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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7144896" data-attributes="member: 71699">I'm with Saelorn in feeling that those 5e stat blocks such as Druid and Mage are "a concession to playability made for the sake of the lazy DM". In 3e it was notoriously time consuming to create NPCs. CosmicKid's discussion of diversity also chimes with me. "The classes in the book are abstractions: generalizations and sample platters of the sorts of things that heroic characters can learn over their careers, presented to us as discrete progression paths for fun and ease of use." All that the condensed stat blocks are doing is abstracting at a higher level for ease of use, which makes a lot of sense because a given NPC might be encountered only a handful of times. If I felt such an NPC was going to become a major part of my campaign, I'd stat them in more detail.If a tier 3 Rogue in my campaign thinks about taking over a guild, she will have to overcome some meaningful opposition. We can say that the boss is a flag waver, but then all we do is shift the burden onto some servant who wields adventurer-level power. And for me at least we lack a clear explanation of why that person or creature didn't take over the guild themselves? We can of course come up with local anomalies. Diversity is great! So maybe this boss bonded with a group of powerful creatures *somehow*? Maybe all the thieves' guilds in our world are run that way? For me that is a stretch when a thieves' guild can simply and interestingly be made up of rogues. I'm happy to use simplified stat blocks to represent that, in most cases.</blockquote>

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