Speeding up baddies creation

[Cicciograna]

While writing an adventure I noticed that I spend a great deal of time flushing out the baddies my PCs will fight: while I find this pleasing from time to time, I don't like the fact that often I spend WAY more time creating enemies than writing the adventure itself!
In your experience, what are some good tricks to speed up the creation of enemies? Do you know a good character generator that would make up balanced enemies, or at least not come up with utter crap like 6th level rangers who took three times the Toughness feat? How long does it take to you the creation of interesting enemies, from the eveil overlord to the lowliest minions?

[Zaq]

My GM has indicated to me that when he's not pulling from a printed monster book, he sometimes builds monsters from a generic base (basically picking HD, BAB/damage, and saves as appropriate for the type of baddie), then gives them a certain number of, for lack of a better term, "monster slots" depending on how powerful they're supposed to be. A monster slot represents a nasty trick the creature has; it can be a feat (with or without prereqs, depending on how mean the monster's supposed to be), some generic special ability (like flight, weird special attacks, etc.), bigger numbers, or whatever. He has a semisolid list of what various tricks are worth (sometimes they take two or three monster slots, depending on party level, monster type, and whatever), though he doesn't follow anything too rigidly. It's mostly just a way of making sure that all the monsters in any given area or group are roughly on par with one another (or are roughly more or less powerful than one another as desired).

It's not a rigid system, but it works for him. I can't really explain it any deeper than that, since I'm not privy to the inner workings of it.

For more bestial types, you might consider literally starting them as Totemists. I'm serious. The Totemist really is the build-your-own-monster class, and I think its mechanics could be used to build actual monsters. Don't use actual essentia or anything, and of course you'd add and change some unique abilities (you don't want an incarnum-loving playing to notice "wait, did it just use the shoulders bind of the Shadow Mantle?"), but the idea of giving a creature of whatever level (CR) so many melds and so many binds of whatever chakras is a decent framework to start with, giving you a good baseline for how many neat abilities a creature should have, and of what type. As a disclaimer, I've never actually GMed in this way (nor seen it done), but I think it could work. Obviously, you wouldn't just throw the finished Totemist at your party, but it's a good "rough draft" to use as something to clean up and turn into a real monster.

[PirateLizard]

Writing up a bad guy from scratch takes me a while. A long while. For the storyline I'm running in my current game it sometimes takes me over an hour to write up some of the BBEG's NPCs not in the monster manuals. This for me pretty much involves adding several class levels to an existing creature, however.
Past that, there are a couple things I do on a regular basis that are a lot quicker than this drawn out process.

1. Write reusable NPCs. Nobody is going to see my BBEG for a looong time. They have a mystery to solve first. While it took me around an hour and a half to write up a CR2 and a CR3 Goblin Barbarian, I now have those lying around. I can throw that at anyone that happens by our game. I can use them dozens of times. They're simple foot soldiers, and typically a sign of "cultist activity" in the area. Just the other day some low-levels ran into one leading a horde of regular goblins and a pair of fire newts. Anyway, this is the basic idea behind the Monster Manuals everyone is so fond of.

2. Get yourself a "personal DM space". In my case, it's in the form of my own private wikidot site, but it can be anything. A manilla envelope, a series of office documents, or in the case of my buddy back in the 90s, a number of crates (he had a game going every day for about 5 years in the hotel we used to run). The key in any situation is to stay organized. If you never lose anything, you may eventually, like him, end up with literally thousands of well-sorted documents to whip out whenever.

3. Cosmetic changes. This one is hilarious, and it's one of my favorite tactics. Someone do something stupid? Need a quick and dirty badguy? Grab something out of the monster manual and DON'T TELL THEM WHAT IT IS. Snakes can become tentacles, cubes can become orbs, angels turned into demons (with a little alignment shifting), etc. Especially with a BBEG driven campaign where you'll need lots of their minions flying around. Adamantium golem? What adamantium golem. It's a magically enchanted suit of plate armor (with some lolsy stats that might catch them off-guard), or maybe better yet some sort of mad-mage's attack robot (http://khryssun.free.fr/starwars-miniatures/Preview_FU/05_The_Junk_Golem.jpg). Anything to keep them guessing works wonders for me.

4. Finally, Templates! (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19869266/Master_Template_List) Need a lot of different kinds of skeleton pirates? Grab the Skeleton/Zombie templates and go hog wild on pre-existing stuff. In my current game, "no home-brew is allowed". Never going to bother me. Between the monsters already published and that huge list of temps., I'm pretty confident you can make just about anything. In fact, most of my stuff near the end of the arc will have templates applied to it, just for that extra oompf and to make things even harder on the PCs. Constantly running into stuff with different configurations of DR and resistances can drive the sanest of PCs mad with curiosity, and add flavor to any mystery driven SL.
Mage: "I cast magic missile."
Me: "Alright, lets see a caster level check."
Mage: "What the...it has spell resistance? It's a freaking CR 1/3"
Me: "No, it -was- a freaking CR 1/3. It's now...well, not."
Yeah that always makes me laugh.

Anyway, hope that helps, that's about all I can think of off the top of my head.

[Gamer Girl]

1.Make up a bunch of generic NPCs of each class at levels 5, 10, 15, 20 or such a spread. Give them the 'standard' stuff you'd think they would have. And make copies of them. Then when you need a NPC grab one of them and add on stuff you need to make them 'fit'.

2.Go find some old issues of Dungeon, any game book or online sites and grab the NPCs from there. They may not be the 'best', but it's again easy to alter them them make a new one from scratch.

3.Wing it. The orc guard has an AC of 20 and a great sword with a Bab of +8. How/why? No reason, just say so. This works great for bads you know won't be around for long anyway.

[Dralnu]

Steal pre-made characters. Lots of them. From everywhere. The DMG has premade NPCs of all the base classes, unoptimized or no they still work fine. Tons of the splatbooks have a premade character of the class / PrC they're introducing. Races of the X books probably has the most of any of the splats, even including "sample encounters" near the back. Drow of the Underdark has a few that I've used too. Then I take stats from pre-made campaigns (how many times have I used you, hobgoblin minions from Red Hand of Doom? how many??) or even the bajillions of character sheets on mythweavers.com

Don't forget the Monster Manual (not #1, but the others) books also have NPCs with class levels. Lizardfolk clans, drow clans, Mind flayer clans, half-dragon clans, etc. Oh, not the race you want? Whatever, cross the name out and refluff it to whatever race you needed.

Oh, and there's also www.dinglesgames.com

I almost always make my minions with dinglesgames. If I want to be fancy, I pillage a pre-made character from somewhere. Only if I really want to make a very specific NPC tuned to my exact desires do I build the thing from scratch.

[Tvtyrant]

Refluff true dragons as whatever you want and then just don't use all the features. If its a melee brute just full attack, breath and stay on the ground for an AoE, spells + flying for a harrier, etc. I use this when I don't have a lot of time and it works pretty well.

[Cicciograna]

Interesting answers so far. I think I definitely should learn to reuse enemies I made for previous encounters: this would really save me a lot of time. Think I'll begin to scavenge in my previous adventures for baddies and index them.

About pre-made characters, do you have any good source, maybe with a clear organization, where browsing for a particular character is simple and quick?

[The-Mage-King]

Well, the Pathfinder GM Guide has... what, 40 premade NPCs of varying levels?

Whoops. Just checked. 90 or so. 10 bucks for the book in PDF, I think. It also has some interesting rules, too.

[Cicciograna]

Well, the Pathfinder GM Guide has... what, 40 premade NPCs of varying levels?

Whoops. Just checked. 90 or so. 10 bucks for the book in PDF, I think. It also has some interesting rules, too.

Interesting. Are they viable for use in a 3.5 game?

[The-Mage-King]

Interesting. Are they viable for use in a 3.5 game?

Yeah. Pathfinder is 3.75, basically. A few minor changes, but those are detailed on their SRD (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/), and there's a conversion guide to PF from 3.5 for free on their website. It's easy enough to reverse the changes.


Though once you see how much better their fighter is, you might not want to change that back...

[Cicciograna]

Though once you see how much better their fighter is, you might not want to change that back...

I already have the Warblade.

[The-Mage-King]

I already have the Warblade.

N/m then. Though it would be tolerable to play a PF fighter...

[Doc Roc]

I... I mean. My solution was sort of extreme.

[Cicciograna]

I... I mean. My solution was sort of extreme.

What's your solution Doc?

[Doc Roc]

I built Legend basically as a direct result of my frustrations as a GM and a player. There's a couple of threads up for it already, so instead I'll point out that War-Marked (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=190893) as designed for a quite similar purpose.

[Jeebers]

Most GM's resort to just using beasties straight out of the monster books, without giving them any class levels to speed up creation. It is easily the fastest way to get a villain ready, and why there are so many different monsters.