Monday, October 26, 2020

The Leader First Before Others

This is different.  The organization imposed by the wiki upon my present design approach is causing me to tackle small issues like the below, that would normally be ignored.  I personally liked the original monster manual's reference to leaders, sub-chiefs and chiefs, as three levels of officers in a milieu that exists outside of present-day military labels.  I've never really sat down and tried to detail such persons from a character perspective before.  As I see it, the term "leader" can be used in its ordinary, every day sense, as we use it habitually, but it can also be used to describe a specific class of persons who have nominal authority in primitive clans and other groups.


It doesn't matter to me that others will see the above too limiting and restrictive, for reasons that are mostly gut-level reasoning.  For me, this makes it easy for me to group varying levels of persons, so that "sub-chiefs" are 3-5th level, "chiefs" are 6-8th level and "lords" are 9th level and more.  I'm comfortable with having a sub-chief fulfill a leader's duties, so I don't see the appellation as limiting at all.

Nor am I bound to considering only fighters.  My sage ability system allows a chance for any class to potentially cross-train into another class, so that -- paraphrasing of Chef Gusteau -- while not every member of a different class will be a leader, a leader may come from anywhere.  A mage may therefore lead a military unit without actually having to be a multi-classed fighter ... and I am just fine with that.

The page glimpsed above is intended to be the first in a long list of future pages describing members of varying professions and skill-sets outside the character class.  These will come up occasionally, amidst the considerable number of other pages I intend to write in the next ten years (which will make me only 66).  That I should have chanced to do the "leader" first is only because it is referenced a lot in the humanoid monster pages I've been creating of late.

1 comment:

  1. I find the stat generation to be elegant, and a nice model to generate classes of NPCs. I've found the 4d6 (drop lowest) method yields a mean stat almost 2 points higher than the 3d6 method (using Excel to generate 1000 stat sets).

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