Re: Epic NPCs and their stats

From: Brian Curley <bkcurley_at_okm7eO7Z6WlfC-20yKSJprztj2-L5znydqCPSNkNfKlLf0fp2Fxhi5S10ayulVWAia2>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:52:58 -0500

jongjom2003 wrote:
> wrote:

>> Lastly, do people want to play in campaigns/senarios where they 

> would

>> interact (or be in conflict) with such powerful demi-god types?

>
> For me: very much so! If not that then what's the point of the scale?
> It's HeroQuest after all!

For me, it's like when the Star Wars RPG came out... you're playing in the past of the world. We know that Argrath is going to raise a dragon to devour the Temple of the Reaching Moon, and that he'll eventually pull the Moon down from the sky. We may not know exactly *who* this Argrath is, but we certainly know what he (and many of the other movers and shakers) are going to do in the future, at least in general terms.

So, like in Star Wars, what would be the point of stats for Darth Vader? You know that whatever the PCs have to do with him, he's going to survive until his son kicks the snot out of him on the Death Star v2.0 and makes him see the light just before he dies. So he's not a character, he's a plot element or a force of nature. He's effectively scenery against which the PCs play out their lives. So his stats are whatever they need to be for him to get to the point that *we know he gets to* later in the story. So what if your group encounters Vader on his way to Endor to meet the Emperor. You're not going to be able to kill him, or even remotely inconvenience him because he's got to get to Endor with relatively full faculties to fight Luke. You don't needs stats for a fait accompli.

Same goes for Jar-Eel, Moonson, Harrek, Kallyr. etc. It's a little more nebulous in their case.

I think it would be far more satisfying to play a game about "Well, sure Agrath tears down the moon, but he wouldn't have gotten to do that (or that wouldn't have been enough) if it weren't for these other guys over here that you haven't heard of until now." Aside from the fact that the Sartar campaign seems to indicate that there's a chance that one of your PCs might be the guy who becomes that Argrath and gets to do that stuff, that doesn't change the fact that Jar-Eel does what Jar-Eel does. She's as powerful as she needs to be to get to where we know she gets to.

Might as well have stats for a chair, IMO.

BKC