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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Stray" data-source="post: 9149922" data-attributes="member: 21691">No, this is emphatically and empirically not the case. Because NPCs are not PCs. You yourself recognize that a distinction exists between PC and monster, but you constantly refuse to acknowledge how arbitrary your distinctions between "monster" and "PC-playable race" are -- You and [USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER] both.He was, however, correct about this. There is not daylight between "NPC" and "monster" -- as far as the game is concerned, they're the same entity. PC design and PC creation rules are there to provide tools for players to interact with the game world. NPCs and Monsters are there to challenge the PCs in various ways. The two functions are as different as night and day, and treating one set of tools as equivalent to the other is just a recipe for headaches, wasted effort, and unnecessary limitation in pursuit of fidelity to arbitrary standards of fictional purity.No. Every fictional character ever is just that -- fiction. They do not exist. An NPC does not turn into a PC when a Player chooses them as an avatar, a PC appears ex nihilo from the void, created whole cloth out of airy nothing and retroactively granted a past and a present. Fiction isn't real. This is a game and these are game pieces. Only people who've had a psychotic break from reality, like Tom Hanks in Mazes & Monsters, really believe otherwise. Pardieu didn't exist as some platonic ideal to be inhabited by Robbie Wheeling.The only stance that makes sense is to separate the character from the mechanics. They are not wedded together. This becomes crystal clear when you take a character and translate it across different game systems. You will quickly find yourself having to make choices about what is important -- fidelity to the character's history and general capabilities, or fidelity to the mechanics of the system you've chosen. Something will have to give. Either slavish devotion to mechanical purity, or the history and backstory of the character you say had to live the levels you've assigned to them.I mean, you don't even have to go outside D&D to see this in action -- just take the same character and translate it into every edition of the game. It's the same character, right? He had all those experiences and upbringing, right? So it should be relatively simple to create a character that is identical, in form and function, in every single edition of the game...right? Right?The very notion is absurd. 6 Levels mean very different things in each edition. Heck, you said "Thief" and not "Rogue," which most modern players wouldn't even recognize as it's own class. Doing this brings you into contact with The Ship of Theseus question -- what defines a thing? How much of a thing can be replaced and still be considered that thing? Or is the idea of the thing more important than the materials that make up the thing? (materials, in this context, being mechanics)If the idea of the NPC is important, then it doesn't actually matter what the mechanics are. It's all abstraction at the end of the day.</blockquote>

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