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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gundark" data-source="post: 3025297" data-attributes="member: 6148">I have been thinking lately after reading through the villian classes section of the Mastering Iron Heroes book. I got reading what Mike Mearls was saying about NPCs and some assumptions about them. In a nutshell#1 DMs don't have time to create a whole cast of characters. Spending up to an hour creating a character isn't unreasonable for a player. A DM for example needs to create and stock the dungeon, if said dungeon is filled with creatures with class levels it can get a bit nuts. #2 Character classes are complex as they assume (mostly) that only the player will be using it. When the DM runs a large cast of NPCs things get hard to manage. Villians need to be easy to use in an encounter. Maybe I'm stupid or something, but I still have to look up spells (gee...what does wall of fire do again), this grinds the game down. Yes I can look it up before the session, but I don't always havethe time. #3. EDIT: I didn't obviously explain this well enough as people seem to be misinterpreting my summary of what mike said. Hexgrid put it better "The only way they "break the rules" is that they aren't constructed with classes and levels the way standard d20 characters and monsters are."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.Spycraft 2.0 keeps this in mind with dramatic scenes. Once a session (I think) the GM can declare that the current encounter is a "dramatic scene" thus the bad guys get a huge bonus to initiative, obtaining hits can be harder to do for the players, there are other benifits to the villains. It's not overpowering but it makes it difficult which what a boss fight should be. Even in non-dramatic scenes there are rules set up that allows the baddie to escape. EDIT: I agree with many that something like this works well in spycraft. But it wouldn't work well with the ways things are currently done in D&D. I was using the above example to illustrate how I think NPCs needto be handled differently in D&DWhat I think that someone should publish a product (WotC or 3rd party) with 4 villain classes (VC for short) (similiar to Masterig Iron Heroes). Each of these VCs should be modeled after the 4 basic "types" of characters (rogue, fighter, arcane, and divine). These classes come preloaded with saving throws, abilities, skills, feats, Hit points, AC, powers, and abilites, etc. Their powers and abilites make the villian overpowering one on one with a PC and a tough match for a group. I like how IH does it. The villians "levels" goes up by CR. For example a 1st level dread sorcerer is a CR 3, at second level they're a CR 4 and so on. Thus the DM picks the CR and is pretty much good to go. The only thing that is missing is the customisablity of the VCs. An ideal product would allow the DM to switch out abilites and powers for others. Lastly the VC idealy would be interchangable with creatures. The system should be flexible enough to add to any existing creature. Thus say adding a CR 7 caster VC to a Bugbear  would up the bugbear to CR 9.NOTE: I'm talking about bosses or sub bosses here. However I think that there should be a "mook" VC as even the NPC classes can be time consuming to generate.</blockquote>

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