What Even is Old School Gaming? (Part 6) NPCs Gotta Have Class!

 Welcome to Part 6 of our series on "What Even is Old School Gaming."

I think this, Part 6, is going to be the last part. I've been carefully considering whether we got all the bullet points covered on "What Even is Old School Gaming",  and I think we've really covered just about everything that really matters to make a game feel old school, no matter what system, or edition, or game you're playing. If there's something else that you'd like to bring up just please mention it in the comments or get a hold of me on our Discord server and I'll be sure to address it.

Also, many of you have been talking to me on Discord, either by voice chat or texting back and forth, and you have been asking for topics and giving me cool feedback that deserves response, so I'm actually backlogged right now for topics to cover with this channel.

The title of this final part of the series is "NPCs Gotta Have Class."

Now, I've been playing D&D since I was 11 years old and I'm 51 now. You do the math. Fifth edition D&D came out in 2014. It actually took me a few years to realize what I'm about to tell you about. I was a few years into 5th edition D&D before I realized that NPCs in 5th edition D&D only have stat blocks. They don't actually have character classes.

In Tomb of Annihilation, Dragonbait the sauriel paladin is not even listed as a paladin. In fact, in the text below his stat block, it specifically states that he is paladin-like, but not actually a paladin. I was there in the 1980s for Azure Bonds. Azure Bonds was a multiplatform product that was a novel, a video game, and a pen and paper tabletop printed module. It was hugely popular.  It's even spawned sequel products, including a sequel Forgotten Realms novel.  Alias and Dragonbait went on to appear in Forgotten Realms comics. I know full well that Dragonbait is indeed a paladin.

So what is the significance of NPCs in 5th edition not actually having character classes? One might say, "Who cares? Doesn't this make it easier for the DM?"

So, what is lost when NPCs don't have character classes consists of two things: realism and challenge. Let's discuss both.

Realism:  Are you telling me that your party's Paladin is the only Paladin in the entire Campaign World? Are there no others?

What about Rangers? Does nobody else in the entire Campaign World have that same training?

Is your party's Barbarian the only Barbarian on the entire planet who knows how to rage?

Of the two problems, realism and challenge, this first part, realism, is the easiest one to brush off and to just rationalize that 5th edition characters have become very complex and reducing NPCs to stat blocks just makes DMing easier. It is my understanding that this is WOTC's philosophy in this regard.

Fine. And if that's all it was, I wouldn't be ranting about it.

But here's the thing, and this is why I purposely brought up Barbarian rage as the last example. Barbarian rage is a big deal. Entire parties base their default combat strategy around the Barbarian raging. Decisions are made about whether to even enter combat based on how many rages per day the party's Barbarian has left.

I noticed when I was an active Adventure League DM in local St. Louis game stores from 2017 to 2018, that none of the enemy warrior-types in the published adventures were barbarians, even if it would have made so much sense in the story because they came from a barbarian tribe or a barbarian people.

The consensus of the other Adventure League DMs in the St. Louis area, when we would go to a 24-hour Steak and Shake to have the meeting after the meeting after the game store closed and we wrapped up our adventure League duties, was that WOTC really didn't want player characters to have to deal with NPCs who were resistant to physical damage.

So, if your Campaign World is a place in which only the player's characters have abilities such as Rage or Cunning Action or Sneak Attack, then Rage and Cunning Action and Sneak Attack become superpowers and your party becomes the Justice League from DC or The Avengers from Marvel.

In the early days of my gaming life, during first edition years and second edition years, I discovered that when players would come up with some sort of overpowered combination of spells cast together back to back, that when tales of what they were doing famously spread through the world and their enemies started using the same combinations against them, that the players rightfully feared that.

After all, in a realistic world, people observe what works. And they copy it. Companies copy what they see other companies doing if it's successful. Sports teams copy plays and strategies that are successful for other sports teams. So if adventuring parties in a fantasy world found successful combat techniques, NPCs in the world would emulate that right back at them.

So what I've observed since I've been a professional dungeon master, approaching 400 games on the StartPlaying.games platform, is that when my players realize that there are barbarians with the actual barbarian character class on the enemy side, they rightfully fear that. If they are fighting an enemy who has Cunning Action and Sneak Attack, and wields those abilities against them the same way they wield them against NPCs, then they get just as frustrated as players fighting in NPCs as I often do with them that Cunning Action and Sneak Attack are so effective.

In other words, whatever player characters can do, NPCs in the world should also be able to do. I have seen player characters be a lot more concerned about fighting NPCs with character classes then they ever get concerned about fighting monsters from the Monster Manual. They know full well what their own abilities are capable of.

So this topic in Part 6 is related to Part 4 about how characters should actually be able to die and Part 5 about how monsters, or in this case NPCs, should actually really be a threat.

So, to be old school, NPCs really got to have class, a character class.

But what do you think?