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<blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 3926455" data-attributes="member: 3820">That's kind of a loaded question. The topic at hand seems closer to &quot;who keeps them all in check if there aren't as many powerful NPCs?&quot;For powerful NPCs to be a consistent problem in players' perception of how much they matter in the world, there are two factors at stake: magnitude, and frequency. The Forgotten Realms get the most flak for this sort of thing because there are both NPCs of orders of magnitude well above what the average campaign will ever see (unless I'm really misjudging just how many epic campaigns are out there), and there are lots of them, not just one or two. The Chosen of Mystra are probably being singled out in particular because not only are they really powerful, but there are so many of them that they have their own sub-grouping of &quot;ways to be a really powerful NPC&quot;. The optimal answer to the &quot;who keeps the evil in check&quot; question is typically &quot;enough NPCs to just barely handle it, until a significant variable arises, then you need PCs.&quot; WotC, and many fans, likely feel that the FR currently have &quot;more than enough NPCs to handle it&quot;, and are adjusting accordingly. The other solution would be to increase the level of evil threat so much that the current standard of NPCs is just barely holding it back, in which case I would assume the Forgotten Realms would wind up looking a lot like a heavy metal album cover. (Which would be kind of cool, but probably no more &quot;like the Forgotten Realms&quot; than a reduction in NPCs would be.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Barastrondo, post: 3926455, member: 3820"] That's kind of a loaded question. The topic at hand seems closer to "who keeps them all in check if there aren't [i]as many[/i] powerful NPCs?" For powerful NPCs to be a consistent problem in players' perception of how much they matter in the world, there are two factors at stake: magnitude, and frequency. The Forgotten Realms get the most flak for this sort of thing because there are both NPCs of orders of magnitude well above what the average campaign will ever see (unless I'm really misjudging just how many epic campaigns are out there), and there are lots of them, not just one or two. The Chosen of Mystra are probably being singled out in particular because not only are they really powerful, but there are so many of them that they have their own sub-grouping of "ways to be a really powerful NPC". The optimal answer to the "who keeps the evil in check" question is typically "enough NPCs to just barely handle it, until a significant variable arises, then you need PCs." WotC, and many fans, likely feel that the FR currently have "more than enough NPCs to handle it", and are adjusting accordingly. The other solution would be to increase the level of evil threat so much that the current standard of NPCs is just barely holding it back, in which case I would assume the Forgotten Realms would wind up looking a lot like a heavy metal album cover. (Which would be kind of cool, but probably no more "like the Forgotten Realms" than a reduction in NPCs would be.) [/QUOTE]

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