NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 2319163" data-attributes="member: 463">Strange - I do the same as you - my current campaign started at 1st level, I use 1/2 XP (Lost City of Barakus) and the demographics noted above, with many NPCs in the 2-5 range.  I haven't had any problem of the PCs randomly attacking the grizzled mercenary at the bar.  In their starting frontier village I did mention "most of these villagers have more hit points than you" and the sky didn't collapse.  <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=":)" />  - Even a 3rd level Expert with 12 hit points would rather a Fighter-1 PC with 11 hit points did his fighting for him.  There was one event where the 2nd level PCs ran into a squad of 9 dragoon guards hunting an escaped slave the PCs were sheltering, the Wizard player did say "We could take these guys" - which had me slightly worried (the dragoons were 6 War-2, 2 War-3, 1 War-4, probably about EL 5-6 over party level) but sensibly the PCs decided to negotiate. The PCs are now 3rd level, making the fighter-types individually tougher than all but the toughest 'mundane' soldiery.  I've had only good experiences from using my NPC demographics so far, it gives the setting much more versimilitude.  Example - a raiding band of 15 orcs (12 War-1 2 War-2 1 War-3) attacked the village; the PCs certainly helped minimise human casulaties as they drove off the orcs, but the ex-mercenary innkeeper NPC couple Vali Ftr-5 & Jeanna Ftr-4 were clearly far from helpless in the fight.  The players got the impression that while the village might have survived without them, far more people would have died than the one War-3 soldier who was actually killed.</blockquote>

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