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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9698547" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think it is fair to say that 3e very much makes the assumption that the vast majority of opponents will not be leveled NPCs, because the game advice and guidelines begin to fall apart if you do try to tell a story where most of the foes are humans and not monsters.  Making 3e work in a setting that is largely about urban intrigue and hidden foes and villains that like to monologue is possible but really outside of the expectations of the game and will require the GM to improvise a lot.  Most particularly as you point out, calculating the CR of NPCs is really hard and that CR has built in expectations regarding equipment which for the most part you will need as a DM to ignore and instead adjust down the amount of equipment and make a corresponding adjustment to NPC CR.  For my part, I found it was a good rule of thumb to make fights with NPCs be 2 NPCs that we two levels lower than the PCs for each PC in the party.   So 4 8th level PCs would fight 8 6th level NPCs where the NPCs had equipment considerably below the wealth by level guidelines for NPCs because otherwise you'd soon flood the PCs with more equipment than they could use or which would necessarily be good for the campaign.  I also tended to assume that NPCs just didn't have ability scores on par with PCs unless they were bosses of some sort, and boss fights with NPCs tended to be pretty rare to avoid again flooding the campaign with magical items beyond what would be expected for the PC's level.As far as building NPCs go, my big advice is to not sweat anything +/- 1 (or maybe even +/- 2).  If you don't exactly get all the skill points right or what have you, that's fine.  Rarely is it going to matter if any number is off by one of its true value.  You don't have to deliberately make mistakes but you also don't need to worry too much about exact rigor.  Most of the time isn't going to come, and even then it only makes a difference like 1 time in 20 if you are off by one.  It's not worth making building NPCs tedious to rigorously adhere to the guidelines when good enough will do.  The guidelines are there to help, not to be a burden.A lot of my NPCs after years of DMing were more or less stock and I could just copy the stat block over and more or less tweak it as needed.  But 3e is really all about the expectation of diving into the underworld or the wilderness and facing unimaginable horrors.  It expects Monsters to be a regular thing.</blockquote>

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