It is optional. See this response from another thread:
While I personally prefer this system myself as well, forcing people to do a bunch of work to get things closely resembling the old way is not the same as optional. "Immersion Breaking" is a pretty good argument, and having to visit a website to see how their points are distributed would be even more Immersion Breaking. Besides, that doesn't fix the gear.
You may have a point about gear, but I disagree that "Immersion Breaking" is a good argument. People just say that when they don't like something but want their criticism to sound objective rather than subjective. Video Games, by their very nature require us break our immersion in various ways so that we can interact with the gameplay.
That it's a computer game, and by definition has elements that aren't part of the story, such as the User Interface, doesn't mean that we can just ignore any forms of immersion whatsoever!
Either way, this change is NOT an "optional" change. Optional is where you can disable it in the options, or simply choose not to touch it. Having to actively do certain things with each NPC that you didn't need to before most certainly does not qualify as optional!
I've renamed this thread for clarity. A couple of notes:
NPCs aren't scaled down to level 1. You always get the lowest version of the NPC that was available in the original games, but we don't reduce their levels below that
The proficiencies, skills, spells and stats that the NPCs had at the lowest levels are unchanged
If your protagonist's XP is higher than what the lowest version of an NPC had, then that NPC gets extra XP to match yours (at certain pre-defined thresholds)
Any special bonuses that NPCs had are retained i.e. Coran still has 3 proficiency points in Long Bow and Baeloth still knows more spells than a normal Sorcerer
In short, this change retains the original stats, skills, spells and proficiencies that the lowest version of all NPCs had, while at the same time allowing players to customize those parameters for the higher versions of all NPCs.
@AletT while we're at it, could you clarify is it intended that NPCs have a certain border, like @Abel mentioned about NPC fighters not being able to have more than 32k XP, or they should be scaled to the main character's level without limits?
@AletT while we're at it, could you clarify is it intended that NPCs have a certain border, like @Abel mentioned about NPC fighters not being able to have more than 32k XP, or they should be scaled to the main character's level without limits?
NPC XP scales up to a certain threshold which is different for each campaign. The values are as follows:
Comments
You may have a point about gear, but I disagree that "Immersion Breaking" is a good argument. People just say that when they don't like something but want their criticism to sound objective rather than subjective. Video Games, by their very nature require us break our immersion in various ways so that we can interact with the gameplay.
Either way, this change is NOT an "optional" change. Optional is where you can disable it in the options, or simply choose not to touch it. Having to actively do certain things with each NPC that you didn't need to before most certainly does not qualify as optional!
In short, this change retains the original stats, skills, spells and proficiencies that the lowest version of all NPCs had, while at the same time allowing players to customize those parameters for the higher versions of all NPCs.
NPC XP scales up to a certain threshold which is different for each campaign. The values are as follows: