D&D General Should NPCs be built using the same rules as PCs?

[Aldarc]

The two bolded pieces agree with each other. Characters are characters regardless of whether they have a player attached, and the rules of the game (should!) apply equally to all.

Your argument here has the is/ought fallacy written all over it.

Fictional consistency is vitally important too, and IMO they're linked closely enough that if the fiction is to be consistent then so must the mechanics.

You will find that this is not true in many games unless you want to make the outrageous claim that the fiction is inconsistent in these other roleplaying games that don't share your aesthetic preferences for gaming. But such extratordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

In principle I agree, but it's easy to run into questions of unfairness. If a situation ever arises where the question "Why can't my PC do that [really cool thing that some NPC just did]?" can only be answered with "Just because", there's a problem. And the flip side is also true: it's unfair to the NPCs if the PCs can do things that NPCs never can.

You seem to preclude other answers to the question other than "just because" which is also a problem.

 

[Staffan]

I'm gonna go with "no". If a player asks me why they can't tame a bulette and ride it while it is burrowing, I'll just explain that they're free to try and learn the secret techniques taught by the Black Earth cult and which require the blessing of Ogrémoch.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm gonna go with "no". If a player asks me why they can't tame a bulette and ride it while it is burrowing, I'll just explain that they're free to try and learn the secret techniques taught by the Black Earth cult and which require the blessing of Ogrémoch.

That's not a "no".

 

[bloodtide]

This is the key thing right here: if an NPC can do it then a PC should be able to do it (assuming pre-reqs, if any, are met), and vice versa.

This is a common complaint from players.....but it falls flat.

Sure a PC can 'use' whatever a NPC does. But NPCs don't have to be built as "playable characters" and even more the "super hero characters" that many players demand. A DM can build a NPC do do a set thing, and sure a player could copy it....but they never would as it would be a useless character.

The problems come when NPCs get abilities PCs don't, just by virtue of being NPCs; or when NPCs don't get abilities that equivalent PCs do get. Why? Because when these are true, they are living in different worlds.

There will always be abilities not everyone can get. Unless your playing a very simple game there should be regional, racial, societal, historical or other such abilities that not everyone can get.

Elven spellsong is a magic known and only usable by elves....but sure is some vague theory a player could be an elf and take it. But other then one perk....the spellsong ability is not so great an ability. But sure a player can hop up on their D20 and say "I CAN take that...I just CHOOSE not too!"

But really it's not so different from just saying "you can take that ability player". It just "feels better" to the players.

Some players like to watchdog the DM and demand to know how each NPC gets each ability, spell or +1 to hit. Many players will even demand the game be stopped over this. Why can NPC Bob cast spell X....oh they have this class/race/template/back ground/feature/ and on and on.

 

[TwoSix]

It isn't strange that they are a bounded subset, it is strange that the bounds are what they are, defined by the specific list of available things (whatever the soure).

That's always been true, of course, and people have always pushed against it. It just occurred to me in the light of this discussion -- especially the "why can't I be a shaman" sub-discussion -- that there is no actual reason for this. The endless list of classes and subclasses in various 3PP books is evidence that people don't want the PC options limited to whatever WotC puts out.

The solution is to built an actual race and class construction system. It doesn't necessarily need to be as broad as, say, Hero, but even something similar to what we had in the 2E DMG would go a long way toward letting players really play what they want.

Anyway, I am just musing on a Saturday morning. It seems silly to point to storm raging barbarians and spell casting swordsmen and dragon blooded sorcerers and then say, "Of course you can't be an alchemist."

On this point, we 100% agree. My solution is simply that I trust myself to build a custom option thats’s roughly balanced based on the player’s idea.

 

[The Stray]

So are the PCs, which is the very root of my whole point here.

No. they aren't. They are the focal point around which the game, in a mechanical sense, revolves. No matter what their background, history, or purpose, the game is, ultimately, about the PCs, not the NPCs. Detailed options that are available to them on a regular basis are superfluous or extraneous when applied to NPCs who are only going to be on-screen for a limited amount of time, and powers and abilities that might be exciting and engaging in a limited quantity (such as the hypothetical encounter with the shaman who can heal and sling fire with equal ease) will prove problematic in the hands of people who are on-screen all the time and have those abilities as a normal part of their problem-solving repertoire.

If the PCs are not representative of that teeming mass then they're either alien to the world or are truly special snowflakes. The former can be cool if only done once, while the latter just ain't the way I roll.

This is a Story take on what is, ultimately, a Gameplay problem. You can use flavor to justify any kind mechanics. You can't do the reverse and have it reliably work, and the 3.x era was a prime example of why. This has nothing to do with the PC's fictional positioning, and everything to do with with the PCs-as-game-pieces. This is a game design-level issue, and it's present in pretty much any RPG you care to name, not just D&D. You either need to stick so much detail on an NPC that they become cumbersome to use in the moments they're on-screen, or you use a different system for building them, which has the flexibility to add what you like but that very strength means they have access to abilities that PCs don't get.

While I get this in principle, a few points:

First, that bolded claim is likely to go over like a lead balloon with some here.

That's a "them" problem. Objective reality doesn't care about their feelings on the matter.

Second, while I might in theory be a part of a "team-based tactical squad" (shudder), both as player and character I'm also a free-willed individual who may or may not always feel like following orders or sticking to plans.

And this has no bearing whatsoever on the objective facts of your character's place in the game. The most free-willed pawn in Chess still only gets to move one square forward at a time and only capture pieces diagonally, as much as it might want to sulk about that, and it can't be anything different unless and until it reaches the end of the board and gets promoted.

Granted, RPGs allow their game pieces a lot more freedom than that, but at the end of the day, they are still pieces, not people.

(This, incidentally, is why I also reject "it's what my character would do" as a defense for wangrod behavior at the game table. The "character" is nothing more than the player's agent in the game world. The player is choosing the character's reactions, not the other way around, and any claims to the contrary are just attempts to deflect responsibility for being a wangrod. The player is the one with agency, not the character, and they've chosen to exercise they agency to harm the game experiance of everyone else for their own selfish reasons, and that's generally unacceptable.)

Third, my question "Why can't I play one of those Shamans?" wasn't meant to imply just tacking those powers on to my existing character but more a) why isn't that class in the char-gen guide and b) why can't I drop my current PC and take one of those instead (i.e. switch one set of limited tools for another)?

I can spin a bunch of Watsonian nonsense to justify my decision, but the Doyalist reasons probably are:

1) This is not a player option because the designers had niche protection goals.
2) This is not a player option because the designers had character balance concerns.
3) This is not a player option because the designers had Watsonian world/setting reasons not to include such. Whether this is valid is going to be up to individual interpretation.
4) This is not a player option currently, but isn't unbalanced or oversteps niches too badly, and the designers either haven't thought of it or are waiting to put it in a different supplement to get more of your money down the line. Or a Third Party designer has cobbled something together that the GM feels comfortable adding to the available options. Or the GM decides to home-brew something.

 

[The Stray]

You'll never catch every archetype but there's room to catch at least some of the more common ones that have been hard to replicate through all of D&D. A few capstone or end-game archetypes that D&D has never done (or explained) all that well:

I have a few thoughts on why this might be case.

A Jedi knight.

Niche protection issues would be my guess. Magic + swordsmanship? I've regularly heard it said that in every Star Wars Game you need to either have the PCs all be Jedi, or none of them be Jedi, and "overshadowing the others" is a commonly stated reason why.

James Bond. (no combination of Fighter-Thief-Assassin has worked yet)

Same problem, only we have Sneaky + Fighty instead of Fighty + Magic.

Any powerful stay-at-home support.

Which runs right into the hacker problem you see in a lot of Cyberpunk games -- either you have an entire subsystem that your stay-at-home dude needs to engage with, layering a whole minigame on top of whatever you're already doing, meaning large swaths of time when the other characters are just sitting on their thumbs, OR you get all-power cheese groups that you can no longer effectively challenge, ruining the gaming experience. The only way a stay-at-home support character works is if they are an NPC which can be conveniently removed from action via plot contrivance when necessary.

Any powerful mystic or psionicist a la the Deryni.

We've got wizards and sorcerers and warlocks, though.

At the other end, the game also doesn't (and never properly has) mechanically cover what I've come to call "part-classes", where, say, commoners have some (but not all) abilities of a class simply baked into their culture. An example: many of the hunters in a hunter-gatherer society would realistically have some Ranger-like tracking and outdoors skills but won't have the hardiness or favoured enemy or animal companion etc. that a full-patch Ranger would. I've been booting around some ideas as to how this could work but so far it's just a football.

This, I'll give you. The NPC classes of 3.x sucked monkey balls and were too stripped down, and every other edition has had its own problems.

 

[tetrasodium]

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This, I'll give you. The NPC classes of 3.x sucked monkey balls and were too stripped down, and every other edition has had its own problems.

I disagree, they were s concept made for the GM not PCs. NPC classes allowed the GM an ability to say "it's not that spell, this works different. He's a high level bartender using a class ability that lets him do $thing in his prepared bar when xyz" or whatever

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. they aren't. They are the focal point around which the game, in a mechanical sense, revolves. No matter what their background, history, or purpose, the game is, ultimately, about the PCs, not the NPCs. Detailed options that are available to them on a regular basis are superfluous or extraneous when applied to NPCs who are only going to be on-screen for a limited amount of time, and powers and abilities that might be exciting and engaging in a limited quantity (such as the hypothetical encounter with the shaman who can heal and sling fire with equal ease) will prove problematic in the hands of people who are on-screen all the time and have those abilities as a normal part of their problem-solving repertoire.



This is a Story take on what is, ultimately, a Gameplay problem. You can use flavor to justify any kind mechanics. You can't do the reverse and have it reliably work, and the 3.x era was a prime example of why. This has nothing to do with the PC's fictional positioning, and everything to do with with the PCs-as-game-pieces. This is a game design-level issue, and it's present in pretty much any RPG you care to name, not just D&D. You either need to stick so much detail on an NPC that they become cumbersome to use in the moments they're on-screen, or you use a different system for building them, which has the flexibility to add what you like but that very strength means they have access to abilities that PCs don't get.



That's a "them" problem. Objective reality doesn't care about their feelings on the matter.



And this has no bearing whatsoever on the objective facts of your character's place in the game. The most free-willed pawn in Chess still only gets to move one square forward at a time and only capture pieces diagonally, as much as it might want to sulk about that, and it can't be anything different unless and until it reaches the end of the board and gets promoted.

Granted, RPGs allow their game pieces a lot more freedom than that, but at the end of the day, they are still pieces, not people.

(This, incidentally, is why I also reject "it's what my character would do" as a defense for wangrod behavior at the game table. The "character" is nothing more than the player's agent in the game world. The player is choosing the character's reactions, not the other way around, and any claims to the contrary are just attempts to deflect responsibility for being a wangrod. The player is the one with agency, not the character, and they've chosen to exercise they agency to harm the game experiance of everyone else for their own selfish reasons, and that's generally unacceptable.)



I can spin a bunch of Watsonian nonsense to justify my decision, but the Doyalist reasons probably are:

1) This is not a player option because the designers had niche protection goals.
2) This is not a player option because the designers had character balance concerns.
3) This is not a player option because the designers had Watsonian world/setting reasons not to include such. Whether this is valid is going to be up to individual interpretation.
4) This is not a player option currently, but isn't unbalanced or oversteps niches too badly, and the designers either haven't thought of it or are waiting to put it in a different supplement to get more of your money down the line. Or a Third Party designer has cobbled something together that the GM feels comfortable adding to the available options. Or the GM decides to home-brew something.

None of your numbered reasons help make the setting a more immersive experience with verisimilitude, and that's what I want out of D&D-style games. Our priorities are just very different. That doesn't make either of us objectively correct in our opinions.

 

[The Stray]

None of your numbered reasons help make the setting a more immersive experience with verisimilitude, and that's what I want out of D&D-style games. Our priorities are just very different. That doesn't make either of us objectively correct in our opinions.

None of my numbered reasons are intended to, either, except for number 3, which is the only one you're focused on. That may be fine for you when you're world-building, but it's bad game design to focus only on Watsonian priorities. Verisimilitude and immersion are Watsonian concerns. There are other concerns that need to be considered, because you can stretch fluff over anything, even objectively bad mechanics.