d20 needs different rules for NPCs

[Jürgen Hubert]

All in all, I'd be interested in easier NPC construction rules for d20, since NPC creation always was one of the more tedious tasks with GMing.

I mean, I created the d20 NPCs Wiki simply to reduce the workload for the GM, but it doesn't cover every conceivable NPC...

 

[Abraxas]

Sorry, I don't buy, and have never bought, the whole "The PCs should be able to do everything the villain can do" argument. I agree that this should be true for most villains.

But I like epic fantasy, and you simply cannot get that if you measure both sides on the same yardstick. Tolkien's Sauron. Feist's Valheru. Eddings' Kal Torak. Not a one of these "Is just like the heroes, but a higher level." The mad Cthulhu cultist performing a rite, or the ancient archmage who created an artifact that is now running wild, aren't using abilities the PCs can use if they just gain enough XP.

Not every game has to involve villains like that. Heck, most of them shouldn't. But such villains absolutely should be an option for them DM to use when appropriate. Any good DM will also include a weakness, something the PCs can do to defeat said villain despite such overwhelming odds and not knowing exactly how the bad guy's powers work. That's the essence of a major portion of fantasy, and simply removing it wholesale doesn't make sense to me at all.

Just had to respond to this - because I have exactly the opposite opinion. I believe the PCs should be able to do everything the NPCs can do. However, those powers and abilities come at a price - a price the PCs might not be willing to pay. The idea that a PC may pay that price and eventually become like Sauron, Valheru or Kal Torakobtain doesn't make those villains any less epic. And, if the PCs go to all the trouble to find out what these epic villains had to do to get where they are, it can make them even more vile, more horrific, or more thoroughly evil.

As for the OP - I am uninterested in such a product. I use various tools (like PCGen or Heroforge) to create NPCs quickly and the situation described here . . .

How many times has a boss fight gone bad because you rolled poorly on initiative, or the group just gets in some crazy rolls and your rolling badly. That saving throw that you should have made ended up failing and now your NPC that you've been carefully building as this total bad@$$ goes down without fanfare.

seems to be a DMs disappointment, not a player's. Whenever my players have totally trounced the BBEG they don't sit around moping that it was anti-climatic, they celebrate and gloat about what badasses their character's are. Since the BBEGs are there to lose (sooner or later) I don't sweat it.

 

[DJCupboard]

Two issues in this thread:

1) Do I want a system for quickly statting NPCs a la Iron Heroes or some form of template system?

YES! For my more envolved NPCs, like major bosses, I love tinkering with optimum classes and the like, but for sub-bosses and tough encounters, this would be ideal.

2) Should sub bosses and bosses (or anyone who should be of importance or earth shattering bada##ness) be able to fudge an escape or a roll?

Yes, but contingent on the feel of the game. For most of the adventures I run or play in, I like the feel of the unstoppable bad guy or the clever genius (and my players tend to agree). The unstoppable bad guy (like a huge barbarian who kills everyone he even looks at) should make most of his saves and have more hp than he should (note: but not limmitless, we still want the players to have the ability to overcome him given great rolling or rping on their part). For example: [from behind the dm screen] Round 1) "As you raise your hand, trembling with arcane might, your finger pointing menacingly at Throk the Unstoppable, an eldrich blast courses forth, surrounding him in a field of the blackest energy. OK, your save or die spell has a dc of X.." [rolls a 1] "...and Throk makes his save, though you can see the beginnings of fear forming in his eyes. Charging forward, he prepares to clear the path of any obstacles in the way of single-handedly destroying you. This round he will need to make a double move before he is in melee range with anyone. What does everyone do for round 2?" Throk probably doesn't have any escape contingencies in place, but he should be pretty hard to overcome, somewhere at the top of his CR. As another example, Throk's Boss, The Mad Wizard, probably doesn't save all that well and won't have optimum hp, but more than likely he has some escape contingency in place and is cunning enough to have multiple escapes in place, since his minions have been dealing with the party's capabilites for some time. Something like, "As your blade cuts through his arcane fortifications, you can glimpse a look of genuine surprise at the sheer force of your attack. Before you have a chance to take advantage of his shock, he disapears in a flash of eldritch light." Technically this isn't anything the players can't do with the right spells and feats, but the BBEG should be able to do it even if you didn't think to add teleport or contigency to his spell list while you spent the hour and a half tweeking him to your liking. The important thing is not to abuse it (i.e. if all your villians are always completely unbeatble, you are doing something wrong) and make sure it doesn't come accross as blatant cheating (which would surely annoy just about any player). As long as it generates excitement and a sense of a good story/game/encounter, I would consider it good GMing. On the flip side, if John's 10th level paladin, Sir Marcus the Exalted, is hit in the first round by Thok for enough damage to kill him outright, without having had the chance to make any significant contributions to the encounter himself, I would rule (from behind my screen, without anyone having seen the roll) that he instead happened to be hit for somewhere between 60-90% of his hp. It's good story telling and it keeps the excitement high. Just like dying in round one sucks for a player, killing the BBEG that you have been hunting for months and months in round one with one attack sucks just as much and makes for quite the let-down for the players.

DJC

 

[wayne62682]

Honestly what I would like to see is having "Mook" bad guys and then "real" bad guys.. but with the abstract HP system it doesn't really work..

I'm thinking something like Star Wars d20 has with VP/WP.. your mooks don't get Vitality and only have Wounds, so you kill them relatively quickly, while important (i.e. classed) people are harder to kill. Makes things more cinematic, IMO, but I'm not sure of how to do it in D&D when everything uses hit points rather than two seperate values.

 

[Fenes]

I think a librabry of NPCs works well for this, without the need of a new system. I collect all NPCs I create, and save them in a file, so if I need some stats I can quickly pick an NPC, change the weapon, maybe replace a feat, and have it ready.

 

[Numion]

Yes, and when my carefully set up encounters are destroyed by a single bad roll, I put it down to bad design on my part and let the PCs have their victory. Then I think about what went wrong and learn not to make the same mistake again. I don't need or want special rules to protect my adventures from my own mistakes because that just leads to more bad design supported by Deus ex Machina rules. In turn, later, I can apply those lessens to when I run PCs.

It's not even bad design, IMO. Once a BBEG Vampire got disintegrated without a single action - lost init, rolled low on save. Not a big deal IMO. It wasn't a failure for me (the DM). The players had a lot of fun with their awesome defeat of a known very-bad-dude and were very much challenged in other parts of the adventure.

Random nature of the game makes it exciting but rarely also into easy victories or frustrating defeats. The unpredictable nature is part of what makes it fun.

Growing PC power is also one of the main draws of D&D - constantly making everything hard plays down this aspect. Easy victory every now and them reminds the players of their characters accomplishments.

Let the dice fall where they may, brothers.

 

[Henry]

I think a librabry of NPCs works well for this, without the need of a new system. I collect all NPCs I create, and save them in a file, so if I need some stats I can quickly pick an NPC, change the weapon, maybe replace a feat, and have it ready.

This would be one workable solution, and indeed not a bad one. Two problems for me, however:

1) My personal preference is for LESS databasing of my work, rather than more.
2) Also contingent in this is a desire for fewer stat references. In my opinion, if NPC stats were perfect as-is, WotC would not have tinkered with them three times in the past five years, and continually experiment with different ways to present NPCs and monster to game masters. I feel it's because the more stats that have to be referenced, the slower a DM is to respond to players' in-game tactics. I have NO trouble at all with 1st through roughly 9th level characters. It's those NPCs from 10th to 20th level that drive me batty.

I don't need the level of detail the players do, for an NPC that's going to spend all of five rounds on the battlefield, and the players have never cared whether he had a fort save that was 1 point off, because they never knew it. Even if they died as a result, my players have never questioned it or insinutated they had less fun. In fact, I hear more grumbling about rules-lookups than I do unfairness. (Admittedly, its from the other gamers in the group who are DMs, but... )

 

[Garnfellow]

HeapThaumaturgist has an awesome draft of a Spycraft style NPC generator over in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=164910&highlight=NPCs

Also, there's a recent Dungeoncraft article where Monte Cook gives some simple math for winging D&D NPCs.

 

[Seeker95]

I think the poll and the original post clouded what has become a much better discussion topic. I voted Neutral / 3. I am now very interested.

 

[Janx]

As for #3, I completly disagree with there being two separate rules for PCs and NPCs in most games. Classes and abilities available to one should be available to the other. In general, I see this as providing a common yardstick and as being "fair". This goes for both as a DM and player. If the boss or sub-boss can do something, it should be something that would be possible for the PCs to also do, or it puts them at an automatic disadvantage whcih they can never make up. Game balance is harder to garantee as well as determine. If the PCs face and are defeated by an NPC party of similar races with class levels that they themselves have runnign under the same rules, then there is less chance that they will feel they did not receive a fair game. I want the PCs and NPCs running by the same rules, abilites, and restrictions for virisimilitude if nothing else. I find it hurts SoB for there to be classes or powers that are open to NPCs but not PCs for no good reason beyond one is on and one is the other.

I don't really care about you're opinion on mearls, on to the main topic:

I think you're missing the point. To some DMs making NPCs as detailed as PCs is time consuming, and ultimately a waste of time as they tend to be short-lived. I've seen suggestions on enworld on NPC making short-cuts, etc. The fact is, the char-gen rules are a drain on DM resources, with little value add to the game.

painandgreed seems to be taking the extreme that anything the DM can do, a player can do. Conceptually I agree with that, in the sense of a PC can try to make any item, go anywhere, cast any spell, learn any feat, become any class that they meet prerequisites for.

However, that doesn't mean that the DM can't have special shortcut methods for NPCs, particularly villains that speed up gameplay, and enhance gameplay. A PC cannot literally do ANYTHING any NPC can do. They have the potential.

And by no means should any special rules for NPC villains be written to ensure victory over the PCs. That would be stupid. It's called a TPK. It ends the game, and neither player or DM wins. If there were special rules, they would basically help ensure the "final battle" is climactic enough to make the PCs work for it, and enjoy it. Imagine the fight, the villain rolls a 1 for init, the monk runs up and does a Stunning Fist. The villain rolls a 2 for a save, and fails. The rest of the PCs grapple and subdue him. Where previously, the last mook encounter took 6 rounds, and was hard. A villain encounter that goes easily because of blind luck is anti-climactic. It'd be a whole 'nother thing if the PCs had a brilliant plan that worked out to succeed in 1 round.

To compare villain encounters to movies or videogames, they never feature a quick bad guy defeat. Never. Because the pacing of a good story requires some dramatic fighting, and stuff. And maybe a monologue.

Lastly, just because there's special rules for NPC construction, doesn't mean it breaks any tenet of the "PC's can do anything" concept. The players should have no real idea that the NPC is a full fighter, or a shortcut fighter. The things they should notice would be any feats or skills or abilities that stand out (that they might want to learn, which is the crux of the "PC's should be able to do anything concept).

As a DM, here's what I find would be useful for NPCs:
shortcut creation, I need less info for an NPC than a fully made PC.
shortcut spells/spell lists, there's too darn many spells...
handy fudge tool for when really bad luck strikes the villain early on (failing the first 3 rolls of the encounter, etc)
handy fudge tool for escaping (PCs can escape because the DM decides to let them because it prevents a TPK. An NPC can seldom escape through non-magical means because the PCs WILL pursue them)

Any fudge tools should be methods that more humanely determine when to let the dice lie, or to lie about the dice (rather than pure DM fiat, yes some DM's roll behind a screen, and they like it that way). Any escape rules should be help the DM plan out plausible escape methods (per CR, etc) that cover most contingencies the PCs might have. Clever, but not perfect. I tend to forget to plan escape methods, so having rules to help, would help flesh out the NPC.
[edit, fixed some typos]