D&D 5E NPCs With Class Levels?

[Dwimmerlied]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] I certainly don't disagree with you, but I must point out that I'm not arguing for complexity and number grinding. In fact I'm hoping they can streamline the way it worked in 3.x. I'm also not arguing for methodical control over the world which involves strict class breakdowns for settlements and such. I'd go as far as ditching wealth by level tables too, because I'm in agreement with you that these sorts of things take from the versimilitude.

But I don't think your examples are mutually exclusive to a desire for DMs tools to produce monsters with classes.

 

[zoroaster100]

If a DM or adventure designer wants a bugbear fighter to fight the players, it should be easy to design a bugbear with a "fighter template" that makes him a little tougher in combat and gives him a couple of fighter features like some expert maneuvers/expertise dice. If a designer or DM wants the bugbear to be a legendary warrior spellcaster who can fight with a sword and cast cone of cold, it should be easy to do that without having to spend a long time making a fighter/wizard with player character type rules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not sure it is a totally different question. Advancing by a class's structure helps keep bad, hodge-podge, gotcha NPC design under control by bundling related capabilities (and limitations) together.

Personally I'm always very dubious about rules that are made to "save the DM from himself", especially when they don't really seem to do that job. I mean who's to say what is 'gotcha' and what should or shouldn't be 'bundled'? I think there can be reasonably some guidelines for that, but I don't see any evidence that PC classes and options, which are designed for a completely different purpose, serve that end. MANY things that in the hands of the PCs are OK are gotcha! in the hands of monsters for instance. Nor do a vast array of PC options really make much sense for monsters. Many of them at best require some reflavoring and rewriting before they DO make sense at the very least. As a general principle of rules design for D&D I am not really buying it.

Looking at 4e's approach I see instead that the general concept of powers is pretty nice, they tend to be small modular reflavorable units of crunch that are unlikely to be problematic in the hands of a monster, even in odd combinations. Beyond that monsters evince a pretty coherent theme and DMs are strongly advised to do the same when designing new monsters. Gotcha! abilities don't generally exist, and when they do they are pretty easily made thematic and interesting, especially since they aren't SoD type mechanics anyway. This is a pretty good system, and it is further buttressed by monster roles, which give you a very nice indication of what you should do. Can a DM create a monstrosity by ignoring all those guidelines? Sure. The guidelines aren't flawless either, you can construct some rather silly encounters, mostly at levels 1-4 or so, if you really try which are technically following the guidelines. Of course it is far more trivially easy to do that in 3e, and I would humbly suggest that class levels on monsters doesn't help that.

My advice to game designers is that adding such a large degree of complexity to the game is VERY unlikely to have a high payoff. If there's one consistent thing that people agree on about 4e it is that monster design was a huge boon. While there's no denying that there's SOMEONE out there who will love class leveled monsters its likely to be a minority taste. If you're going to go out of your way to support THAT then where's the justification for dropping other things that aren't so popular? K.I.S.S

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred I certainly don't disagree with you, but I must point out that I'm not arguing for complexity and number grinding. In fact I'm hoping they can streamline the way it worked in 3.x. I'm also not arguing for methodical control over the world which involves strict class breakdowns for settlements and such. I'd go as far as ditching wealth by level tables too, because I'm in agreement with you that these sorts of things take from the versimilitude.

But I don't think your examples are mutually exclusive to a desire for DMs tools to produce monsters with classes.

Well, the way I see it there are PCs and there are NPCs. Some NPCs are 'monsters' and some aren't, but they are all fundamentally the same sort of thing, characters not run by the players. They largely fill the same sorts of niches in the game, and when they are actual opponents where their detailed stats really matter the distinction goes from minor to utterly academic. The point being that once you say "OK, monsters have class levels" then you ARE effectively saying that "NPCs have class levels". Now, you may certainly restrict that to a small subset of NPCs and eschew the AD&D-ism of EVERYONE in the world having some sort of class/level. However, at that point what's the difference? All you have left are 'commoners' and such anyway. You can now of course create a second parallel system for NPCs where you just give them any old stats, but all of this seems to be getting pretty silly. Now you have the town priest as a "stat block NPC" because you don't want him to be a real cleric and have raise dead, but the evil priest down the block is a level 9 cleric because you want the PCs to fight him... What happens if they ally with him and get him to raise the king? It makes my head hurt and it SURELY isn't doing anything for anyone's verisimilitude anymore.

Anyway, I don't mean to harp on it, there's little more to be said on the subject really from my perspective. If WotC wants to put out a supplement on monsters and PCs with monster class rules and such great. I probably won't buy it, and I'd greatly appreciate if the basic core assumption is you can build monsters any which way with some good guidelines and powers ala 4e monsters.

 

[Alphastream]

But Li, is that just having monstrous races? A dwarf is a monster, but we have the rules to play a dwarf cleric. In 4E we have hobgoblin as a playable race.

That is very different than addressing a DM who is dreaming up a wizard who was mummified and is protected by four fallen fighters, who have become shadows. In 4E we can take a mummy and shadows and add themes, or we could take mummy/shadow powers/traits and add them to another spellcaster/fighter monster, reskinning as needed. This is pretty easy and quick, but is certainly not going to create something that feels like a PC class that happens to be a monster. In 3E we would give appropriate class levels to the creatures, which is far more accurate from the perspective of common rules regulating the world, but far more laborious.

Each approach will please different fans. Is there a better way?

In D&D Next, we seem to be straddling the fence. Some monsters have what are basically spells, but turned into powers. Others have actual spell lists. None of it is a system where we can easily level up or down or move powers across, and there are no rules for that. Bounded accuracy seems to actually say we shouldn't do that, though we can imagine we need some different levels of things like 'enemy caster' to be suitable challenges. It's a bit of a non-system right now.

I would guess that the current Next monsters could very easily do away with spell lists and just embrace powers. That would give us some simplicity. With some XP/level guidelines, powers could have a tier. That would allow us to swap powers of a same tier around, letting us resking. The hobgoblin leader can then swap in a power or two from a human wizard to be a hobgoblin wizard.

A Module might allow the use of spell lists as an option, plus give us rules for creating NPC monsters with class levels. It might resemble 3E, but it could also be a package of iconic capabilities. Wizard could be captured, for example, with just a few spells as part of a package, worth x XP and bumping up a monster by y levels. The package could be customizable, perhaps explaining how to quickly change a spell into a monster power. Shouldn't be hard for fireball and magic missile (use the actual range and damage for final monster level). For a spell with adjudication, there might be guidance on how to streamline that.

Not sure how well a system like that pleases others. The devil is always in the details, so I don't mean to make this sound simple (it isn't).

 

[zoroaster100]

A Module might allow the use of spell lists as an option, plus give us rules for creating NPC monsters with class levels. .... Wizard could be captured, for example, with just a few spells as part of a package, worth x XP and bumping up a monster by y levels. The package could be customizable, perhaps explaining how to quickly change a spell into a monster power. Shouldn't be hard for fireball and magic missile (use the actual range and damage for final monster level). For a spell with adjudication, there might be guidance on how to streamline that.QUOTE]

Something along these lines sounds good, except instead of saying spells boost a monster by x levels I would instead like to see a package that provides strong and weak spell caster packages for monsters/npcs that will be primarily versus secondarily a spell caster, with packages of a few attack and defense spells appropriate for a level x monster, level y monster, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I don't know either. Just out of interest what motivates the sentiment that "This is pretty easy and quick, but is certainly not going to create something that feels like a PC class that happens to be a monster. In 3E we would give appropriate class levels to the creatures, which is far more accurate from the perspective of common rules regulating the world, but far more laborious."

I understand the 'easy and quick' and 'far more laborious' parts, but IME a monster (lets say a lower level enemy spellcaster) only lasts a couple rounds on average. Its unlikely in a fray that such a character is going to do any really fancy casting, they're going to either fire off their most potent attack spell and follow it up with the next best one, or they're going to cast some sort of defensive/get-me-out-of-dodge magic and scram. That's at most 4 powers, 3 really. This is about the complement of your average 4e monster. Make those powers say "Stinking Cloud, Magic Missile, and Expeditious Retreat" and you have "low level wizard" written all over it. Give the monster one more at-will melee power (Dagger, or maybe Shocking Grasp) and you're covered. Damage can be 'level appropriate damage expression' etc and you really don't have to delve into the arcanities of what feats and etc a level 5 wizard would have taken in order to have those damage and attack expressions. I don't see any reasonably probability that this sort of 'wizard' is going to have ANY different feel to the players than one made with a PC class that has 12 spells but still only ever uses the same 3 before gank sets in.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I get why people want the flexibility to build a monster or NPC without using the class rules. Or why they would want creation to be fast.

What I don't get is why anyone who wants that wouldn't want the same things for PC's.

Which is where the time issue comes in. Building all characters by the same rules does not increase the time needed to make a character. If anything the improved consistency makes it easier to learn and use the one set of rules. It is much easier, for example, to use the same feat progression for monsters and PCs (3.5) than it is to look up some table with goofy rules for generating the number of feats (3.0) for every monster you create.

If that consistency causes anyone to feel like their time is wasted or the classes don't do what they need to do for NPCs, that would seem to me to be a reason to make those rules more flexible and less voluminous. Why not fix the actual problem (rules bloat) instead of creating a new one?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I get why people want the flexibility to build a monster or NPC without using the class rules. Or why they would want creation to be fast.

What I don't get is why anyone who wants that wouldn't want the same things for PC's.

Which is where the time issue comes in. Building all characters by the same rules does not increase the time needed to make a character. If anything the improved consistency makes it easier to learn and use the one set of rules. It is much easier, for example, to use the same feat progression for monsters and PCs (3.5) than it is to look up some table with goofy rules for generating the number of feats (3.0) for every monster you create.

If that consistency causes anyone to feel like their time is wasted or the classes don't do what they need to do for NPCs, that would seem to me to be a reason to make those rules more flexible and less voluminous. Why not fix the actual problem (rules bloat) instead of creating a new one?

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying. At least in my opinion you just assign stock numbers and a small number of powers and traits to a monster. There's no need for monsters to have feats, backgrounds, etc. All they need are the final numbers. Its not really relevant that the Orc Slayer does Nd12+M damage because of this and that feat plus an ability score bonus, etc. Its fine that it does "adequate damage to be a level 5 threat". Its fine that its axe blow power can daze opponents, we don't need to know that comes from using an MBA plus the benefits of the Axe Murderer feat. Now, its fine if the game details what sorts of stock numbers and variations in those numbers are going to project various conclusions (IE the orc has hide armor on, we can conclude AC is not particularly high amongst orcs), and we can be pretty sure the orc's FORT is probably higher on the scale than for a typical monster perhaps, but that its REFLEX is average and its WILL is a bit on the low side. The rules may well note that this is the typical expected pattern for lower intelligence humanoid monsters, though some of course may be quicker and less sturdy, etc.

I have to say, I think 4e failed to really discuss this and tie it into the game in as convincing a fashion as it might have. Monsters work well, but I think 30 levels of scaling every number by +1/level tended to blur things a lot. 20 levels of half-level scaling probably will work better and allow a tighter coupling, which IMHO even reduces the case for using class-like mechanics or other PC mechanics even further.

 

[Alphastream]

but IME a monster (lets say a lower level enemy spellcaster) only lasts a couple rounds on average. Its unlikely in a fray that such a character is going to do any really fancy casting, they're going to either fire off their most potent attack spell and follow it up with the next best one, or they're going to cast some sort of defensive/get-me-out-of-dodge magic and scram. That's at most 4 powers, 3 really.

I agree. However, it was a big deal (and is still) for some to have a spellcaster stat block provide full spell lists. Things would happen such as an enemy pre-casting buffs (Bull's Strength, Haste, etc.) or might cast those if PCs retreat. Or, the caster might escape and hunt them down later. There was the feeling for some that this accuracy also needed to be there - it had to be a real caster, not some approximation.

Have we moved beyond that? I don't think enough have to be able to say that the 3E system can be abandoned. I'm personally a big fan of the 4E system, but I hear enough wanting the 3E method for monsters to think we need something that speaks to it, perhaps as a module.