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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Stray" data-source="post: 9150254" data-attributes="member: 21691">My argument here is that the elf has a different metafictional purpose depending on who is playing them. If this is a character that's being passed through the hands of different players (GM included), I can see the case for them having the same build as a PC, but absent that, having them go through the same generation process as a PC strikes me as a lot of unnecessary work.Alrighty, I can see this perspective. I think the roles are different enough in game function to require a clear separation, though. We've all heard the sorts of horror stories that come from tables where the GM has decided to insert their own PC into a group. Clear boundaries between PC and NPC are a guard against this particular pitfall. This may or may not be a concern for you, depending on how cleanly you can separate yourself from your characters.The perils of GMPCs aside, a GM is still in the position where they are arbiter of an entire world. That's a large amount of stuff to keep track of at once, both in design and in play.Can we at least agree that, as a time-saving tool, considering NPCs a subset of monster works as a time-saving shortcut for people who might not have the free time/mental bandwidth to keep track of an entire teeming population.There's a trick in Manga* of variable granularity -- for most normal panels of a work, a thing (let's say a sword, in this example) is rendered in a simplified art style. However, when particular attention is paid to the thing (such as a close-up on the sword), we zoom in and, lo and behold, we see details pop into place! Then we go back to an action scene, and those details vanish...but the reader still "knows" those details are present. Their mind fills in the blank.[SPOILER="*"]and other visual media, too, but it's most prominent in Manga.[/SPOILER]What does this have to do with anything? Well, mechanics are the medium with which we paint characters in RPGs. And I'd argue that you can save yourself a lot of brushstrokes by only focusing on the NPC-to-PC details when and if they matter.But! You've already acknowledged you don't have an issue with treating monsters as monsters, and you don't have an issue with using approximations to get into a ballpark of equivalent PC abilities. Yes?So the real core of the contention is: should NPCs have access to abilities PCs can't get? Is the fictional life of the character bound forever to a 1-to-1 translation to PC mechanics, or should the DM have the freedom to paint their NPCs with any mechanics they see fit?Well, the the thing is, if your goal is fictional purity, neither PC nor monster rules are pure. They're both abstractions. There's no such thing as a "6th level Elven Thief," there's only this guy, of Elven descent, who has skills and abilities he's gained from a life of larceny and petty crime. He never "earned levels," he picked pockets, opened locks, searched for traps, and so on. The whole process of assigning levels to him in the first place is artifical and imprecise. It will not and cannot capture his nuances -- something will get lost in the translation from pure fictional entity to impure mechanical game constuct that can be manipulated by a player.Moreover, while PCs and the GM are playing a game together, they aren't playing the same game. It's a Player-vs-Environment system, and the GM is the Environment. So while the PC's mechanics are pencils and inks, the GM's mechanics are acrylics. They can both be used to depict the same character, but do so in vastly different ways and with different techniques.And this isn't even getting in to the sticky quandry of asking whether or not to consider monsters people. Because that, I think, is what the true crux of the issue is. Are the PC races the only people in the world, in an ontological or moral sense? The only beings with souls, minds, and free will?Hey, I've gone and made the same character in Mutants & Masterminds, FATE, Savage Worlds, Storyteller, ShadowRun, and a bunch of other systems. Some of the versions were closer to the conception than others, admittedly, but that was because the games the designers were trying to make were seeking to accomplish different goals and play outcomes. Fidelity to concept is more important than fidelity to a set of statistics.</blockquote>

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