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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7138543" data-attributes="member: 22779">It's interesting that you bring up Caderly [MENTION=94143]Shasarak[/MENTION].  That's one of the few FR books I actually have read.  Although, it was a LONG time ago and I don't think I read all of them.  Wasn't there something about a killer yo-yo in those books?  Anyway, think about what you just said though.  Cadderly is the exception.  Most of the priests don't adventure, and never did.  Yet, funnily enough, there were higher level clerics than Cadderly at his temple.  How did they gain levels?  They specifically weren't adventurers, so, what did they kill or loot in order to gain several thousand xp points to go from 1st to, say, 3rd level.  Just to roll this back to the idea of NPC's using PC rules.  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] spells it out pretty well.  In AD&D, sure, you could use NPC rules for a humanoid (and only a humanoid - sorry, no class levels for your beholder), or, you could kinda sorta just bolt on some PC abilities onto an NPC, or, as was the much more common case, you could use a unique stat block.3e changed all that.  Not only did you have the option of adding class levels to everything, but, all monsters were built using the classes as a template.  A 4HD monster used the type of that monster to determine pretty much everything - stats plus stat boosts from levels, skills, number of feats.  Advance that same monster 4 more HD, and it was the same as adding 4 levels.  Monsters are a class in 3e.  Gaining HD in that monster type is exactly the same as gaining levels in a class.AD&D was far less codified and far more organic.  You gave the monster X HD, because it was supposed to be that tough.  Those HD only affected THAC0 and saving throws.  The special abilities of the monster were not in any way tied to HD.  It was all very ad hoc and guesswork.  For example, you might see something like HD:12+2-7 - a purely arbitrary number.  You cannot do that in 3e.  Well, you can, but, not by the rules.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />So, no, NPC's certainly were not governed by PC rules in AD&D.  3e is the outlier here in that it tried to codify NPC's.</blockquote>

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