Reviews of No Dignity in Death and People of Pembrooktonshire continue to trickle in (including private emails and IMs) - today has a batch of reviews on Chgowiz's blog
here - and I notice a common element of the reviews.
"Some DMs might quibble that no stats are given for the NPCs, but that makes this book useful in that its system neutrality makes it accessible to all." - from the review linked above.
"I was mildly disappointed that Raggi made no effort to place these NPCs within the game context of
D&D and its clones/simulacra..." - from the Grognardia review.
Those are just the publicly available comments of that sort.
The "system neutrality" is a by-product of my philosophy, after-the-fact residue, not an intentional feature of the book.
Everyone is 0 level (with maybe,
maybe, a half dozen examples that are level 1, and that one magic guy who would technically be higher level but it now old and senile and is effectively just a normal guy that remembers just one spell), with generally average stats, and those with better stats made obvious in the text. And 3/4ths of the people under thirty being a
bit more physically gifted and a
bit less mentally gifted if you're using that one character in your version of the town.
And that's spread between the two adventures.
Stats for everyone else would look like this:
Bob Jones, lvl 0, STR 12 INT 9 WIS 9 DEX 10 CON 12 CHA 11
... repeated literally over 100 times with only the most minor of variations.
It didn't even occur to me that people would wonder if and how any of these people were
statistically unusual (and I figured that People of Pembrooktonshire was included in the last line of the Overview on page 3 of No Dignity in Death). In my games, leveled characters really don't fit into or exist within society very well. Town guards, kings, important people... level 0, with few exceptions.
Oh, and Shorten also gave me a plug
here. Much appreciated!
