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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6482273" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not only is it a straw man, at this point it amounts to thread crapping.  It's really not my place or yours to tell another DM what rules that they need, how they should use them, or what sort of campaign that they should have.   More to the point though, having the same rules for PC's and NPC's is not necessarily and certainly not exclusively or even primarily a 'sim based idea'.   Even if it were the case that simply being a 'sim based idea' disqualified a rule as a good rule, which you seem to take for granted and I don't feel like quibbling with, we don't need to appeal sim ideas to justify having the same rules for PC's and NPC's.   For one thing, as a point of simple fact, PC's and NPC's pretty much do have the same rules.Can NPC's have classes?  Yes, they can.   Can NPC's have Strength or Intelligence?  Yes, they can.  Can NPC's have proficiencies or skills or use equipment or anything else?   Yes, they can.   Do NPC's make attack rolls or saving throws or skill checks?  Yes, they can and do.   In short, 5e is already a system where NPCs and PCs utilize the same rules.  It's not necessarily the case that this is for some desire for process simulation.  Quite simply, the main reason for this is probably that it's just a lot simpler to have one set of rules for both PC's and NPC's instead of two whole sets of rules plus some sort of mapping or translation between them.   Imagine the annoyance of having different combat rules for PC's and NPC's and then trying to translate for problems like PC's attacking PC's or NPC's attacking NPC's.  Imagine the additional page count this would necessitate.   You seem to be laboring under a common misperception - that having exceptions to the rules makes your rules set simpler rather than more complicated.  I get to 'enjoy' the fruits of this misperception all the time in my daily work, as I have to explain to business analysts and project managers that when they write rules to treat two things differently, they aren't in fact making it easier for the developers to exclude something and treat it as a special case, but in fact making it more complicated.   If you are doing something like video game development, it isn't in fact simpler to give the PC's and the NPC's different powers.   It's in fact simpler and easier to give NPC's the ability to use the same spells available to the PC's, since if you have to create abilities for the PCs that effect the environment then its relatively little cost to allow the NPCs to access these routines compared to creating whole separate systems for the NPCs.   This is why as often as not lately in cRPGs you see a trend to make NPC's and PC's belong to the same class of objects and leveraging the same special abilities.  It's not out of the desire to make the inner lives of innkeepers make since, but out of a desire to get the most content for the labor put into the game.As for the rest, it's not my place to decide whether NPC's have downtime or not or what makes for a fun scenario.   If a group decides to run a contest between a PC innkeeper and a NPC innkeeper, to see which can turn a profit and become the greatest innkeep in the village, that's their decision.  If you say, "Heh, that's not D&D!", what you are really saying is 'badwrongfun'.   If a player decides that, having recreated the labors of Theseus, he now wishes to leave retainers in the inns to ensure travelers on the road will hitherto have a place of rest and succor, and further that he desires that the retainers each give him 1/3rd of the profits, then that's all well and good as well.  All the sudden, NPC's have downtime!  Of course NPC's have downtime.  Arguably, all most NPCs have is downtime!   The important point isn't whether NPCs have downtime, the important point is that most of us won't play the sort of game where the details of the NPCs downtime matters most of the time.  But it doesn't make the rule better if it is of no use in the situations where the NPCs downtime matters.  Whether its the sort of game I want to play or not has no bearing on the strength and quality of the rules or how we should evaluate them.</blockquote>

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