Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
I support noncombat encounters, and the ability to level up at a standard pace by engaging them. Noncombat encounters happen often enough in my campaigns.In our games, the most notable moments aren't in combat. We have entire sessions without attack rolls. (And then we attack a series of fortifications that takes 7 sessions of combat so in all things there is balance.)
Do those sessions count for nothing in your games? How does the Peace paladin advance? The Face character? The ghostly scout that is never seen but sees all? The cat burglar whose thefts aren't discovered until days later?
Those same events would cause Non PCs to level up. The merchant who gets better at haggling in their 40s than they were at 20. The elf that after five centuries of resolving disputes can almost smell a lie.
It's not like it's more work than bespoke npcs. I find classes easier. I've been using PCGen or it's successors for like 20 years. I want the guild master of a big city to be five levels higher than the lowest guild member. Click the stat roller until I get a set that doesn't suck, set the level, assign stats.
If an npc gets pulled into shenanigans and I level them up. The app prompts what to assign.
Bespoke is either a slapdash result made unpredictable based on how little effort I put in it or more work than it's worth, IMO.
I keep a small set of "stock" classed npc so if something unexpected happens midgame, I use those to adjudicate and, if it looks like a persistent character, I make a more detailed version. If not I note the name & demographics and which stock npc block I used (noble 5, expert 1, etc).
At the same time, when players opt for noncombat, the combat features of their classes go unused. The noncombat challenges are often about backgrounds and skills.