Forum

Has anyone looked at their NPCs skill and talent levels so they can scale them to give a greater challenge to the player characters?

I was thinking of giving a standard number of advances to represent differing experience 'levels'..

Something along the lines of:

Novice/Green: No advances beyond character generation.
Experienced: Up to 5 additional skill levels or talent ranks.
Veteran: 5-10 additional skill levels or talent ranks.
Elite: 10+ additional skill levels or talent ranks.

Not sure how this would actually work in terms of additional threat towards the PCs, but I was wondering if anyone had done anything similar?

Has anyone looked at their NPCs skill and talent levels so they can scale them to give a greater challenge to the player characters?

I was thinking of giving a standard number of advances to represent differing experience 'levels'..

Something along the lines of:

Novice/Green: No advances beyond character generation.
Experienced: Up to 5 additional skill levels or talent ranks.
Veteran: 5-10 additional skill levels or talent ranks.
Elite: 10+ additional skill levels or talent ranks.

Not sure how this would actually work in terms of additional threat towards the PCs, but I was wondering if anyone had done anything similar? This seems like a reasonable idea.

I have not, but goodness knows the system needs something like this! The core npcs are very weak after you've been playing for a few months.

This sounds like a good idea. It's always been a bit of a thing to some measure with non-leveling systems played in long campaigns. When you're running your own campaign material, you write it to reflect your player characters' strengths, but when running the sort of free form campaign material in these publications, I can foresee this being an issue. It might be worth sketching scaled versions of major NPCs, and generic NPCs for the settings before getting started.

I'll have to play a few sessions first to get a feel for how these things play out - I'm new to this system, having just picked up all the books in a sale. I also haven't played a role playing game in about 20 years! Fortunately, this games looks like a good choice to get me back in the saddle.