Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benben" data-source="post: 4027759" data-attributes="member: 110">Takasi here's where it takes time for me to do a high level npc in my games.  I'll define high level as anything greater than 12th level.1.) Choose Class - 5 minutes:  Okay getting to skill monkey/fighter/arcane/divine/psion is pretty easy.  After that I'll take a few minutes looking over all of the new classes in all of my supplements and see which works best.  2.) Determine Ability Scores - 5 minutes.  I always use point buy to make high level npcs.  They're as special as PCs in my games so I usually have to optimize this a bit.3.) Pick Race - 1 minutes: This writes itself, and I hate using freakshow races for the most part.  4.) Pick Skills - 10 minutes.  For a high level npc with possible boosts to Int during their career and doubtless Prestige class pre-reqs this takes time to balance.  This is especially true for skill monkies.5.) Pick Feats - 15 minutes.  Between countless source books and prestige classes I'll be tweaking things back and forth for a while to make sure everything is a feat well spent.6.) Equipment - 30 minutes.  Taking in NPC gold amounts and the deciding what the party should get if they kill the npc is a very careful balancing act.7.) Spells - 15 minutes.  PHB2 lists doesn't cover half of the sources of spells I have, and I like each spell caster to have an interesting theme.  8.) Put it all together - 15 minutes.   Go over everything, and add an extra 15 minutes if I'm using a weird race or monster combination.  Start to finish - 96 minutes.Fortunately high level NPCs are rare in my game.  Additionally I would add half an hour to get their backstory fully fleshed out so they will have some story hooks beyond whatever plot element is important to them for the current scenario.I am not slow at math, my slowdown is getting something balanced against high level PCs in D&D 3.5.</blockquote>

Verification