Would Paizo Make a Better Steward for Our Hobby?

[pemerton]

The PC build rules are pretty much how people make NPCs for Runequest. Take a race, add a background, add a prior career, add any other relevant factors

<snip>

So if you want a wyvern who is a priest of the Sun Dragon, take a wyvern, add the priest career, stick the cult magic in there, and you're mostly done.

OK, I guess I wasn't thinking of RQ monsters as "races" in the relevant sense - because in 3E a gnoll, say, or a wyvern, even before you get to treat it as a "race" to which you can add class levels, has a "monster level" which dictate its mechanical features.

So in 3E there is a mechanical connection between (say) the gnoll's hit points (via its hit dice) and its skill bonuses and its feats, whereas in RQ those two things are distinct - you can give a monster/race, like a wyvern, a certain stat spread, and also a default skill spread, without having to jump through the 3E-style hoops of explaining how one is related to the other.

 

[Bluenose]

OK, I guess I wasn't thinking of RQ monsters as "races" in the relevant sense - because in 3E a gnoll, say, or a wyvern, even before you get to treat it as a "race" to which you can add class levels, has a "monster level" which dictate its mechanical features.

So in 3E there is a mechanical connection between (say) the gnoll's hit points (via its hit dice) and its skill bonuses and its feats, whereas in RQ those two things are distinct - you can give a monster/race, like a wyvern, a certain stat spread, and also a default skill spread, without having to jump through the 3E-style hoops of explaining how one is related to the other.

If I'm dealing with creatures that don't have fixed Int, I don't really make a distinction between "monster" and "race" in RQ. Though without anything equivalent to "level", abilities usually just have a base value, which then gets modified according to the stats of the creature in question and any bonuses from careers or prior experience. In practice, it's a lot easier when average values are given, since those are easy enough to modify when the stats deviate significantly from the average. A fat wyvern (higher than usual Size) may have enough bulk to hit harder, but also is going to have penalties to other skills such as Dodge/Evade.

 

[N'raac]

Hero System has been around in one form or another since the early 1980's, and as a point buy system has always applied the same build rules to PC's and NPC's (other than the occasional "not intended for PC's subsystem, and even there some groups have allowed them for PC's). "PC and NPC built the same way" was not a 3rd Ed innovation.

 

[TwoSix]

"Trap choices" is not a meaningful term in the context of modeling the PC concept without concern for mechanical optimization.* When your goal is modeling the PC concept first, then tweaking, then there are no "trap choices."

There's a school of thought in some games that these two concepts do not have to be orthogonal. Designing your character to fit your concept is the strongest mechanical option, because the mechanics are built to support narrative.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hero System has been around in one form or another since the early 1980's, and as a point buy system has always applied the same build rules to PC's and NPC's (other than the occasional "not intended for PC's subsystem, and even there some groups have allowed them for PC's). "PC and NPC built the same way" was not a 3rd Ed innovation.

In fairness, Hussar did basically admit that point that when he said it was new to non point-buy systems.

(Also, for precision's sake- Champions, the original form of HERO, debuted in 1981.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Doubled.

 

[Imaro]

There's a school of thought in some games that these two concepts do not have to be orthogonal. Designing your character to fit your concept is the strongest mechanical option, because the mechanics are built to support narrative.

Yes, but D&D has never been a game whose mechanics were specifically built to support narrative desires as opposed to gamist or simulationist. And, honestly I'm not sure it should ever be.

 

[billd91]

In fairness, Hussar did basically admit that point that when he said it was new to non point-buy systems.

(Also, for precision's sake- Champions, the original form of HERO, debuted in 1981.)

But even non-point buy systems like Villains and Vigilantes built villains like heroes too. So I'm still skeptical that is was really innovative in 3e.

 

[Hussar]

Hero System has been around in one form or another since the early 1980's, and as a point buy system has always applied the same build rules to PC's and NPC's (other than the occasional "not intended for PC's subsystem, and even there some groups have allowed them for PC's). "PC and NPC built the same way" was not a 3rd Ed innovation.

As DannyA said, I specified new to games that didn't use point buy. Point buy games have always (pretty much) built everything the same way. GURPS does it, and so does virtually every non-class based game.

But, I'm strugging to thing of a class based game that builds EVERYTHING in the game using the PC gen rules. Right from the ground up. Monster type is treated as a class - BAB progression, Save Progression, Skills, and HP are all based on the number of levels (measured by HD) that that creature has in that particular monster type.

To the point where humanoids are actually advanced specifically using PC rules and not through monster type. An orc has 4 HP because he's a 1st level Warrior, not because he's an orc.

This is a pretty big innovation for class based systems.

 

[N'raac]

Well, we certainly have "race and class" structures, but I don't think a dragon, a troll, a succubus, a ghoul or a gelatinous cube is reasonably considered to have been "built using the PC rules". Similarly, point buy games tend not to constrain the adversaries to the same build limits as the PC's, so do they really build NPC's exactly as PC's?

I also cannot think of any class-based game that would build all the monsters as classes. Maybe we could have made that jump instead of dividing race and class way back (Orc as a class, for example), but that ship has long since sailed. Squeezing monsters into "class level equivalents" has never worked that well all round.

Was the innovation (if there was one) 3e deciding you could add levels of Cleric to Goblins (pretty sure we had humanoid shamans before 3e, just not as clearly linked to the PC class rules), or whoever first decided we could have a Lich who is a Cleric, or even a different level Wizard than the standard?