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<blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 2024863" data-attributes="member: 14140">Actually, i feel your pain but i don't think its limited to skills.Recently as part of playtesting i was generating multiple 10th level npcs and 5th level npcs and even a few 15th level npcs and it really struck home again to me the time consuming aspect of generating characters. By the time you take into account the skills by class, feats by class, and figure in at least two sources (assuming you are only using PHb and a single sourcebook) and even assuming NO PRCS, it gets to be quite a bit of work to generate the mechanics and numbers for a single NPC, much less a dozen for a playtest.I recall in my last DND campaign, by halfway thru i was reusing the earlier adversary stats with a few tweaks up for the most part and by the end in many cases i wasn't really using stats at all, sometimes the &quot;BBEG's sheets&quot; i was consulting were grocery lists, budget notes, and access query code i needed for tomorrow at work.This is I might add without any detailed &quot;wealth by level&quot; equipment buying and with just a few sketched notes like &quot;chain shirt, shield, axe and bow&quot;.I had a discussion with some of my playtester partners about this and found they too were averaging around an hour or more per character for the 10th level ones from scratch. I use a lot of &quot;generic fighter at level 5&quot; building blocks (once i create them) and it saves a little time but not much.All in all, if the mechanics and numbers took only 10-20 minutes, that would give me more time for the meaty stuff like concept, contacts, and background details, the nouns to go with the numbers. That would be much preferable.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="swrushing, post: 2024863, member: 14140"] Actually, i feel your pain but i don't think its limited to skills. Recently as part of playtesting i was generating multiple 10th level npcs and 5th level npcs and even a few 15th level npcs and it really struck home again to me the time consuming aspect of generating characters. By the time you take into account the skills by class, feats by class, and figure in at least two sources (assuming you are only using PHb and a single sourcebook) and even assuming NO PRCS, it gets to be quite a bit of work to generate the mechanics and numbers for a single NPC, much less a dozen for a playtest. I recall in my last DND campaign, by halfway thru i was reusing the earlier adversary stats with a few tweaks up for the most part and by the end in many cases i wasn't really using stats at all, sometimes the "BBEG's sheets" i was consulting were grocery lists, budget notes, and access query code i needed for tomorrow at work. This is I might add without any detailed "wealth by level" equipment buying and with just a few sketched notes like "chain shirt, shield, axe and bow". I had a discussion with some of my playtester partners about this and found they too were averaging around an hour or more per character for the 10th level ones from scratch. I use a lot of "generic fighter at level 5" building blocks (once i create them) and it saves a little time but not much. All in all, if the mechanics and numbers took only 10-20 minutes, that would give me more time for the meaty stuff like concept, contacts, and background details, the nouns to go with the numbers. That would be much preferable. [/QUOTE]

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