D&D 5E Rival adventurers - should they be built like monsters or PCs?

[aco175]

Keeping the world on the same plane, I do not call the fighter NPC a fighter, he is a warrior or a knight or something. This way he can have whatever powers I need and the players cannot say that they should have this or that power. I also tend to give the NPCs powers from 4e like a close burst 1 attack as an encounter power or recharge power. I also give some 5e powers like second wind but may make it heal a set amount to avoid more DM work or even make it a heal he could give another person.

Another thing I have tried in the past is to have the PCs fight each other with 'shadow' characters. A room creates duplicate characters of the PCs that attack each other. The players seem to like rolling to hit each other as their bad guy and then help each other as their good guy. The DM hardly needs to roll anything. You can just let the players handle both sides. It becomes a really tough fight even if you do not have the shadow PCs use the same magic items.

 

[the Jester]

Absolutely like monsters. There are a lot of parts of pc building that don't really matter to a monster- like, under all but the weirdest or most story-related circumstances, who cares if the guy you're fighting is a guild artisan?

 

[David Howery]

As a general rule, building NPCs the same as PCs was a good idea.... because players excel at squeezing every advantage out of the those builds, and anything they can do, you can use against them with NPCs. But... I admit, I've never played 5E, but having three tweaked up groups of PC-types going at it might be a hassle for the combat rules...