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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4029146" data-attributes="member: 3146">Here are my thoughts on "15 minute NPCs" statement.My first thought was "heh. More boilerplate WotC Marketing approved hype. 3e bad. 4e good. Coming from someone whose paycheck depends on people buying 4e, I'll believe the 4e good bit when (and if) I see it. But I've played 3e for 8 years now and it's not bad. It's good."Thinking about it a bit more, there are a few other things that spring to mind.First, like some others here, I would agree that 90 minutes for a single NPC is a bit much. 4 hours on NPCs will produce eight or nine NPCs with versions appropriate to challenge 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th level characters, using the standard WotC format with all the hiddent text they make us use when writing for the RPGA. On the other hand, I know that there are statblocks I've spent a LOT of time working on--maybe not 90 minutes per statblock generated, but more time than I would like.The designers are promising me that 4e will fix that. How realistic is that claim? When I think about designing 3e NPCs, there are several factors. What kind of NPCs am I creating? A warrior type is generally quicker than a spellcaster. Anything is quicker than a wizard. (Increasing Int every four levels and thus having skill points that cannot simply be analyzed by saying "Skills per level x(Class level +3)" as well as requiring a spellbook (which no other class requires) makes wizards inherently more time consuming than any other class). Adding multiple prestige classes takes time. Anything that is a clone (or close to it) of one of the PCs I have played or have thought of playing takes less time. Equipping a character takes a little time. Thinking about the amount of gold I'm handing the party and revising the equipment to be more stingy takes time. However, what it really comes down to is that, in 3e, I can spend as much time as I want to to create a character. If a straight up orcish barbarian is required, I can crank that really quickly. If I want a fiendish displacer beast, that's fairly quick too. If, on the other hand, for some reason I want an awakened tauric multi-headed half-fiendish axiomatic bullette marshal/wizard/spellsword advanced by hit dice, that's going to take a while. As a writer or a DM, I can choose how particular I want to be.Now, why would 4e be quicker? If the rumors about using more or less the SAGA skill system are true, that would make 4e NPCs somewhat quicker. (On the other hand, if I want to be quick, at the moment, I simply numbering the number of skill points the NPC gets per level and putting that many class skills at max ranks (the next level of detail is dropping a few max rank skills to get two half-rank skills each); that's not really significantly slower than picking "trained" and "untrained" skills in similar numbers. What about not having to calculate multiple attack routines? I'm pretty sure that's going to be balanced out by having multiple x/day and x/encounter powers. (In any event, it's calculating the first attack where all the work is; the iterative attacks take an extra second. So, reducing the number of attacks doesn't seem like a likely candidate for saving time). Here's what I would see as the biggest reason: At this stage in its development, it's likely that any designer is working with the equivalent of a playtest PHB, DMG, and MM. No Complete Sasquatch or Races of the Wild Blue Yonder. No MM II, MM III and Complete book of bizarre templates. So, anything that the designer is likely to cook up is going to be the 4e equivalent of a bunch of (probably single classed) NPCs plus one fiendish NPC. 4.0 simply doesn't have enough supplements for their to be any equivalent to an an awakened tauric multi-headed half-fiendish axiomatic bullette marshal/wizard/spellsword advanced by hit dice. Furthermore, as writers working with a new system, designers know that whatever abilities they give their gnolls will be somewhat new and exciting to players (assuming that the game is as good as 3e). Writers don't need to distinguish themselves by writing bizarre anomalies in order to get past jaded player syndrome. The meat and potatoes monsters will be new and interesting enough.In short, I'd bet that SRM, et al are comparing apples to oranges. By the time 4th edition has been around 5 years, they'll be back to spending 90 minutes on a statblock for an an awakened tauric multi-headed half-fiendish axiomatic bullette marshal/wizard/spellsword advanced by hit dice in order to have a new and interesting opponent that the PCs haven't faced before.</blockquote>

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