Inspired by this recent thread on levels compared to XP I've been considering reengineering several of the NPC classes for my campaign.
The basic premise is that Commoners=Peasants and Experts=Townsfolk and village craftsman and in both cases they earn on average 2 xp per day but their class increases do not increase their HP, BAB or saves. Effectively their skill ranks go up and they collect feats but their CR should remain unchanged. This should provide a greater skill range than then 1XP per day and consequently allow for the DCs for crafting etc to be higher.
Peasants should be tougher than townsfolk so peasants have 1d8 HP and townsfolk 1d6 HP. Peasants should be competent with one simple weapon and townsfolk with one light simple weapon. Townsfolk should only get 4 skill points instead of 6 and possibly a smaller range of class skills
Either class can also train as a militia, the XP rate halves but they gain levels as a warrior for BAB and saves but keeping their class skills and gaining either d8 or d6 for HP
Professional soldiery, such as town guards follow the fighter path instead of the warrior path or perhaps the rogue path using the extra skill points and class skills to make more of an investigative policeman watch style guard than a military force.
Aristocrat should be modified to be a more formidable class with good social skills and combat ability, maybe with some low level arcane or divine casting ability. Perhaps it should be recast as a prestige class requiring land ownership as a prerequisite?
I'll put some more thought into this but thought I would share and bounce ideas off of the community
What's the justification behind aristocrats having the ability to cast?
Compared to the rest of the population, aristocrats will tend to be highly educated, even if not overly intelligent. This education may well include time spent with the church or time spent with an arcane college.
This really seems like more trouble than it's worth to me. Are you going to stat up every Tom, Dick, and Harriet the PCs encounter?
I don't think there's any point in statting up noncombatant NPCs; they do what the plot requires them to do.
While I'd go with Aristocrat/Adept at that point, your take is not unreasonable. I can dig it.What's the justification behind aristocrats having the ability to cast?Compared to the rest of the population, aristocrats will tend to be highly educated, even if not overly intelligent. This education may well include time spent with the church or time spent with an arcane college.
After posting that reply, I had the though that the aristocrat class could have a lot of parallels with the Bard class in being socially adept, with reasonable combat prowess and some magical capability. The focus of the class would be different with powers based on entitlement that could cross-over the bard and cavalier.
@Zhayne: It's more about world building and building an interesting economy model that the players participate in. In turn that helps control the PCs at higher levels as their actions have increasingly wide political ramifications and attract increasingly high levels of interest. It also gives the players a reason to play other than to accumulate a high score.