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<blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 3404889" data-attributes="member: 537">As I was saying to Jasin on CM, I think there's a real difference in build times. In my previous game, building any character &gt;10th level could be tedious in the extreme, especially if it involved multiclassing, cast spells, or had other special abilities. And that was with handwaving things like skill points, buying magic items, ability scores, etc. If I'd been doing everything strictly by the book, it would have been even more tedious.Eg, those sample stat blocks took about 2-3 minutes each. The higher-level ones would have taken much longer, say 20-30 if doing things by the book. The idea here is that you can present everything as just a bunch of tables, and read the results straight off them. The Mastering IH book is like this; for each villain class there's tables giving hit points, total save bonuses, total attack and AC bonuses, etc by level.Um, just like with any other creature. If the class has the skill in question, then it's happy. If it doesn't, it's screwed.The only optional stuff is really the stat boosters, in the sense that they're just items. Do you mean the funky per-level save and AC bonuses? It shouldn't matter in practice since the only time it makes a difference is if you walk into an antimagic field. I can count the number of times it's happened to me on one hand, in 7 years of post-3E D&amp;D. Folding these bonuses directly into the relevant stats will definitely cause problems for things like init, skills, attacks (Weapon Finesse) etc.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="hong, post: 3404889, member: 537"] As I was saying to Jasin on CM, I think there's a real difference in build times. In my previous game, building any character >10th level could be tedious in the extreme, especially if it involved multiclassing, cast spells, or had other special abilities. And that was with handwaving things like skill points, buying magic items, ability scores, etc. If I'd been doing everything strictly by the book, it would have been even more tedious. Eg, those sample stat blocks took about 2-3 minutes each. The higher-level ones would have taken much longer, say 20-30 if doing things by the book. The idea here is that you can present everything as just a bunch of tables, and read the results straight off them. The Mastering IH book is like this; for each villain class there's tables giving hit points, total save bonuses, total attack and AC bonuses, etc by level. Um, just like with any other creature. If the class has the skill in question, then it's happy. If it doesn't, it's screwed. The only optional stuff is really the stat boosters, in the sense that they're just items. Do you mean the funky per-level save and AC bonuses? It shouldn't matter in practice since the only time it makes a difference is if you walk into an antimagic field. I can count the number of times it's happened to me on one hand, in 7 years of post-3E D&D. Folding these bonuses directly into the relevant stats will definitely cause problems for things like init, skills, attacks (Weapon Finesse) etc. [/QUOTE]

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