RobbyPants wrote:shadzar wrote:
NO, because they are not supposed to. the majority of things will be "monsters", not players or NPCs. the toughest will be NPCs, but you need to design around the common factor, which is you will be fighting mosnters.
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If at any point you design around or account for PvP, you have left cooperative gaming.
does it happen inter-party conflicts and fights? yes. should the game be built around them? no!
Well, like it or not, evil wizards and black knights are a staple of the genre, which leaves you two options:
1) Use PC rules to generate PC-classed villains. If you do, you need to have a way to equate a level X wizard with a monster/challenge of a certain level (hopefully X).
2) Go full 4E and have evil "wizards" and "fighters" not actually be wizards or fighters. This gets extremely unsatisfying, and does weird things if they fight each other.
So, if your game is even remotely sane, you
will have the PCs fighting other characters with PC classes, even if the PCs aren't fighting each other. It does need to be addressed.
except NPCs that you speak of don't follow PC rules for creation. They have really only one design goal, "to fight the PCs in a climactic battle". so you really don't need to design based on PC rules as the single opponent is against all or a mix of the PC classes.
this is in fact where min-maxxing comes from, the metagame knowledge that a player will need to be able to fight the "end boss" so they "optimize" for that fight throughout the game by twinking their character with this or that.
the problem is, there is only an "end boss" when you decide to quit playing. if you continue, you don't know what comes next, and the stronger the PCs try to get quicker, then either you reach the limits of the game and must do like the Immortal set and 4th edition sid, and throw your character away and start a new one to fight god-like creatures in a new set of game rules unlike all the levels that built up to where you are now.
there is then only 2 cases in which you need to design for PvP in the cooperative game:
1. all human PC, or human-centric game world. nobody likes this
2. all monster races are PCs. this is what people have been trying to do and what is causing the problem.
not everything needs to be a race the players can choose ALL the time. leave the Player's Options books and CBoHumanoids in the trash where they belong.
you design the class as to what it should be able to do so you have it a role. sad depraved ones like 4th edition had, or archetypes like pre-WotC had. then you design the mosnters around those classes. the classes need not have a unified XP table, and the monsters don't need upgrades ala Brute/Solo/etc to keep them current for higher levels.
sometimes monsters just drop off because D&D isnt Final Fantasy Vii where you go level-grinding by killing slimes for the next plot point to open up when you get Y XP points. the DM can adjust the story at any time to make things level appropriate, or the players delving into kobold warrens, might should choose a different area of the world to adventure in if all there is is kobolds and they want to play the level gaining game instead of D&D.
you know there are weekly BD&D games that are still going on weekly since it came out that have not reacher the highest level yet right? so ther is more than just gaining levels, and many people accustomed to video games since FF and its level grinds, jsut forget about that.
not sure which edition says this but one says along the lines of "give full XP if the encounter was threatening to the PC party, otherwise give less to no XP if it wasn't"
so the game should be designed for the way it was
created to be played, not for some new age game theory. if you want to use new theories, then jsut make a new game, else D&D can never be fixed and will always be the bastard step-child of gaming, that has now spawned other and better games in the view of the gaming populace.
i hope you dont think your black knight NPC has its stats rolled for or treasure randomly generate that it can use like magical armor or weapons, and understand that the DM assigns these things based on his function in the adventure?
BBEGs violate every character generation concept for PCs, and can NOT be equated to them directly. they are like Ultimate in Final Fantasy, or Sephiroth, Genova, Edna, etc....
this is where the player comes into play, not just the PC, because in every story like D&D can create, the protagonists pull some deus ex machina to win the day in the end. they just happen to have the McGuffin to beat the BBEG even though he is too powerful for them to logically and mathematically, AND statistically defeat.