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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ridley's Cohort" data-source="post: 3451183" data-attributes="member: 545">Through the bubbling cauldron of experience, it eventually dawned on my DM that it was extremely unlikely that the players would ever notice whether he spent 2 minutes or 20 minutes designing the typical NPC.  90% of the time that NPC would be dead within 11 seconds of hostile contact, not the slightest hint revealed through play what his full set of Feats and Skills happen to be.Now obviously this does not apply to every NPC.  Making a few special ones carefully is one of the joys of being a DM.But on the grand scale of things, most NPCs that make it to the battlemat are mooks.  They might live through the first 3 hits instead going down at once, but they are still just Orcs in drag.I am a bit of a Balance Nazi.  I also advocate that the DM should "cheat, fair and square" in order to speed things up for the sake of everyone's fun.  What I mean is that the DM should feel free to take short cuts that on average will be fair to the PCs.The number of standard humanoid types you really need are small.  Stat them out simply.  Vanilla Guard Level 2,  Vanilla Guard Level 4, etc.From there you can just use simple deltas.  How tough is the leader of a band of Vanilla Guard 2's?  Give him +10 HP, +2 to hit, +2 damage, +1 to all saves and all skills, and call that close enough.You do not have to get all the details "right".  You just need to make sure that you are assigning reasonable CRs when designing the encounter and that NPCs are not "cheating" in some strange way that gives them a really unfair advantage due to bizarreness.  But surely it is not possible to make NPC so boring as to be unfair, so you know which way to lean when in doubt.</blockquote>

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