Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justin Bacon" data-source="post: 3122558" data-attributes="member: 3795">Let's get concrete: What would you get rid of, exactly?I'm probably not the best person to be trying to come up with a solution (because I've never spent an hour statting up a dragon and have to wonder what, exactly, people are doing during that hour which is taking up so much time), but there are a few tools and changes which would greatly simplify my prep:(1) Buff spells should be standardized to one of two durations: Short and Long. This will make it much easier for me to prep "buff package" stat blocks for my villains. That would give you 2-3 stat blocks for a villain capable of buffing: Unbuffed, with a full buff package, and (optionally) with just the long-term buffs (because the short-term buffs have worn off). And you've only got 1-2 timers for all your buffs, rather than trying to figure out six different timers for nine different spells.(2) Separate out active abilities in the stat blocks. (They've already started doing this to some degree.) Since I was originally playtesting 3.0 back in '99, my adventure prep included not only separating out the key abilities that would impact the battle, but also including a short summary of their game effects. (So I might have "POWER ATTACK: -X to attack, +X to damage".) This adds a couple of minutes to the prep, but it streamlined gameplay immensely. And I never discovered, half-way through the battle, that the creature actually had damage reduction or energy resistance that I hadn't been applying. Recently I've run a couple of modules out-of-the-box without re-prepping the stat blocks, and I'm constantly losing information in that big block of text.(3) A large number of pre-selected spell lists built around different concepts/themes. The largest time-killer for me in prepping any stat block is spell selection. If I could have some standard spell lists that I could plug in and tweak as necessary, this would drastically reduce my prep time.(A comprehensive and matching resource for spellbooks would be great, too. As treasure goes, spellbooks are a PITA to prep.)(4) A supplement containing nothing but stat blocks for archetypal characters (knights, sages, swashbucklers, etc.) from 1st to 20th level. Because, again, it's easier to take something and tweak it than trying to build it from scratch every time.This is also why dragons are harder to prep than other creatures, IMO: They don't have a stat block that you tweak, they have a unique toolkit that you use to create a new dragon every time. (Although I think they fixed this to some degree in 3.5, IIRC: There are a few sample dragon stat blocks. But dragons are still mostly a unique toolkit, whereas something like an ogre just uses the standard character building rules now.)To some extent, I satisfy #3 and #4 in practice by looking at the bulk of material I've either prepped or purchased over the years and stripmine it. "Hmm... I need a spell list and I want his guy to be throwing fireballs around. Where's my notes for that 8th-level fire mage they ran into a couple years ago? I can probably add a couple of levels and a new race to that."I guess my overall point here is that I still want all the options. I would just like to have the tools put in place to make it easier to prep and use those options.</blockquote>

Verification