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Good Evening All,
I'm converting my home-brew campaign setting to run under Pathfinder Playtest rules. The hardest thing for me is converting the Non-Adventure class NPCs. What I mean, is if Adventurers make up less than 5% of the population (less than 1% in many cases), what of the remaining 95-99 percent. What about that dwarven master-craftsman who has done nothing but practice his trade for the last 40 years. Or the Sage (non-magical) in the old tower who has a wise answer to any question you can think to ask him.
For example, I have an elven city-state called Ashla Alora. It is governed by a Lord Mayor (Executive Branch), a City Council (Legislative Branch) and the Council of Magistrates (Judicial Branch). All of these NPCs, along with many others, are high-ranking, highly-experienced people within the city. However, they do not fit into the Adventurer Classes, nor should they.
I know its probably not covered in the Playtest Rules for a reason, but for some GMs World Building is a huge part of the game for them, at least it is for me. Using the Playtest Rules as written, I can easily provide a Level to an NPC and use the SKILL DCS BY LEVEL AND DIFFICULTY table to assign a DC.
For example, if the Magistrate is hypothetically 13th level, then PCs should have the following DCs for challenges dealing with them:
Easy............ DC 20
Medium..... DC 28
Hard........... DC 30
Incredible.. DC 35
Ultimate..... DC 36
But, that seems flat and lacks personality.
My question is:
Has anyone thought about NPC Classes or how NPCs fit into the world as a whole? Because, if the answer is Non-Adventurers max out at Level 5 or something like that, then that is totally ridiculous and will not work for most Persistent World type campaigns.
Thanks for reading my post and I hope it makes sense.
-- URLORD THE WONDERFUL
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NPC building I believe (Much like Starfinder) is going to be SUPER DUPER simplified.
There is NO GOOD REASON to have to "build" NPCs like you would a Player Character, they don't need X/Y/Z Class Abilities to allow them to Cast Spells, Craft Alchemical Gear, Climb a Cliff. They will almost certainly have a way to add a number of "Grafts/Templates" to a given existing Monster or Ancestry but in terms of your Lord Mayor here, they won't have literally ANYTHING except what you as the GM says they have, likely balanced around specific numberical bonuses to X/Y/Z number of Abilities/Skills, so for example if you feel he needs a specific Feat, they wont EVER need to meet pre-reqs, they'll simply need to "pay" for that ability with some % of their CR Budget.
Commoner/Expert/Warrior is going away, as it should becuase it honeslty doesn't and never really HAS worked to portray an even remotely realistic world.
In short, I think that 99% of custom NPCs will NEED their own statblock , and those that will need to be hand-build using the NPC creation guidelines they'll setout in the Bestiary I.
NPC building I believe (Much like Starfinder) is going to be SUPER DUPER simplified....
So, what you are saying is like my example above. The Magistrate is a 13th level challenge and that's pretty much it
Does this help you?
Expert: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eshL-0v3gtqqQSj0RrKr8fDfheYaY-PxUCR5-KX eRn4/edit