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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6044494" data-attributes="member: 17106">In this context, balance refers to how hard you have to work to reach a certain level of skill. If you take away the class system, it becomes possible for minor NPCs to have unreasonably good values in certain skills, many of which are not game-breaking, but some of which can be.What dungeons?I completely disagree with that. I think it's tangential to D&D's gameplay.Advanced players pick out complex combinations of abilities and routinely ignore the rules and just build their own classes. The more you play, the closer and closer you get to a de facto classless system. I could easily imagine D&D ditching the concept entirely.Well unified mechanics produce fairness and consistency, but yeah, that's about it. Nothing too complicated here.Yours seems to be that using your judgment in creating NPC stats rather than working within a consistent set of character creation rules will produce better results for less work. I agree with this. I fudge NPC stats sometimes on the fly for NPCs I don't feel like building using the rules or didn't anticipate needing. Occasionally I give NPCs statistics that aren't easily achievable through the character creation rules, if there's a compelling reason to do so. It's fine to do that. I also think the same thing can be true for other forms of "DM cheating" like dice fudging or reskinning of mechanical elements. If these things are done appropriately, they can enhance the game.I just don't think that the rules should be written that way. It would be like writing the combat chapter and saying that if a PC drops to negative hit points, he dies only if the DM determines he wants to kill the character. That is for some groups what happens, but it's not on the books, and with good reason. The rulebooks provide a fair and consistent foundation for players and DMs. Going off the book is the DM's choice.</blockquote>

Verification