WotC Rodney and Mearls: custom NPCs so easy

[Majoru Oakheart]

you don´t need max ranks to be effective in some skills, actually it is 1 or 5 or max.

Also I wish that if int raises somehow, it should be applied retroactively so that there is no need to notice when you raised it. Anything which requires you to make extra notes on attributes or skills should be eliminated.

Almost no skill is effective with that few ranks. At least no skill that matters.

You want at least 10 ranks in most to make sure you succeed.

 

[Dr Simon]

To Majoru Oakheart: Aside from tying up rogues*, there is no reason to have Use Rope at anything more than 5 ranks, since the trickiest action otherwise is DC 15 and you can usually Take 10. Plus those 5 ranks are enough to give you the synergy bonuses.

I have to say I was fairly surprised that Mearls thinks 40 minutes is *good* for a couple of NPCs. Perhaps after six Lazy GM books I can do a lot of these things in my sleep, but I'm not sure it would even take me that long for even a lich or a lycanthrope (the worst of the core options to apply!). That's for publication worthiness (but generally itemless, mind). Fiddly multi-classing towards a prestige class can be a pain, I'll admit. If I was doing it purely for personal use, though, there's a tremendous amount of fudge that you can get away with.

*Because there aren't many others who'd put ranks in Escape Artist. Perhaps an octopus.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

f I was doing it purely for personal use, though, there's a tremendous amount of fudge that you can get away with.

I don't know, but I think he wasn't doing it for personal use only, he did it using all the rules at his hands, possibly for a playtest scenario or even one of the modules they're working on...

 

[Anthtriel]

Sounds really, really bad to me. I'm not going to spend even 10 minutes for one NPC.
So 4E NPC creation will probably not be better for me than 3E NPC creation, I'll just throw some reasonable numbers together anyway.