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Old 10-19-2018, 01:23 PM   #37
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Alternate XP progression schedule

Quote:
Originally Posted by platimus View Post
You know NPCs don't really exist, right? LOL

A lot of people write backgrounds for their NPCs as if they were PCs. How did NPC get to be who he is today? Gather 'round the camp-fire and let me tell you a story...
Well, they exist on paper, and however they exist in the game. I and most of the friends I most enjoyed playing with, were interested to some degree in immersing by taking the experience somewhat seriously and that included having the NPCs have some logical existence, at least in theory. We had a lot of NPCs who spent a fair amount of time with the players because (as TFT greatly rewards and almost requires) adventuring parties tended to have quite a few NPC members. Where are they from, what are they like? As we continued to play, we as players got more curious about the world, and we as GMs got more and more capable and interested in what's in the world and why it's that way, and one of the topics of particular attention started to be what's available at wizards' guilds - what (if any) magic items, gates, services, information, training? We tended to play out visits to guilds, which means there were natural questions at least about what you saw, who you talked to and saw, and what they said, and so the GM naturally would think about how many wizards there would be in a guild house, what their abilities would be like, and what they would choose to do with themselves. If you stop and think about that sort of thing, you realize that unless you are in a huge guild house filled with many powerful wizards, and they all are interested in doing all sorts of things for adventurers for coin, then there will be limited goods and services available, and having a self-consistent idea about how much that is, is something we very much enjoyed exploring both as GMs and as players. It leads to thinking of interesting situations and reasons for various sorts of intrigue and adventure and plotting, which can be naturally supported by the game system and the thought the GM puts into it. If the GM does not put much thought into it, but the players explore and exploit what they can find, you can get into paradoxes or at least embarrassing weirdness when the GM has to choose whether there were really as many wizards with the IQ and spells needed to produce the things he just said "ya sure" to in the past, and then how many wizards are there in the rest of the world, and how does that compare to the world population... it's nice when some thought has been given to that sort of thing, and it can hold some water and therefore enable play that can be interacted with without the world having weird situations that don't make sense.
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