Power and NPCs

 There's this inherent issue in the way that D&D (and, I think, a lot of similar TTRPGs) treat expertise and power. Generally speaking, the world is built for adventurers. As our player characters risk their lives in adventures, they gain more power. When it comes to martial classes, there's a certain logic to it - veterans perfect their martial techniques, and even just getting lots of exercise makes one stronger.

And to a certain extent, this makes sense for spellcasters as well - magic-users will get better at casting more complex magical spells in the heat of combat as they gain experience doing so.

But the odd result here is that know-how gets linked inextricably to one's experience fighting monsters. In D&D worlds, often the most powerful people are retired adventurers.

I had the following issue in the Spelljammer campaign I run on Sunday nights.

The party began at level 3, crash-landing on a colony world. Most of the monsters one faces in Wildspace are kind of geared for a tier-2 party or higher, so I decided to take a moment to introduce the characters and their dynamics via some classic grounded D&D (the players also wanted something of a space-western, and while I've leaned far more into the "X-Files/Roswell" vibe of the American Southwest, I figured we could do at least a bit of classic tier 1 "quests around a small town" thing.

To justify why they couldn't yet leave, I had their Spelljamming helm destroyed in the crash, and while they have a Living Ship (something I might already regret letting them start with - less for its ability to repair itself and more for having a treant in the hull that can defend the ship) the Helm needed to be replaced.

Now, they have an Artificer, but she'll only be able to cast the "Create Spelljamming Helm" when she hits level 17 - in other words, not for a very long time. This spell can also be cast by a Wizard, but even they would need to be level 9, as it's a 5th level spell.

So, I decided they would need to have an NPC come and cast the spell for them. But I also wanted to imperil said NPC (you know, for drama and to give them a reason to delve into the military base where one faction of Men in Black were being hunted by another faction of MIBs - the former being the classic "government agents trying to cover up the existence of aliens" vibe and the latter being "something deeply offputting that might be some kind of Cosmic Horror monstrosity in an unconvincing human-like disguise"). How, then, do you imperil a 9th level wizard or a 17th level artificer when the party is level 4?

The answer: maybe you don't need to be an adventurer to cast high-level spells.

See, the lens through which we see the worlds of D&D is very much built around the player characters, and the universal trait of all D&D characters, and the basis for their classes, is that they are adventurers. These are the people who delve into dungeons, fight monsters, and gain power and renown for their deeds. They're superheroes.

In the real world, you don't need to be a veteran soldier to design sophisticated computers.

So, I created an NPC, a dwarf named Erman Steelvar, who is an engineer that the government contracts with, and whom a friendly NPC had brought in to help fix the ship. Steelvar is a renowned engineer, but he's not a fighter. He's got the Commoner stat block, but has an Intelligence of 18 and can prepare and cast any Artificer spells that don't deal damage or restore hit points. And, if those spells have a casting time of less than one minute, they take at least one minute to cast.

The point is: this is a guy who understands the magic of artifice on a deep and profound level, thanks to a lifetime of study. But he's not a combatant. He's useless in a fight. Indeed, when the party found him, he had been stuffed in a closet to keep him safe during the incursion by a deadly "Division 10" agent, and when they took him out of the closet, he immediately had a heart attack, requiring the party to act quickly to save his life (here, magical healing was very useful).

I recommend looking at the possibility of expanding the world of civilians in your D&D settings. Adventurers are built to be very self-sufficient, but in most of these worlds, they're also very rare. I mean, few people would choose such a lifestyle if they had other options.