Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5357666" data-attributes="member: 82106">Except that giving a creature a class template also gives them access to additional powers. Just like with any conversion from standard monster to elite you can't just make the basic adjustments and not make changes to the creature's action economy and power suite and have a good result. This is no different with the classed NPCs where you still have to select a few iconic powers for the NPC to use. In neither case do the rules provide some kind of exact formula for doing this, you have to work out for yourself exactly what makes a good NPC/Monster.IMHO the NPC rules in DMG1 are obsolete. In fact I can't find even one single example of a published product, INCLUDING Fallcrest etc, where WotC has ever actually used these rules. ALL existing official material "NPCs" are actually built as monsters. Beyond that DMG2 provided functional class templates for monsters but doesn't provide page 187 style ones for any of the newer (PHB2 mostly) classes at all. DMG2 also introduces Companion Characters as the preferred way to make NPCs that are allied with a party and adventure with them.So the real question is what is the purpose of the NPC rules in DMG1? I think basically they were a hold-over from past editions where NPCs were simply DM controlled PCs. They never worked very well, the rules for them are ambiguous at best, WotC never used or further developed those rules, and there are alternate ways of doing anything you might want to do with those rules.That isn't to say NPCs are unusable, but IME they have too few hit points to stand up in combat against PCs, more powers than they really need and more complex powers than are really desirable for the DM to deal with, and we don't even know what their XP value is. Nowhere do the rules clarify if an NPC is elite or not. They certainly don't have anything close to elite hit points, though they may have in some cases healing powers that make up for that. Overall they tend to be flaky opponents. You can use them as allies, but then why not just make a CC, which is really mostly a refined version of the same system. As opponents a monster with a class template has both better defined rules and works better in a fight.</blockquote>

Verification