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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8148210" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I think the biggest issue I have is with the organization of NPCs. I'd like NPCs every 3 HD or so and have them grouped together. Like I want Acolyte and Priest to kind of be together. It's pretty frustrating that NPCs are across multiple books. I think there needs to be a better way to make arbitrary NPCs in general. I get why it's hard because there's both a quality dial (low stats, average stats, high stats) and a class (martial, divine caster, arcane caster) and a role (tank, sneak, ranged, support, blasting, etc.) and a level (1 HD, 3 HD, 6 HD, 9 HD, etc.) and a race/ancestry (with benefits from a different part of the book).Otherwise, I'm a fan of:1. Reintroducing 4e minions. What I've done is used low CR creatures (1/8), given them 1 hp, and then said they always have disadvantage and can't gain advantage. Just complete trash mobs.2. Better rules options for running elite and solo monsters. Legendary actions are a good start, but they feel a little half-baked. I really like <a href="https://youtu.be/y_zl8WWaSyI" target="_blank">action-oriented design</a> for monsters that are meant to be prominent encounters. I do not think every monster should be this way, but I think a lot more of them should be. I'd like a toolkit for doing that.3. Eliminating spell blocks from most NPCs. They're miserable as a DM and the spell selection is always terrible. The default lich spell list has like 10 blaster spells and no utility. It's awful. Every monster should have two modes: the "This is an epic monster that will need to have full stats for the next 12 sessions" and "this thing is going to live for about 30 seconds of in-game time just give me some abilities to use oh my god don't make me read a spell description."In general, I want to have stuff I can farm for ideas so that I can feel more comfortable retooling monsters as I want.I want to just be able to pull the type of NPC I want for any situation I want them, but they all take a moment of retooling. It's the one thing that I really want a digital solution for to combine the NPCs into a stat block based on the 5-6 things I pick. Like in my head I think, "Ok, they're fighting hobgoblins, I want 2 hobgoblin average martials, an average hobgoblin sneak, an elite hobgoblin blaster, and then several goblin mooks at minimal CR." There's my encounter, now I just want to pull those stat blocks easily. 4e was built to do this, and while there's a lot that I didn't like about 4e I really miss how well put together the monsters were. I didn't like that the game just took the same 5-6 monsters for each race and scaled them from level 1 to level 30 across like four books, but other than that I thought it was great.</blockquote>

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