A Monster's PoV

[violence in the media]

RC, there is definitely something wrong with your methods if it is taking you even 2 hours to create a stable of 3e NPCs for an adventure.

I suspect you're probably min-maxing them and belaboring the decisions of each and every spell on down to cantrips. Don't do that.

I totally agree with this. For a general NPC that's likely to see combat, what I used to do was throw down a few notes about personality, stats, and tactics. Things like "this fighter is stubborn and will focus on one opponent and is going to trip people" or "this wizard is going to lay an empowered touch of idiocy on the spellcaster, however, he's cowardly and will run if half his team goes down" and then build them to do that. They'd often be effective, just not very versatile if their primary gig got trumped. On top ot this, I also didn't care about these NPCs in the same way that you don't care about monsters. There is no expectation that they have to provide a "good" fight. If the PCs were up against an organization, I'd use the same fighter or wizard I wrote up several times under the "similar training" justification. Sometimes I'd use PC character sheets from a few levels back. These guys were mostly offensive weapons, as mooks in evil organizations tend to be.

If it was a recurring NPC, then I'd give them the full workup so the PCs could encounter them at the fruit market or public baths or wherever. These guys would be the ones built for survival and escape, assuming they were an adversary. Peter the Potato Merchant, on the other hand, is probably not going to survive if the PCs turn on him, no matter how recurring he is.

[MGuy]

Well how detailed are you making your npcs? I am ok with the rules but I am far from knowing every spell and feat. However as long as I know generally WHAT the pc is there for and a tidbit about what it can do I don't need to flesh the rest out most of the time. If the PCS end up fighting them for whatever reason (as it tends to happen a lot) I just need to know the kind of damage output and defenses such an npc would need to have.Like say its a 10th level warrior. I'd just have to think: Is he a strong guy or a weak guy? If I just wanted to throw stats on him I'd have him at 90ish hp, an AC of 30-35, Attack of about +20 or so, and he'd deal about 15-30 damage per hit. I regularly wouldn't need to think much more than that. Slap on some saves and he's golden.

And this is.... the 4E monster generation system in a nutshell. Just slap some numbers on stuff based on a table and go.

I don't mind going with generation for npcs who aren't likely/supposed to see combat. I'm not suggesting he go through these motions for actual important npcs/combatants. Just generate some quick stats for guys who player's aren't supposed to be fighting or ones that don't matter much in the fight. It should save time to concentrate on the bad guys that have ACTUAL names.

[RandomCasualty2]

There is no expectation that they have to provide a "good" fight.

Honestly, whenever someone says this about encounter design, I just kinda stop reading and think "Well that defeats the whole purpose."

When I'm building an encounter, the first thing I want to be able to do is set the challenge level. If I can't control that, then basically, any features of the system beyond that are pretty useless.

I mean, some campaigns are going to be NPC based, and some are going to be monster based. What you're telling me is that with this NPC generation system (which is somehow superior to 4E), you can't run NPC based games and expect any kind of regularity in your combat challenges.

That's just unacceptable.

The 4E system can:
-Generate NPCs quickly.
-Generate NPCs that come pretty close to being equivalent to a monster of the same level with just a little bit of experience with the system.
-Generate NPCs that are easy to run.

There are lots of ways 4E is inferior to 3E. Monster generation just isn't one of those ways. Literally the only advantage to the 3E system is the fact that it produces that warm and fuzzy "we're all equal" feeling. It utterly fails as a system of creating encounters. It even utterly fails at being fast. Generally when people want to actually use it in any decent regard, they toss it and use something similar to 4E, where they just make up numbers. It's great if you care only about simulationism, but if you want to use something to create interesting aspects in a game, you're shit out of luck.

To make things even worse, lets go back to the the whole warm and fuzzy "we're all equal" that is supposedly more important than anything else. It doesn't even fucking work. You're not equal. An NPC wizard can damn well blow his whole wad in one day, and is expected to. He doesn't have more than one encounter to deal with, and gains an extraordinary amount of power from the fact that he can just go nova on your ass. So while he may have the same stat block as you do, he's just not even playing the same game.