The Usual Characters
September 5th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome to another Dark Designs. As you might be aware, today is Labor Day. To be perfectly honest, I’m not really sure what Labor Day is about. I’ve heard that you’re not supposed to wear white afterwards (presumably there’s another point in the year where white becomes acceptable again, or else this wouldn’t really be an annual thing), but based on the name of the holiday I can only assume that its primary function is not supposed to be a fashion landmark.
I could find out what Labor Day is about, most likely in less than a minute, with a quick look on the internet, but I’m not sure there would be much point. After all, I imagine that I’m not alone as someone who doesn’t know the meaning of Labor Day: I suspect that most people simply don’t question a free day off (and, with a name like Labor Day, one might even surmise that that’s how it all began: a free day off for the laborers).
So, today seems as good a day as any to talk about labor-saving tips for the hardest-working member of any gaming group, the DM. There are a lot of things a DM has to work on in order to create a fun experience at the table, but one of the more involved, lengthy, and often tedious ones—which also happens to be fairly important—is creating stat-blocks.
Now, in your average “kick in the door and kill everything on the other side” dungeon crawl style of game, you don’t really need to make that many stat-blocks, it’s true. After all, you’re typically using exciting, scary monsters, plucked from monster manuals full of evocative art and hand-crafted monster stats. You just look for monsters at your CR and go. The only time you need to worry about stat-blocks is when you’re making Dark Lords and Lich Kings and other uber-villains or the like.
But if your game involves a little less sword and sorcery and a little more of, well, just about any other genre of fantasy, you likely find yourself needing stat-blocks fairly often. For example, suppose you want the PCs to be ambushed by bandits on the road. Now you need bandit stats for the normal bandits, and probably a bandit captain, and, depending on how many bandits there are, it might not be bad to have stats for a second-hand man. This means building whole character stat-blocks, with levels, feats, skills, gear, etc., etc., etc. At low levels it’s not that hard, but at higher levels it can be a pain, and the same principle applies to town guards, hired thugs, barroom brawls, and just about anyone that the PCs are likely to pick a fight with.
Of course, maybe the stats are for an NPC who isn’t actually going to be thrown under the proverbial bus of heroic aggression. You might just need to know whether or not the guard captain, or mayor, or diplomat believes the lies that your PC bard is telling. Or you might need to know whether that pickpocket is able to make off with the PC fighter’s gold pouch without him noticing. Or if the PCs’ plan to talk in orcish so the spy tailing them wouldn’t overhear their plan is working, or if that spy understands every word they say. And so on.
In some topsy-turvy bizarre cases, the NPCs might even be trying to help the PCs. Typically speaking, it’s not worth the time or effort to worry about the stats of an NPC healer, or item-maker: after all, if all they’re doing is acting as a source of heal spells, do you really want to have to explain why that high-level cleric isn’t just going out and handling the Dark Lord himself? You just declare that yes, in fact, they are able to make those magic items or cast those spells, and it doesn’t matter why, because it’s just better that way, so stop asking so bloody many questions.
Sometimes, though, it’s not “just better that way.” For example, if your games are anything like mine, your PCs have a habit of picking up stray NPCs. Damsels, orphans, guard captains, whatever the case, they tend to have one or two with them more often than not. Sometimes (in the case of damsels and orphans) these characters largely just stay out of fights, and you can just sort of phase them out when combat is going on. But sometimes there are friendly NPCs that really seem like they should be fighting alongside the PCs. Often, these can be the worst difficulties of all, as you rarely foresee the need to stat out these NPCs—after all, they won’t be fighting the party, right?
Now, in all of these cases, you can always just fudge it. I don’t mean deciding “oh, of course the pickpocket can steal the fighter’s gold without being noticed,” though that’s an option, too…technically. What I mean is that if you know that the bandit captain would probably be around level 4 or 5, and he’s almost certainly going to be a warrior (or a fighter, or what have you), and he’d most likely have a Strength of 14 or 15, then you can get a pretty good idea that his attack bonus will probably be something like 6 or 7, maybe as high as 8. You can probably guess his AC, as well, and so on.
There’s nothing wrong with this system, and it’s probably your best bet in a jam, but it definitely has some problems. For one, it tends to break down at higher levels, when the math gets all complicated and there’s more to keep track of. For another, there’s always a margin of error that can dramatically overpower or under-power your character. And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s not going to leave very much room for interesting abilities, which means that the bandit captain isn’t going to feel that much different from the bandit, or the town guard, or the thug, or the tavern brawler, etc., etc., etc. After all, you’re not even picking feats for them, so they’ve got very little opportunity to differentiate themselves.
A better option, in my opinion, is to have some stock NPCs. “But Alex,” I’m sure you’re saying, “You just said you wanted NPCs to differentiate themselves! Stock NPCs won’t let you do that at all!” Obviously, if by “differentiate themselves,” you mean that they need completely unique stat-blocks, this is true. What I meant is that fighting a bandit should feel different from fighting a knight, which in turn should feel different from a bounty hunter, town guard, tavern brawler, etc., etc., etc. In some cases (most cases, in fact) it doesn’t hurt to have two or three different varieties, but you generally don’t need a completely unique set of stats for each town guard.
Stock NPCs, in my opinion, should be a little more specific than “level X human warrior,” “level Y elven wizard,” etc., etc. Even those are still useful, after all: just having bland stat-blocks for a given class at various CRs will overcome most of the drawbacks of the “eyeballing it” system I provided above. But, for me, the ideal is to have some stat-blocks for bandits, which are different from those for…well, you get the idea by now, I’m sure. This allows you to cultivate a certain bandity “feel,” such as sneak attacks, ambushes, dirty fighting, and group tactics, as opposed to those of knights, who obviously favor mounts, often have a chivalric code, and may fight solo.
Obviously, since the whole point of this article was that making the stat-blocks can be a lot of work, the idea of making a whole library of stock NPCs probably isn’t that appealing. There are a few approaches here. There are certainly products which have pre-made NPCs in them, and I certainly wouldn’t discourage you from looking at them, but I don’t know of any that stand out as particularly great. Mostly, I recommend that DMs sort of slowly collect generic NPC stat-blocks (possibly making them generic by taking stats for, say, Haidan the Thief, and turning them into stats for “catburglar.”), building a library with time until, eventually, whenever he needs stats for an NPC he simply goes “I have the perfect stats for that!”
Not too long ago, we came out with a free book designed specifically with such a “stock NPC library” in mind, so if you want a score or so of free, versatile, but still specific and interesting NPC stat-blocks, check out our downloads section today and click on either of our distributors. The book is GM's Gallery: Useful and Interesting NPCs.
That’s it for today. Join me next week for a very special theme week.