PDA

View Full Version : Why I care about NPC experience accumulation



Thoughtbot360
2008-06-09, 04:34 AM
So, the way that DMs assign levels and CR for their adventure is to give no further thought than what matches them evenly with the PCs. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, its what we are pretty much inclined to do to have a game worth coming back to. Too strong and the players will get frustrated and the Characters (their in-game personas) would've given up. Too weak and it gets boring. In this perspective, the axiom "The NPCs strength is determined by the plot" is correct.

Thats not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is, and this is a fairly big issue for me: How strong are the city guards anyway?

I mean, there are certain moments were the PCs do things that demand immediate action from the local authorities. How do you handle it? The PCs could just as easily end up asking for help from the guard as fighting them when the Rogue robs the magic shop and bluffs the party into giving him backup informs the party that the King has been usurped by the Chancellor -who is really the evil magic user they've been fighting all along- and they've just been framed as the Assassins and need to fight their way out of town.

This wouldn't be such a problem if the core rulebooks didn't say such silly things as:

-Most Everyone is Level 1 with their highest stat having a 13 in it and 10 in everything else. And most of them have the notoriously underpowered "NPC" classes from the DMG.
-The average peasant supports his family off of 1 silver piece a week.
-Surviving a 3rd-level spell like fireball makes people think you are protected by the gods

Which imply a rather low-power world in which the PCs (and the BBEG) are really something very unique and can easily surpass everything. But they then get contradicted by such things as:

-Magic Item shops (presenting the twin paradigms of items with price tags in the thousands and tens of thousand worth of gp, and shopkeepers who have levels in the double digits-most likely in PC class like Wizard)
-If the PCs get uppity with the law, the DM should say that the city held some high-level "champion" and a special "Anti-Magic unit" in reserve.
-This isn't really mentioned in the books, but its implied for any decent campaign: There are several BBEGs with many different schemes, but all have that same high-level power to seriously challenge (and ideally, worry) the PCs.
-The existence of intelligent CR 8+ monsters that could, with a force many times smaller, crush any army of humans or any other PHB race without levels and magic weapons, and otherwise outcompete us. Implying that humans are working overtime to power level (and probably find ways to blantantly cheat) so as to keep their position of being-shoot, forget being on top, being alive and having independent nations sounds pretty hard. Otherwise the best case scenario is that we become integrated into their empire in some non-sucky, but probably still not fantastic position. Also:

That assumes the monsters themselves, not even the really, really smart ones, don't ever take levels of PC classes.


All of which imply a high-power world where there is always someone stronger than you (and the city guards are backed up by a number of such people). Well, either that or the world catches with the PCs and all the strong monsters the PCs cannot even touch are all cooling their heels "backstage" for the first 20 sessions of the campaign. A world thats harder for the PCs to dominate, but can also diminish their sense of "heroic relevancy" -basically, it can make the PCs seem superfluous.

Tempest Fennac
2008-06-09, 04:41 AM
I know what you mean bout it not making much sense (the fact that a housecat can kill a level 1 Commoner is also worrying). I think it's mainly a case of WotC not thinking everything through that throughly.

Reinboom
2008-06-09, 04:52 AM
For my current campaign, I've taken a drastic different level scheme for most people.
Level 1: You are a teenager, or a very incompetent adult.
Level 2: You are the average adult, no significant training. An apprentice carpenter, a training guard, a standard low ware merchant.
Level 3: You are trained significantly in something. Guards are usually this.
Level 4: You are the more notable versions of the above, your the exceptions. You are not the elites, but, people know you for something. Or don't know you for something when they should. You can still be anonymous yet though. The highly trained guards are this. The full service soldier is this. In my world, almost anyone who fights in the pits is this. At least, most of them.
Level 5: This is the same group as level 4.
Level 6-7: You are the highest guard. "Sir", "Ma'am". You are 1 in a thousand. You are a captain in a small city, a high guard in a large city. Or you could be at the low end of the 'elites'.
Level 8-9: You are an elite. You don't guard.
Level 10-11: High elite, possibly a leader.
Level 12-15: Leader. Extreme specialist. Ridiculous type. Very very very few reach this point.
Level 16-17: People debate whether you can really exist.
Level 18+: People try to debate whether you can exist, but those who say you can are far outnumbered by those that say you could.

This system works out rather well, actually. It meant that I "had" to start the campaign with the party at 4 (due to the basis of the start of the campaign), however, that's also 1 level shy of what I prefer to be the starting level.

Side note:
Wizards, Clerics, Druids, Archivists, and Artificers don't exist in my world.

Tempest Fennac
2008-06-09, 04:58 AM
Is the lack of those classes due to the setting, or your view that they are overpowered? That system makes sense as far as NPCs go (I think I read somewhere that NPCs could gain some small amounts of Exps over time, and I think the person who mentioned this also said that human NPCs are likely to be at around level 14 by the time they reached Venerable).

Segial
2008-06-09, 05:00 AM
I strongly recommoned against setting the general level for NPCs to 1, because 1st level characters are basically all the same and more or less die when looked at. I have looked at the problem and decided to set the level of an average cityguard to warrior third level, which gives the cityguard enough strength to deal with what I consider normal problems for a cityguard without making them seem overpowered. I generally use something like this: appropriate class corresponding to the NPCs profession with a level like 1st level=child, 2nd level=teenager/young adult, 3rd level=adult, 5th level=officer/veteran, and for everything above that I usually take the time to flesh out the NPCs individually.

Oslecamo
2008-06-09, 05:04 AM
You never wondered what happens to all those PCs who finished their adventures or gave up on them middle way?

Well, that's what happened to them. They become guards/shopkeers/kings/villains etc etc.

Iku Rex
2008-06-09, 05:05 AM
Which imply a rather low-power world in which the PCs (and the BBEG) are really something very unique and can easily surpass everything. Bad logic. For some reason you're ignoring the word "most" in "most everyone is low level".

Most everyone in the real world have no powerful weapons and little or no combat training. A team of well-trained special forces guys in heavy body armor and with automatic rifles and grenades could run roughshod over most local law enforcement organizations. (Think "North Hollywood Shootout" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout).) Such a group could rob almost any business and get away in the short run. Never mind what you could do if you brought a tank into a city and started shooting up the place.

None of that "implies" that a small group of well armed soldiers could "easily surpass everything", or that getting hold of a tank would make you emperor of the world. Someone could do a lot of damage, but then they get killed by a SWAT team, a lucky/good cop or, in an extreme case, the army.

The existence of the occasional mid- to high level wizard with a few choice items for sale does not "contradict" that most people in a DnD world are low-level NPC classes.

A high CR monster could do a lot of damage - and from time to time they do - but eventually it gets killed. Even if a monster wipes out a village, powerful mercenaries (like the PCs) or elite government forces will soon be hunting it down. The intelligent monsters have the good sense to keep away from the human hives.

Reinboom
2008-06-09, 05:07 AM
Is the lack of those classes due to the setting, or your view that they are overpowered? That system makes sense as far as NPCs go (I think I read somewhere that NPCs could gain some small amounts of Exps over time, and I think the person who mentioned this also said that human NPCs are likely to be at around level 14 by the time they reached Venerable).

Because, I, as a DM, hate keeping track of what is every NPC's and PCs list of today's spells are. Also, yes, for power.

Tempest Fennac
2008-06-09, 05:15 AM
Thanks for clarifying (ironically, I'd probably enjoy that part of making the NPCs).

Dan_Hemmens
2008-06-09, 05:24 AM
The books are flatly contradictory on this point. On the one hand, they say that most people are first level with no stats above 13, on the other hand the official demographics make it quite clear that a population of a thousand people contains quite a lot of mid-high level characters.

I personally usually go with the "50/50" rule: 50% of the population are 1st level, 50% of those who remain are second, 50% of the next are third, and so on and so forth.

I tend to pitch guards at around 3rd level: enough to kerb stomp a raw beginner, no threat to a powerful hero.

Iku Rex
2008-06-09, 05:32 AM
The books are flatly contradictory on this point. On the one hand, they say that most people are first level with no stats above 13, ...Where do they say that?

Tsotha-lanti
2008-06-09, 06:39 AM
Levels are abstract representations, related only to the importance of the NPC in the story. If my PCs are 5th-level, the town guards are 2nd-level; if my PCs are 10th-level, the town guards are 5th-level... and so on. The same goes for classed monsters - the higher-level my PCs, the higher the average level of that orc horde.

Chronos
2008-06-09, 12:03 PM
I personally usually go with the "50/50" rule: 50% of the population are 1st level, 50% of those who remain are second, 50% of the next are third, and so on and so forth.This is a good rule of thumb, since it results in an exponential falloff of higher levels. I'd skew the ratio a bit more towards the lower levels, though: The 50/50 rule would put 20th level characters at the proverbial one in a million, whereas I prefer the model that 20th level characters show up, on average, once in a lifetime or so.

Arakune
2008-06-09, 12:44 PM
This is a good rule of thumb, since it results in an exponential falloff of higher levels. I'd skew the ratio a bit more towards the lower levels, though: The 50/50 rule would put 20th level characters at the proverbial one in a million, whereas I prefer the model that 20th level characters show up, on average, once in a lifetime or so.

Depending on the setting, one in a million is one in a lifetime.

Thoughtbot360
2008-06-09, 01:25 PM
Where do they say that?

The DMG talks about NPCs and gives them one of two sets of ability scores:

Average Array: 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8


Elite Array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8

Very few people have the Elite Array. Also, every monster in the monster manual has a base (before counting their racial modifiers) array of abilities of 11 or 10 in everything. IE: Ogres have a final strength score of 28, so their racial modifier is +18 Str.


Depending on the setting, one in a million is one in a lifetime.

....Well, That certainly doesn't imply a post-apocalyptic setting.

Aquillion
2008-06-09, 01:32 PM
The thing is, what you're objecting to isn't simply a D&D issue; it's a basic heroic fantasy issue. Your typical heroic fantasy world has big heroes, big BBEGs, and a huge number of helpless peasants in between. No, it doesn't always make sense, but it's necessary to accept the basic premise if you want to play in that setting.

Telonius
2008-06-09, 02:26 PM
"How strong are the city guards anyway?"

Imagine your local mall security guard.

Now imagine an honest-to-God mercenary, or Special Ops soldier.

Both of those exist in the real world. If it came to blows, the security guard would be dead before he knew what was happening. Yes, the local guards are generally just a little bit above the "random peasant" level. That's because the better fighters are recruited to do things like be on the medieval version of a SWAT team, guard the king, or go out on adventures themselves.

Chronos
2008-06-09, 07:32 PM
Also, every monster in the monster manual has a base (before counting their racial modifiers) array of abilities of 11 or 10 in everything.Except, confusingly, for the ones that use the 8-13 array instead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/orc.htm). That seems to be mostly reserved for the humanoids with low LA, which would make reasonable PCs.

Thoughtbot360
2008-06-09, 07:58 PM
The thing is, what you're objecting to isn't simply a D&D issue; it's a basic heroic fantasy issue. Your typical heroic fantasy world has big heroes, big BBEGs, and a huge number of helpless peasants in between. No, it doesn't always make sense, but it's necessary to accept the basic premise if you want to play in that setting.


Bad logic. For some reason you're ignoring the word "most" in "most everyone is low level".

Most everyone in the real world have no powerful weapons and little or no combat training. A team of well-trained special forces guys in heavy body armor and with automatic rifles and grenades could run roughshod over most local law enforcement organizations. (Think "North Hollywood Shootout" .) Such a group could rob almost any business and get away in the short run. Never mind what you could do if you brought a tank into a city and started shooting up the place.

None of that "implies" that a small group of well armed soldiers could "easily surpass everything", or that getting hold of a tank would make you emperor of the world. Someone could do a lot of damage, but then they get killed by a SWAT team, a lucky/good cop or, in an extreme case, the army.

The existence of the occasional mid- to high level wizard with a few choice items for sale does not "contradict" that most people in a DnD world are low-level NPC classes.

A high CR monster could do a lot of damage - and from time to time they do - but eventually it gets killed. Even if a monster wipes out a village, powerful mercenaries (like the PCs) or elite government forces will soon be hunting it down. The intelligent monsters have the good sense to keep away from the human hives.

Its amazing how I never fail to get two people to disagree with me, and yet they take opposite stances between each other.

Turcano
2008-06-10, 12:17 AM
For my current campaign, I've taken a drastic different level scheme for most people.
Level 1: You are a teenager, or a very incompetent adult.
Level 2: You are the average adult, no significant training. An apprentice carpenter, a training guard, a standard low ware merchant.
Level 3: You are trained significantly in something. Guards are usually this.
Level 4: You are the more notable versions of the above, your the exceptions. You are not the elites, but, people know you for something. Or don't know you for something when they should. You can still be anonymous yet though. The highly trained guards are this. The full service soldier is this. In my world, almost anyone who fights in the pits is this. At least, most of them.
Level 5: This is the same group as level 4.
Level 6-7: You are the highest guard. "Sir", "Ma'am". You are 1 in a thousand. You are a captain in a small city, a high guard in a large city. Or you could be at the low end of the 'elites'.
Level 8-9: You are an elite. You don't guard.
Level 10-11: High elite, possibly a leader.
Level 12-15: Leader. Extreme specialist. Ridiculous type. Very very very few reach this point.
Level 16-17: People debate whether you can really exist.
Level 18+: People try to debate whether you can exist, but those who say you can are far outnumbered by those that say you could.

This system works out rather well, actually. It meant that I "had" to start the campaign with the party at 4 (due to the basis of the start of the campaign), however, that's also 1 level shy of what I prefer to be the starting level.

Side note:
Wizards, Clerics, Druids, Archivists, and Artificers don't exist in my world.

Interestingly, this roughly matches the NPC guidelines for the A Game of Thrones d20, where most named bit NPCs are levels 5-8, and the most physically powerful* characters are around 14-16. Also, it's a very low-power game where magic is a huge pain in the ass and requires a large feat investment.

*Physical power and political power are completely unconnected in this game, although there is some degree of correlation between the two.

TempusCCK
2008-06-10, 01:21 AM
In a setting that fits within the perameters provided, yes, there are tons of high level characters, however, they are not always in the proper location, do not always posess the proper skills to handle a situation, this is where the PC's come in.

Sure, guards themselves cannot defeat the horde of orcs in Gloomy Cave, at least not in Gloomy Cave, however, when the Orcs come to Adventure Town looking to loot and pillage, the local militia rises up, the ballistas come out, arrow volleys from the protection of your high walls, etc etc and the people can defend themselves. If you absolutely must think of it in an in-game perspective, all the little commoners are gang-banging the big monster and providing aid another bonuses, so they bring the thing down.

Same goes for when the PC's create trouble, there's alot of people aiding another to hit the fighters high AC. Hell, the argument that "If the Guards are so strong why don't they just handle all the adventures? Dur, lolz, I burked ur game!" doesn't hold water. Yes, the guards can beat up the PC's, yes, so they can beat up the monsters too. Is that the job of the guards? No, they don't want to do that because it's risky. They care about their lives more than you as a detached PC do, so it's your job to invade Gloomy Cave and kill the Orcs, get over it.

Yes, I know I just contradicted myself, but you can use either one in a consistent in-game scenario, bugger off.

Tempest Fennac
2008-06-10, 01:24 AM
I know it's really inconveniant for the DM (as well as unnecessary most of the time), but shouldn't stats for NPCs be completely random rather then them just getting lumbered with the Standard or "Eliet" arrays? I was just wondering due to those arrays not being that accurate for most people.

Iku Rex
2008-06-10, 01:26 AM
The DMG talks about NPCs and gives them one of two sets of ability scores:

Average Array: 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8


Elite Array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8

Very few people have the Elite Array. Also, every monster in the monster manual has a base (before counting their racial modifiers) array of abilities of 11 or 10 in everything. IE: Ogres have a final strength score of 28, so their racial modifier is +18 Str.First of all, the DMG doesn't "give NPCs one of two sets of ability scores". What you call the "average array" is from the MM, and is typically used for random, average NPC warriors. According to the DMG (p 110), "average characters, have average abilities (rolled on 3d6)".

Monsters have average stats by default - how else would you do it?

If you try rolling a hundred sets of 3d6 (average abilities, per the RAW) you'll find that most people in the game world do not have "13 in [their highest stat] and 10 in everything else".

(This is not terribly important. I just wanted to clear up the misunderstanding.)

You didn't say what you were basing the "most everyone is level 1" part on, but that's certainly somewhat supported by the RAW random city generation guidelines. (DMG 139). In any given random community in a default DnD world you'll have plenty of level 1 commoners and other NPC classes. However, in a city where you can buy items worth tens of thousands (your example from the OP), you'll also find a good number of high level NPCs, with both PC and NPC classes.

Iku Rex
2008-06-10, 01:32 AM
Thoughtbot360, can you summarize the point you're trying to make in the OP? Because I don't think I'm getting it.

Thoughtbot360
2008-06-10, 04:45 AM
Thoughtbot360, can you summarize the point you're trying to make in the OP? Because I don't think I'm getting it.

Truth be told, I originally thought that the conundrum I found with the level system was very simple to explain. But the more I thought about it, the harder it was to define in basic terms. That, and I hurt my arm last night and it was getting late and I wanted to finish my piece quickly (although the fact that the computer lost my first attempt to make the thread didn't help either). Looking back, the original post is horribly incomplete, all because I lost my train of thought. I probably should've just waited and made the thread another time.

I think the basic question was "How strong are the guards anyway?" But that by itself branched out into many other questions and observations that never actually made it to the OP. It all boils down to "how does the level of social tradition and organization that makes high-level characters with PC classes possible hold up in a world full of monsters and the abuses of the said super people they create? and how much disruption to that stability can society take before PCs are no longer able to free move about?" Mouthful much? Thats at least four subjects in one quotation. Let me try to break it down and expand upon what I mean by talking about those four:

NOTE: I might not be able to finish all these tonight. I'll come back to edit the post later.

Social organization and Adventurers: In Preindustrial society, the basic unit of currency is not the metal coin by the bushel of wheat. For every single nonfarmer (craftsman, Politician, Soldier, Scholar, etc.), you need x amount of farmers.

Here's a tough question for you. "What is a freelance D&D-style adventurer?" I mean it, they are like Superheroes, minus the double life; they are also like Mercenaries, minus the soulless amorality. Forget having individual PC classes, what conditions must be met for an individual to live the life of the crazy Dragon Slayer/Wanderer/Bounty Hunter/Detective/Indiana Jones garble of a profession.

Monsters:

Abuse of power and its ramifications:

Freedom of Movement: The Giant himself said a piece on this in his worldbuilding articles in the gaming section.
I'm not sure I quite want that level of social upheaval in this world; it needs to be able to support independent adventuring, after all. That means that the civilization needs to be stable enough for the player characters to travel from town to town without getting pressed into someone's army or caught in the middle of an armed revolt.



Of course, the question has to be asked, "Why is any of this important?" Does the average player really care about how your fictional society work from a simulationist point of view? Or specifically why the cities are never threatened by Devastation Vermin (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/devastationVermin.htm) before he reaches Epic level? Or even why the guards are a 2 levels below him when the party are wanted criminals on the run for the law, but suddenly have a much higher level after that story arc when the new guy plays a psycho character and starts misbehaving badly? Or even if their existence makes no sense? Probably not.

You can very likely pull all kinds of weird and arbitrary crap without the players questioning it, as long as it works. However, to sometimes, thinking

You know what? Nevermind, I found a more eloquate way to describe what the problem is. Check out my next post

Matthew
2008-06-10, 08:05 AM
This just looks like the same question asked another way, Thoughtbot360. Some basic thoughts about D20 Dungeons & Dragons.

1) The default setting is not really supported by a strict reading of the rules (that is to say, when applying them without using some common sense).

2) The class and level system, when applied uniformly to every inhabitant of a campaign world, is not condusive to a believable setting.

With those two thoughts in mind, let us take a look at your conundrum: "How strong are the city guards anyway?"

To begin with, we need a city. I am going to choose the Free City of Greyhawk, since it is the default campaigns setting and I have the Greyhawk Gazetteer to hand. So, Greyhawk is a metropolis with 25,000+ inhabitants. Let us call that 30,000. Now we head over to the population distribution charts in the DMG:

I will randomly roll up the classes:

Adept: 1d6+12 = 17, 13, 16, 15
Aristocrat: 1d4+12 = 13, 13, 15, 13
Barbarian: 1d4+12 = 15, 16, 14, 13
Bard: 1d6+12 = 15, 15, 14, 16
Cleric: 1d6+12 = 13, 14, 18, 16
Commoner: 4d4+12 = 20, 19, 19, 20
Druid: 1d6+12 = 16, 16, 13, 16
Expert: 3d4+12 = 18, 17, 20, 20
Fighter: 1d8+12 = 15, 17, 17, 14
Monk: 1d4+12 = 14, 15, 13, 13
Paladin: 1d3+12 = 15, 13, 13, 14
Ranger: 1d3+12 = 13, 14, 14, 14
Rogue: 1d8+12, 19, 14, 13, 14
Sorcerer: 1d4+12 = 13, 14, 16, 14
Warrior: 2d4+12 = 16, 14, 18, 17
Wizard: 1d4+12 = 15, 13, 15, 15

So, let's work out the number of Fighters in Greyhawk:

17 (1), 9 (2), 5 (4), 3 (8) 1 (16)
17 (1), 9 (2), 5 (4), 3 (8) 1 (16)
15 (1), 8 (2), 4 (4), 2 (8) 1 (16)
14 (1), 7 (2), 4 (4), 2 (8) 1 (16)

Total: 17 (2), 15 (1), 14 (1), 9 (4), 8 (2), 7 (2), 5 (8), 4 (8), 3 (16), 2 (16), 1 (64).

...and now the number of Warriors

16 (1), 8 (2), 4 (4), 2 (8),
14 (1), 7 (2), 4 (4), 2 (8)
18 (1), 9 (2), 5 (4), 3 (8)
17 (1), 9 (2), 5 (4), 3 (8)
1 (1,500)

So... the answer to your question appears to be that all but sixty of the 1,560 Warriors in Greyhawk are Level 1. It follows that most City Guards are also Level 1. Of course, there another hundred or so of each other class in the city, any of which may be serving in the guard or available to lay the smack down on the player characters.

Revlid
2008-06-10, 08:36 AM
Truth be told, I originally thought that the conundrum I found with the level system was very simple to explain. But the more I thought about it, the harder it was to define in basic terms. That, and I hurt my arm last night and it was getting late and I wanted to finish my piece quickly (although the fact that the computer lost my first attempt to make the thread didn't help either). Looking back, the original post is horribly incomplete, all because I lost my train of thought. I probably should've just waited and made the thread another time.

I think the basic question was "How strong are the guards anyway?" But that by itself branched out into many other questions and observations that never actually made it to the OP. It all boils down to "how does the level of social tradition and organization that makes high-level characters with PC classes possible hold up in a world full of monsters and the abuses of the said super people they create? and how much disruption to that stability can society take before PCs are no longer able to free move about?" Mouthful much? Thats at least four subjects in one quotation. Let me try to break it down and expand upon what I mean by talking about those four:

NOTE: I might not be able to finish all these tonight. I'll come back to edit the post later.

Social organization and Adventurers: In Preindustrial society, the basic unit of currency is not the metal coin by the bushel of wheat. For every single nonfarmer (craftsman, Politician, Soldier, Scholar, etc.), you need x amount of farmers.

Here's a tough question for you. "What is a freelance D&D-style adventurer?" I mean it, they are like Superheroes, minus the double life; they are also like Mercenaries, minus the soulless amorality. Forget having individual PC classes, what conditions must be met for an individual to live the life of the crazy Dragon Slayer/Wanderer/Bounty Hunter/Detective/Indiana Jones garble of a profession.

Monsters:

Abuse of power and its ramifications:

Freedom of Movement: The Giant himself said a piece on this in his worldbuilding articles in the gaming section.



Of course, the question has to be asked, "Why is any of this important?" Does the average player really care about how your fictional society work from a simulationist point of view? Or specifically why the cities are never threatened by Devastation Vermin (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/devastationVermin.htm) before he reaches Epic level? Or even why the guards are a 2 levels below him when the party are wanted criminals on the run for the law, but suddenly have a much higher level after that story arc when the new guy plays a psycho character and starts misbehaving badly? Or even if their existence makes no sense? Probably not.

You can very likely pull all kinds of weird and arbitrary crap without the players questioning it, as long as it works. However, to sometimes, thinking

THIS IS NOT A SUMMARY.

In any case, I find the levels most commonly categorized by my DM as:
Party Level 1: Average Joes
Party Level 2: Security Guards
Party Level 3: Army Grunts/Mercenaries
Party Levels 4-5: SWAT Teams/SAS
Party Levels 6-8: MIB - Best of the Best of the Best
Party Levels 9-10: Superhuman. No real-world parallel can be drawn past this point
Party Levels 11-15: High-Level Superhuman
Party Levels 16-19: Justice League
Party Level 20: The Wrath of God

Riffington
2008-06-10, 09:10 AM
I completely agree with Thoughtbot. To make the issue even simpler:
1. Unlike the real world, things that pose a real challenge to low level characters pose essentially zero risk to higher level characters.
(a Navy Seal can easily die in a barfight; high level characters are not similarly threatened by weaker opposition)

2. Adventuring carries rewards far greater than almost any other activity.
(kingdom-ruling may occasionally be more profitable)

Therefore: almost anyone capable of adventuring would be doing so. If you have a city guard capable of handling a party, then one wonders why they aren't handling the party's adventures. Invisible Hand...

There are few decent solutions to this problem, alas.

OneFamiliarFace
2008-06-10, 09:29 AM
@Matthew: A man of my own heart, pulling out the rulebooks. I like this example because the DMG was always my go-to source when I was worried about NPC levels. It also showed me the progression I would need in city sizes to keep up with the players. And if I wanted a high level wizard in a tiny village, I just put him there, no big deal.

@Riffington and Guard Adventurers: One could always assume alternate reasons for higher level NPCs. Sometimes they are too busy for the work. Perhaps adventuring is lucrative, but it is still far more deadly than being a town guard (depending on what group of PCs we are talking about). And guards may have an aversion to leaving their families, as they were not orphaned by a dragon/orc attack that has caused them to be a ranger.

That being said, I prefer my PCs to be able to take on the guards. As most parties I DM are supposed to be good (which, even if not law-abiding, should exclude most unnecessary killings), they should try to avoid guard-killing in non-evil cities because it is what people do in normal society (out of politeness at the least), and I have had PCs surrender to guards of much lower level after crimes of passion.

And then there are higher level cities, or places under more frequent attack. These places have higher level guards because they would need them. Outside of the world of the strange, most cities are going to involve lvl 1 guards defending a wall against little more than a possible band of lvl 1 monsters (or goblinoids or some such). If the challenge is more than the guards can handle, I call that an easy plot-hook.

There is also a favorite tactic of mine: aging higher level NPCs. Maybe they used to be the kings of town back in their prime, but now, they mostly assume leadership positions won from good reputation and spend their time training my PCs (because they gotta learn all that stuff from somewhere). If you want to go blatant cliche fantasy, then any other group of high-lvl adventurers will invariably be one of the groups that went into the Enchanted Forest and never returned (seduced by ne'er-do-well dryads, no doubt).

I heart NPCs.
(Good topic Thought!)

Segial
2008-06-10, 10:08 AM
It always annoys the hell out of me when NPCs level are adjusted according to that of the PCs. I mean of course a DM needs to pick encounters that are challenging for the PCs, but what is the point of reaching a higher level when everyone! else suddenly leveling up as well. How I see it, if a first level PC picks a fight with the city guard, he gets beaten up, and if a tenth level PC picks a fight with the city guard, the city guard gets beaten up. I recently read an high-level adventure of the age-of-worms adventure path where there is a bunch of rag-tag orc pirates stranded on a beach that decide to attack the PCs, and those pirates are all 12th level fighter/rogues. I mean, what is that, the secret gathering of rag-tag orc pirate ninja-mutant hero captains? Why did they become pirates in the first place if they already have skills that rival those warlords, masterassasines or swordmasters? It's just silly, and an example of the idiocy that somehow the NPCs always need to be able to compete with the PCs. Why not put 3rd level pirates on that beach? The PCs will know that the pirates are no match for them, and the pirates will find out about that pretty quickly. And then things are actually getting interested because maybe the orcs don't want to be slaughtered and the PCs might find a better use for the pirates then just kill them. The whole notion that NPCs levels need to match the PCs is simply a bad idea, and it leads to such insanly ridiculous settings like the city of "Union" where everyone including the cityguard is of epic level. I mean, honestly, if you were epic level, wouldn't you have something better to do with your time then be a city guard, and also, if you were epic, would you rather live in a normal city where you are special or in a city where everyone is just as powerfull as you? My advice would be: Do not adjust your NPCs level to match those of the PCs, and also don't be afraid to have your PCs interact with people way above or way below the current level (like 3rd level city guards in a high level campaign), because the asymmetry in power between the PCs and those NPCs makes it even more intesting.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-06-10, 04:35 PM
It always annoys the hell out of me when NPCs level are adjusted according to that of the PCs.

In general it annoys me too, I just thought I'd chime in and point out that since the level system is something of an abstraction *anyway* a certain amount of level-matching isn't always a problem. If the PCs are going to fight the guards, it's nice to avoid a totally one-sided bloodbath.

To put it another way, if I put first level PCs in a fight with a bunch of guards, those guards will probably be level 1-2, because I don't want the PCs to get slaughtered, those guards will creep up to levels 3-4 maybe maxing out at level around the time the PCs get to levels 8-10.

Point being: while it's obviously stupid for demigods and archmages to get into a fair fight with guardsmen, it's fairly reasonable for a fight with guards to be a close thing in any mid-low fantasy part of the game, so some amount of "scaling" is actually appropriate.

Of course, this is based on the assumption that "level" isn't really an IC concept.

Thoughtbot360
2008-06-11, 04:10 AM
Its funny that Aquillion calls heroic fantasy (The good guys, the bad guys, and hundreds of helpless "normals" in between), because that sounds a lot like a comic book. And I've just realized that one of the things that occassionally bother me about comic book Superheroes applies to the argument here.

It best begins with a cliche that almost always shows up in that genre. If TV Tomes was still up, they'd probably have a page on this. But its not, so I only have this (http://superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28&Itemid=45&limitstart=45).

In case the link doesn't work (or you're just lazy), that goes to a page on Superdickery.com, showing a cover where Superman has apparently just retired (thinking the world can survive without him), and in the background everything is immediately falling into chaos. This is particularly notorious in the Superhero genre. The protagonist discovers his inborn powers/some (plot) device that gives him powers, and suddenly the number of supervillians threatening (sometimes specifically) his hometown drastically increases from what (at least in the beginning) seems like zero (sometimes the existence of the hero's powers and the antagonists come from the same source and become mutually linked, but usually not). Now that the hero is here, he's kind of stuck saving the day every week, with probably no way to put the "genie" back in the bottle.

I don't want to waste time giving examples, so lets just want to jump straight to the connection of D&D fantasy.

The typical Fantasy world has a similar problem with asymmetrical power (you want magical lightning bolts and gargantuan monsters to be commonplace in a world where people fight in metal fully-body armor that will be shredded like paper under the giant claws and will probably conduct elemental magic damage, making it worse?), only its had to (and will still have to after the PCs are long gone) live the problems for generations. Its seems unlikely that, for instance, war will always break out, or that splukening monster lairs will always be profitable (eventually, all the ancient civilization's treasure gets collected, or the monster's economy collaspes-well either that or they stop keeping quite so much gold on them, or they switch to a currency human markets don't recognize), or that such events will always continue at a nice, even pace with the weakest will pair off with the weakest and society always ensured a fresh crop of high-levels each generation (Yeah, blah, blah, xp can be award for other things than combat). Also, despite Ms. Glimmer Moon's testimony (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcU2-Fm8wVQ) to the contrary, problems happen at their own pace, they don't exclusively stalk the PCs (In fact, the monsters probably attack targets that look weak and exploitable. Then again, adventuring parties are less noticeable than great armies.)

Actually, anyone making a setting has to face this problem. Everyone wants to save the world; but to do that, the world has to, pretty suddenly, get into trouble, usually some unique type of trouble. Monsters might be involved, but they are kind of, more or less, written off as pests (Well, not all of them, the Tarrasque for instance doesn't count cause it sleeps for a hundred years.) As I alluded to in those parenthesis at the bottom of the last paragraph, they probably attack the small village PCs go to because its a less-guarded spot (although monsters and bandits will probably hang around trade cities and forks in the road to waylay caravans, too), and sometimes, irregardless of how famous and renowned (read: high-level) they are, some random group of armed strangers are the only place for the villagers to turn. Which sort've brings up the question of specifically why adventurers travel from town to town like this and where they even come from.

Of course, thats a whole other question.

Aquillion
2008-06-11, 04:58 AM
Its funny that Aquillion calls heroic fantasy (The good guys, the bad guys, and hundreds of helpless "normals" in between), because that sounds a lot like a comic book. And I've just realized that one of the things that occassionally bother me about comic book Superheroes applies to the argument here.

It best begins with a cliche that almost always shows up in that genre. If TV Tomes was still up, they'd probably have a page on this. But its not, so I only have this (http://superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28&Itemid=45&limitstart=45).I think the similarity is no coincidence. They're like that for the same reason: People go to RPGs and comic books for the same reason, to see (or be) the main characters kicking ass.

If there are no problems in the world, then there's no asses to be kicked. And if the world can solve the problems on its own, then it's not really the main characters kicking ass anymore.

There are ways around this, of course, to try and approach the situation realistically -- but in my experience both D&D and comic books tend not to take them. So you end up with situation where it's impossible to imagine how the world survived for so long before the PCs / Superman came along.

One limited answer to the city-guard problem, at least, is to turn the city guards into a human (or elven, or dwarven, or whatever) version of Tucker's Kobolds (http://www.tuckerskobolds.com/) -- very low-level individually, but with enough of them (including conscripts that they can call up when people like the PCs cause trouble) using careful plans, knowing the city like the palm of their hand, setting up traps (tricky, since they have to be ones that could be safely present in the middle of a city -- but doable, if they have ways to arm them), chokepoints, crossbow ambushes...

Drow poison is cheap. With a horde of city guards firing crossbows from the rooftops, a player is going to get hit and roll a 1 on their save eventually. And any major settlement is going to have at least a few casters to call on, doing things like casting magic weapon on large amounts of ammunition at once or throwing spells (from cover on the rooftops, where it's hard to pick out who's doing the casting) like Grease or Glitterdust that put the PCs at a disadvantage when fighting a large number of foes.

At higher levels, move on to having high-level threats having an 'interest' in important towns. In general, high-level wizards in the neighborhood are going to be annoyed if the town where they have friends and buy their supplies gets attacked. Heck, any metallic dragons in the area are likely to get annoyed eventually, too. Churches have high priests that are likely high-level clerics, often with several lesser priests, paladins, bodyguards or whatever to call on.

These people have thematic excuses not to do adventurer things -- it can be assumed that high-level wizards gain something from research in their towers, say. Metallic dragons like to protect and admire their horde. High priests and their bodyguards have jobs that preclude adventuring. These are what most of the high-level threats in your world are likely to be, and most of them are going to get very annoyed if PCs start causing trouble in their towns.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't occasionally have the high priest adventure. That can make a great plot hook -- have them get captured, or have them get killed to show how awesome the latest threat is, or they go out to settle something and the PCs are sent to find out what happened to them. (Corruped by evil corrupted by evil corrupted by evil -- ahem.)

You can also come up with excuses for why the PCs are being sent, occasionally. Perhaps someone in the organization hiring them wants to keep it quiet, particularly from the rest of their organization (the prince who can't risk a diplomatic incident by sending his own troops, the priest who doesn't want anyone else in his church to know that he's engaging in a "practical" solution to the problem at hand, someone who is hiring the PCs to do clean-up work that will hide their own mistakes from their superiors in their organization, etc.) Not every quest the PCs take on has to be a big local / global quest on a big obvious quest list that anyone could do; sometimes the PCs are simply the people for the job, or, conversely, the usual people for the job are right out.

Another possibility, which 4th edition suggests, is to have the PCs start at a small settlement with nobody really powerful around (but they're low-level, too, so even the blacksmith in town with high str and a good weapon is a threat.) Nobody but the PCs really cares about this settlement, so they're the people for the job. As they go up in levels, they move to larger and more important places, too.

None of this really solves the underlying thematic problem, but it can at least make things smoother for your players, conceptually.

Thoughtbot360
2008-06-11, 08:09 PM
Well, thank you for all the ideas, Aquillion, and everyone. Particularly, the mention of Tucker's Kobolds brings up another argument I had with someone whose name I can't remember (it was a while ago, in some thread about Detect alignment).

Edit: Now I remember. It was Yahzi. And he has already made it to the scene in the sort amount of time since I originally posted this reply.

To paraphrase his words: "A baron who can't put down a peasant uprising is one who can't fight off gnoll invasion. And a baron who can't fight that off isn't a baron at all, he's a dog biscuit. And because the peasants need someone strong enough to chase off the monsters, they will simply live with any tyrant, even if he's openly evil, and people know that any paladin will tell them that. They will put up with infant sacrifice once a month because the gnolls will eat all the babies in a single month." "Smartened up" CR 1/2 monsters beating 12th level PCs like Tucker's Kobolds flies in the face of that argument.

I actually have another way to look at the monster problem. Turn it around. If the humans need a super-powerful army to protect them from any and all threats, then what, oh what, is protecting the gnolls?

If humans can power level into oblivion, then why aren't human cities loaded with monster slaves?

Gtg, edit later, storms coming.

Edit: Ultimately, there needs to be balance. The monsters that exist are rival kingdoms and/or threats to public safety. Also, the monsters can fight amongst themselves. There is no single Empire that ever ruled the world, and as it overextends itself, it become indefensible. One possibility is that the kingdoms of say, the great Cloud Giant race like to keep their territories small -which they could do with efficient enough agriculture- for defensive reasons. AKA_Bait's post (below) touches on the idea of a tacit agree not to have wholesale conflict between. That might be the case, depending on who's setting it is (but then again, so is a lot of this stuff.) In the monster manual alone, there are no less than 60 intelligent races, so its not impossible that sometime in the distant past, they got together and worked out some kind of treaty.

AKA_Bait
2008-06-11, 08:31 PM
Actually, anyone making a setting has to face this problem. Everyone wants to save the world; but to do that, the world has to, pretty suddenly, get into trouble, usually some unique type of trouble.

Most of what you said in the post I excerpted the quote from I agree with. This I don't. Not all players want to be the ones saving the world. Not all DM's want to run that kind of game. I don't. In the most recent campagin I ran, my PC's have spent most of their time trying to stay alive after running afoul of a BBEG who really wanted nothing more to be left alone to continue his magical research. The BBEG didn't want to rule the world and wasn't trying to, but also wouldn't risk the PCs knowing about him and living.


I actually have another way to look at the monster problem. Turn it around. If the humans need a super-powerful army to protect them from any and all threats, then what, oh what, is protecting the gnolls?


Well, there are a few ways of dealing with this issue. One, is to use powerful BBEG's and evil gods as deterrents to wholesale invasion of monster territories. Another, and my preferred method, is that the powerful folks at the top have a kind of tacit agreement. The humans don't go to war wholesale against the goblins (but small bands will occasionally go slaughter a few of them) and the goblins will have only small and limited raiding in human lands (and never directly against nobility, at least not intentionally). This keeps both ruling groups in power, through fear of the other one. mmmm stealing from Orwell...

Yahzi
2008-06-11, 09:03 PM
If my PCs are 5th-level, the town guards are 2nd-level; if my PCs are 10th-level, the town guards are 5th-level...
I remember playing with a DM whose BBEG (a dragon) had a similar feature: the creature's hit points were defined as N+1, where N was the amount of damage the party could deal over any given period of time.

:smallyuk:

Chronos
2008-06-11, 09:49 PM
I remember playing with a DM whose BBEG (a dragon) had a similar feature: the creature's hit points were defined as N+1, where N was the amount of damage the party could deal over any given period of time.Cool, so all you have to do is make sure you can't deal more than 198 points of damage, and then hit it with a Power Word: Kill!

tyckspoon
2008-06-11, 09:59 PM
To paraphrase his words: "A baron who can't put down a peasant uprising is one who can't fight off gnoll invasion. And a baron who can't fight that off isn't a baron at all, he's a dog biscuit. And because the peasants need someone strong enough to chase off the monsters, they will simply live with any tyrant, even if he's openly evil, and people know that any paladin will tell them that. They will put up with infant sacrifice once a month because the gnolls will eat all the babies in a single month." "Smartened up" CR 1/2 monsters beating 12th level PCs like Tucker's Kobolds flies in the face of that argument.


It doesn't, really. Tucker's Kobolds works because the 'weak' monsters are in a situation where they have every possible advantage. Think about what happens if you take them out of their den. They can still be smart, but without the home field advantage, that intelligence is probably going to show up as them doing their best to run the hell away. Because they're still weak, and they know it, and they're not going to try and engage more powerful beings without every stacked advantage they can get.

Similarly, low-level NPCs can defend their own town well enough. Anybody who is familiar with the problems of modern day urban fighting can tell you why. But that's not the only thing that needs defending- what do those low-level NPCs do when the marauding Green Ugly Things set up camp on their farms and cut off their food supply? What do they do when their trade roads get blockaded (if they're lucky, they just get heavily tolled and can still use them.) I'm going to bet they ask the local Wealthy Ass-Kicking Man (ie, an adventurer-classed character) to take care of it still.

Yahzi
2008-06-12, 12:48 AM
It doesn't, really.
Hey, them is my words! And a right good paraphrase, too. :smallbiggrin:


Tucker's Kobolds works because the 'weak' monsters are in a situation where they have every possible advantage.
They also work because the players in question are foolish.

Or, to be more fair, the players have played D&D too long. The unspoken assumption of a D&D game is that the DM will only throw out encounters that are level-appropriate. And that most of those encounters won't be particularly dangerous. That kind of kid-glove handling offends me almost as much as the NPCs-are-different rules, and that's as a DM. As a player, having eight-foot high safety rails makes me suicidal. Literally, as in my characters tend to commit suicide rather than suffer under the oppressive hand of insignificant fate.

Once you get players out of that mind-set and into what some people call "power-gaming" (but which in my world is more accurately called "trying not to die") you realize that D&D has a spell list designed for offense. There are hardly any long-term defensive spells; on the other hand, spending three rounds buffing up and then ambushing your opponents is almost an auto-win. D&D was designed for players to assault and destroy other creature's homes, and it only takes a minor insight to realize that there's no particularly good reason why orcs aren't assaulting and destroying people's homes.

The only possible defense against high-levels is other high-levels. The only reason high-levels keep low levels around is as a warning alarm; their dying screams usually give the high-levels enough time to buff up for the fight. This is why the Baron lives in the middle of town surrounded by all-but-defenseless 0th level guards: because they give him time to put his armor on. And they fight and die willingly, knowing this is all they are worth, because they are counting on him to come out and save their families. If you take a look at what people of different nationalities (let alone different skin colors!) have done to each other over the years, and then imagine what gnolls would do to a defeated town of humans, you can see why soldiers who love their families will sacrifice themselves to buy their lord a few seconds of prep time.

This is the world that D&D players live in. It is an exciting and dramatic world of incredibly difficult moral choices, where feudalism makes sense, heroism is necessary, and the penalty for failure is a brutal, savage death at the hands of demonic fiends if you're lucky. This is a great world to tell stories in. This is why I play D&D.

Turning it into a RenFair party game, where you casually murder nameless monsters who apparently exist for no other reason than to deliver loot and xp to the uber-privilged PCs who gained their divine status by merely being born, is not why I play D&D. That's why I play WoW.

And there - I've neatly turned this into a "4e is WoW" thread, which apparently is the new Godwin's Law for these forums. :smallbiggrin:

Tough_Tonka
2008-06-12, 01:25 AM
I personally like the 1 in a 100 or one in 50 people in the world are above lv 1 commoners, with the majority of these being low level (2-5).

Tsotha-lanti
2008-06-12, 02:07 AM
I remember playing with a DM whose BBEG (a dragon) had a similar feature: the creature's hit points were defined as N+1, where N was the amount of damage the party could deal over any given period of time.

:smallyuk:

That doesn't sound even remotely comparable, thanks. Like I already said, levels represent absolutely nothing concrete - not years of service or training, none of that. They only represent the story importance of NPCs.

Therefore, the levels of unimportant mooks rise at a fraction of the rate the PCs' levels rise.

If the game in question were, say, RuneQuest, this wouldn't be necessary, but the way D&D works (differences in level make for pretty absolute differences in ability), this is necessary to scale NPCs as threats, even if the level of the threat they represent goes down.