blacksmith, Smithing +X" regardless of any other system; I just don't see that as persuasive for why there shouldn't be guidelines. 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>

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