D&D 5E (2024) NPCs, and the poverty of the core books

[pawsplay]

5e already leaned into a distinction between PC stat blocks and NPCs. The 2024 revision has deepened this divide; whereas giving monsters PC levels was before only discouraged, now it is not even contemplated. Essentially, now, every NPC is a monster, and the GM's guide helpfully refers you to the section on customizing monsters if you want to alter one of the NPC stat blocks. That's great, I can say this Veteran has an axe instead of a sword, and maybe I'll even change out one of the Mage's spells or turn its eldritch burst into Cold damage or something.

A notable weakness of the new rules, compared to prior editions, is that I can't simply whip up a Mage or Rogue equivalent for any given CR. Do you want an NPC Ranger? Good luck, there is no such thing at all. There's also not a single stat block that looks like it might be a Warlock. And as of the new DMG, there aren't even any guidelines to painfully reverse engineer new NPC types.

There are a ton of third party NPC books to fill this void, but since there aren't any guidelines in the new rules, I have a lot of doubt about the balance and style of those writeups. What do you think? Do you ever find yourself hunting around for a CR 8 Mage with Warlock spells?

 

[payn]

This is in general, but seems 5E intended. I loved the NPC codexes that Paizo pout out for Pathfinder. Id look to them in the DMs Guild.

 

[AlViking]

There's nothing saying you can't modify NPCs, give them class levels or whatever else you want. The game is and pretty much always has been what we make out of it. If you're going to be modify monsters, honestly I've never found any guidelines that were all that great, just take a look at the monsters at the level you're aiming for and do something similar. Then again I've been doing custom monsters for a long time.

But I do see the current DMG as mor of a beginner's DMG than an advanced DMG (or whatever they want to call it) that I could see coming some day. They've already stated that at least some of the monsters in upcoming adventures and splat books will be more setting specific.

 

[bloodtide]

This is going back to the 1E and 2E Style. An NPC just had whatever powers they needed for the adventure.

Very often very specialized powers and abilities unique to only them. It made ever NPC unique.

Very often with very crazy unbalanced powers and abilities too. And a big player complaint was that it was not fair that NPC got all sorts of "cool" things that PCs could never have,

3E introduced the idea that all NPCs must follow the same PC rules, in general. And got rid of "special crazy unbalanced powers and abilities". Anything a 3E NPC had, a PC could also have.

As an Old School Gamer, you should just embrace it and make up unique NPCs.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Worrying about balance is overrated.

Make an NPC. If the party decides to attack said NPC for whatever reason, then the NPC might die, might be a good fight, or might kill a PC or two. All valid options. But worrying about trying to hit the "might be a good fight" bullseye every single time by trying to "build a balanced encounter" for every encounter you make is rather boring in my opinion.

Others feel differently, and that's fine. But it means they might need to put in a little bit of extra work if they only make themselves beholden to the 5E25 Monster Manual, rather than using monster material across the 5E spectrum (5E14 included.)

 

[Charlaquin]

There are a lot of folks who have reverse-engineered the math in the new monster manual, and it seems like the benchmarks really haven’t changed much from 2014 to 2024. Which makes sense, given the explicit goal of “backwards compatibility” meaning that all previous adventure material should be runnable without needing to make changes.

The main differences are initiative - monsters now often add their proficiency bonus or double their proficiency bonus to initiative, particularly legendary monsters and dragons - and hit points. Which still seem to follow the same guidelines, but damage resistances and immunities are much less common, so it looks like the average monster HP has increased because monsters that used to resist non-magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing just have double the HP instead. Otherwise, revised monsters just tend to hit the offensive and defensive benchmarks more consistently than their 2014 counterparts. So you can pretty much still use the 2014 DMG monster building guidelines.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Worrying about balance is overrated.

Make an NPC. If the party decides to attack said NPC for whatever reason, then the NPC might die, might be a good fight, or might kill a PC or two. All valid options. But worrying about trying to hit the "might be a good fight" bullseye every single time by trying to "build a balanced encounter" for every encounter you make is rather boring in my opinion.

Others feel differently, and that's fine. But it means they might need to put in a little bit of extra work if they only make themselves beholden to the 5E25 Monster Manual, rather than using monster material across the 5E spectrum (5E14 included.)

My priority in making NPCs, as always, is doing my best to represent mechanically whatever the creature is supposed to be in the fiction, as accurately as possible (within practical limits). Balance isn't really a big concern in making the statblock (though I don't ignore it, other things are more important to me).

In particular, if the NPC is depicting a similar sort of being to a PC, they don't have access to any ability I wouldn't allow a PC under similar circumstances to have. Thus, an NPC wizard who is supposed to be around a particular level wouldn't have spells a PC wizard of the same level couldn't possibly have, and vice versa.

 

[Reynard]

The problem.here goes well beyond NPCs. The lack of detailed mobster creation rules in either (or both) the DMG or MM is a major oversight, and really the only reasonable take away is that WotC did not have detailed monster creation rules with which they set CRs etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem.here goes well beyond NPCs. The lack of detailed mobster creation rules in either (or both) the DMG or MM is a major oversight, and really the only reasonable take away is that WotC did not have detailed monster creation rules with which they set CRs etc.

I mean, I had thought it was obvious that WotC did not have that. CR is only very slightly less of a joke now than it was in 3e, and that can be placed entirely at the feet of the overall reduction in the power of spells and the inclusion of Concentration.

 

[Reynard]

I mean, I had thought it was obvious that WotC did not have that. CR is only very slightly less of a joke now than it was in 3e, and that can be placed entirely at the feet of the overall reduction in the power of spells and the inclusion of Concentration.

You can have a detailed system of monster creation and still have some CR failures in edge cases.