3.5 Stat Blocks Kill my creativity

[MrFilthyIke]

Try Castles & Crusades.

Booooooooo...

 

[demiurge1138]

You know, I actually like making stat-blocks. Maybe I'm just a natural accountant, but I think they're fun. And I've gotten pretty good at 'em. I'm nowhere near the 1-hour of play = 1-hour of prep 'rule', although I got pretty close when I was fairly new and was running an epic game. Let me tell you, statting up 25th level NPCs on a regular basis gets you pretty good at making monsters and characters pretty damn fast.

Demiurge out.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Yeah, stat blocks can be a drag. I like looking through all the various d20/D&D books I have to find a stat block that suits my purpose, then typing or cut 'n' pasting it into a Word doc, so I can print it out. There have been enough NPC stats produced, from low-level commoners through epic-level wizards, that I usually can find what I want pretty easily. Recently, I've enjoyed how WotC gives an example of an NPC using their new prestige classes. Makes things just a bit more easy.

I really, really like the slew of generic NPC stats found in d20 Modern and the Menace Manual. Very handy stuff.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

You know, I actually like making stat-blocks. Maybe I'm just a natural accountant, but I think they're fun.

I like them sometimes myself. What I find is that if I'm running into a block on the plot of my game, I can do some of the leg-work building stat blocks, defining the NPC's, and that will spark ideas for my plots.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

e-tools makes this easier than any game I've ever played, in any version.

I really don't understand why everyone does not get this program.

I totally agree with this. There may be some bugs, but by god it cuts my prep time from hours to minutes! I wish I had had it for my old campaign which petered out around level 17 for the players.

 

[Wormwood]

I love, LOVE cranking out stat blocks. I can cheerfully tweak the numbers for hours.

Hey, it beats working.

 

[driver8]

Ah, the "D&D is too complex" thread. Been a while, thread, nice to have you back.

LOL

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Bye bye Ulrick.

If you think that Stat Blocks are worth giving up the game for then do so, I have never had a problem with them, there are plenty of software tools to handle it for me, and most of them are free and can be downloaded from this site.

The Auld Grump, sick of this topic popping up. (And with a headache...)

 

[S'mon]

I used to loathe the stat blocks - I used Jamis' but the NPCs always felt weird and sterile. So then one day I read Henry's post about his quick NPC system, which I developed into the Henry/S'mon System in my sig link - now I'm a happy bunny.

Actually the one thing I'm not satisfied with is magic items, I could do with a better quick way to assign NPCs' items by level, something like the 1e table of NPC adventurer items that gave reasonable variety but far quicker than actually rolling on the main tables.

 

[Kelleris]

I have a problem with this too, and although I'm pretty adept at running something on the fly since I've got most of the classes and a decent number of magic items memorized or in formula, my pet project lately has been making a sort of campaign monster manual.

I make full monster-manual-style write-ups for average city guards, elite city guards, skilled and master assassins, sample members at various levels in the mage's guild, that sort of thing. If I know some kind of monster has a particular life-cycle or a particular area is well-known for that kind of monster I'll do an advanced/leveled version of that monster, along the lines of the Troll Ranger or the Displacer Beast Packmaster.

As I get further along in this project, I'm finding that I can easily scale these full write-ups up or down two CRs or so and not get that sense that the character is vague and ill-defined I get when completely improvising.

And really like the "typical dwarven defender" and "typical gnome illusionist" stat-blocks in the Races of... books. I've been stealing liberally from a friend's copy of them.