Mudfarming, Commoners Inevitability gain exp

[liquidformat]

Because we like tangents I opened up a thread if we want to continue scratching our heads over how commoners gain levels original discussion (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?581177-The-LA-assignment-thread-Making-monster-PCs-VI-able/page22).
Farming Encounter list for reference:

Plowing a field - very strenuous activity that can take multiple days or even weeks. I would see an argument for gaining exp/field plowed
seeding a field - less strenuous but some seeds require more effort than others, also dependent on soil quality. Again potential exp/field seeded
pest management (toads, frogs, locusts, rats, snakes..) - um standard random encounter exp on the farm right here! 'Thar be a plague of locust coming get me my swatting hammer!"
Feeding animals - daily morning activity
healing an injured animal - potent extraordinary encounter right there.
finding lost animals - random encounter maybe? 'Betsy ran away again we need to find her before the wolves do!'
foraging for herbs - depends on level of danger involved could be an adventure arch for commoners or just normal daily hustle and bustle...
protecting livestock and plants from things (wild dogs, wild boar, wolves, thieves, goblins...) - again farm based encounter going from rough to epic farm ending commoner encounter...
managing farm hands - later on hire level commoner handles the people working for him, hard to say if this could get exp?
harvesting - pretty rough and effort intensive activity seems like potential for exp
transporting and selling farm produce. - again anywhere from same stuff different day to an adventure arch...
dealing with landlord - hopefully not an adventure arch but hey lots of evil money grubbing landlords out there...
repair/maintaining tools - probably no exp here, move along...


I personally don't think it is reasonable that commoners, experts, and nobles can only gain exp through combat, that seems unreasonable. So sure they aren't gaining a lot of exp and maybe only 1exp/week for all the random things they go through but that still adds up...

[Malroth]

Its why i put most NPCs at lv 4-5 unless they're exceptionally weak or young.

[javcs]

The original discussion started on the page before the one currently linked in the OP.

--

At any rate, if someone earns an average of 1XP per day - which isn't really that much - they gain more than enough XP to level up 3 times by the time they're 20.

To be sure, in one's earliest years, XP gains will be minimal, but education, training, and/or apprenticing will improve those gains significantly.
And, to be fair, there will be diminishing returns, since they won't be dealing with "encounters"/XP-worthy events of ever-increasing difficulty as they level as Adventurers/PCs do on top of the increasing XP costs to level. But diminishing returns only really kicks in after the level distribution tables are blown to hell.

[unseenmage]

Admittedly the D&D world is more like a nightmare simulator for the basic human.
They're food for practically everything and an incubator for the young of everything else.

On top of that it's a world that's supposed to model a primitive pre medicine, pre hygiene, pre public education, pre private freedoms era.
It's an ill, filthy, ignorant, indentured life.

So finding appropriately scaling challenges might not be that hard in a world with such low life expectancy and survival rates.
Successfully birthing a child becomes an epic feat (the event, not the game element).
Leaving town at the first whisper of plague becomes a momentous life saving decision.
Just not getting eaten when going to the city for supplies is impressive to the point of absurdity given the encounter charts.

[Sereg]

I agree that everyone automatically gains xp over time, and this is why I rule it as impossible for a middle aged person to be below level 6 etc.

[Biggus]

My understanding is that commoners do gain XP, but veeery slowly: the average person doesn't reach more than level 2 or 3 in their entire life, and some never get past level 1. Also, most people are effectively "level 0" until they reach the age of majority. So that comes out at about 1XP per 1-2 weeks on average, based on the human lifespan. It would make sense for the longer-lived races to be higher level in old age though, although mostly extremely unoptimised.

EDIT: in fact, it says this in the DMG, p.107. "most commoners never attain higher than 2nd or 3rd level in their whole lives".

[GreatWyrmGold]

First, I'd like to quote a post I made in the original thread:


In D&D, you don't get experience for every creature killed, every social encounter, every challenge—only exceptional ones. A game where the DM handed out XP for winning arguments and other common challenges would be much different than most (and not just because the DM was rewarding things other than fighting).
Of course, the "exceptional challenge" clause makes it inconvenient to figure out how much XP peasants "should" be getting, since "exceptional" is really tough to define. That said, it does make sense that some people would be getting vastly more XP than others. Some people are exceptionally unlucky, and run into exceptional challenges on a regular basis, but most people probably don't run into anything exceptionally challenging for years at a time.
Short version for people quoting me: You don't get XP for every little action, only exceptional challenges.


Responding specifically to the Farming Encounter List:

Basic farm work is strenuous. That doesn't make it challenging*, and certainly not exceptionally challenging. (Compare e.g. overland travel—often strenuous, but not worth XP until you encounter wandering monsters and the like.) I could see turning raw wilderness into a farm earning you some "quest XP," but you wouldn't get that every year.
Pest management only counts as combat if the pests fight back. If they don't, it's basically just another strenuous but non-challenging task.
PCs don't get XP for healing each others' wounds; why would farmers get XP for healing their farm animals?
Finding lost animals is not automatically exceptional enough to warrant XP. That said, if finding the lost animal took some exceptional effort for whatever reason, it could be worth "quest XP".
Foraging for herbs: How could this be "an adventure arch for commoners"? It's just another thing you do! Not everything is an adventure, not even if you're an adventurer!
Protecting livestock from predators could definitely earn XP.
Adventurers can't hire people to do adventures and get XP from that. Why would people get XP from hiring people to do things that don't earn XP? (An exceptional labor negotiation encounter could get some XP, but it has to be exceptional, not just basic haggling.)
Dealing with the landlord works basically the same way as dealing with labor, only in reverse.



*I mean, it's difficult, but that's not the same as challenging. I realize they're synonyms, but I'm using "challenging" to mean a fairly certain kind of difficulty.




Also, most people are effectively "level 0" until they reach the age of majority. So that comes out at about 1XP per 1-2 weeks on average, based on the human lifespan.
How many XP does it take to go from level 0 to level 1? It sounds like you think it's around 1,000, which strikes me as an odd assumption, given that that's the cost to go from level 1 to 2 and XP costs go up with each level.
I'd also argue that childhood doesn't work the same way as adulthood, because I have been both a child and an adult. Learning the basics of a skill or a skill-set is almost as simple as watching someone else do it and pitching in when they need a spare set of hands; mastering a skill or skill-set requires a lot of practice. That's the difference between level 1 and higher levels.

[AvatarVecna]

One of the interesting consequences of giving NPCs CP based on how long they've been doing their job is that some of the fluff for longer lived races (the "dwarves and elves are just better than humans" stuff) becomes more codified.

[Luccan]

Even if you want to say commoners gain enough XP in their daily life to level a few times (and I think that makes sense) it's clearly not intended within the game itself that most regular people will pose much of a threat to even low level PCs. Hence they must not get much XP. I mean, if the most you can expect out of the average horde of goblins are level 8 leaders (and goblins probably face level appropriate threats and challenges more often, being a very combat focused society), then I imagine the average commoner or expert or even most aristocrats probably only reach level 3 in their life time. It might be slightly higher for warriors and aristocrats more involved in military matters, but then they probably die more often, so who can say. But seriously, if a level 2 fighter in his prime can routinely get beaten up by middle aged farmers, there's something screwy with your XP calculations. The way I see it, for NPC classed individuals, level is more of a measurement of skill.

To paraphrase the DMG, there's a difference between a blacksmith that's a 3rd level commoner and one that's a 20th level expert. But in most cases, it's intended to represent a difference in skill at a task, not that the world's greatest blacksmith has also become a mighty warrior spending his life hunched over an anvil. It's just that 3.X doesn't represent that very well. All that to say, I think you should keep the majority of people, especially those with commoner levels, under level 5.

[Albions_Angel]

Im with GreatWyrm on this. Being a medieval farmer doesnt net you D&D XP because doing farming as a PC also doesnt net you XP (prof farmer during down time...). Its a different sort of experience.

Levels and experience in D&D improve your encounter abilities. Your health goes up, your skills go up, your attack bonus, saves, even damage goes up. You get class abilities that help you with either skills or combat. Some of this MAY help you be a better farmer, but not as directly as it helps you become a better monster killer/king charmer.

Similarly, I am sure commoners do earn a lot of experience being a farmer, but it goes into the farmer subclass, which doesnt get them more health, more saves, more skills, but does make them better at spotting when the turnips are ripe. They are orthogonal tracks for experience. One called XP (for combat and stuff) and one called... um... experience I guess?

I make my NPCs level 2-10 (2 for peasants, 3 for basic craftsmen and shop keepers, 5 for guards, 6 for hedge mages and alchemists, 7 for generic battle mages, 10 for soldiers), and then special NPCs get class levels and go up to about level 16. But thats because I wanted a certain feel to my world where even attacking a farmsted is dangerous for a low level party. The theme of my world is more viking than it is medieval. You wander through Britain in AD 600, you will have a bad time attacking a farm, as everyone guards their own plot of land. You do the same in AD 1200 and now feudal lords protect the farms, and the peasants just farm them. So in my world, peasants got experience from surviving raids, and defending their land. Not from working it.

If you want to illustrate commoner experience gain, do it in bonus skill points that can exceed level cap. A 20 year old farmer will be a level 1 commoner with 4 ranks in prof farmer and maybe a few ranks in knowledge geog, while a 50 year old farmer (human for all of this btw) might have 8 ranks in prof farmer, and 5 ranks in knowledge geog. But he is still a level 1 commoner and still falls over in a light breeze.

[ShurikVch]

From the "10 signs the DM is too nasty and wicked":
Most of Commoners have 20 HD, and many of them using Power Word Kill.

[Mechalich]

I feel like, to add to GreatWyrmGold's point, that d20 D&D has an in-game mechanical mechanism for people undergoing countless events that could potentially involve rolls, but not gaining XP: Taking 10. Most people in D&D game worlds, including adventurers, are taking 10 something like 99% of the time, and most of the rest of the time they are super thorough and take 20. Adventurers take 10 when wandering around town, when conducting mundane camping tasks, maintaining equipment, and countless others things that they don't gain XP for and so do normal people. XP only comes into play when a character faces a situation in which they would actually roll a skill (and attacking is, ultimately, just a highly specialized form of skill).

This can probably most easily be illustrated using the example of an artisan, like a blacksmith. The average village blacksmith spends his days making the same things over and over. Nails, pots, horseshoes, scythes, etc, and this produces no real demand on his skills. He occasionally gets given a more difficult task like making a fine knife that still lies with his capabilities but might take multiple attempts to get right. Very rarely he gets commissioned to do something he doesn't really know how to do - like make a complex lock or repair an exotic weapon and has to actually roll this. Equally rarely the village faces some severe crisis and maybe he has to pump out as many spears as possible to arm the militia before orcs arrive and this also requires a roll. some of these rolls will be failures, some of them will be successes, and XP will be attained but unique jobs and immanent crises are rare events and might be experienced only a couple of times each year. Also, they're unlikely to scale with level. A blacksmith who's a Level 1 Expert might churn through CR 1 smithing challenges at a rate of one a quarter, and thus hit level two in 3-4 years, but as a level 2 blacksmith he's still going to face mostly level 1 smithing challenges, so level gain is going to go down in rate very rapidly and by level 5-6 most artisans will struggle to find any challenges capable of providing them XP at all unless they go work for a high-ranking noble with unusual demands - but even the leading nobility only need so many suits of armor, so the kingdom can only have so many master armorers. There's only so much challenge to go around.

[noob]

There is level 24 commoners for a reason: when on your trip to town you have to defeat a tarrasque, retreat from a dragon, encounter a pyro cryo learnean supersonic flying hydra demilich (can not be decapitated by lack of a neck) and somehow still survive you probably gain one or more levels.
Then there is all the hard daily encounters in your farm like subduing the tarrasque after your house cat rampaged so much it freed the tarrasque(then subduing the house cat which sadly is not nearly as much rewarded by the xp system) surviving the constant stream of billions of bandits with elaborate siege weaponry, massive caster support and generals so charismatic each bandit is ready to die for the cause of banditism,(it is how bandits survive: else they would get killed by the local dragon, the local itilidths, the local vecna sect populated with demiliches, the hordes of crazy balors that all carries wells of many worlds and tries to put spheres of annihilation within those and so on)

[Sereg]

First, I'd like to quote a post I made in the original thread:


Short version for people quoting me: You don't get XP for every little action, only exceptional challenges.


Responding specifically to the Farming Encounter List:

Basic farm work is strenuous. That doesn't make it challenging*, and certainly not exceptionally challenging. (Compare e.g. overland travel—often strenuous, but not worth XP until you encounter wandering monsters and the like.) I could see turning raw wilderness into a farm earning you some "quest XP," but you wouldn't get that every year.
Pest management only counts as combat if the pests fight back. If they don't, it's basically just another strenuous but non-challenging task.
PCs don't get XP for healing each others' wounds; why would farmers get XP for healing their farm animals?
Finding lost animals is not automatically exceptional enough to warrant XP. That said, if finding the lost animal took some exceptional effort for whatever reason, it could be worth "quest XP".
Foraging for herbs: How could this be "an adventure arch for commoners"? It's just another thing you do! Not everything is an adventure, not even if you're an adventurer!
Protecting livestock from predators could definitely earn XP.
Adventurers can't hire people to do adventures and get XP from that. Why would people get XP from hiring people to do things that don't earn XP? (An exceptional labor negotiation encounter could get some XP, but it has to be exceptional, not just basic haggling.)
Dealing with the landlord works basically the same way as dealing with labor, only in reverse.



*I mean, it's difficult, but that's not the same as challenging. I realize they're synonyms, but I'm using "challenging" to mean a fairly certain kind of difficulty.




How many XP does it take to go from level 0 to level 1? It sounds like you think it's around 1,000, which strikes me as an odd assumption, given that that's the cost to go from level 1 to 2 and XP costs go up with each level.
I'd also argue that childhood doesn't work the same way as adulthood, because I have been both a child and an adult. Learning the basics of a skill or a skill-set is almost as simple as watching someone else do it and pitching in when they need a spare set of hands; mastering a skill or skill-set requires a lot of practice. That's the difference between level 1 and higher levels.

Actually, it's implied that every task does grant xp, but non challenging ones grant less than 0.5 xp, which is rounded down for pcs for simplicity.

If you want to use "challenging" though, you are out of luck, as it IS defined by how strenuous it is. A moderately challenging task is supposed to be one that can be repeated exactly four times before requiring rest. However, commoner professions DO enforce rest. As such, by DnD definition, a day of labour would give do equivalent to 4 challenging encounters. As I have just convinced myself to raise average level in my setting even higher.

[AvatarVecna]

Actually that's a good point: ome of tue consequences ofnrandom settlement gemeration rules is that commoners are not only by far the most frequent class presemt, they're also generally by far the highest-level present. They got that XP somehow.

[zlefin]

some things I'd expect to result in real xp gain:

dealing with dangerous disease/plagues.
dealing with major natural disasters (severe blizzard, hurricane)
especially things that lead to crop failure/starvation risk.

dealing with ornery animals (death amongst farmers, while rare, does happen some both in modern and ancient times, it's definitely an occupation with some risks)

construction/housing accidents

dealing with major fires.

[Quarian Rex]

I think that the real question here is 'Do you actually want the consequences of this in your campaign?'. D&D of any edition is really based around the idea of the base population being almost completely un-leveled, with only notable exceptions (heroes, villains, and rulers) acquiring any actual personal power, despite what may be printed in an oft-ignored chart in he back of the DMG.

If you choose to not ignore that chart (god help you) then you have to accept a number of consequences that are not accounted for in any setting that I'm aware of (at least if you want to maintain any sense of 'realism' in your campaign. Why else would you be thinking about this sort of thing?). First, you have to accept that either the vast majority of the population are village-idiot level morons (for choosing to actually put level increases into commoner), or that people in your world are incapable of choosing their class levels/multiclassing (and so unable to choose anything but commoner). Then you would have to admit that passive xp gain is a thing in your campaign world. Every period of downtime or narrative time-skip now has to be accounted for in the xp totals of the PCs. If the daily life of a commoner is enough to be rewarded then the downtime shenanigans of PCs should be vastly greater, to say nothing of the xp rewards for spell research and other such great works.

Now you need to completely restructure every society in your world to be a gerontocracy. Not only do old people gain in sensory acuity (Wis), cognitive capacity (Int), and general attractiveness (Cha), but they actually have gains in physical durability (HD) as well as martial (BAB) and spiritual (saves and skill caps) capability of several magnitudes over someone in the 'prime' of their life, much like dragons of myth and legend . A greatsword hit that would outright kill an 18 y/o soldier could easily be shrugged off with a chuckle by his (great)grandfather. In this world all young people should be back on their farms/homesteads slowly grinding up xp and breeding, while their hyper-competent nigh transhuman elder relatives handily take care of any threats. If the young don't like the status quo they are effectively powerless to change it. Even the ones who brave the dangers of the world to power-level as adventurers will have to come back to face the ever increasing hordes of super-geezers (increasing HD and saves mean there is actually less chance of death as one gets older on this world).

This may not be what you want, but it would be the consequence of these mechanical realities. Is pursuing this in an actual game really worth it? Are you (and your players) comfortable with ignoring these consequences? What do you think it adds to gameplay?

[Biggus]

How many XP does it take to go from level 0 to level 1? It sounds like you think it's around 1,000, which strikes me as an odd assumption, given that that's the cost to go from level 1 to 2 and XP costs go up with each level.
I'd also argue that childhood doesn't work the same way as adulthood, because I have been both a child and an adult. Learning the basics of a skill or a skill-set is almost as simple as watching someone else do it and pitching in when they need a spare set of hands; mastering a skill or skill-set requires a lot of practice. That's the difference between level 1 and higher levels.

I didn't mean that getting to level 1 by the age of majority comes out at 1XP per 1-2 week, I meant that as far as I'm aware you're not normally assumed to gain XP at all as a child, for similar reasons to those you give. javcs said


if someone earns an average of 1XP per day - which isn't really that much - they gain more than enough XP to level up 3 times by the time they're 20.


which assumes that you start gaining XP from the day you're born: I was disagreeing with that. I probably could have made that clearer to be fair.

The 1XP per 1-2 weeks figure was based on the assumption that you start gaining XP at around age 15, and live to perhaps 55-65 as "Most people in the world at large die from pestilence, accidents, infections, or violence before getting to venerable age".

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm#age

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Actually, it's implied that every task does grant xp, but non challenging ones grant less than 0.5 xp, which is rounded down for pcs for simplicity.

If you want to use "challenging" though, you are out of luck, as it IS defined by how strenuous it is. A moderately challenging task is supposed to be one that can be repeated exactly four times before requiring rest. However, commoner professions DO enforce rest. As such, by DnD definition, a day of labour would give do equivalent to 4 challenging encounters.

There's actually more to a "challenging encounter" than that. That definition would make a few hours of anything including sitting around a challenging encounter as you will need to go to sleep at the end of the day.

You're supposed to be able to do 4ish challenging encounters because each encounter is supposed to take ~20% of your resources. After a full day of farm labor a skilled farmer has hopefully taken no HP damage and hasn't used and significant consumables and has no spells of similar 1/day abilities they have consumed ~0% of their party resources meaning they had only trivial encounters.

[Pippa the Pixie]

It's simply put: the the game the D&D is. D&D is a combat adventure game with the focus on a small group of people. And that is it.

Commoners and the vast majority of NPCs are there as background and support for the player characters.

The vast majority of NPCs are pure role playing characters: they need no game mechanics. They just need a role playing write up. This type of NPC will never do anything using game mechanics.

A small number of NPC will directly interact with the player characters and use game mechanics. And, for the most part, this type of NPC will just use the player character game mechanic rules.

The rest that are left really only need mechanics if they are caught in the ''crossfire" of the mechanical game. This is what 3X tried to do....poorly...with the NPC classes. But having classes that can only get XP by combat, that can't engage in combat, is stupid.

It's just the tip of an iceberg to a whole other Non-D&D game. A game where characters have classes and can gain xp by doing this and over coming challanges with all most zero combat.

And such a game would be a lot less character focused, and much more focused on a bigger picture. And it would look at lot more like SimCity or other such simulation type games. Nothing even close to D&D.

[Sereg]

I think that the real question here is 'Do you actually want the consequences of this in your campaign?'. D&D of any edition is really based around the idea of the base population being almost completely un-leveled, with only notable exceptions (heroes, villains, and rulers) acquiring any actual personal power, despite what may be printed in an oft-ignored chart in he back of the DMG.

If you choose to not ignore that chart (god help you) then you have to accept a number of consequences that are not accounted for in any setting that I'm aware of (at least if you want to maintain any sense of 'realism' in your campaign. Why else would you be thinking about this sort of thing?). First, you have to accept that either the vast majority of the population are village-idiot level morons (for choosing to actually put level increases into commoner), or that people in your world are incapable of choosing their class levels/multiclassing (and so unable to choose anything but commoner). Then you would have to admit that passive xp gain is a thing in your campaign world. Every period of downtime or narrative time-skip now has to be accounted for in the xp totals of the PCs. If the daily life of a commoner is enough to be rewarded then the downtime shenanigans of PCs should be vastly greater, to say nothing of the xp rewards for spell research and other such great works.

Now you need to completely restructure every society in your world to be a gerontocracy. Not only do old people gain in sensory acuity (Wis), cognitive capacity (Int), and general attractiveness (Cha), but they actually have gains in physical durability (HD) as well as martial (BAB) and spiritual (saves and skill caps) capability of several magnitudes over someone in the 'prime' of their life, much like dragons of myth and legend . A greatsword hit that would outright kill an 18 y/o soldier could easily be shrugged off with a chuckle by his (great)grandfather. In this world all young people should be back on their farms/homesteads slowly grinding up xp and breeding, while their hyper-competent nigh transhuman elder relatives handily take care of any threats. If the young don't like the status quo they are effectively powerless to change it. Even the ones who brave the dangers of the world to power-level as adventurers will have to come back to face the ever increasing hordes of super-geezers (increasing HD and saves mean there is actually less chance of death as one gets older on this world).

This may not be what you want, but it would be the consequence of these mechanical realities. Is pursuing this in an actual game really worth it? Are you (and your players) comfortable with ignoring these consequences? What do you think it adds to gameplay?

My campaigns have always gone with the assumption that the levelling capabilities of pcs is completely normal. And so there are plenty of high level characters. Including epic level commoners. In fact, I rule that monsters with INT of 3 or higher are literally incapable of not having class levels, unless they are children. I like the world having that level of background power (and yes, you are incapable of choosing your class without training), (but I also have ruled that every class has advantages over others, so commoner is a bit different).


There's actually more to a "challenging encounter" than that. That definition would make a few hours of anything including sitting around a challenging encounter as you will need to go to sleep at the end of the day.

You're supposed to be able to do 4ish challenging encounters because each encounter is supposed to take ~20% of your resources. After a full day of farm labor a skilled farmer has hopefully taken no HP damage and hasn't used and significant consumables and has no spells of similar 1/day abilities they have consumed ~0% of their party resources meaning they had only trivial encounters.

Fair enough. So, it would be a lot longer than a day, but they still do use up resources over time and are thus earning xp.

[Remuko]

I think that the real question here is 'Do you actually want the consequences of this in your campaign?'. D&D of any edition is really based around the idea of the base population being almost completely un-leveled, with only notable exceptions (heroes, villains, and rulers) acquiring any actual personal power, despite what may be printed in an oft-ignored chart in he back of the DMG.

If you choose to not ignore that chart (god help you) then you have to accept a number of consequences that are not accounted for in any setting that I'm aware of (at least if you want to maintain any sense of 'realism' in your campaign. Why else would you be thinking about this sort of thing?). First, you have to accept that either the vast majority of the population are village-idiot level morons (for choosing to actually put level increases into commoner), or that people in your world are incapable of choosing their class levels/multiclassing (and so unable to choose anything but commoner). Then you would have to admit that passive xp gain is a thing in your campaign world. Every period of downtime or narrative time-skip now has to be accounted for in the xp totals of the PCs. If the daily life of a commoner is enough to be rewarded then the downtime shenanigans of PCs should be vastly greater, to say nothing of the xp rewards for spell research and other such great works.

Now you need to completely restructure every society in your world to be a gerontocracy. Not only do old people gain in sensory acuity (Wis), cognitive capacity (Int), and general attractiveness (Cha), but they actually have gains in physical durability (HD) as well as martial (BAB) and spiritual (saves and skill caps) capability of several magnitudes over someone in the 'prime' of their life, much like dragons of myth and legend . A greatsword hit that would outright kill an 18 y/o soldier could easily be shrugged off with a chuckle by his (great)grandfather. In this world all young people should be back on their farms/homesteads slowly grinding up xp and breeding, while their hyper-competent nigh transhuman elder relatives handily take care of any threats. If the young don't like the status quo they are effectively powerless to change it. Even the ones who brave the dangers of the world to power-level as adventurers will have to come back to face the ever increasing hordes of super-geezers (increasing HD and saves mean there is actually less chance of death as one gets older on this world).

This may not be what you want, but it would be the consequence of these mechanical realities. Is pursuing this in an actual game really worth it? Are you (and your players) comfortable with ignoring these consequences? What do you think it adds to gameplay?


I dont think this is as big an issue as you make it out to be. The average commoner will have 10-11 Str Dex and Con in their youth. The Great Grandpa is probably rocking a -3 penalty to his Con at this point meaning he would likely not even have 20 hp depending on his level. So yeah a 8-10 hp lvl 1 soldier might die to the hit that doesnt kill the grandpa but its not that massive a gap. likewise the penalties to Str Dex and Con from aging offset the saves and attack bonus a bit (elderly commoners will have decent will saves from their wisdom tho).

I checked the aging and commoner charts and an 11 wisdom, level 20 commoner of Venerable age will be rocking a +8 will save. +10 BAB but with -6 penalty to their str from aging meaning they likely have a Str of 4. So a +7 to hit with whatever pitiful thing he can manage to lift to be able to swing. The -6 to Dex and Con mean -3 to Fort and Ref so those saves will only be +3, barely better than the good saves of a lvl 1 character, and this is a lvl 20 commoner. That Con penalty also means hes only getting 1hp per HD (20d4 - 60 HP).

So yeah based on the info above I think you might have exaggerated a bit just how much of a "problem" this makes. Lvl 2 PCs could likely handle a lvl 20 commoner fairly easily. Probably even Level 1 PCs thanks to action economy advantage, tbh.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Actually, it's implied that every task does grant xp, but non challenging ones grant less than 0.5 xp, which is rounded down for pcs for simplicity.
Where?


If you want to use "challenging" though, you are out of luck, as it IS defined by how strenuous it is. A moderately challenging task is supposed to be one that can be repeated exactly four times before requiring rest. However, commoner professions DO enforce rest. As such, by DnD definition, a day of labour would give do equivalent to 4 challenging encounters. As I have just convinced myself to raise average level in my setting even higher.
That implies that two hours of overland travel, spell research, or crafting should count as a challenging encounter. Yet PCs don't get XP for any of that, do they?
Challenging encounters are strenuous; this does not mean that strenuous encounters are challenging.



Fair enough. So, it would be a lot longer than a day, but they still do use up resources over time and are thus earning xp.
A PC spending a month carousing in local taverns is also using up resources. Does that PC get XP for that?



First, you have to accept that either the vast majority of the population are village-idiot level morons (for choosing to actually put level increases into commoner), or that people in your world are incapable of choosing their class levels/multiclassing (and so unable to choose anything but commoner).
...which is why I've always wished the NPC classes had some kind of class features that would make them better farmers/laborers/craftsmen than, say, a barbarian or a rogue.
Given the complete lack of NPC classes in 5e, I've been thinking of brewing up one or two with such class features. Of course, given that NPCs don't seem consistently bound by the same class/level/ability restrictions as PCs, it might be pointless.

[Blue Jay]

First, you have to accept that either the vast majority of the population are village-idiot level morons (for choosing to actually put level increases into commoner), or that people in your world are incapable of choosing their class levels/multiclassing (and so unable to choose anything but commoner).

This feels like a very metagame-y approach to mechanics here. Levels and classes are just abstractions to represent what a character's skills and abilities are, so a guy with 7 levels in commoner is a guy whose abilities and experiences are best represented by giving him 7 levels of commoner.


Then you would have to admit that passive xp gain is a thing in your campaign world.

Not necessarily. If you were to say something like, "Adventurers gain XP for adventuring; commoners gain XP for common-ing," I don't really see any problems with that (other than the obvious grammatical problem with using "common" as a verb).

I also don't think it's fair to call this whole thing "passive XP gain." The idea isn't that everyone should just slowly accrue XP over time: the idea is that we should assume that everyone is at least occasionally facing challenges that are worth XP, and we can kind of simulate that with a simple formula like "1 XP / day."


Now you need to completely restructure every society in your world to be a gerontocracy. Not only do old people gain in sensory acuity (Wis), cognitive capacity (Int), and general attractiveness (Cha), but they actually have gains in physical durability (HD) as well as martial (BAB) and spiritual (saves and skill caps) capability of several magnitudes over someone in the 'prime' of their life, much like dragons of myth and legend.

There's a decent argument for that. But, the gerontocracy may not be all that inevitable, because there are also penalties that come with old age. An old guy who gets +3 Wis from his old age is also taking -6 Con from his old age. So, consider a 1st-level young guy and a 7th-level old guy who both start with 11's in all stats. The 1st-level young guy has a total attack bonus of +0, 1d6 damage with a club, base saves of +0/+0/+0, AC 10, 4 hit points, and 11 in all stats. The 7th-level old guy has a total attack bonus of +0 (+3 BAB, -3 Str), 1d6-3 damage with a club, base saves of -1/-1/+4, AC 7, 7 hit points, and Str/Dex/Con 5, Int/Wis/Cha 14 (and a +1 to one stat).

{Ninja'd}

So, I think the young guys can hold their own against the old guys.

What I think it would really mean is that the average NPC's base stats are more important than their levels in the commoner class (i.e., nature is more important than nurture): in a game where all commoners are 7th level or lower, a 1st-level commoner with 13 Str could very well be the best martial combatant among them.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

If you were to say something like, "Adventurers gain XP for adventuring; commoners gain XP for common-ing," I don't really see any problems with that (other than the obvious grammatical problem with using "common" as a verb).

Obviously it would be "Commonering".

[Biggus]

despite what may be printed in an oft-ignored chart in he back of the DMG.

What chart are you referring to here?

[Pippa the Pixie]

...which is why I've always wished the NPC classes had some kind of class features that would make them better farmers/laborers/craftsmen than, say, a barbarian or a rogue.


This is the big problem with 3E D&D: The NPC classes don't get anything useful to their class and are still stuck in the Only Combat D&D game.

Even an easy fix: NPC classes get a Base Skill Bonus, NOT a base attack bonus.

For a bit more you need to add class skills, feats, and even magic. And a whole non combat game.




I also don't think it's fair to call this whole thing "passive XP gain." The idea isn't that everyone should just slowly accrue XP over time: the idea is that we should assume that everyone is at least occasionally facing challenges that are worth XP, and we can kind of simulate that with a simple formula like "1 XP / day."


I think it's fine to say everyone gets life expereince and learns something everyday of 1 XP. After all, it's not a lot, and they won't even go up a level.

It's the challanges in life that really give you the XP though. I think the great example here is the 'eueka moment'. You know...when you have a problem/challange that you can't figure out......and then, suddenly, you DO figure it out. You get that rush of ''of course" or ''oh, that is what I was doing wrong".....that rush is XP.

[Blue Jay]

Obviously it would be "Commonering".

Believe it or not, that's what I wrote first, but then I realized that I'd have to write "adventurer-ing" to maintain parallel structure, and I wasn't prepared to do that. :smallwink:

[Biggus]

It's the challanges in life that really give you the XP though. I think the great example here is the 'eueka moment'. You know...when you have a problem/challange that you can't figure out......and then, suddenly, you DO figure it out. You get that rush of ''of course" or ''oh, that is what I was doing wrong".....that rush is XP.

That makes sense, it would explain among other things how you can have something like a 20th level blacksmith. If you're utterly decidated to your chosen craft or profession, if you spend every second you can spare thinking and working to become better at it, you get a lot of XP because you have a lot of eureka moments, without ever having to fight anybody.

Still doesn't explain why you're better at fighting than most veteran soldiers, but hey, you can't have everything ;)

[ShurikVch]

...which is why I've always wished the NPC classes had some kind of class features that would make them better farmers/laborers/craftsmen than, say, a barbarian or a rogue.
Given the complete lack of NPC classes in 5e, I've been thinking of brewing up one or two with such class features. Of course, given that NPCs don't seem consistently bound by the same class/level/ability restrictions as PCs, it might be pointless.How about the Master class from the War of the Lance?



This is the big problem with 3E D&D: The NPC classes don't get anything useful to their class and are still stuck in the Only Combat D&D game.There is double untruth there:

The "don't get anything useful" - Adept gets Familiar (and may qualify for Hexer PrC), Expert - open class skill selection made it popular choice for pre-Factotum skillmonkeys; Aristocrat is about the only class which can make WbLmancy at 1st level; and even Commoner still gets Handle Animal (Bubs (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=7097263&postcount=38)!), and may qualify to Survivor at 2nd level
"the Only Combat D&D game" - not all games of D&D are "Only Combat": for example, intrigue game shouldn't include too much of combat; and for "monster survival" game, Combat is a failure

[Luccan]

PCs being able to be better at commoner tasks is a consequence of letting PCs get training in those tasks. If you want your NPCs to be better at what they do than the PCs, invest their skill points where appropriate and give them feats that compliment those skill choices. IME, most PCs don't take Craft or Profession and if they do, they don't invest that many points. And if your Rogue player is still a better baker because they invested heavily in baking related skills and feats? Well, they clearly want to be a great baker so you might as well let them.

[Quarian Rex]

My campaigns have always gone with the assumption that the levelling capabilities of pcs is completely normal. And so there are plenty of high level characters. Including epic level commoners. In fact, I rule that monsters with INT of 3 or higher are literally incapable of not having class levels, unless they are children. I like the world having that level of background power (and yes, you are incapable of choosing your class without training), (but I also have ruled that every class has advantages over others, so commoner is a bit different).


This is kind of the standard that I see when people have leveled NPCs. A general assumption that everyone gets xp but (to my mind at least) seemingly little thought as to what that would actually mean when played straight. This isn't necessarily a criticism, play things as you and your group see fit, I just like to have a justification that satisfies me for the mechanics I include in my worlds. For the reasons I mentioned above, and others, I cannot justify, in any way, the existence of epic level commoners. It just breaks my suspension of disbelief.

For your campaign, how can you justify a commoner having the ambition and capability to achieve epic levels without having the initiative (or even basic survival instinct) to get training in anything else?




I dont think this is as big an issue as you make it out to be. The average commoner will have 10-11 Str Dex and Con in their youth. The Great Grandpa is probably rocking a -3 penalty to his Con at this point meaning he would likely not even have 20 hp depending on his level. So yeah a 8-10 hp lvl 1 soldier might die to the hit that doesnt kill the grandpa but its not that massive a gap. likewise the penalties to Str Dex and Con from aging offset the saves and attack bonus a bit (elderly commoners will have decent will saves from their wisdom tho).

I checked the aging and commoner charts and an 11 wisdom, level 20 commoner of Venerable age will be rocking a +8 will save. +10 BAB but with -6 penalty to their str from aging meaning they likely have a Str of 4. So a +7 to hit with whatever pitiful thing he can manage to lift to be able to swing. The -6 to Dex and Con mean -3 to Fort and Ref so those saves will only be +3, barely better than the good saves of a lvl 1 character, and this is a lvl 20 commoner. That Con penalty also means hes only getting 1hp per HD (20d4 - 60 HP).

So yeah based on the info above I think you might have exaggerated a bit just how much of a "problem" this makes. Lvl 2 PCs could likely handle a lvl 20 commoner fairly easily. Probably even Level 1 PCs thanks to action economy advantage, tbh.

I think that this is being more than a little disingenuous. Half of the total penalties don't apply till age 70 and by that time it has already been mentioned that, even under the most generous xp gains for a commoner, the river of experience would would have dried up long ago due to out leveling any valid sources. Up to age 69 the character is only taking a -3 to physical stats, being only a -1 penalty to the bonus on odd stats or on any stats in Pathfinder. 6-7 levels of progression (the 'reasonable' maximum that I have seen bandied about), even on a crap chassis, utterly dominates those with only one or two. Hence the gerontocracy.

You also seem to be backwards on the action economy. This would not be a situation where a PC group is taking on a freakishly high level commoner. This would be a few jumped-up whipper-snappers taking on the village elders. And there would be so... many... elders. Breed early, breed often was the mantra of the day. By the time a farmer gets into his 60's he would already have 3-4 generations of descendants, each learning of the wisdom and power of age, all but the youngest and weakest supporting the most powerful. That can be a hefty number of people (all ranging from 3-7th level with no more than a -1 to their physical bonuses), and remember, with each year it gets harder and harder to whittle that number down, whether through disease or through violence. As you have already noted, action economy rules all. All hail the gerontocracy.

But you are correct, this isn't really a big deal, because nobody plays this kind of thing straight. A thread like this looks at the concept in an attempt to justify it (an interesting exercise), and so this is the place to see if it really would be a big deal. If you want to legitimize commoner advancement then you should critically examine the effects of that on the game world.




...which is why I've always wished the NPC classes had some kind of class features that would make them better farmers/laborers/craftsmen than, say, a barbarian or a rogue.
Given the complete lack of NPC classes in 5e, I've been thinking of brewing up one or two with such class features. Of course, given that NPCs don't seem consistently bound by the same class/level/ability restrictions as PCs, it might be pointless.

This is why I have been favoring some of what was done in World of Prime. Commoner is a 0 level class, something that only exists for a standard humanoid and is replaced as soon as someone gains a class level. The NPC classes are also given some buffs (like an additional attribute point per level to a max. of 18, and requiring less xp to level) which doesn't make them good by any stretch of the imagination, but it does provide a slight reason for their existence. The fact that they were considered to be the most 'primitive' classes also had some implications that I like (tales of your forefathers being stronger and tougher than you may have been true with the attribute increases from Warrior, but there is also a reason why people tend to take other paths).




This feels like a very metagame-y approach to mechanics here. Levels and classes are just abstractions to represent what a character's skills and abilities are, so a guy with 7 levels in commoner is a guy whose abilities and experiences are best represented by giving him 7 levels of commoner.

Any time you start digging into the mechanics of a system it starts feeling metagame-y. If you actually think that levels and classes are just abstractions than why would you want to apply mechanical chassis upgrades to a farmer (an abstraction that has no need of mechanical advancement)? Also, what 'guy', other than the village idiot, would have abilities best represented by advancement in commoner? Who would deserve to be the living paradox of achieving high levels in the lowest form of human advancement (worse that taking levels in racial HD even)?



Not necessarily. If you were to say something like, "Adventurers gain XP for adventuring; commoners gain XP for common-ing," I don't really see any problems with that (other than the obvious grammatical problem with using "common" as a verb).

I also don't think it's fair to call this whole thing "passive XP gain." The idea isn't that everyone should just slowly accrue XP over time: the idea is that we should assume that everyone is at least occasionally facing challenges that are worth XP, and we can kind of simulate that with a simple formula like "1 XP / day."

The only difference between a PC and an NPC is who is in control of the character. If a PC dies a player can take over an NPC if they wish and are so permitted. There is no adventurer xp, commoner xp, wizard xp, or dragon xp. There is only XP. It can be given out as the DM sees fit at his table, whether with the precision of a crazed accountant or as if at the whims of a fickle god. If you want to give bonus xp to commoners (or to elves, or to your girlfriend, or to the kid who brought the cheetos, whatever) that is your call to make, just don't pretend that it has any kind of justification in the game world.

As to calling this "passive XP gain", I think that is a fair assessment. If you think that the minimal 'challenges' of the average commoner mud farmer are worthy of XP but not worthy of taking up playtime at the table, then the research, training, and presumed off-time skullduggery of the PCs during downtime is of far, far greater value. If you think otherwise then it would appear that you are no longer in the realm of extrapolating game mechanics in the campaign world (as seems to be the focus of the thread) but are back to XP rewards based solely on DM fiat, without any consistency or mechanical support in the game world.



There's a decent argument for that. But, the gerontocracy may not be all that inevitable, because there are also penalties that come with old age. An old guy who gets +3 Wis from his old age is also taking -6 Con from his old age. So, consider a 1st-level young guy and a 7th-level old guy who both start with 11's in all stats. The 1st-level young guy has a total attack bonus of +0, 1d6 damage with a club, base saves of +0/+0/+0, AC 10, 4 hit points, and 11 in all stats. The 7th-level old guy has a total attack bonus of +0 (+3 BAB, -3 Str), 1d6-3 damage with a club, base saves of -1/-1/+4, AC 7, 7 hit points, and Str/Dex/Con 5, Int/Wis/Cha 14 (and a +1 to one stat).

So, I think the young guys can hold their own against the old guys.

See what I said to Remuko above. The penalties are doubled at age 70. They are pretty trivial prior to that considering the gains of class progression, even on something as craptastic as the commoner. The vast majority of super-geezers would only have a -1 penalty to their physical bonuses which is more than made up by the extra 6 HD that they gained in your example, so perhaps rethink how that fight would go. Remember, the old will outnumber the young. Any threat that the community faces will have a greater chance of killing the young whether that be sickness, violence or anything else. Levels equal bonuses and bonuses equal power, even those as small as the commoner. Remember, they don't have to be strong, they just have to be stronger. And with every year the surviving old become more powerful and the young become old.



What I think it would really mean is that the average NPC's base stats are more important than their levels in the commoner class (i.e., nature is more important than nurture): in a game where all commoners are 7th level or lower, a 1st-level commoner with 13 Str could very well be the best martial combatant among them.

While you are not completely wrong (if 13 is the highest Str in the village then he would have the most innate talent for martial combat) you are still talking about a single +1 to hit and damage. A 7th level 69 year old would still be more accurate, more durable, and have more options (What feats did he take? Where are his skill points? A couple into Intimidate and the young prodigy is now less effective than his little sister). At everything but venerable, levels are vastly better than mere youth when evenly compared, no question. Even at venerable, that merely takes away much of the combat advantage, but doesn't put them at any real disadvantage (and still leaves their skill and feat advantages untouched).




What chart are you referring to here?

The 'Highest-Level Locals' chart on p.139 of the DMG



Edit: Spelling

[Sereg]

Firstly, you don't need to be ambitious to be an epic level commoner. It's not that hard. Secondly, my version of the commoner class has actual class features, so there are actually benefits to taking 20 levels in commoner over taking something else (assuming you have a relatively mundane job) But it is true that it is common to multiclass when given the opportunity.

[Quarian Rex]

Firstly, you don't need to be ambitious to be an epic level commoner. It's not that hard.

This right here suggests that you are playing something that most of us might not be able to recognize as D&D.

[noob]

This right here suggests that you are playing something that most of us might not be able to recognize as D&D.

wandering armies of learnean demiliches and bandit groups that contains mostly T1 full casters that stacks a ton of boosts are a staple of dnd.

[Biggus]

The 'Highest-Level Locals' chart on p.139 of the DMG


Ah, so by "in the back of the DMG" you meant "in the middle of the DMG". No wonder I couldn't find it...

[Quarian Rex]

Ah, so by "in the back of the DMG" you meant "in the middle of the DMG". No wonder I couldn't find it...

When I said it was a chart that no one looks at that includes me. To be fair it has been a loong time since I looked in the 3.5 DMG. *shrug*

Also, you're welcome.

[javcs]

I didn't mean that getting to level 1 by the age of majority comes out at 1XP per 1-2 week, I meant that as far as I'm aware you're not normally assumed to gain XP at all as a child, for similar reasons to those you give. javcs said



which assumes that you start gaining XP from the day you're born: I was disagreeing with that. I probably could have made that clearer to be fair.

No it doesn't. It assumes that while some days (many, even most) you gain little or no XP, other days you are doing things that generate more XP, and that it AVERAGES OUT over time.
Sure, you probably aren't earning much XP before you're 5 or 6, but if your family is poor, you're getting put to work, if your family is wealthy you're getting some kind of education or tutoring, if your family is in the middle, you're getting some education and probably being apprenticed. Those would tend to produce more XP.




The 1XP per 1-2 weeks figure was based on the assumption that you start gaining XP at around age 15, and live to perhaps 55-65 as "Most people in the world at large die from pestilence, accidents, infections, or violence before getting to venerable age".

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm#age
This is nonsense. And irrelevant. Part of my position is that the level distribution charts are BS, and the XP gains demonstrate that.
An.assumption of average XP gains based on those level distribution charts doesn't have any bearing on the reliability of those tables.


--
--

Consider that a Fox is probably somewhere between a CR1/4 Cat and a CR1/3 Dog in terms of CR. It is therefore worth between 75 and 100 XP until you're level 7, and even until you're level 9, it is still worth at least 50XP.






Also, consider that if an average season, barring extraordinary events, ends up being more or less on par with a CR 1 encounter equivalent, or a combination of lesser events that add up to one or the equivalent thereof, you're gaining 1200XP a year until they're Level 7 - which isn't really that far off from the 1XP per day average I mentioned.
You're level 4 in 5 years at that rate, and get to level 7 in 17.5 years (total), and reach level 8 in another ~6.75 years (~24.25 total), and get to level 9 in another 10 (~34.25 total). Not counting, of course, any extraordinary events that would result in more XP.
But diminishing returns have kicked in at that point, and you would only gain further XP from extraordinary events.

[Biggus]

No it doesn't. It assumes that while some days (many, even most) you gain little or no XP, other days you are doing things that generate more XP, and that it AVERAGES OUT over time.
Sure, you probably aren't earning much XP before you're 5 or 6, but if your family is poor, you're getting put to work, if your family is wealthy you're getting some kind of education or tutoring, if your family is in the middle, you're getting some education and probably being apprenticed. Those would tend to produce more XP.

But the game starts new players at 0XP at level 1, at a minimum age of 15 for humans. The training you do in childhood doesn't gain you XP, it just gains you the skills necessary to become a level 1 character.


This is nonsense. And irrelevant.

How is this nonsense, and what is it irrelevant to?


Part of my position is that the level distribution charts are BS, and the XP gains demonstrate that.
An.assumption of average XP gains based on those level distribution charts doesn't have any bearing on the reliability of those tables.


--
--

Consider that a Fox is probably somewhere between a CR1/4 Cat and a CR1/3 Dog in terms of CR. It is therefore worth between 75 and 100 XP until you're level 7, and even until you're level 9, it is still worth at least 50XP.






Also, consider that if an average season, barring extraordinary events, ends up being more or less on par with a CR 1 encounter equivalent, or a combination of lesser events that add up to one or the equivalent thereof, you're gaining 1200XP a year until they're Level 7 - which isn't really that far off from the 1XP per day average I mentioned.


Did you accidentally delete part of your answer or something? I'm struggling to understand you here.

[Blue Jay]

I think that this is being more than a little disingenuous. Half of the total penalties don't apply till age 70 and by that time it has already been mentioned that, even under the most generous xp gains for a commoner, the river of experience would would have dried up long ago due to out leveling any valid sources. Up to age 69 the character is only taking a -3 to physical stats, being only a -1 penalty to the bonus on odd stats or on any stats in Pathfinder. 6-7 levels of progression (the 'reasonable' maximum that I have seen bandied about), even on a crap chassis, utterly dominates those with only one or two. Hence the gerontocracy.

The disingenuousness started when you highlighted all the numbers that supported your position without mentioning any of the numbers that mitigated it. That gave everyone the impression that you were intentionally leaving things off, and that's why you got three or four people challenging you on it.

The goal of the scenario I spelled out was to maximize the numbers you mentioned and show how doing so comes with trade-offs, and thereby illustrate that you hadn't considered all the relevant factors. There's always more nuance than any short post can ever show, but if you'd like to get into it, here's my reasoning:

The reason I made the 7th-level guy Venerable is because that's the natural result of the assumptions we were using: start a 0 XP at 15 years old, and gain XP at an average rate of 1/day throughout your life, and you're 73 years old by the time you've accrued enough XP to reach 7th level. Here's the actual table, in case you're interested:


Level XP Age
1 0 15
2 1000 18
3 3000 24
4 6000 32
5 10000 43
6 15000 57
7 21000 73


So, let's go into a little more depth. Since you want an "Old" guy instead of a "Venerable" guy, we're looking at a 58-year-old with 6 levels in commoner. So, let's see how dominant this guy would be in an all-commoner society, by looking at some case studies.

First case: Old guy (58-year-old with all 11's and 6 levels of commoner, 15,000 XP) vs Young guy (15-year-old with all 11's and 1 level of commoner, 0 XP):

Old guy:
6d4-6 hit points (average 10.5, max 1st, Con changes retroactively alter hit points)
Str 8
Con 8
Dex 8
Int 13
Wis 14 (+1 at 4th)
Cha 13
Club +2 melee (1d6-1)
AC 9
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +4
28 skill points (human, Int changes don't retroactively alter skill points)
4 feats (human)

Young guy:
1d4 hit points (average 4, max 1st)
Str 11
Con 11
Dex 11
Int 11
Wis 11
Cha 11
Club +0 melee (1d6)
AC 10
Fort +0
Ref +0
Will +0
12 skill points
2 feats

Head-to-Head: Old guy's hit chance is 65% vs young guy's hit chance is 60%. DPR is 1.6 for the old guy and 2.1 for the young guy (not accounting for crits). Old guy kills in 2.5 rounds, Young guy kills in 5.

Old guy is clearly superior to 15-year-old in combat.

Second case: Old guy with 6 levels of commoner vs Young guy with 2 levels of commoner (18 years old by the table above):

Old guy:
6d4-6 hit points (average 10.5)
Str 8
Con 8
Dex 8
Int 13
Wis 14 (+1 at 4th)
Cha 13
Club +2 melee (1d6-1)
AC 9
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +4
28 skill points
4 feats

Young guy:
2d4 hit points (average 6.5)
Str 11
Con 11
Dex 11
Int 11
Wis 11
Cha 11
Club +1 melee (1d6)
AC 10
Fort +0
Ref +0
Will +0
15 skill points
2 feats

Head-to-Head: Both hit on an 8 or above (65% chance). DPR is 1.6 for the old guy and 2.3 for the young guy (not accounting for crits). Old guy kills in 4.1 rounds, Young guy kills in 4.6.

The margin for error for our veteran is quite slim here already, in spite of a 4-HD advantage!

Third case: Old guy with 6 levels of commoner, vs Young guy with 3 levels of commoner (24 years old):

Old guy:
6d4-6 hit points (average 10.5)
Str 8
Con 8
Dex 8
Int 13
Wis 14 (+1 at 4th)
Cha 13
Club +2 melee (1d6-1)
AC 9
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +4
28 skill points
4 feats

Young guy:
3d4 hit points (9)
Str 11
Con 11
Dex 11
Int 11
Wis 11
Cha 11
Club +1 melee (1d6)
AC 10
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +1
18 skill points
3 feats

Head-to-Head: Both hit on an 8 or above (65% chance). DPR is 1.6 for the old guy and 2.3 for the young guy (not accounting for crits). Old guy kills in 5.6 rounds, young guy kills in 4.6 rounds.

Looks like the scales have tipped here: Old guy is slightly outmatched by a guy with half as many HD.

Finally, the fourth case: Old guy with 6 levels of commoner, vs Young guy with 4 levels of commoner (32 years old):

Old guy:
6d4-6 hit points (average 10.5)
Str 8
Con 8
Dex 8
Int 13
Wis 14 (+1 at 4th)
Cha 13
Club +2 melee (1d6-1)
AC 9
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +4
28 skill points
4 feats

Young guy:
4d4 hit points (11.5)
Str 11
Con 11
Dex 11
Int 11
Wis 12 (+1 at 4th)
Cha 11
Club +2 melee (1d6)
AC 10
Fort +1
Ref +1
Will +2
21 skill points
3 feats

Head-to-Head: Old guy's hit chance is 65%, young guy's hit chance is 70%. DPR is 1.6 for the old guy and 2.45 for the young guy (not accounting for crits). Old guy kills in 7.2 rounds, young guy kills in 4.3 rounds.

Now the old guy is at a pretty clear disadvantage, and it's hard to imagine how the extra 7 skill points and 1 feat will make up for his disadvantage in combat without largely compromising his advantages in things commoners actually care about, like farming, blacksmithing and local politics.

So again, your premise that these rules make old guys inherently superior to young guys is simply not supported.

-----

Now, how about your second assumption, that there will be more old guys than young guys?

Well, your predictions are also wrong on this point. What you're describing is not a recipe for having "so... many... elders." Mortality is cumulative across age categories, so every young guy that dies is an old guy who never exists, and you've completely failed to account for that. Any age category suffers from all the mortality experienced by all younger age categories, plus its own mortality.

Let's run a quick life-table analysis. Let's use these survival numbers:

Babies: 25% survive to adulthood (15 years)
Adulthood: 25% survive to middle age (35 years)
Middle Age: 50% survive to old age (53 years)
Old: 75% survive to venerable age (70 years)
Venerable: 100% survive to maximum age (110 years)

See how old guys have better survival chances than young guys? That's the underlying assumption of your argument. You can flex the numbers around, but it ultimately won't make that much difference.

Convert it to yearly survival rates, assuming that we start with 400 babies (a convenient number for me to use):

Babies -> Adulthood -> 300 deaths over 15 years (20 deaths/year)
Adulthood -> Middle Age -> 75 deaths over 20 years (3.75 deaths/year)
Middle Age -> Old Age -> 13 deaths over 18 years (0.72 deaths/year)
Old Age -> Venerable Age -> 3 deaths over 17 years (0.18 deaths/year)
Venerable -> Maximum -> 9 deaths over 40 years (0.23 deaths/year)

Then, look at the recruitment statistics.

25% of babies making it to adult age means 6.67 people join the "adult" category each year (100 survivors over 15 years).
25% of adults making it to middle age means about 1.25 people join the "middle age" category each year (25 survivors over 20 years).
50% of middle-agers making it to old age means 0.67 people join the "old age" category each year (12 survivors over 18 years).
75% of old-agers making it to venerable age means 0.53 people join the "venerable" category each year (9 survivors over 17 years).

Birth rates are trickier, but let's keep it simple. Let's just assume 20 births/year, just to keep the population at equilibrium. That works out to each adult having about 4 babies, or 8 babies per couple (not unreasonable, given historical trends).

So, what will this population look like?

Babies -> net growth rate 0 people/year
Adults -> net growth rate 2.92 people/year
Middle Age -> net growth rate 0.53 people/year
Old Age -> net growth rate 0.49 people/year
Venerable Age -> net growth rate 0.3 people/year

See how, even with old people having three times the survival probability of young people, the population of young people is still growing at least 5 times faster than the population of any category about it? In fact, the "adult" category is growing more than twice as fast as all the older categories combined. This means the village elders will likely be outnumbered at least 2-to-1 (if everyone Middle Age and above is counted in "village elders"), and could be outnumbered by as much as 12-to-1 (if only Venerables are considered "village elders").

And these numbers were canted very favorably towards the older guys. Using D&D numbers, old guys have maybe 1 or 2 points advantage on d20 rolls that enhance survival, and perhaps 3 times the hit points. In all likelihood, that's not going to translate into three times the survival probability.

In fact, the way the numbers work out, the only way you realistically can get a population dominated by old folks is if birth rates are lower than mortality rates. Populations with age structures like that are usually populations in decline, which means it is not a good sign for your population's future if your old people outnumber your whipper-snappers. If you run the numbers, you'll see that, in a population that's growing, the differences will lean even more in favor of the young folks; and it will only lean in favor of the old folks if the population is a matter of generations from extinction.

-----

So, now it seems like we've established that "passive XP gain" probably leads to a situation in which 30-year-olds tend to be the best commoner militants, and populations will tend to have a lot more young adults than old adults.


Any time you start digging into the mechanics of a system it starts feeling metagame-y.

How does this justify inpugning the Intelligence of an NPC when the DM chooses to give him levels in commoner?


The only difference between a PC and an NPC is who is in control of the character. If a PC dies a player can take over an NPC if they wish and are so permitted. There is no adventurer xp, commoner xp, wizard xp, or dragon xp. There is only XP.

Agreed. But, commoners would be gaining a bigger portion of their XP from things like skill challenges and other non-combat encounters, and a campaign co


As to calling this "passive XP gain", I think that is a fair assessment. If you think that the minimal 'challenges' of the average commoner mud farmer are worthy of XP but not worthy of taking up playtime at the table, then the research, training, and presumed off-time skullduggery of the PCs during downtime is of far, far greater value.

I'm going to want to see your numbers on this. For example, there aren't any rules that say a DC 15 Spellcraft check should be worth more XP than a DC 15 Profession (farmer) check, so researching that new spell probably nets you the same XP as the farmer troubleshooting and fixing his wheelbarrow. So, if we're talking about non-combat encounters with level-appropriate CRs, I see no reason to think that an Xth-level adventurer's noncombat encounters should be worth more XP than an Xth-level farmer's.

[GreatWyrmGold]

This feels like a very metagame-y approach to mechanics here. Levels and classes are just abstractions to represent what a character's skills and abilities are, so a guy with 7 levels in commoner is a guy whose abilities and experiences are best represented by giving him 7 levels of commoner.
Which would make more sense if "commoner" gave you abilities worth note.



This is the big problem with 3E D&D: The NPC classes don't get anything useful to their class and are still stuck in the Only Combat D&D game.

Even an easy fix: NPC classes get a Base Skill Bonus, NOT a base attack bonus.

For a bit more you need to add class skills, feats, and even magic. And a whole non combat game.
I mean, you'd need a whole noncombat game to make a significant number of players choose NPC classes, but you wouldn't need that to add class features that non-adventurers would find useful. Bonuses to specific skills, some kind of exhaustion resistance, maybe attribute bonuses...there are a fair few tools in the D&D rulebook that you could use to craft simple class features that a farmer would value more than BAB or a fighter bonus feat. I'd like that.



PCs being able to be better at commoner tasks is a consequence of letting PCs get training in those tasks. If you want your NPCs to be better at what they do than the PCs, invest their skill points where appropriate and give them feats that compliment those skill choices. IME, most PCs don't take Craft or Profession and if they do, they don't invest that many points. And if your Rogue player is still a better baker because they invested heavily in baking related skills and feats? Well, they clearly want to be a great baker so you might as well let them.
"Most casters don't prepare spells that let them dominate melee combat, and if they do, they don't invest that many slots. And if your Wizard player is still a better fighter because they invested heavily in melee-related spells and feats? Well, they clearly want to be a great fighter so you might as well let them."
The problem isn't that wizards can fight if they dedicate themselves; after all, a wizard dedicated to fighting can still save a few slots for knock and glitterdust and wish and stuff. (Also wizard bonus feats or some prestige class that advances casting.) The problem is that a dedicated fighter, dedicated only to fighting, can't be even better.
Similarly, it's not a problem that a rogue can be a great baker if they invest in baking alongside their many other rogue talents. It's a problem that a baker can't be an even greater baker by investing into baking and only baking. A 10th-level rogue shouldn't be able to evenly challenge a 10th-level baker in pan-to-pan combat* for the same reason a 10th-level wizard shouldn't be able to evenly challenge a 10th-level fighter: It robs the specialist of their entire existence, and is also kinda silly when you think about it.

*Though the baker would definitely respect their skill if they focused on it...and who's to say you can't get another 5-10 levels of rogue before the 10th-level rival gets more than one?




Still doesn't explain why you're better at fighting than most veteran soldiers, but hey, you can't have everything ;)
So is the 20th-level archmage who got all that XP from being a huge bookworm and introducing a new thaumatological paradigm. Whatever arbitrary force lets gods give high-level clerics access to miracles they can't grant to acolytes, what stops perfectly competent mages from learning spells that can be cast by adventurers who graduated from Hogwarts four months of adventuring ago, what lets a week of dungeon-crawling be more educational than four years at Fighter U...that force seems to grant improved physical prowess alongside its myriad other benefits.



This is why I have been favoring some of what was done in World of Prime....
Ooh, sounds neat.
I also like the sound of "primitive" classes being ones with basic stat bonuses and stuff, and more "advanced" classes giving more interesting class features but requiring more formal training.



Sure, you probably aren't earning much XP before you're 5 or 6, but if your family is poor, you're getting put to work, if your family is wealthy you're getting some kind of education or tutoring, if your family is in the middle, you're getting some education and probably being apprenticed. Those would tend to produce more XP.
You're assuming that those things produce XP to begin with, even though PCs only get XP by killing monsters or by extraordinary achievements.
Which is kind of a problem with a lot of the arguments for "Shouldn't commoners be getting hundreds of XP a year?" A problem that I have brought up repeatedly, but which nobody seems to have addressed.


Also, consider that if an average season, barring extraordinary events, ends up being more or less on par with a CR 1 encounter equivalent, or a combination of lesser events that add up to one or the equivalent thereof, you're gaining 1200XP a year until they're Level 7 - which isn't really that far off from the 1XP per day average I mentioned.
Ah, you addressed it by...asserting that a normal season is worth a CR 1 encounter, even if nothing unusual happened. Even though PCs go through normal seasons all the time without getting that kind of passive XP. At least with previous examples I had to think to provide comparable PC actions that don't generate XP! This is the sort of crap that happens when you just assert stuff.



How does this justify inpugning the Intelligence of an NPC when the DM chooses to give him levels in commoner?
Because if you're focusing on one way that rules and worldbuilding intersect, you can approach any situation from any angle and be justified. Apparently.


I'm going to want to see your numbers on this. For example, there aren't any rules that say a DC 15 Spellcraft check should be worth more XP than a DC 15 Profession (farmer) check, so researching that new spell probably nets you the same XP as the farmer troubleshooting and fixing his wheelbarrow. So, if we're talking about non-combat encounters with level-appropriate CRs, I see no reason to think that an Xth-level adventurer's noncombat encounters should be worth more XP than an Xth-level farmer's.
That's assuming that it's the skill check that earns the XP, and not the result. I'd argue that, in general, researching a spell is more likely to cause an extraordinary result worth XP than repairing a wheelbarrow.
And also that that would probably be some kind of Craft check (if only because Intelligence seems like a better skill-stat for troubleshooting and repair than Wisdom), but that's not important right now.

[Quarian Rex]

The disingenuousness started when you highlighted all the numbers that supported your position without mentioning any of the numbers that mitigated it. That gave everyone the impression that you were intentionally leaving things off, and that's why you got three or four people challenging you on it.

Three or four people didn't challenge me on it. Both you and Remuko replied with what essentially boils down to 'but venerable sucks'. That is a more than fair assessment but doesn't actually address any of the points brought up. Pointing out that you "highlighted all the numbers that supported your position without mentioning any of the numbers that mitigated it" by singling out the only age category that has significant penalties was no deception on my part. Merely pointing out that you were failing to see the whole picture.

Despite the math provided for commoner fight club (and, as a side note, thanks for the math. I think that this sort of thing is really interesting and the extra homework shows that you are giving this some thought. I appreciate it) all that you have really pointed out is that some old guys are better at physical combat that some even older old guys. Yeah, no kidding. The only scenario that has any value is Case 1. This isn't moving the goalposts or anything like that, this is because by the time someone has gained their second level in commoner they have bought into the gerontocracy. They have settled in, started breeding (and are already a parent), and accepted that with age comes strength. Your 'young' guy in Case 4 (32 years old) is probably already a grandfather. He is part of the system, not fighting against it.

Remember...


Humanoids with 1 Hit Die exchange the features of their humanoid Hit Die for the class features of a PC or NPC class. Humanoids of this sort are presented as 1st-level warriors, which means that they have average combat ability and poor saving throws.

Humanoids with more than 1 Hit Die are the only humanoids who make use of the features of the humanoid type.

... and commoner is the even worse stand-in for racial HD that PC races get. If they don't get out of commoner before 2nd level they are stuck. And no one becomes Commoner2/Wizard1. No one. If you don't buck the system in that first level, you are part of it.

Let me be clear, I am not trying to make any claim of what age a commoner would be at their peak combat potential, especially when combating other members of the gerontocracy. That really is irrelevant. Though, I do have to thank you for proving that the community's most powerful combatants would be be the 43-52 year olds.

Now, the question that I want you to think about, the one that I originally brought up, is how will this affect the society? Steady gains in power till the early 50s before losing some minor physical capability is a pretty good basis for keeping the youth in line. A 90 year old who put max ranks into Heal could provide an effective +7 on saves vs. disease for the entire village and has probably individually saved the lives of everyone in the village several times over, and nobody f**ks with the white mage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MK4k7V4vA). Another elder who made a similar investment in Diplomacy can just 'explain' things to the troubled youths to make sure that they understand the wisdom of their elders. Should a youth decide to take a swing he gets functionally dismantled by all but the most decrepit. By the time he has gained enough strength to become even a slight threat to the status-quo he has now bought in completely, is raising his own family, and has a vested interest in not rocking the boat.

Deciding that commoners magically get an XP allowance will have greater effects on the world than are initially apparent. Ponder that for a moment.




Now, how about your second assumption, that there will be more old guys than young guys?

I appreciate your attempts here but I do think that the assumptions are pretty off. As the commoner fight club demonstrates pretty well, once a passive leveling commoner reaches their early 30s they are probably going to die of old age. When you start so weak that a cat getting thrown at your face means you ded early mortality will be horrendous. Once they have a few additional HD (even those as bad as the commoner) then the chance of accidental death gets closer to zero. Even disease is trivial so long as you have an elder with max. ranks in Heal available (again, hammering home the worth of age). There will be a crapton of 'old' people. When you are cranking out a new generation @ every 16 years then you are a grandfather at 32 and by 96 you have 5 generations of grandfathers, none of whom need to worry about dying of sickness and all of whom can take a max damage club to the face without dropping (not a high bar but it's there).




How does this justify inpugning the Intelligence of an NPC when the DM chooses to give him levels in commoner?

When literally anything makes a better survival chassis, then multiple levels in commoner is a sign of DM fiat permanent head injury. Every other class but Wizards and Sorcerers have better HD, and they have magic to compensate. Almost every class has better skill access, whether through skill points or skill selection, and none are worse. Every other class has better saves. Every other class has better proficiencies, even Wizards (the epitome of 'weapons and armor are eww'). Remember the definition for the Humanoid Type above? Yup, every 1 HD humanoid creature is presented as a Warrior, not a commoner, by default. The 'class' is that bad.

If leveling is explicitly seen as an expensive process, either in the monetary cost of training, or in the potential risk of life to acquire XP, then this makes sense. Single HD Humanoids are full of potential, but that potential can go unfulfilled if not given the proper outlet (training) or means to cultivate (XP). The idea that someone could exceed their spiritual and physical capabilities (level) in a way that is so much worse on every level (commoner) than even just raw animal growth (racial HD increase) is anathema to the entire concept of using a progression system.

So yes, progression past the first level in commoner is the same as taking levels in the Village Idiot prestige class (except an actual Village Idiot class would probably get a bonus to begging or flatulence or something, and so be objectively superior to commoner).






The only difference between a PC and an NPC is who is in control of the character. If a PC dies a player can take over an NPC if they wish and are so permitted. There is no adventurer xp, commoner xp, wizard xp, or dragon xp. There is only XP.

Agreed. But, commoners would be gaining a bigger portion of their XP from things like skill challenges and other non-combat encounters, and a campaign co



As to calling this "passive XP gain", I think that is a fair assessment. If you think that the minimal 'challenges' of the average commoner mud farmer are worthy of XP but not worthy of taking up playtime at the table, then the research, training, and presumed off-time skullduggery of the PCs during downtime is of far, far greater value.

I'm going to want to see your numbers on this. For example, there aren't any rules that say a DC 15 Spellcraft check should be worth more XP than a DC 15 Profession (farmer) check, so researching that new spell probably nets you the same XP as the farmer troubleshooting and fixing his wheelbarrow. So, if we're talking about non-combat encounters with level-appropriate CRs, I see no reason to think that an Xth-level adventurer's noncombat encounters should be worth more XP than an Xth-level farmer's.

Your first reply seems to have been left unfinished but these seemed to go together. You seem to be getting stuck in the weeds on this. The numbers really don't matter because there aren't any numbers for this. I am unaware of any XP awards tables for passing skill checks. If you know of some valid ones then please enlighten me. We are talking about the consequences of an arbitrary DM decision to award combat XP for tasks too minor to note yet capable of being acomplished by fantasy mudfarmers on a regular basis. You seem to think that successful skill checks should get XP awards. I'm saying that it doesn't matter what those rewards are.

If you give bonus XP to the commoner for passing the skill check to plow his field then you need to give the Scout bonus XP for sneaking past the enemy guard, or the Fighter when he makes a Perception check to detect ambush while on nights watch. If you give the commoner a big chunk of XP for the accomplishment of creating a masterwork root cellar, then you need to give a proportionally similar boost to the Rogue who picks a masterwork lock, or to the Wizard when he finishes researching a new way to reshape reality with words and gestures. And for all of this you would need to give a bigger reward to the adventurers since they will be making most of their checks under various forms of duress. Add to this all of the Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, Knowledge, Escape Artist, and bear wrestling grapple checks that are presumed to occur in the average adventurers downtime that no one bothers rolling for (much like any proposed sources of commoner XP) then it seems pretty clear that a significant XP stream will be rolling in. Add to that the fact that all these new sources of XP will stay level relevant to the adventurers, while whatever 'challenges' are faced by the commoners will essentially stay static and so suffer diminishing returns as they level. Fixing that wheelbarrow will always be a CR 1 encounter (or whatever you choose to award it as). If bluffing a 1st level guard is CR 1 (the equivalent of whatever the wheelbarrow was) then Bluffing a 10th level guard is worth proportionally more XP, while the wheelbarrow stays CR 1.

See what I'm getting at? If you are looking for a more simulationist approach and want to level commoners because you think that it is more 'realistic' then there are some pretty weird consequences of that 'realism'. To be clear, I made three points in my original post here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23843152&postcount=17).

1. There has to be a reason why people have stayed in the commoner class. To take it voluntarily would imply an Int. stat only slightly higher than that of an animal. Even then I would think that human level Wis. would provide a tingle of common sense to level anything else. If it wan't voluntary then your game world has some absolutely draconian house rules on class selection, and the first noble that realises that a minimal investment in the commoner youth to make them Warriors or Experts is a good idea will find himself ruling a grateful utopia and dominating his neighbors in short order. I will add that this has not really been addressed at all yet.

2. New XP rewards provided to commoners should be applied proportionally to the PCs as well. Already discussed above. Anything commoners can do PCs can do better and in more dangerous situations (and so get a better reward).

3. Behold the rise of the gerontocracy. Again, discussed above. The gradual accumulation of actual, tangible, power based on age has effects that need to be taken into account on a societal level.

These points still stand.

[Quarian Rex]

Ooh, sounds neat.
I also like the sound of "primitive" classes being ones with basic stat bonuses and stuff, and more "advanced" classes giving more interesting class features but requiring more formal training.


Have a look here (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/2849/M-C-Planck). The relevant book is Heroes of Prime. There is a lot of interesting things in there and most of the authors material is free. While I don't use it whole cloth there is a lot of good material to dig through. I tend to use the XP changes, Craft skill consolidations, alignment system, and some of the class tweaks (some are nuts, ignore the spell slot changes to the Adept).

[GreatWyrmGold]

If they don't get out of commoner before 2nd level they are stuck. And no one becomes Commoner2/Wizard1. No one. If you don't buck the system in that first level, you are part of it.
There's at least one canon NPC with commoner levels and other levels. No Commoner/Wizard, just a Commoner/Monk.


1. There has to be a reason why people have stayed in the commoner class. To take it voluntarily would imply an Int. stat only slightly higher than that of an animal. Even then I would think that human level Wis. would provide a tingle of common sense to level anything else. If it wan't voluntary then your game world has some absolutely draconian house rules on class selection, and the first noble that realises that a minimal investment in the commoner youth to make them Warriors or Experts is a good idea will find himself ruling a grateful utopia and dominating his neighbors in short order. I will add that this has not really been addressed at all yet.
It kinda has been. The proper response is "You're making a lot of assumptions about how much agency characters have in their class choice".
It's not "draconian house rules" to say that characters have no choice over their class; in fact, it would 100% be draconian house rules to say that they do. After all, under the default rules, players choose their character's levels for them; it would be draconian (and also weirdly meta) to take that choice away from them. Players pick whatever class they think would benefit their character most, whether it involves giving their paladin sorcerous powers or teaching their fighter to sneak attack.
NPCs work the same way. The player controlling them selects what classes they took levels in at the moment of character creation, and chooses what classes they take when (if) they level up. The only difference is the player who controls them also controls every other NPC in the setting, mediates disputes among characters, and controls information flow to the other players...oh, and that they have concerns beyond combat effectiveness when deciding what to give those NPCs.

[Luccan]

"Most casters don't prepare spells that let them dominate melee combat, and if they do, they don't invest that many slots. And if your Wizard player is still a better fighter because they invested heavily in melee-related spells and feats? Well, they clearly want to be a great fighter so you might as well let them."
The problem isn't that wizards can fight if they dedicate themselves; after all, a wizard dedicated to fighting can still save a few slots for knock and glitterdust and wish and stuff. (Also wizard bonus feats or some prestige class that advances casting.) The problem is that a dedicated fighter, dedicated only to fighting, can't be even better.
Similarly, it's not a problem that a rogue can be a great baker if they invest in baking alongside their many other rogue talents. It's a problem that a baker can't be an even greater baker by investing into baking and only baking. A 10th-level rogue shouldn't be able to evenly challenge a 10th-level baker in pan-to-pan combat* for the same reason a 10th-level wizard shouldn't be able to evenly challenge a 10th-level fighter: It robs the specialist of their entire existence, and is also kinda silly when you think about it.

*Though the baker would definitely respect their skill if they focused on it...and who's to say you can't get another 5-10 levels of rogue before the 10th-level rival gets more than one?

Massively snipped.

The wizard does actually have to focus to beat the fighter at melee combat if the wizard is the one actually fighting in melee (though admittedly they don't have to try hard if the right spells are available), the problem with the wizard is that it invalidates the need for melee combat. But you're right, a PC class should not be able to overshadow another PC class's niche. I don't see this as the same thing.

My point is that any character investing in beating the NPCs at totally mundane tasks clearly cares about doing so, so I fail to see why their doing so should be a problem. Is it particularly realistic? Not really, but it doesn't break the fiction for me anymore than what most PCs above level 4 or 5 can do.

Also, the greatest baker in the world, assuming they're using an NPC class, should be an expert not a commoner. That's what that class is there for. So they'll have only few fewer skill points and unless the rogue PC is being built as a joke, it probably evens out (since the rogue player presumably also wants to do rogue things, too). As you suggested, let's say they're level 10. At best, by that level (and only by that level, not before) the Rogue could have one extra relevant feat (unless they're human and the baker isn't) or Skill Mastery in Craft (Pastry), Profession (Baker), and whatever other relevant skills there are. That is an advantage, though only by that level, and in all likelihood a serious character won't make such investments. But again, if your player cares about this, I fail to see why it's a problem. You want to make a plot hook out of them making their way to the top of bakerdom? Then make the NPC high enough level where they're better than the PC and introduce them early enough the PC can't just cheat their way to the top (with, say, magic items). And if you don't care that much about who the greatest baker in the world is, why shouldn't it be the player?

Again, you're right about the wizard vs fighter thing. I just think you're right because it's about two classes PCs are expected to take, filling PC expected niches. Should someone who has dedicated their life to baking be a better baker than a random PC? Sure. But a PC who invests so much valuable build strength into something so trivial should be allowed, at the very least, to be better than even experts eventually. If you need a verisimilitude argument: some people are better than others at certain things. Some people are better than a lot of others at a lot of things. And if they actually take time to hone their skills, they can become amazing at those things. Perhaps even surpassing the "greatest ever" that came before, while still being better than a lot of people at other things.

In the end, I think this comes down to opinion. Whether or not PCs should be able to beat NPCs in matters normally unimportant to a game is not a designer intent or game rules argument. It's a what-do-you-prefer argument. If you feel the need to homebrew to prevent it, I say go ahead... Although, you could also use the generic Expert from UA. That might work better, actually. It's almost the same thing, but gets a ton of bonus feats (some of which can be class abilities. Skill Mastery?). That should help stop master bakers from being beaten by rogues. Wizards could still probably devise a way to out-bake them, but magic trumps effort in 3.5 so *shrug*.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The wizard does actually have to focus to beat the fighter at melee combat if the wizard is the one actually fighting in melee (though admittedly they don't have to try hard if the right spells are available), the problem with the wizard is that it invalidates the need for melee combat. But you're right, a PC class should not be able to overshadow another PC class's niche. I don't see this as the same thing.
Because you don't understand my point at all. Let's take a few specific quotes:


My point is that any character investing in beating the NPCs at totally mundane tasks clearly cares about doing so, so I fail to see why their doing so should be a problem.

But again, if your player cares about this, I fail to see why it's a problem. You want to make a plot hook out of them making their way to the top of bakerdom? Then make the NPC high enough level where they're better than the PC and introduce them early enough the PC can't just cheat their way to the top (with, say, magic items). And if you don't care that much about who the greatest baker in the world is, why shouldn't it be the player?

Whether or not PCs should be able to beat NPCs in matters normally unimportant to a game is not a designer intent or game rules argument.
You seem to think this is a matter of specific PC builds versus specific NPC builds, a matter of one player who wants to bake really well versus the world. It isn't. It isn't even saying that the NPC classes don't do their jobs; they do perfectly competently at their purpose (ie, basic placeholder stats for people who shouldn't need stats often).
They just could be better, because they don't have anything that makes them good at what the people they represent are supposed to be good at. Some basic abilities (Experts getting scaling skill bonuses in a subset of the skills they're proficient in, commoners resisting fatigue better, aristocrats getting social skill bonuses...) would solve that issue, without needing to add anything more complex than some slightly longer tables and a few paragraphs of "This ability does this".
But NPCs you don't kill are pretty low-priority in most D&D games, so the rules for building them don't get nearly as much space or designer-hours as e.g. the tables for default NPCs-you-might-kill stats.


As a final point to point out a place where you misunderstand me:


...As you suggested, let's say they're level 10. At best, by that level (and only by that level, not before) the Rogue could have one extra relevant feat (unless they're human and the baker isn't) or Skill Mastery in Craft (Pastry), Profession (Baker), and whatever other relevant skills there are. That is an advantage, though only by that level, and in all likelihood a serious character won't make such investments.
My point wasn't that rogues are better bakers than experts, because they really aren't. My point is that noncombat classes can't be better at noncombat stuff than a class that's good at that, lockpicking, sneak attacks, etc—hence me comparing it to a wizard who prepared enough self-buffs to equal a fighter and also do other things instead of a wizard who prepared spells that could Save-or-Die the fighter into an empty husk.
If the fighter is a class for people who specialize in fighting, shouldn't they have something that makes them better fighters than people who learn fighting and magic? If the expert is a class for people who specialize in a given task, shouldn't they have something that makes them better whateverers than people who learn whatever and sneak attack?

[dhasenan]

It kinda has been. The proper response is "You're making a lot of assumptions about how much agency characters have in their class choice".
It's not "draconian house rules" to say that characters have no choice over their class; in fact, it would 100% be draconian house rules to say that they do. After all, under the default rules, players choose their character's levels for them; it would be draconian (and also weirdly meta) to take that choice away from them. Players pick whatever class they think would benefit their character most, whether it involves giving their paladin sorcerous powers or teaching their fighter to sneak attack.
NPCs work the same way. The player controlling them selects what classes they took levels in at the moment of character creation, and chooses what classes they take when (if) they level up. The only difference is the player who controls them also controls every other NPC in the setting, mediates disputes among characters, and controls information flow to the other players...oh, and that they have concerns beyond combat effectiveness when deciding what to give those NPCs.

In other words, everyone's being controlled by an ineffable being. People aren't pursuing their goals as well as they do in the real world; they might try, but if so, they're thwarted by a DM trying to mold them into a role they don't want. This is entirely unsatisfying for people wanting an in-universe explanation. This person is a level 1 Commoner because the DM has decreed it so; they didn't gain any experience because the DM decreed it so; it's not a self-consistent world and a lot of stuff only works by fiat, or if everyone involved is utterly alien. (Every thorp has a communal thought bottle they use to destroy XP so they keep the right distribution of levels, perhaps.) We understand that.

What about a self-consistent world based on the D&D rules?

There's no reason a person would prefer to add a level of Commoner instead of nearly any other class. In fact, the DMG explicitly says of it: "This class should be reserved for everyone who does not qualify for any other class." An NPC class like Aristocrat doesn't have any listed requirements in the rules block. Even if we reinterpreted the fluff as prerequisites, we'd still have Adept and Expert as classes that lack prerequisites entirely. So there should be no Commoners at all, just Experts and Adepts. That's still true if NPC actions generally don't gain experience — they'd just be level 1 Adepts and Experts.

[GreatWyrmGold]

In other words, everyone's being controlled by an ineffable being. People aren't pursuing their goals as well as they do in the real world; they might try, but if so, they're thwarted by a DM trying to mold them into a role they don't want. This is entirely unsatisfying for people wanting an in-universe explanation.
Classes aren't about profession or role or whatever; they're a set of statistics chosen by whoever's controlling the character. Characters have as much control over their class as their race or feats; I don't see why a detailed in-game explanation is needed.


This person is a level 1 Commoner because the DM has decreed it so;
My latest D&D character is a paladin 5/sorcerer 6 because I decreed it so. The Big Bad of the adventure I just completed was an 11th-level transmuter because I decreed it so. Neither the sorcadin nor the transmuter possess a scrap of agency in their classes and levels. Why is it so unusual that commoners would be the same?



I've made a number of arguments for why commoners wouldn't gain a significant amount of XP using the rules laid out in the book. STOP PRETENDING THEY DON'T EXIST. If you disagree with them, respond to them. That's how this is supposed to work.

[quote]...it's not a self-consistent world and a lot of stuff only works by fiat, or if everyone involved is utterly alien.
If you make the series of assumptions you did about NPCs getting to consciously choose their own class and XP being earned by mundane skill checks, sure. Out of curiosity, do you also rule that NPCs can choose what bloodline feats they take (and hence what ancestors they have), or give XP to PCs for every skill check they make?
And while we're talking about NPCs being aware of rules, do they even know what a hit die is or what saving throw bonuses they would get for each level?


What about a self-consistent world based on the D&D rules?
The rules that make it clear that the characters have no agency in their own creation, or anything else, because this isn't Doki Doki Literature Club: The RPG? The rules that make it clear you need to do something significant to earn XP, not just hold down a regular job and deal with the mundane things that happen


In fact, the DMG explicitly says of it: "[Commoner] should be reserved for everyone who does not qualify for any other class." An NPC class like Aristocrat doesn't have any listed requirements in the rules block. Even if we reinterpreted the fluff as prerequisites, we'd still have Adept and Expert as classes that lack prerequisites entirely. So there should be no Commoners at all, just Experts and Adepts. That's still true if NPC actions generally don't gain experience — they'd just be level 1 Adepts and Experts.
If you ignore the fluff prerequisites spelled out in the class descriptions, of course. Few people train to become a "wise woman (or holy man) and mystical defender," and only a fraction of the remainder train to become "The skilled blacksmith, the astute barrister, the canny merchant, the educated sage, the master shipwright," or other such skilled professionals. This is as clear and obvious as "Aristocrats are the wealthy or politically-influential people in the world".
Not everyone becomes an adept or expert for the same reason not everyone picks up a bachelor or associate's degree—not everyone needs one, and the time and effort taken to learn the required skills isn't worth it to everyone. This doesn't require DM fiat, it requires that classes exist as something beyond a string of numbers. Which they sure appear to, based on the flavortext every class receives.

[dhasenan]

I've made a number of arguments for why commoners wouldn't gain a significant amount of XP using the rules laid out in the book. STOP PRETENDING THEY DON'T EXIST. If you disagree with them, respond to them. That's how this is supposed to work.

Repelling a goblin raid is defeating monsters and should gain XP for PCs and NPCs alike. The reason that 2/3 of the village hasn't reached level 2 after repelling the tenth annual goblin raid is that the DM has decreed that the goblins haven't raided that often. If the DM is not paying careful attention and there have been a few dozen goblin attacks, they've got an inconsistent world and would need to resort to some extreme measures to restore consistency (like all the villagers using thought bottles to destroy excess XP to avoid leveling up).


If you make the series of assumptions you did about NPCs getting to consciously choose their own class and XP being earned by mundane skill checks, sure. Out of curiosity, do you also rule that NPCs can choose what bloodline feats they take (and hence what ancestors they have), or give XP to PCs for every skill check they make?

PHB page 58 says: "If your character has more than one class or wants to acquire a new class, you choose which class goes up one level." This indicates the characters have agency when leveling up. If this doesn't impact initial character creation for typical NPCs, then there would be tons of NPCs stuck with one level of Commoner. When leveling up, though, an informed NPC would prefer to take a level of Expert instead if nothing else, since Experts are uniformly tougher and more resilient and more skilled than Commoners. So in any society with enough level 2 characters for people to have observed these differences, we should expect very few people with two levels of Commoner.


And while we're talking about NPCs being aware of rules, do they even know what a hit die is or what saving throw bonuses they would get for each level?

NPCs should absolutely understand that people who have been through several battles emerge tougher and gain skills during the process. In fact, combat is the only formalized way of gaining experience in D&D, so any NPC with more than one level must either have some sort of ad-hoc rewards applied (which should be formalized to make a self-consistent world, and that's the point of this thread) or have gone through several battles.


If you ignore the fluff prerequisites spelled out in the class descriptions, of course. Few people train to become a "wise woman (or holy man) and mystical defender," and only a fraction of the remainder train to become "The skilled blacksmith, the astute barrister, the canny merchant, the educated sage, the master shipwright," or other such skilled professionals. This is as clear and obvious as "Aristocrats are the wealthy or politically-influential people in the world".
Not everyone becomes an adept or expert for the same reason not everyone picks up a bachelor or associate's degree—not everyone needs one, and the time and effort taken to learn the required skills isn't worth it to everyone. This doesn't require DM fiat, it requires that classes exist as something beyond a string of numbers. Which they sure appear to, based on the flavortext every class receives.

What time and effort? What training? Retraining, sure, that takes time (and a quest). There are no rules establishing a laborious process for taking levels for classes in general; a PC Fighter 1 who got 6000xp in one day can take three levels of Wizard. Even granting that fluff can impose requirements is beyond rules as written.

But even with that, there's no fluff requirement for an Expert to have taken an apprenticeship. There's no fluff requirement for an Adept to have completed a course of training. Neither is implied. The examples for Expert includes "the canny merchant", which seems like a trade that you can get without any explicit training, for instance.

[lord_khaine]

So, now it seems like we've established that "passive XP gain" probably leads to a situation in which 30-year-olds tend to be the best commoner militants, and populations will tend to have a lot more young adults than old adults.
Yeah.. i think those numbers were quite telling.
Im sold on the argumentation.

[liquidformat]

Despite the math provided for commoner fight club (and, as a side note, thanks for the math. I think that this sort of thing is really interesting and the extra homework shows that you are giving this some thought. I appreciate it) all that you have really pointed out is that some old guys are better at physical combat that some even older old guys. Yeah, no kidding. The only scenario that has any value is Case 1. This isn't moving the goalposts or anything like that, this is because by the time someone has gained their second level in commoner they have bought into the gerontocracy. They have settled in, started breeding (and are already a parent), and accepted that with age comes strength. Your 'young' guy in Case 4 (32 years old) is probably already a grandfather. He is part of the system, not fighting against it.

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If leveling is explicitly seen as an expensive process, either in the monetary cost of training, or in the potential risk of life to acquire XP, then this makes sense. Single HD Humanoids are full of potential, but that potential can go unfulfilled if not given the proper outlet (training) or means to cultivate (XP). The idea that someone could exceed their spiritual and physical capabilities (level) in a way that is so much worse on every level (commoner) than even just raw animal growth (racial HD increase) is anathema to the entire concept of using a progression system.

So yes, progression past the first level in commoner is the same as taking levels in the Village Idiot prestige class (except an actual Village Idiot class would probably get a bonus to begging or flatulence or something, and so be objectively superior to commoner).


So there is a lot to unload here that you seem to be overlooking. First and foremost is that it is unreasonable for an older person 30-52 years old are usually the most powerful combatants of all commoners. I think this is a perfectly reasonable assumption, remember even if we go with a 'passive exp' system this is also representing the fact that once every month or so the village is being attacked by real threats like marauders, animals, and monsters. In this situation it makes sense that yes the people who make it through all of those encounters alive would in fact be the most powerful people in the village. To further highlight this point I will point to some real life experience, I was a wrestler all through middle school and high school and regularly made it into competition for state, the vast majority of our coaches were 30-60 and it was rare for anyone to be able to beat our coaches in a match. For another point I have a lot of friends in the army and most gunnies are in 30+, you don't mess with them unless you want to get laid out.

Second, the venerable old person is venerable for a reason, one they have been able to survive all the raids on their town, secondly they have amassed knowledge, skills, and power in order to live that long. This is a pretty common concept in high fantasy especially wuxia.

Another point you make it seem weird that a commoner with 3 or 4 levels has worse hd than an animal and can't take an animal down. When was the last time you heard about someone kill a wolf or a bear with a wooden stick? Heck even a kick from an angry horse or cow can be deadly, why should this be the case for the common person?

Finally onto your thought that it is unreasonable that people are commoners, I have always seen commoner as the default 'you have received no meaningful training'. This seems pretty reasonable, Cletus the average mudfarmer only has training so much as his family has given, so why is it unreasonable that without a great strike of fate he would live his life as a commoner progressing in said class? If his family saw potential in him and had a bit of wealth to grease some wheels maybe he gets an apprenticeship with a local craftsman (expert) or town guard (warrior) but otherwise it is rare indeed that he would ever have access to other classes.

On a side note I always make the standard town guards warrior and anyone who is part of a standing army is a fighter at the very least since that represents the training, time, and money invested into having a standing army.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Repelling a goblin raid is defeating monsters and should gain XP for PCs and NPCs alike. The reason that 2/3 of the village hasn't reached level 2 after repelling the tenth annual goblin raid is that the DM has decreed that the goblins haven't raided that often. If the DM is not paying careful attention and there have been a few dozen goblin attacks, they've got an inconsistent world and would need to resort to some extreme measures to restore consistency (like all the villagers using thought bottles to destroy excess XP to avoid leveling up).
What kind of DM lists every goblin attack that has ever happened to a given village? And what kind of person assumes no other adventurers exist who could have driven off those goblin attacks and then left in a world where that kind of behavior is the entire premise of the story?


PHB page 58 says: "If your character has more than one class or wants to acquire a new class, you choose which class goes up one level." This indicates the characters have agency when leveling up.
No, it doesn't; it says the opposite. Your character has the class, but you choose the class.


NPCs should absolutely understand that people who have been through several battles emerge tougher and gain skills during the process. In fact, combat is the only formalized way of gaining experience in D&D, so any NPC with more than one level must either have some sort of ad-hoc rewards applied (which should be formalized to make a self-consistent world, and that's the point of this thread) or have gone through several battles.
1. How does any of that relate to recognizing what classes are, and the differences between (say) a high-level commoner and a low-level warrior?
2. How are the types of ad hoc rewards given to player characters for completing extraordinary tasks (like resolving potentially-lethal encounters nonviolently or rescuing Mrs. MacGuffin or whatever) even comparable to the types of rewards proposed in this thread? That's the exact argument you are continuing to pretend doesn't exist, instead strawmanning me as saying something like "NPCs can't gain levels from completing adventures, duuur!"


What time and effort? What training? Retraining, sure, that takes time (and a quest).
To begin with, look at the starting age rules. Do you think human rogues just have to wait 1d6 years after reaching adulthood, and suddenly they know how to rogue?
It's true that PCs can pick up new classes and levels with just a barest justification, but that's clearly not always true. Not to mention that the PHB all but states that you are expected to have a justification.


But even with that, there's no fluff requirement for an Expert to have taken an apprenticeship. There's no fluff requirement for an Adept to have completed a course of training. Neither is implied. The examples for Expert includes "the canny merchant", which seems like a trade that you can get without any explicit training, for instance.
1. You can buy and sell things without being an Expert, just like you can fight without being a Warrior...but without the proper training, you can't be a canny merchant, just like you can't be a warrior without learning how to fight.
2. The only argument I can see for "no course of training" is "They don't have starting age requirements".
3. The druid fluff doesn't say that druids need to learn from other druids, just that they need to be inducted into the druidic organization. Are we therefore to assume that being inducted as a druid as a druid instantly bestows upon you an animal companion, 1st-level spells, and fluency in Druidic? Of course not! And bear in mind that the druid's fluff is longer than the entire adept class.

You're constantly asserting that we make a certain set of wild assumptions about how the world works, and of course XP allocation rules that aren't in the book, all in the name of "creating a believable world"...but you also insist that because the DMG doesn't say NPCs require training time to pick up the skills of their new class, and the PHB doesn't strictly say you must have some kind of training to multiclass, an NPC can freely pick any class whenever they want.
You talk about how unbelievable it is that anyone would choose to be a commoner, but then you go around and say unbelievable crap like this when we point out that NPCs can't freely choose their classes. Please tell me you notice the contradiction here...

[ShurikVch]

Consider that a Fox is probably somewhere between a CR1/4 Cat and a CR1/3 Dog in terms of CR.According to most sources, Fox is CR 1/4 (and in the latest printed source - refluffed Cat)


If they don't get out of commoner before 2nd level they are stuck. And no one becomes Commoner2/Wizard1. No one. If you don't buck the system in that first level, you are part of it.
There's at least one canon NPC with commoner levels and other levels. No Commoner/Wizard, just a Commoner/Monk.Also, Seskaya Atnall (Mysteries of the Moonsea) - innkeeper in Mulmaster, Commoner 4/Rogue 5; and, probably, the most baffling example - Surrolph Hlakken (City of Splendors: Waterdeep) - horsemaster and an information gatherer for the Red Sashes, Commoner 16/Vigilante 1


There's no reason a person would prefer to add a level of Commoner instead of nearly any other class. In fact, the DMG explicitly says of it: "This class should be reserved for everyone who does not qualify for any other class." An NPC class like Aristocrat doesn't have any listed requirements in the rules block. Even if we reinterpreted the fluff as prerequisites, we'd still have Adept and Expert as classes that lack prerequisites entirely. So there should be no Commoners at all, just Experts and Adepts. That's still true if NPC actions generally don't gain experience — they'd just be level 1 Adepts and Experts.Apparently, becoming an Expert is kinda a big deal in the D&D world.
For example, goblin alchemists in the Into the Dragons' Lair adventure: Mev and Dek are both Commoner 7 with Alchemy +10, and Grot - Commoner 9 with Alchemy +12
Just look at them: they're able to produce any alchemical item in the game, without blowing themselves up (too much :smallbiggrin:) - and still Commoners!

[dhasenan]

snip

I could reply point-by-point, but the main issue is that you seem to want a world that both runs by D&D 3.5 rules and looks like a standard western fantasy world. I'm more interested in what happens when we take the rules as given, formalize a few things that are informal, and figure out what world results from it.

So, for instance, when you find it absurd for a person to go from a child to a Rogue overnight upon hitting the starting age for Rogue — yes, that's absurd [b]for the purposes of crafting a western fantasy world[b]. It is, however, exactly what the D&D rules mandate. So when I'm talking about a D&D world, that absurdity is just a foundational aspect of that reality.

And I reject the idea of a DM constantly interfering with the world because my goal is to see how the world evolves on its own, without outside intervention.

[Quarian Rex]

1. There has to be a reason why people have stayed in the commoner class. To take it voluntarily would imply an Int. stat only slightly higher than that of an animal. Even then I would think that human level Wis. would provide a tingle of common sense to level anything else. If it wan't voluntary then your game world has some absolutely draconian house rules on class selection, and the first noble that realises that a minimal investment in the commoner youth to make them Warriors or Experts is a good idea will find himself ruling a grateful utopia and dominating his neighbors in short order. I will add that this has not really been addressed at all yet.

It kinda has been. The proper response is "You're making a lot of assumptions about how much agency characters have in their class choice".
It's not "draconian house rules" to say that characters have no choice over their class; in fact, it would 100% be draconian house rules to say that they do. After all, under the default rules, players choose their character's levels for them; it would be draconian (and also weirdly meta) to take that choice away from them. Players pick whatever class they think would benefit their character most, whether it involves giving their paladin sorcerous powers or teaching their fighter to sneak attack.
NPCs work the same way. The player controlling them selects what classes they took levels in at the moment of character creation, and chooses what classes they take when (if) they level up. The only difference is the player who controls them also controls every other NPC in the setting, mediates disputes among characters, and controls information flow to the other players...oh, and that they have concerns beyond combat effectiveness when deciding what to give those NPCs.

I get what you're saying here but that is more than a bit of a cop-out. When a noble family sends their middle child to apprentice with a Wizard and their youngest to study at the temple to be a Cleric, do they get back a Barbarian and a Samurai? No. While there are exceptions (Sorcerers, Oracles, some Warlocks) where a characters class is 'decided' for them, everyone understands that a person's capabilities are learned and take time to fully master. In this world it would also be pretty obvious that people gain actual physical power over time and that those who have even a minimal about of training of any sort (even Warrior or Expert) would have vastly superior capabilities over someone without. The difference in ability of someone who got this minor training at a low level and someone who got it much later in life would be extremely apparent as well.

To suggest that the people in-universe wouldn't/couldn't act on this knowledge would indicate a suicidal level of apathy or the iron-clad chains of destiny deciding that the vast majority of people are fated to be useless without any option to change. A decidedly foreign concept to the human perspective. In this world Barbarians would be graduating from Wizard school because they cannot fight fate.

If you think that it makes sense that the majority of the population is useless due to DM fiat that is fine. But then why would you bother providing them with levels?




In other words, everyone's being controlled by an ineffable being. People aren't pursuing their goals as well as they do in the real world; they might try, but if so, they're thwarted by a DM trying to mold them into a role they don't want. This is entirely unsatisfying for people wanting an in-universe explanation. This person is a level 1 Commoner because the DM has decreed it so; they didn't gain any experience because the DM decreed it so; it's not a self-consistent world and a lot of stuff only works by fiat, or if everyone involved is utterly alien.

Pretty much this. The assumption that commoners level as commoners opens up in-universe question that shouldn't exist, with all answers seemingly being nothing more than 'because the DM says so' which leaves more than a bad taste in the mouth.



There's no reason a person would prefer to add a level of Commoner instead of nearly any other class. In fact, the DMG explicitly says of it: "This class should be reserved for everyone who does not qualify for any other class." An NPC class like Aristocrat doesn't have any listed requirements in the rules block. Even if we reinterpreted the fluff as prerequisites, we'd still have Adept and Expert as classes that lack prerequisites entirely. So there should be no Commoners at all, just Experts and Adepts. That's still true if NPC actions generally don't gain experience — they'd just be level 1 Adepts and Experts.

There are virtually no classes that have any mechanical prerequisites and few that even have fluff ones which comes back around to there has to be a reason why people have stayed in the commoner class.




Classes aren't about profession or role or whatever; they're a set of statistics chosen by whoever's controlling the character. Characters have as much control over their class as their race or feats; I don't see why a detailed in-game explanation is needed.

Wizard schools, Thieves Guilds, Cleric churches, Paladin/Cavalier Orders, Ninja clans, Alchemist apprentices, Witch Covens, Monk dojos, Bard colleges, and Trade guilds would all like to have a word with you. When a human figures out how to do something others want to learn how. People of similar capabilities gather to share knowledge and to pass it on. This is how humans work. Why don't they work that way in your world? This isn't a classless system like GURPS. When someone learns something they learn it in certain ways with associated capabilities. Why on earth would you think that this wouldn't be noticed? Normally a 'detailed in-game explanation' isn't there because everyone at the table assumes that the simulated people in the game world have the same basic pattern recognition capabilities of people in our world. It seems like you are assuming that they don't. That is weird.



My latest D&D character is a paladin 5/sorcerer 6 because I decreed it so. The Big Bad of the adventure I just completed was an 11th-level transmuter because I decreed it so. Neither the sorcadin nor the transmuter possess a scrap of agency in their classes and levels. Why is it so unusual that commoners would be the same?

Fictitious character don't have agency, you are correct, because they are fictitious. However, they are assumed to have implied agency, as well as history, motivations, emotional bonds, you know, the roleplaying part of an RPG. I see what you are trying to say here, but you are taking it to such a weird extreme that it would break any kind of internal consistency in the game world. The world you are presenting does seem alien and detached from anything recognizable to humans.




I've made a number of arguments for why commoners wouldn't gain a significant amount of XP using the rules laid out in the book. STOP PRETENDING THEY DON'T EXIST. If you disagree with them, respond to them. That's how this is supposed to work.

You do realize that you have been arguing that commoners don't get to choose anything other than commoner while leveling. Remember, this was one of the considerations that needs to be made when you decide that commoners can level. If you agree that it doesn't make sense for commoners to level (which was my assumption of your position until the last couple of posts) then I already have you covered...


If leveling is explicitly seen as an expensive process, either in the monetary cost of training, or in the potential risk of life to acquire XP, then (Humanoids being 1st level commoners by default) makes sense. Single HD Humanoids are full of potential, but that potential can go unfulfilled if not given the proper outlet (training) or means to cultivate (XP). The idea that someone could exceed their spiritual and physical capabilities (level) in a way that is so much worse on every level (commoner) than even just raw animal growth (racial HD increase) is anathema to the entire concept of using a progression system.

I think we just got turned around and you were arguing the opposite of my point. Hence the apparent confusion. Though your position was still... strange.




So there is a lot to unload here that you seem to be overlooking.

You seem to be making arguments against points that I didn't make. If someone gets XP from combat that is completely valid. What I'm talking about is the consequence of the assumption that pulling weeds and fixing wheelbarrows would provide XP points. If someone fights off a goblin attack on their village they are now a part-time adventurer. If this is a regular occurrence then the logical consequence would be for them essentially be field trained as a Warrior (at the very least). How many times would your family have to be in danger before you figured out how to wear padded ot hide armor without tripping over yourself? Before you figured out how to use a club and a spear and a shortbow? Commoners only have a single simple weapon proficiency. If all they know how to do is swing a bit of wood (club) and someone hands them a spear or dagger they can't figure out where the pointy end goes.



I have a lot of friends in the army and most gunnies are in 30+, you don't mess with them unless you want to get laid out.

You know what that sounds like? That sounds like combat training. That sounds like mid-level Fighter/Ranger/Warrior/whatever in the process of shaping a commoner into an actual class, if you want to make the comparison.

That is not what is under discussion. What we are talking about is a 50 year old hippie weed farmer, who has never been in a fight in his life and has had no combat training whatsoever, being able to go up to a recent army graduate and knock him the f*ck out with his bong because he has spent 35 years nursing bud and has managed to make some really wicked macrame. Oh, yeah, he can take a max damage musket shot to the chest without dropping. This is what is being discussed.



Another point you make it seem weird that a commoner with 3 or 4 levels has worse hd than an animal and can't take an animal down. When was the last time you heard about someone kill a wolf or a bear with a wooden stick? Heck even a kick from an angry horse or cow can be deadly, why should this be the case for the common person?

You missed the point on this one. The point was that leveling commoner was worse that gaining racial HD in Humanoid, the equivalent of larger animals gaining HD.



Finally onto your thought that it is unreasonable that people are commoners, I have always seen commoner as the default 'you have received no meaningful training'. This seems pretty reasonable, Cletus the average mudfarmer only has training so much as his family has given, so why is it unreasonable that without a great strike of fate he would live his life as a commoner progressing in said class? If his family saw potential in him and had a bit of wealth to grease some wheels maybe he gets an apprenticeship with a local craftsman (expert) or town guard (warrior) but otherwise it is rare indeed that he would ever have access to other classes.

Oh, it is not unreasonable for people to be commoners. See my excerpt above from a previous post. It is unreasonable for people to continue leveling commoner. If you think that the actions of a character are meaningful enough to warrant an XP reward then by the time they level they should have had enough meaningful experience (on the job training or what have you) to provide them with an actual direction and outlet for their capabilities. Whether that is weapon and armor proficiencies after fending off goblin raids (became a Warrior), or gained skill in maintaining farm equipment (Craft), animal husbandry (Animal Handling), field lore (Knowledge-Nature), finding lost sheep (Survival), and haggling with his neighbors (Diplomacy), to be a better farmer (becoming an Expert).

When someone levels commoner it is like saying that they somehow figured out how to become better at being useless, that their enlightenment somehow resulted in a deepening of their ignorance. It's an oxy-moron.

[javcs]

Adventurers/PCs would or should get the same sort of noncombat XP ... only they usually level up too fast through adventuring for the fairly slow rate of XP gain from regular life/downtime to matter.
Plus, their "regular life" when not adventuring is going to be decidedly different from the kind of "regular life" common non-adventuring folk have, probably with fewer hardships (adventuring money buys you comfortable downtime), and therefore less challenge and less XP gain. Besides, active adventurers are going to end up at the point where they've outleveled the difficulties of regular life/downtime XP in fairly short order.



Skills/skill tests can generate XP on their own - see traps. Those are noncombat skill-based encounters that provide XP.
Or the Druid/Ranger solving a wild animal encounter through Wild Empathy/Handle Animal - that's still worth XP.
Sure, domesticated animals are going to be easier to handle than wild animals, but a farmer is also going to be dealing with animals a whole lot more often, and it'd add up over time.

The challenges of "regular life" are going to be easier (and thus worth far less XP on an individual basis), but they'd add up over time. Eventually. At least at low levels.



At my ballparked ~CR1 per average season, that's in the ballpark of an average day being on the order of a CR 1/100 or CR 1/90 equivalent noncombat encounter, depending on how long a season is.
If we use my earlier figure of an average of 1XP per day, that puts an average day in the area of a CR 1/300 equivalent noncombat encounter, and puts the entire year at a slightly more than CR1 equivalent noncombat encounter, maybe a CR 1 1/5 equivalent, depending on how long the year is. Or, perhaps more likely, the typical day is worth no XP and there are more difficult days that are worth more XP and it averages out.


A CR 1/300, even a CR 1/90, equivalent noncombat encounter is going to be easy - easy to the point of not really being noticeable. Especially since it's spread out over a day.


Now, sure, we could track this for our PCs, but let's be honest - it'd be a whole lot of bookkeeping for relatively negligible benefit for adventurers. It's not even something a DM is going to bother with tracking particularly closely for NPCs that matter.

[MisterKaws]

I always think of Bob, the level 28 Commoner(totally RAW-legal as described for the strongest Commoner in a metropolis) as the barman who keeps serving all these murderhobos daily.

I mean, anyone would learn how to smash dragons' faces if they had to deal with necromancers and inquisitors, chaingating outsiders to fight each other, at their doorstep, every single day.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I could reply point-by-point, but the main issue is that you seem to want a world that both runs by D&D 3.5 rules and looks like a standard western fantasy world. I'm more interested in what happens when we take the rules as given, formalize a few things that are informal, and figure out what world results from it.
But you gleefully ignore the rules when it suits you, like asserting that NPCs get XP from tasks that no book says characters get XP from.


So, for instance, when you find it absurd for a person to go from a child to a Rogue overnight upon hitting the starting age for Rogue — yes, that's absurd [b]for the purposes of crafting a western fantasy world[b]. It is, however, exactly what the D&D rules mandate. So when I'm talking about a D&D world, that absurdity is just a foundational aspect of that reality.
PHB, Page 109. Humans reach adulthood at age 15, but can't be a rogue for another 1d4 years. (I mistakenly said 1d6 years earlier, but a die size doesn't matter that much.) However, it takes 1d6 years to become a ranger, and 2d6 to become a monk. The rules not only give rules for random age generation, but use those rules as a basis for the minimum age a player can make their character if they just choose a number. Why on earth could this be?
You're making crap up again, and saying that I'm the one ignoring the rulebook to support my argument.


And I reject the idea of a DM constantly interfering with the world because my goal is to see how the world evolves on its own, without outside intervention.
To begin with, it doesn't exist. The world does not exist without DM intervention, both because it only exists in his head (until he acts to make it exist in the players' head), and because the DMG constantly makes references to decisions made by the DM. The players (including the DM) are baked into the rules of D&D.




I get what you're saying here but that is more than a bit of a cop-out. When a noble family sends their middle child to apprentice with a Wizard and their youngest to study at the temple to be a Cleric, do they get back a Barbarian and a Samurai? No.
Of course not. They don't control what class they become, but they do control the circumstances which determine class. However, not everyone can send their kids to apprentice with a wizard or study under a priest. These people are the ones stuck as commoners.
I probably should have been more clear about the distinction between "control over class" and "control over circumstance".


...those who have even a minimal about of training of any sort (even Warrior or Expert) would have vastly superior capabilities over someone without. The difference in ability of someone who got this minor training at a low level and someone who got it much later in life would be extremely apparent as well.
And here you go, automatically assuming that experts and warriors require minimal training. The DMG doesn't specify how long it takes to train an expert or warrior, but that leaves you with two options—you can make something up that causes the world to make no sense, or you can make something up that causes the world to make sense. Why are you doing the first when the second is equally-valid?


If you think that the actions of a character are meaningful enough to warrant an XP reward then by the time they level they should have had enough meaningful experience (on the job training or what have you) to provide them with an actual direction and outlet for their capabilities.
I agree that high-level commoners shouldn't be nearly as common as they are. However, I can absolutely see a commoner happening to get enough incidental XP that they level up without ever getting dedicated enough training to "count" as an Expert or Warrior or Ranger or whatever. This is especially true if we consider "quest XP" to be available for doing exceptional things that don't involve dungeons or dragons.

Part of your problem seems to be that you see that the commoner class offers no real mechanical benefits, making it useless, and therefore seem to assume that it is specifically a class for useless people. This is ridiculous.
It's not. It's a class for unskilled and low-skill laborers. Sure, it doesn't provide any benefits that make the commoner better at those tasks (beyond a few skill points and a slightly better Fortitude save), but skill points aside, clerics don't get anything that makes them better at leading worship, wizards don't get anything that makes them better at researching spells, and aristocrats don't get anything that makes them better at making people listen to their inane. That doesn't mean that cleric isn't the default class for priests, wizards isn't the default class for magical researchers, or that aristocrat isn't the default class for nobility.
Yes, commoners aren't going to get XP for pulling weeds and chasing deer out of the field (barring exceptional circumstances). But clerics don't get XP for sermons, wizards don't get XP for studying books, and aristocrats don't get XP for starting blood feuds that go on to destroy whole kingdoms. That doesn't mean those activities aren't tied to those classes in the same way.

[liquidformat]

You seem to be making arguments against points that I didn't make. If someone gets XP from combat that is completely valid. What I'm talking about is the consequence of the assumption that pulling weeds and fixing wheelbarrows would provide XP points. If someone fights off a goblin attack on their village they are now a part-time adventurer. If this is a regular occurrence then the logical consequence would be for them essentially be field trained as a Warrior (at the very least). How many times would your family have to be in danger before you figured out how to wear padded ot hide armor without tripping over yourself? Before you figured out how to use a club and a spear and a shortbow? Commoners only have a single simple weapon proficiency. If all they know how to do is swing a bit of wood (club) and someone hands them a spear or dagger they can't figure out where the pointy end goes.

Commoner farmers are easier to logic in the why they are getting exp as inevitably according to standard dnd they will be attacked by monsters/animals/other humanoids. However, I am not sure if that should be the only way they are getting exp. For example a smith in a big city is probably rarely if ever going to see any combat but will somehow gain exp... I think rather than braking down the how and why of it all going with a blanket of 1 exp per day or week is a decent way to break things down and fits decently well with the NPC charts. It also puts some context down such as most npcs over level 5 are old or older. (at least for humans things get more screwy when we use this same assumptions for longer lived races). Also even if you apply the exp gain across the board it isn't exactly going to break the game if PCs gain 31 exp for the month they take training and doing stuff and things, and if it is breaking your game you have bigger problems.

Also I think there is a big difference between say learning how to properly wear and use light armor (taking a feat) and being a trained combatant (warrior levels). A person could learn to wear a set of armor by simply wearing it while doing daily activities for a couple weeks. Where as becoming a warrior takes actual guided training from someone who knows what the heck they are doing. There is a major difference between someone who goes to the gym and punches a punching bag for a few minutes every day and someone who has been taught how to throw punches and the reactions and instincts to do so in a high stress situation. Also not to mention the cost of buying armor and the pc ignored costs of maintaining it...


You know what that sounds like? That sounds like combat training. That sounds like mid-level Fighter/Ranger/Warrior/whatever in the process of shaping a commoner into an actual class, if you want to make the comparison.

And again the key there is that there are trainers there to teach you the skills, even so I think it is a reasonable analogy regardless of what class is being taught. A farmer commoner is taught how to fight from his commoner farmer father, in comparison the father is going to be able to dominate the son, I am not seeing an issue with this analogy...


That is not what is under discussion. What we are talking about is a 50 year old hippie weed farmer, who has never been in a fight in his life and has had no combat training whatsoever, being able to go up to a recent army graduate and knock him the f*ck out with his bong because he has spent 35 years nursing bud and has managed to make some really wicked macrame. Oh, yeah, he can take a max damage musket shot to the chest without dropping. This is what is being discussed.

No that is exactly what we are talking about, we aren't talking about some hippie up in the hills of modern California, we are talking about something closer to a farmsteader. They have the expectation to get into at least a few deadly fights a year, that ain't no happy pot smoking potfarmer...


You missed the point on this one. The point was that leveling commoner was worse that gaining racial HD in Humanoid, the equivalent of larger animals gaining HD.

Ah, quite right, and yes it always bugs me that one there is humanoid rhd and two it doesn't directly correlate to any npc class...


Oh, it is not unreasonable for people to be commoners. See my excerpt above from a previous post. It is unreasonable for people to continue leveling commoner. If you think that the actions of a character are meaningful enough to warrant an XP reward then by the time they level they should have had enough meaningful experience (on the job training or what have you) to provide them with an actual direction and outlet for their capabilities. Whether that is weapon and armor proficiencies after fending off goblin raids (became a Warrior), or gained skill in maintaining farm equipment (Craft), animal husbandry (Animal Handling), field lore (Knowledge-Nature), finding lost sheep (Survival), and haggling with his neighbors (Diplomacy), to be a better farmer (becoming an Expert).

When someone levels commoner it is like saying that they somehow figured out how to become better at being useless, that their enlightenment somehow resulted in a deepening of their ignorance. It's an oxy-moron.

I guess we have to agree to disagree, although I agree that it doesn't make sense to pump commoner there are opportunity costs associated with switch your class, IE having access to the training. There are a few reasons that this is rare outside of PCs and nobles. First switching classes is supposed to take a long time of dedicated training, a commoner with a family to support isn't going to be able to drop everything to devote themselves to such training for a few weeks, months, or even years depending on the class. Like I said in the previous post getting access to training requires greasing the right wheels, whether this is by money or a strike of fate that allows someone with class x to owe the commoner a favor, for reasons stated in the last comment this is better used to further your child's future than your own. Lastly access to training, just because you want to become class x doesn't mean you can find someone with that class nor does it mean that they will be willing to train you even if you can find them.

[GreatWyrmGold]

For example a smith in a big city is probably rarely if ever going to see any combat but will somehow gain exp...
How? By smithing? Why would smiths get XP from normal Craft checks when PCs don't?
Sure, if he gets some big important order, or otherwise uses his smithing skills to do something exceptional, that's a whole different story...but that doesn't happen predictably enough that we can put a rate on it.

[liquidformat]

How? By smithing? Why would smiths get XP from normal Craft checks when PCs don't?
Sure, if he gets some big important order, or otherwise uses his smithing skills to do something exceptional, that's a whole different story...but that doesn't happen predictably enough that we can put a rate on it.

My point is the game has established that there are experts with multiple levels of expert and no clear competency in combat. Often it is questionable if they have ever seen combat period and yet they somehow have been able to gain enough exp for multiple levels. That really isn't up for debate there are plenty of RAW examples the question is how did they gain their levels if they aren't fighting much less murderhoboing.

I keep seeing you argue adamantly against the concept of npcs gaining exp differently than pcs but have yet to see any concrete explanations of how these npcs are getting levels if they aren't kill things, having commoner fight club or something silly like that...

[dhasenan]

But you gleefully ignore the rules when it suits you, like asserting that NPCs get XP from tasks that no book says characters get XP from.

You're confusing me with someone else. The only thing I used as an example of NPCs gaining experience from was combat, and PCs gain experience from combat.


PHB, Page 109. Humans reach adulthood at age 15, but can't be a rogue for another 1d4 years. (I mistakenly said 1d6 years earlier, but a die size doesn't matter that much.) However, it takes 1d6 years to become a ranger, and 2d6 to become a monk. The rules not only give rules for random age generation, but use those rules as a basis for the minimum age a player can make their character if they just choose a number. Why on earth could this be?
You're making crap up again, and saying that I'm the one ignoring the rulebook to support my argument.

In my interpretation, the age requirement is arbitrary. Lord knows there's enough arbitrariness in D&D rules already.


To begin with, it doesn't exist. The world does not exist without DM intervention, both because it only exists in his head (until he acts to make it exist in the players' head), and because the DMG constantly makes references to decisions made by the DM. The players (including the DM) are baked into the rules of D&D.


And you can't imagine that someone would want to come up with the nearest equivalent that's self-contained and self-consistent?

You're getting rather worked up about this. Maybe just leave the thread for a couple days?

[noob]

My point is the game has established that there are experts with multiple levels of expert and no clear competency in combat. Often it is questionable if they have ever seen combat period and yet they somehow have been able to gain enough exp for multiple levels. That really isn't up for debate there are plenty of RAW examples the question is how did they gain their levels if they aren't fighting much less murderhoboing.

I keep seeing you argue adamantly against the concept of npcs gaining exp differently than pcs but have yet to see any concrete explanations of how these npcs are getting levels if they aren't kill things, having commoner fight club or something silly like that...

you gain xp by solving encounters.
Example: a bandit threaten you then you give your money and the bandit let you go then you go to the nearest police station and try to give indications on where the bandit is then adventurers goes and murderkill half the planet including the bandit thanks to the fact you indicated the existence of a bandit somewhere. You solved the encounter(even if it was indirect)
Or the encounter is "survive taxation" and the men that inflict taxation are epic level 50 experts that goes around with the disintegrate variant of oxyders and destroys all wealth.
surviving this encounter is like surviving an encounter with a god(heck there is a god which is just a level 20 expert) so the commoner would probably get xp as if it had a CR20 encounter.

[GreatWyrmGold]

How? By smithing? Why would smiths get XP from normal Craft checks when PCs don't?
Sure, if he gets some big important order, or otherwise uses his smithing skills to do something exceptional, that's a whole different story...but that doesn't happen predictably enough that we can put a rate on it.My point is the game has established that there are experts with multiple levels of expert and no clear competency in combat. Often it is questionable if they have ever seen combat period and yet they somehow have been able to gain enough exp for multiple levels. That really isn't up for debate there are plenty of RAW examples the question is how did they gain their levels if they aren't fighting much less murderhoboing.

I keep seeing you argue adamantly against the concept of npcs gaining exp differently than pcs but have yet to see any concrete explanations of how these npcs are getting levels if they aren't kill things, having commoner fight club or something silly like that...
...You quoted me giving two examples of how an expert could gain XP! Vague examples, but still!



You're confusing me with someone else. The only thing I used as an example of NPCs gaining experience from was combat, and PCs gain experience from combat.
Sorry about that.


In my interpretation, the age requirement is arbitrary. Lord knows there's enough arbitrariness in D&D rules already.
...Dude, no. You don't get ignore "arbitrary" rules and say there aren't rules for the thing those arbitrary rules are clearly supposed to represent.


And you can't imagine that someone would want to come up with the nearest equivalent that's self-contained and self-consistent?
I can. I just can't imagine it would work the way you are envisioning it, because your vision requires all sorts of extra assumptions that clash with what the rulebooks lay out.

[Quarian Rex]

Commoner farmers are easier to logic in the why they are getting exp as inevitably according to standard dnd they will be attacked by monsters/animals/other humanoids.

That would only apply to lone farmers out on the frontier or isolated villages, in which case they are part-time adventurers and should be handled as such. But most likely they would just die, because the commoner class is so bad that the chances of surviving a monster raid approach nil.




For example a smith in a big city is probably rarely if ever going to see any combat but will somehow gain exp... I think rather than braking down the how and why of it all going with a blanket of 1 exp per day or week is a decent way to break things down and fits decently well with the NPC charts.

And the consequences of this blanket XP gain for characters with no valid way to gain it is what is being discussed. Read the thread with this already in mind.



It also puts some context down such as most npcs over level 5 are old or older. (at least for humans things get more screwy when we use this same assumptions for longer lived races).

Yup, welcome to the gerontocracy...




Also even if you apply the exp gain across the board it isn't exactly going to break the game if PCs gain 31 exp for the month they take training and doing stuff and things, and if it is breaking your game you have bigger problems.

This is where I think that you are way off. If you are providing commoners with 1 XP per day as an abstraction for minor XP gains due to skill checks (again, this is not an abstraction for frontiersmen being raided, this is for farmers and tradesmen who spend their lives being 'safe') then you have added a new source of XP to the game, one that should be provided to the PCs. You are not providing XP for small trivial tasks, you are providing NPCs XP for skill uses that are only capable of small trivial tasks. If skill use in your game provides XP then the skill use of the PCs would provide proportionally more. Whether its researching the true name of a demon, seducing a Cthulhu cultist, or staring down the royal executioner, these are more difficult and higher stakes skill uses than fixing your wheelbarrow.

"But fixing a wheelbarrow is an appropriate challenge to the commoner and those other things are appropriate challenges to PCs so they get the same XP, which isn't enough to affect the players!", I hear called out from the darkness. 'Appropriate' challenges are not equal. A 1st level party completing a CR1 encounter gets CR1 XP. A 10th level party completing a CR10 encounter gets CR10 experience. If you are making a change like this, and you want the PCs to buy into it as something other than DM fiat, then this is what you have to consider.



Also I think there is a big difference between say learning how to properly wear and use light armor (taking a feat) and being a trained combatant (warrior levels). A person could learn to wear a set of armor by simply wearing it while doing daily activities for a couple weeks. Where as becoming a warrior takes actual guided training from someone who knows what the heck they are doing. There is a major difference between someone who goes to the gym and punches a punching bag for a few minutes every day and someone who has been taught how to throw punches and the reactions and instincts to do so in a high stress situation. Also not to mention the cost of buying armor and the pc ignored costs of maintaining it...

Warrior is not learning the secrets of the Shaolin masters. It is a general understanding of how to move with protective layers, a working knowledge of how to hurt someone with objects, and a willingness to expose yourself to the aggression of others. Cavemen figure this out before they hit puberty. Goblins, who have the attention span of a cracked-out mayfly, are not graduating from warrior college. Has a goblin Warrior ever even put on a suit of heavy armor? Probably not, but they get the gist of it. Pretending that it would be difficult to be something other than commoner, or that Warrior and such are anything but a basic and easily attainable option, goes against everything we know, both in reality and in fantasy (how many farm boys pick up a sword and are thrust into adventure without formal education? Not a one of them has commoner in their build).



And again the key there is that there are trainers there to teach you the skills, even so I think it is a reasonable analogy regardless of what class is being taught. A farmer commoner is taught how to fight from his commoner farmer father, in comparison the father is going to be able to dominate the son, I am not seeing an issue with this analogy...

The issue is that you seem to be missing the point. I'm saying that you now have to account for a world of 50 year old (comparative) arsekickers, across the board. Pointing at a 50 year old army Sgt (a mid-level martial) is completely missing the point.



No that is exactly what we are talking about, we aren't talking about some hippie up in the hills of modern California, we are talking about something closer to a farmsteader. They have the expectation to get into at least a few deadly fights a year, that ain't no happy pot smoking potfarmer...

The hippie is exactly what we're talking about! When you decide that all NPCs (not just the frontiersmen who are part-time adventurers) get regular XP purely from non-combat activities then your world is now filled with 50 year old hippies (or ditch diggers, or beggars, or chambermaids, or village idiots, etc.) who can beat the crap out of recent military graduates and can take a full strength musket shot to the face without dropping.

This is the consequence of that choice and it should have massive effects on your game world, yet you seem to be hand-waving it.



I guess we have to agree to disagree, although I agree that it doesn't make sense to pump commoner there are opportunity costs associated with switch your class, IE having access to the training. There are a few reasons that this is rare outside of PCs and nobles. First switching classes is supposed to take a long time of dedicated training, a commoner with a family to support isn't going to be able to drop everything to devote themselves to such training for a few weeks, months, or even years depending on the class. Like I said in the previous post getting access to training requires greasing the right wheels, whether this is by money or a strike of fate that allows someone with class x to owe the commoner a favor, for reasons stated in the last comment this is better used to further your child's future than your own. Lastly access to training, just because you want to become class x doesn't mean you can find someone with that class nor does it mean that they will be willing to train you even if you can find them.

As I said above, not all classes are equal as far as required training goes. People learn by doing. If you are the child of a farmer (the competent Expert version) or blacksmith you are raised being taught your skills, you don't need to go to school for it. Even assuming that a child raised by two commoner parents with different farming appropriate skill selections can become an Expert with those farming skills selected as their class skills (see my previous post) makes sense on every level.

Saying that any way to get out of commoner would be prohibitively expensive in time or money is just silly. That is like saying that you can't learn to be a good farmer (an Expert) because you are spending too much time farming.

Commoners being commoners only really makes sense...


If leveling is explicitly seen as an expensive process, either in the monetary cost of training, or in the potential risk of life to acquire XP, then (Humanoids being 1st level commoners by default) makes sense. Single HD Humanoids are full of potential, but that potential can go unfulfilled if not given the proper outlet (training) or means to cultivate (XP).

As soon as you start making leveling a relatively easy (if slow) process then people staying commoners has to be rethought with the three considerations. So far it looks like the proponents of commoner leveling think that there is no further consequence to the world for doing so. It's your game, do as you wish, but then don't pretend that it is anything but DM fiat, and don't pretend that there is any in-world support for the idea.

[Blue Jay]

Despite the math provided for commoner fight club (and, as a side note, thanks for the math. I think that this sort of thing is really interesting and the extra homework shows that you are giving this some thought. I appreciate it) all that you have really pointed out is that some old guys are better at physical combat that some even older old guys. Yeah, no kidding. The only scenario that has any value is Case 1. This isn't moving the goalposts or anything like that, this is because by the time someone has gained their second level in commoner they have bought into the gerontocracy. They have settled in, started breeding (and are already a parent), and accepted that with age comes strength. Your 'young' guy in Case 4 (32 years old) is probably already a grandfather. He is part of the system, not fighting against it.

You most certainly are moving the goalposts here. Your original comment, the one that I was originally disputing, was this:


Now you need to completely restructure every society in your world to be a gerontocracy. Not only do old people gain in sensory acuity (Wis), cognitive capacity (Int), and general attractiveness (Cha), but they actually have gains in physical durability (HD) as well as martial (BAB) and spiritual (saves and skill caps) capability of several magnitudes over someone in the 'prime' of their life, much like dragons of myth and legend.

32-year-olds do not have age-boosted Wis, Int and Cha scores, so you clearly were not talking about 32-year-olds when you first made your case for the gerontocracy.

Your original argument was that mechanically old people are mechanically superior to mechanically young people, and that, because of this, old people will inevitably dominate and rule society.

But, now you're arguing that some mechanically "young" people actually count as "old" people because of non-mechanical reasons that you never mentioned until now.

It's hard to imagine a clearer example of moving the goalposts than this.

You also made a couple other comments in your original post that no longer make sense in regards to your most recent comments.

In the quote above, you compared "old people" with "people in the 'prime' of life," and you talked about "orders of magnitude" differences. But now you're saying that the only meaningful comparison is between the old guy and a 15-year-old, and the numbers are showing that the actual differences in that comparison are are in the range of "5% to 20% better chance of success on a given d20 roll." An "order of magnitude" usually means "factor of X" or "X times greater," so that was clearly an exaggeration.

In reality, I suspect that an outbreak of filth fever is probably going to kill old guys and young guys at very similar rates, because while old guys will have a slightly better chance of succeeding on the Fort saves, young guys have a higher Con score, which means the disease will take longer to kill them via Con damage, and they'll get more chances to roll the Fort save.

Also, most people who say "prime of life" are not referring to 15-year-olds. You actually used an 18-year-old as an example in your first post:


A greatsword hit that would outright kill an 18 y/o soldier could easily be shrugged off with a chuckle by his (great)grandfather.

Laying aside the fact that a soldier surely ought to be a warrior, and not a commoner, let's work with this. An 18-year-old would be a 2nd-level commoner in our scheme. Using your proposed generation time of 16 years, the 18-year-old's great-grandfather would have to be at last 66 years old (so, 6th level and "old" age). And, if you recall, the old guy in commoner fight club had only a very slim advantage over the 18-year-old (4.1-round kill vs 4.6-round kill).

And putting his great-grandfather at 66 years old is assuming that the 18-year-old is the firstborn of the firstborn of the firstborn. Given your scenario of "massive birth rates," firstborns are likely to massively outnumbered by later births. So, a majority of 18-year-olds will not be firstborns, and a huge majority of their fathers will not be firstborns, etc. So most 18-year-olds' great-grandfathers are likely to be significantly older than 66.

-----

So, if you're now dropping your original premise that gerontocracy means mechanically old people, then I feel like the only thing you and I actually disagree on here is whether or not the word "gerontocracy" is the appropriate term for this. And I frankly think you're now using the term "gerontocracy" in such a loose way that basically any type of government would count as a gerontocracy if you squint a little and tip your head just so.


I appreciate your attempts here but I do think that the assumptions are pretty off. As the commoner fight club demonstrates pretty well, once a passive leveling commoner reaches their early 30s they are probably going to die of old age. When you start so weak that a cat getting thrown at your face means you ded early mortality will be horrendous. Once they have a few additional HD (even those as bad as the commoner) then the chance of accidental death gets closer to zero. Even disease is trivial so long as you have an elder with max. ranks in Heal available (again, hammering home the worth of age). There will be a crapton of 'old' people. When you are cranking out a new generation @ every 16 years then you are a grandfather at 32 and by 96 you have 5 generations of grandfathers, none of whom need to worry about dying of sickness and all of whom can take a max damage club to the face without dropping (not a high bar but it's there).

Okay, the only reason I can think of for why you would respond to my analysis with the stuff you wrote in this paragraph is that you didn't actually understand my analysis. What you're so laboriously explaining to me here is exactly the set of assumptions I incorporated into my model. For example, my model incorporated the assumption that "early mortality will be horrendous": in my model, 3 out of every 4 babies died before reaching the "Adult" category, and 3 out of every 4 adults died before reaching "Middle Age." So, in my model, only 1 out of 16 people reached middle age, and mortality began tapering off after that. I also incorporated the assumption that Venerable people live a freakin' look time: in my model, every person who reached the Venerable category lived to the maximum possible age for a D&D human, which is 110 years (70 + 2d20 maximized).

But, you're right that I did leave off a few important elements of my analysis, so I'm going to try a more complete life-table analysis, using the vital statistics in this spoiler:

The biggest thing that I didn't account for was "graduation," or the number of people who leave an age category each year due to advancing into the next age category. The other thing is that I didn't actually run a year-by-year simulation. So, I'll complete my model now by adding these components.

Here are the numbers I'm using:

Birth rate: 0.2 babies born per "Adult" in the population each year. This means that every Adult who survives to age 35 will have 4 babies (or 8 per couple), and people older than that do not have babies.
Mortality: These are just numbers that I assigned to make sure young people died at a much faster rate than old people.

Adolescent: 75% die before adulthood (age 15). That means that, on average, 5% of adolescents in the population will die each year.
Adult: 75% die before middle age (age 35). That means that, on average, 3.75% of adults in the population will die each year.
Middle Age: 50% die before old age (age 53). That means that, on average, 0.55% of middle-agers in the population will die each year.
Old: 25% die before venerable age (age 70). That means that, on average, 0.59% of old-agers in the population will die each year.
Venerable: 100% of venerables live to the maximum age of 110 years.


Graduation: Assume the members of an age category are spread out evenly across the range of ages covered by the age category. So, you have a number of "cohorts" equal to the number of years in the age category. The "Adult" category spans 20 years, so break adults up into 20 cohorts. if there are 100 people in the "Adult" category, each cohort will have 5 people in it. That means five 15-year-olds, five 16-year-olds... and five 34-year-olds. So, each year, the 34-year-olds (1/20th of the Adult population) "graduate" and join the Middle Age category.

Adolescent: 15 years, so on average, 1/15th (6.67%) of Adolescents graduate and join the Adult category each year.
Adult: 20 years, so on average, 1/20th (5%) of Adults graduate and join the Middle Age category each year.
Middle Age: 18 years, so on average, 1/18th (5.55%) of Middle Agers graduate and join the Old category each year.
Old: 15 years, so on average, 1/15th (6.67%) of Old-Agers graduate and join the Venerable category each year.
Venerable: 40 years, so on average, 1/40th (2.5%) of Venerables "graduate" and join the "Death by Maximum Age" category each year.


Here's a link to a Google Doc version: Mudfarming Demographics (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zd39D7LUY6gMjtXMZZP-AwCxWaFUfulOOqHBiSvpZJU/edit?usp=sharing) (supposedly this is a "shareable link," but I'm not exactly experienced with Google Docs yet, so tell me if I got that wrong).

On the document, I started with a population that had 100 people in each age category, and ran it for 200 years. What you see is that the 'Adolescent" category is always the largest, year after year (compare the "end" columns across a given year). You'll also see that there is an initial period where Venerable is the second largest age category. That lasts for 57 years. At year 58, the "Adult" age category overtakes the Venerable category, and it remains the second largest age category from then on. The reason for this is that the starting population was a highly unnatural condition, and it took awhile for the population to reach its stable state.

And ultimately, it doesn't really matter what numbers you use. Go ahead and try it, if you like (I don't think you can edit my Google Doc, but maybe you can copy-n-paste into Excel or something): set mortality rates for Adolescents and Adults up to 99%, and everyone else to 0%, if you'd like. Actually, don't do that, because that population will go extinct before anything noteworthy happens. But, tinker with the mortality rates and see if there's any combination of mortality rates across age categories that leads to old people consistently outnumbering young people without also leading the entire population in a downward spiral towards extinction.

The conclusion is inescapable: differential mortality alone simply cannot result in the situation you imagine. I can think of only two ways to get the situation you imagine, with "so... many... elders": (1) The population is dying out due to unsustainably low birth rates or catastrophically high death rates, or (2) there is no maximum age, and Venerable people can live on indefinitely. Neither of these is really a tenable position, so the situation you imagine is also untenable.


If you give bonus XP to the commoner for passing the skill check to plow his field then you need to give the Scout bonus XP for sneaking past the enemy guard, or the Fighter when he makes a Perception check to detect ambush while on nights watch. If you give the commoner a big chunk of XP for the accomplishment of creating a masterwork root cellar, then you need to give a proportionally similar boost to the Rogue who picks a masterwork lock, or to the Wizard when he finishes researching a new way to reshape reality with words and gestures. And for all of this you would need to give a bigger reward to the adventurers since they will be making most of their checks under various forms of duress. Add to this all of the Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, Knowledge, Escape Artist, and bear wrestling grapple checks that are presumed to occur in the average adventurers downtime that no one bothers rolling for (much like any proposed sources of commoner XP) then it seems pretty clear that a significant XP stream will be rolling in. Add to that the fact that all these new sources of XP will stay level relevant to the adventurers, while whatever 'challenges' are faced by the commoners will essentially stay static and so suffer diminishing returns as they level. Fixing that wheelbarrow will always be a CR 1 encounter (or whatever you choose to award it as). If bluffing a 1st level guard is CR 1 (the equivalent of whatever the wheelbarrow was) then Bluffing a 10th level guard is worth proportionally more XP, while the wheelbarrow stays CR 1.

See what I'm getting at? If you are looking for a more simulationist approach and want to level commoners because you think that it is more 'realistic' then there are some pretty weird consequences of that 'realism'.

Okay, hold on here. You're trying to shoehorn me into a position that I haven't taken. You seem to have forgotten that I've already accepted javcs' proposed rate of 1 XP/day for commoners, a rate at which a commoner takes 58 years to reach 7th level, a rate that is significantly lower than any adventurer ought to expect. Nobody is arguing that a commoner ought to gain XP as fast as an adventurer over the course of their entire lifetime.

If your only point here is that DM's should give XP for non-combat encounters, then you and I are in total agreement. But, it sounded to me like that wasn't the extent of the argument you were making. It seems like you're still stuck on the erroneous notion that commoner XP is some kind of "allowance," and that it's being awarded for stuff that normally wouldn't provide XP; and because of this misconception, you feel like PCs should also get an "allowance" for downtime activities that also normally wouldn't provide XP, like spell research.

But again, the premise of this commoner-advancement concept is that commoners probably do overcome challenges that are worth XP, and that this XP is not currently accounted for in the usual assumptions about how commoners advance. So, the basic idea is that these advancement rules are making up for a deficit in the way commoners are typically treated. And I believe there is good justification for this.

Consider the rules for Noncombat Encounters (DMG p 40). Those are pretty loose, minimalist rules, but there are there are a few relatively clear guidelines, like this one: "A roleplaying encounter should only be considered a challenge at all if there's some risk involved and success or failure really matters." Many (probably most) commoners are people who live in some degree of hardship, because they have to invest most of their time and energy into meeting their basic needs. So, even if a farmer's tasks are menial and not difficult, the results of these menial tasks usually rather directly impact his chances of survival, because he can't really afford to invest much (if any) of his time and energy into things that aren't directly connected to his survival. So it seems reasonable to me to suggest that a disproportionately large number of a commoner's menial tasks are worth XP based on the "risk" criterion.

Meanwhile, things adventurers do in their downtime usually don't meet the risk criterion, so most downtime activities for adventurers should not be worth XP. Adventurer tasks that do meet the "risk" criterion are things that should probably be actively roleplayed and treated as noncombat encounters. So, if that's all you're trying to argue, then I completely agree with you.


1. There has to be a reason why people have stayed in the commoner class. To take it voluntarily would imply an Int. stat only slightly higher than that of an animal.

This argument is entirely inconsistent with the other points you've been making. In every other part of the discussion, you're all about "recognizing and accepting the implications of the game mechanics." But on this particular point, you seem to be all about "making the game mechanics beholden to (your views on) reasonableness."

There is no mechanic that requires a high-level commoner to have a low Intelligence score. In fact, since high-level commoners are most likely to be old guys in our scenario, they're quite likely to have relatively high Intelligence scores. So, if you continue to insist that only "village-idiot level morons" will advance as commoners, you're just ignoring the implications of that fact that Intelligence score and advancement as a commoner are mechanically independent qualities.


3. Behold the rise of the gerontocracy. Again, discussed above. The gradual accumulation of actual, tangible, power based on age has effects that need to be taken into account on a societal level.

I think we've pretty clearly established that the power curve is not monotonically increasing, but is actually hump-shaped: the accumulation of actual, tangible power based on age is mitigated by the concurrent accumulation of actual, tangible handicaps which mean that the mechanical power peak comes somewhere in the middle of the age distribution, not at the higher end of it. And that's pretty much exactly what I would expect in a non-gerontocratic world.

[dhasenan]

...Dude, no. You don't get ignore "arbitrary" rules and say there aren't rules for the thing those arbitrary rules are clearly supposed to represent.

I'm not a dude.

You seem really determined to argue with me, and you've only managed to do that by misrepresenting me. I said starting ages are arbitrary, not that they're not part of the rules.

I want a self-consistent, independent, concrete, non-arbitrary set of rules for a world that hews closely to D&D 3.5 rules as written. Similarity to our reality is not a goal for me. I need to make tradeoffs to meet my goals, and one of the tradeoffs I'm making is accepting arbitrariness for starting ages.

If I wanted to resolve that arbitrariness by introducing a training requirement, I'd have to change the starting age rules to be based on Int, the stat that's described as controlling how well you learn, instead of race. An 18 Int elf should be able to learn wizardry faster than an 11 Int human, one would think, so I'd have to fix that inconsistency. I'd have to add training time to the multiclassing rules. But then, if it's a minimum of two years to become a level 1 wizard, and a level 10 wizard is so much better, one would think it would take longer. So perhaps training should be a prerequisite for leveling up, too. But leveling up is so coarse-grained; why can't you learn Sneak Attack on its own? Why can't you simply train to advance a skill and gain the advantages of a level 20 wizard just through study and practice? And if training is required and in real life is sufficient, why isn't it enough in D&D? What's the point of XP?

Once I resolved those questions, I'd end up with something uncannily similar to GURPS. And I already have GURPS.

[liquidformat]

And the consequences of this blanket XP gain for characters with no valid way to gain it is what is being discussed. Read the thread with this already in mind.

So read the thread believing everything said in the thread is wrong, this explains most of your posts...



Yup, welcome to the gerontocracy...

According to the tables in the DMG most of any population is level 1 so young adults, and the vast majority is 1-3 again adults. You seem to take offense to the concept that most people in any given campaign world with a high level (outside of potentially pcs) would also be old. This seems perfectly reasonable, pcs are supposed to be extraordinary outlier geniuses/heroes or in other words the exception not the rule. The average person with 7 levels in any class is probably going to be old, how old depends on the profession. For example I would expect warriors and other classes that see combat on a regular basis to be gaining levels faster than your average mudfarmer.


This is where I think that you are way off. If you are providing commoners with 1 XP per day as an abstraction for minor XP gains due to skill checks (again, this is not an abstraction for frontiersmen being raided, this is for farmers and tradesmen who spend their lives being 'safe') then you have added a new source of XP to the game, one that should be provided to the PCs. You are not providing XP for small trivial tasks, you are providing NPCs XP for skill uses that are only capable of small trivial tasks. If skill use in your game provides XP then the skill use of the PCs would provide proportionally more. Whether its researching the true name of a demon, seducing a Cthulhu cultist, or staring down the royal executioner, these are more difficult and higher stakes skill uses than fixing your wheelbarrow.

"But fixing a wheelbarrow is an appropriate challenge to the commoner and those other things are appropriate challenges to PCs so they get the same XP, which isn't enough to affect the players!", I hear called out from the darkness. 'Appropriate' challenges are not equal. A 1st level party completing a CR1 encounter gets CR1 XP. A 10th level party completing a CR10 encounter gets CR10 experience. If you are making a change like this, and you want the PCs to buy into it as something other than DM fiat, then this is what you have to consider.

I think you are completely missing the point that we are trying to get at. It isn't that we should erroneously assign exp. It is that by RAW there are npcs such as nobles, commoners, experts and so on that have never or very rarely ever seen combat but are gaining levels without any clear basis on why or how. All I am saying is this gaining of exp can be represented by saying each commoner and expert is effectively gaining exp at a rate 1 exp/week or warrior could be 1 exp/day and that explains the level demographics of towns, cities, and so forth decently well. It also gives context and flavor to the town/city when I can say 9 out of 10 npcs with 5 levels get old age category applied to them. That was what this thread was about.

The only reason I even mentioned gaining exp on adventurers down time was because you seem obsessed with the concept and how game breaking it is when to be honest in the average campaign that takes place for 5-10 levels and a duration of 6 months with maybe a month or two of down time it makes no difference what so ever.

On a side note when it takes you a few weeks to a month to plow and plant a field a few months maintaining and protecting that field and a week or two to harvest, each day you are having to make skill checks on whether you succeed in said task or not during that time, and your literal survival depends on the success of that field ya I think it is reasonable that you would be gaining some exp along the way as you succeed on keeping your livelihood and not dieing over the winter of starvation because you failed to properly maintain and protect said field.




Warrior is not learning the secrets of the Shaolin masters. It is a general understanding of how to move with protective layers, a working knowledge of how to hurt someone with objects, and a willingness to expose yourself to the aggression of others. Cavemen figure this out before they hit puberty. Goblins, who have the attention span of a cracked-out mayfly, are not graduating from warrior college. Has a goblin Warrior ever even put on a suit of heavy armor? Probably not, but they get the gist of it. Pretending that it would be difficult to be something other than commoner, or that Warrior and such are anything but a basic and easily attainable option, goes against everything we know, both in reality and in fantasy (how many farm boys pick up a sword and are thrust into adventure without formal education? Not a one of them has commoner in their build).
.
.
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As I said above, not all classes are equal as far as required training goes. People learn by doing. If you are the child of a farmer (the competent Expert version) or blacksmith you are raised being taught your skills, you don't need to go to school for it. Even assuming that a child raised by two commoner parents with different farming appropriate skill selections can become an Expert with those farming skills selected as their class skills (see my previous post) makes sense on every level.

Saying that any way to get out of commoner would be prohibitively expensive in time or money is just silly. That is like saying that you can't learn to be a good farmer (an Expert) because you are spending too much time farming.

Commoners being commoners only really makes sense...

I agree warrior isn't going to take the same time and dedication as monk or swordsage, that is why I said weeks, months, or years depending on the class. It is pretty clear by raw that learning a new class takes time and training and there are explicit text talking about taking the time to train with another pc to pickup the class (trainer) and others such as a lot of prcs have entry requirements that hint at or directly come out and say you need to have someone train you to enter. Also your examples don't do much to help your argument, cavemen and goblins are in a situation where they are forced to learn to fight and kill from the time they are children or die, that type of environment is forcing you to learn certain skill sets but still takes time and effort to do so.

As far as the expert farmers go yes and no, I think what you are getting stuck on is the expert class verses having expertise (enough skill points) in a field. The way that I look at it is the expert class is gained by say going to a college and studying a specific field, or being taught by a true master of a profession. So sure a commoner is going to learn and gain knowledge from his parents, that is why they have so many skill points 2+int x4 at level one instead of just 2+int but they aren't going to know any more than what they learned from their parents.



The issue is that you seem to be missing the point. I'm saying that you now have to account for a world of 50 year old (comparative) arsekickers, across the board. Pointing at a 50 year old army Sgt (a mid-level martial) is completely missing the point.

Why is it an unreasonable expectation that most people in a setting take years to gain levels and not days, weeks, or months like most pcs who are defined as extraordinary individuals? This is all just a thought processes to look at npc demographics to figure out how npcs level and what age they would be? What is the issue with old people? Is the classical high fantasy idea that most powerful wizards are old people offensive to you or something?



The hippie is exactly what we're talking about! When you decide that all NPCs (not just the frontiersmen who are part-time adventurers) get regular XP purely from non-combat activities then your world is now filled with 50 year old hippies (or ditch diggers, or beggars, or chambermaids, or village idiots, etc.) who can beat the crap out of recent military graduates and can take a full strength musket shot to the face without dropping.

This is the consequence of that choice and it should have massive effects on your game world, yet you seem to be hand-waving it.

In high fantasy the old hobo that slaughters a group of ruffians when they mess with him too much is pretty common so forgive me if I don't see much of an argument here. Also the dnd musket already causes major suspension of disbelief when anyone with 3 levels could mechanically do the same...



As soon as you start making leveling a relatively easy (if slow) process then people staying commoners has to be rethought with the three considerations. So far it looks like the proponents of commoner leveling think that there is no further consequence to the world for doing so. It's your game, do as you wish, but then don't pretend that it is anything but DM fiat, and don't pretend that there is any in-world support for the idea.

I am just making sense of RAW, raw gives population demographics based on level, raw gives commoners with multiple levels, raw says it takes time, training, and either hints at or outright states needing a trainer to enter different classes. Given all of this information I am just trying to put meat on the bones...

[javcs]

1 XP per day is easy. If you have on average one CR 1/300 equivalent noncombat encounter a day, congratulations, that's 1XP per day.

How difficult is a CR 1/300 equivalent noncombat encounter going to be?
I'd say not very hard at all. Possibly not even enough to really remember or notice.
That's good for 1XP all the way to level 7, and then it's fractional XP until level 9.



If you instead get wild and crazy with an average of one CR 1/90 equivalent noncombat enounter a day, that's a total of a bit more than 3XP per day and roughly the equivalent of a CR1 equivalent noncombat enounter per season (depending on how long a season is).

A CR1/90 equivalent noncombat encounter is not going to be particularly difficult or memorable either, IMO.



Sure, adventurers and PCs should get this XP too. On the other hand, adventurers and PCs are going to level up a whole lot faster just from basic adventuring, and won't take that long before they've outleveled getting XP from CR1/300 or CR1/90 equivalent encounters.

It's not worth the effort of tracking on PCs. It's not even really worth tracking that closely on important NPCs. Though, realistically, an important NPC



Again, traps are encounters that can be solved entirely with skills and give XP.
Or the Druid/Ranger solving a wild animal encounter through Wild Empathy/Handle Animal.
Admittedly, domesticated animals aren't going to be as much of a challenge on a per individual animal per incident basis as wild animals. On the other hand, the farmer is going to be dealing with more animals and dealing with each of them multiple times a day. Quantity has its own kind of quality.


The fundamental point is that even trivial XP gains add up meaningfully over time for low level non-adventurers and screw up the NPC level distribution tables.
Those same XP gains are basically rounding errors for active adventurers (PCs).

[liquidformat]

Admittedly, domesticated animals aren't going to be as much of a challenge on a per individual animal per incident basis as wild animals. On the other hand, the farmer is going to be dealing with more animals and dealing with each of them multiple times a day. Quantity has its own kind of quality.

I don't know most dogs until the last 20 to 30 years were working dogs and of those a large percentage were guard dogs...

[javcs]

I don't know most dogs until the last 20 to 30 years were working dogs and of those a large percentage were guard dogs...

True. On the other hand, getting your own dogs to do what you want them to do, with or without training, or training them yourself, is probably going to be less hazardous than getting jumped by somebody else's guard dog.

Also, I was mostly thinking about the fact that cows would probably be based on the bison - a CR2 animal - and while managing cattle is by no means a cakewalk, it's probably not going to be a CR2 encounter equivalent either, barring extraordinary circumstances.

Now, the process of breaking a horse to saddle? That probably is a full CR encounter for the kind of horse it is.

[liquidformat]

Oh I was thinking more of the fact that most dogs you come across will be very aggressive and maybe even trained to attack on site...

I don't know about the cows, a kick from a cow can be pretty deadly not to mention if a whole heard freaks out and starts a stampede. Granted a stampede should be relatively rare.

Ya I would imagine breaking a horse should be a cr 2 or 3 encounter, though I suppose the skill system would end up dropping that down quite a bit...

[Elves]

I could reply point-by-point, but the main issue is that you seem to want a world that both runs by D&D 3.5 rules and looks like a standard western fantasy world. I'm more interested in what happens when we take the rules as given, formalize a few things that are informal, and figure out what world results from it.

I want to reply to this specific point, about whether the game rules are imperative (primary) or descriptive (secondary). The fact is, they're not either or. I'm totally with you about following the rules to their logical conclusions in order to end up with cool new situations. But you should only apply this to places where it's worth doing, because you're using the game as a generative tool more than as a puzzle -- the point is to end up with cool new situations.

The worlds described by stuff like the Tippyverse and Gavinfoxx's D&D transhuman guide are cool spins on rote pulp medievalism. But changing physics to work on a HD/level system, I don't really see the point of or find interesting. In part because literalizing a low-resolution model usually gets you a low-resolution reality.

[noob]

The worlds described by stuff like the Tippyverse and Gavinfoxx's D&D transhuman guide are cool spins on rote pulp medievalism. But changing physics to work on a HD/level system, I don't really see the point of or find interesting. In part because literalizing a low-resolution model usually gets you a low-resolution reality.
Tons of simple models disagree with you(typical example: Conway game of life and its variants)

[Elves]

I sure wouldn't rather be a glider gun.

But notice I said literalizing, not extrapolating. You can extrapolate complexity from almost anything, that's not the point.

[javcs]

Oh I was thinking more of the fact that most dogs you come across will be very aggressive and maybe even trained to attack on site...

Some would, sure, but I think most of the dogs a nonadventurer is going to be dealing with are more likely to be trained in the direction of herding-assistance and the ones trained for fishing still either be trained to guard an individual who is present to control them and mark fellow villagers as nonhostiles, or trained to guard specific areas and alert their masters.

One does not, after all want to train your dogs in such a way that they go after the neighbors when they knock on your door.
Or village kids playing.




I don't know about the cows, a kick from a cow can be pretty deadly not to mention if a whole heard freaks out and starts a stampede. Granted a stampede should be relatively rare.

A stampede would count as extraordinary circumstances, IMO. And probably would involve something else as a trigger - and that'd probably be worth XP in its own right.
Sure, an angry and provoked cow would be a definite danger. On the other hand, farmers usually aren't going go be dealing with angry cows, either.



Ya I would imagine breaking a horse should be a cr 2 or 3 encounter, though I suppose the skill system would end up dropping that down quite a bit...
Hard to say exactly how it'd work out, but it'd be complicated for sure.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

Keep in mind that by RAW, nobody can get a level (in PC classes at least) without reaching the minimum starting age for it

[redking]

The OP is the reason why it is absurd to even think about XP and levels for non-heroic NPCs. I've written about this before. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?563450-Proposal-for-3-5-PF-Separation-of-NPC-normals-and-heroics)

If you want a 'hardy, skilled farmer', then simply apply a template that gives him 2 hitdice and 7 ranks in profession (farming). If you want a sage that is an expert in all things nobility and history, then apply a template giving the sage 20 ranks in both Knowledge (Nobility and royalty) and Knowledge (History). The idea of a 17th level expert NPC class for that sage is absolutely absurd.

[javcs]

Keep in mind that by RAW, nobody can get a level (in PC classes at least) without reaching the minimum starting age for it
At whatever point you start gaining XP, if you average gains of 1XP per day (noncombat encounter equivalents of CR1/300), you make level 2 (1000XP) in 1000 days, or less than 3 years, give or take depending on how long the year is. You make level 3 in another 6-ish years (9-ish total), level 4 in another 9-ish(18-ish total), and level 5 in another 12-ish (30-ish total).
If instead of slightly more than a noncombat encounter equivalent of CR1 1/4-ish for the year, you have roughly a CR1 noncombat encounter equivalent for an average season (roughly a CR1/90 noncombat encounter per day, depending on how long the season is), you instead average ~3.3XP per day, and make level 2 inside of a year, level 3 less than two years after than, level 4 in three years after that (6 total years).
Both of those assume that nothing extraordinary happens to cause increased XP gains.
Sure, adventuring will absolutely level you up a whole lot faster, but for non-adventurers? Most of them aren't going to be level 1 the way the level distribution charts would otherwise indicate.

And realistically speaking, the difference between CR1/300 and CR1/90? I'm honestly not sure you'd really be able to tell the difference in the moment.


Besides, IIRC, those minimum starting ages are only in Core, and not included with base PC classes that are printed elsewhere. So RAW, starting age minimums would apply only to those PC classes in Core, or those base classes from elsewhere that have minimum starting age information included/provided.



The OP is the reason why it is absurd to even think about XP and levels for non-heroic NPCs. I've written about this before. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?563450-Proposal-for-3-5-PF-Separation-of-NPC-normals-and-heroics)

If you want a 'hardy, skilled farmer', then simply apply a template that gives him 2 hitdice and 7 ranks in profession (farming). If you want a sage that is an expert in all things nobility and history, then apply a template giving the sage 20 ranks in both Knowledge (Nobility and royalty) and Knowledge (History). The idea of a 17th level expert NPC class for that sage is absolutely absurd.
The glory (and curse) of d20OGL, and thus 3.x, is that everybody uses the same rules*. Your proposal breaks that.
*Except, for some reason, Wealth By Level - that's the one spot that NPCs use different rules than PCs do.

A sage is going to know a fair bit off the top of their head (ranks, and maybe an appropriate skill feat), and then hit their reference and source books/other means of recording information for the truly obscure stuff (+various bonus types).


Also, a level 17 character (of any class) will have had to deal with CR9 or higher encounters. If they're scraping by with minimum effort, they'd need 40 solo CR9 encounters to make level 17 from level 16.
Even so, at that point (level 17), you're hardly in the realm of regular person.

[liquidformat]

The OP is the reason why it is absurd to even think about XP and levels for non-heroic NPCs. I've written about this before. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?563450-Proposal-for-3-5-PF-Separation-of-NPC-normals-and-heroics)

If you want a 'hardy, skilled farmer', then simply apply a template that gives him 2 hitdice and 7 ranks in profession (farming). If you want a sage that is an expert in all things nobility and history, then apply a template giving the sage 20 ranks in both Knowledge (Nobility and royalty) and Knowledge (History). The idea of a 17th level expert NPC class for that sage is absolutely absurd.

I am really not seeing any validity in your argument, what is so absurd about the idea of npcs gaining exp and levels? In fact saying it is absurd breaks the game both RAW and RAI.

I will admit templating is an interesting way to go about level increases; however, home brewing a horde of templates to account for everything is a huge pain especially when we already have a working system that does the same thing with more consistancy.

[awa]

The glory (and curse) of d20OGL, and thus 3.x, is that everybody uses the same rules*. Your proposal breaks that.
*Except, for some reason, Wealth By Level - that's the one spot that NPCs use different rules than PCs do.


Thats not true, for instance Npcs use CR not xp and their are plenty of LA - creatures that simply arnt playable.

Their are also a few other things like oriental adventures taint that also apply different rules to npcs than pcs. Their are likely quite a few other things as well I simply dont know them off the top of my head.
edit
also Pcs have minimum stat values npcs do not

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'm not a dude.
I often use "dude" as a non-gender-specific term. Dunno how universal that usage is across English dialects, but I also don't know how universal the term "dude" is. It doesn't seem like the most formal term however you use it... Not important.


You seem really determined to argue with me, and you've only managed to do that by misrepresenting me. I said starting ages are arbitrary, not that they're not part of the rules.
Your problem with my argument seemed to be that it wasn't based in actual rules, so when you called starting ages "arbitrary," I assumed you meant that you didn't consider them part of the rules. Which wouldn't be completely bonkers—the Description chapter is basically all fluff—but it would be ignoring something in the rulebook despite your insistence on adhering to every mechanic in the rulebook.


I want a self-consistent, independent, concrete, non-arbitrary set of rules for a world that hews closely to D&D 3.5 rules as written. Similarity to our reality is not a goal for me. I need to make tradeoffs to meet my goals, and one of the tradeoffs I'm making is accepting arbitrariness for starting ages.

If I wanted to resolve that arbitrariness by introducing a training requirement, I'd have to change the starting age rules to be based on Int, the stat that's described as controlling how well you learn, instead of race. An 18 Int elf should be able to learn wizardry faster than an 11 Int human, one would think, so I'd have to fix that inconsistency.
First off, intelligence doesn't necessarily correlate to how quickly you can learn new skills. It's not 100% clear what intelligence means, exactly, but it's clearly more about possessing and/or processing information, and learning new skills (especially physical skills) requires more than just that.
Second, I fail to see why you think elves, humans, etc (races which mature and age at vastly different rates) would all learn at the same rate, all else held equal. To me, it makes sense that long-lived races would tend to be more set in their ways, which means they would need a slower, gentler learning process. Of course, you need to dig into the fluff to get that kind of justification, but I don't see why you'd want to build a world out of D&D's mechanical bones alone.


I'd have to add training time to the multiclassing rules. But then, if it's a minimum of two years to become a level 1 wizard, and a level 10 wizard is so much better, one would think it would take longer. So perhaps training should be a prerequisite for leveling up, too. But leveling up is so coarse-grained; why can't you learn Sneak Attack on its own? Why can't you simply train to advance a skill and gain the advantages of a level 20 wizard just through study and practice? And if training is required and in real life is sufficient, why isn't it enough in D&D? What's the point of XP?

Once I resolved those questions, I'd end up with something uncannily similar to GURPS. And I already have GURPS.
So...you're insisting that I can't say "It takes certain kinds of training to become class X" to justify people not all being PC classes, because if I did I would be required to add additional rules about training time. I can't possibly think that wizarding schools and acolyte programs and whatnot serve an actual purpose, nor that there's a reason classes which would "require" them require longer delays between maturity and the start of the career, without writing rules which codify all of this.
It seems like you want me to give a 100% mechanical reason for why any NPC would have levels in commoner. I can't, because you can't build a world out of game mechanics alone. Even the Tippyverse adds in flavor-related assumptions, like the idea that there are enough people around to justify that kind of effort—or, for that matter, the idea that people want to be powerful. You can't get that from the rules, because the rules don't cover motivations.
Trying to build a world out of nothing but pure mechanics would be like if Tolkien tried to make a world out of nothing but pure linguistics. Tolkien knew that he'd have to come up with justifications for his languages (ie, history) and build his world around that if he wanted to make something interesting. Similarly, building a world around D&D's mechanics requires making some assumptions about how the rules interact with the setting's "reality"—assumptions that cannot be made based purely on the game mechanics, because the mechanics are just mechanics (by definition).

As an aside, why would getting new levels in wizard be so much more work than getting that first level? Leveling up in one class is just improving the skills you already have.



Discussion of the CR of barnyard "encounters"
I don't think the CR is going to give a good estimate of how much XP you'd likely get from dealing with a barnyard animal. CR stands for Challenge Rating, not...Creature Rating or something. The amount of XP you gain from an encounter has more to do with the associated difficulties and dangers (ie, challenge) associated with the encounter than the type of creature it is. That's why any WotC adventure which includes a wounded or otherwise weakened form of a monster will reduce the encounter's Encounter Level and/or the creature's CR.
Generally speaking, CR is based on the assumption that either the creature is trying to kill you, or you are trying to kill the creature and it's fighting back, which isn't going to be true of most barnyard animals. You don't get the same XP for getting kicked by a horse as you would for fighting it, for instance. If you fought somebody's guard dog, sure, you'd get XP for beating it, but that's not going to come up regularly.



The worlds described by stuff like the Tippyverse and Gavinfoxx's D&D transhuman guide are cool spins on rote pulp medievalism.
I'd argue that those are less grounded in rules than what dhasenan implies she's going for. The Tippyverse requires certain assumptions to be made about the world that can't be found in the rules. Example: The only available meterstick for how difficult it is to get food are the prices given in the Player's Handbook. Wow, food is really cheap! What's the purpose of wasting tens of thousands of gold pieces on something whose function could be replaced by throwing (smaller amounts of) money around? The answer is simple: Because you can't conjure food by throwing money around. But this answer won't be found in any rulebook, because it's beyond the scope of almost all adventures.



The OP is the reason why it is absurd to even think about XP and levels for non-heroic NPCs. I've written about this before. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?563450-Proposal-for-3-5-PF-Separation-of-NPC-normals-and-heroics)

If you want a 'hardy, skilled farmer', then simply apply a template that gives him 2 hitdice and 7 ranks in profession (farming). If you want a sage that is an expert in all things nobility and history, then apply a template giving the sage 20 ranks in both Knowledge (Nobility and royalty) and Knowledge (History). The idea of a 17th level expert NPC class for that sage is absolutely absurd.
Why is it more absurd to give NPCs class levels than it is to give PCs class levels? I personally think it's absurd that your narrative role should dictate how your mechanics work. Sure, it can dictate how many of your mechanics are actually calculated (you probably don't need to know the sage's Reflex save), but that's hardly the same thing.
Why should NPCs be built using a completely different set of rules from PCs? What happens if a PC becomes an NPC or vise versa? And above all, what do you gain by restricting NPCs to a handful of restrictive templates? (Oh, hi there, one of the few simplifications in 5e that I don't think is worth the efficiency gain.)



Thats not true, for instance Npcs use CR not xp and their are plenty of LA - creatures that simply arnt playable.
Just because an NPC doesn't have an ECL doesn't mean they don't use the same rules. They do, there are just plenty of rules that do not matter for an NPC. They're not adventuring alongside the party, so they don't get XP, so their ECL doesn't affect anything. Similarly, PCs do have CRs, but who cares? No DM worth their salt is going to give parties XP just because they killed something of a theoretically level-appropriate ECL.