Thymos wrote:Why does everyone think Pre-statted tables of vital NPC's and a Monster Manual isn't good enough to run things on the fly.
If you run things on the fly you can't be picky that your prestatted guy (from a list of tables provided by the developer) doesn't have breastplate, and is instead wearing scale. That's ok though because, get this, you can just tell your players that he's wearing breastplate. The guy in the table has a short sword and you said a mace? Doesn't matter.
In my opinion theres a huge difference between a number of monsters that you select from and creating a monster from various tables on the fly.
Hypothetical example: The party starts messing about with a random magic field and summoning and starts fighting a half man, half ... hippo with a ... tentacle coming out of it's left armpit that you haven't prepared. How would you run it?
I can see three ways to do it.
1: Create it using PC rules: create a character with a number of templates, rolling or averaging the numbers. This could take a long time. It really needs pre planning to do this.
2: Use an existing monster, slightly changing it if needs be. Fast, but often there won't be a suitable monster and changing can break CR.
3: Create a monster made up basic abilities from a list of NPC monster abilities and stats by CR. Not all of the stats are needed at the start so if you keep these tables out you can probably start using the monster faster than it would take to find a suitable monster from a Monster Manual.
From your descriptions you would find the closest monster to it. Errr.... yeah. Good luck with that. Especially for beginner DMs.
But lets say that you use a Minotaur since thats another half man half animal. Firstly its unsuitable: hippos are much, much scarier than bulls. They can charge much faster, are much tougher and stronger and can last a long time underwater. I wouldn't be surprised if you added a poison tot he bite. So, it needs to be CR 8 rather than CR 4. Oh no! You need to add Fighter or Barbarian levels to make it suitable which takes a while.
But what about just adding some numbers? Double the hitpoints and add some numbers. Wrong. PCs get new abilities so it needs new abillities to actually be CR 8. And thats still not getting started on the tentacle.
Heres the way I'd like to do it:
You spend 10 seconds deciding on the type of monster and the basic tactics, getting out a piece of paper to make notes. You describe the hippoman coming out of the river towards you. The Ranger decides to fire an arrow at it. You look up on the table for a suitable AC and DR, taking a second or two longer than otherwise. If it hits you find hitpoints on the table and write down the new hitpoints. Then you look up the initiative and start the combat rounds. As you go through the combat you find out new information from the tables.
The important part of this is that you don't need to stop the game for 2 minutes to find a suitable monster and check that it can be used, writing down any differences. The game can continue, with 5-10 second longer pauses during the combat. However, the monsters could end up simplistic and additions made during the combat could make previous happenings ridiculous.
This is only a basic overview and is likely to have imbalances so pre-generating monsters and using stock characters is better, but when using monsters that haven't been prepared this would take less time which is a very good thing if you don't want to take a break before every combat.
