Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Sorinth" data-source="post: 9597268" data-attributes="member: 7050650">Obviously subjective, but personally I don't want my NPCs to be loaded up to the degree PCs are. It adds a lot of complexity on the DM's side for very little real gain. And I don't even believe it helps the in fiction to do so, if the setting was a Magic University I wouldn't expect every student who is specializing as an Illusionist to have the Improved Illusions ability. I would expect that while one Illusionist student might focus on and gain Improved Illusions, another student is probably focused on invisibility effects and maybe gains the ability to turn objects of a certain size invisible, another will have focused on the Phantasmal Force/Killer type of effects and gain some bonus to psychic damage, etc... Having that variety of abilities makes the fiction much more believable then everyone running around with the exact same set of abilities.And while giving all of these as options for the PCs to take sounds nice in principle, it's a hell of a lot more work to balance things for PCs compared to balancing it for NPCs. Giving a unique ability to an NPC is fairly low effort to balance, and provides a high degree of believeability to the world. At the end of the day if a PC really wants some ability that only MM NPCs get, they can create a balanced homebrew spell/subclass with it so the only work on the DMs part is just looking at it and deciding whether it's balanced or not.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Sorinth, post: 9597268, member: 7050650"] Obviously subjective, but personally I don't want my NPCs to be loaded up to the degree PCs are. It adds a lot of complexity on the DM's side for very little real gain. And I don't even believe it helps the in fiction to do so, if the setting was a Magic University I wouldn't expect every student who is specializing as an Illusionist to have the Improved Illusions ability. I would expect that while one Illusionist student might focus on and gain Improved Illusions, another student is probably focused on invisibility effects and maybe gains the ability to turn objects of a certain size invisible, another will have focused on the Phantasmal Force/Killer type of effects and gain some bonus to psychic damage, etc... Having that variety of abilities makes the fiction much more believable then everyone running around with the exact same set of abilities. And while giving all of these as options for the PCs to take sounds nice in principle, it's a hell of a lot more work to balance things for PCs compared to balancing it for NPCs. Giving a unique ability to an NPC is fairly low effort to balance, and provides a high degree of believeability to the world. At the end of the day if a PC really wants some ability that only MM NPCs get, they can create a balanced homebrew spell/subclass with it so the only work on the DMs part is just looking at it and deciding whether it's balanced or not. [/QUOTE]

Verification