PC's out of the box?

[DarkEternal]

Hello.

Pathfinder had an interesting product, called the NPC codex where you could take characters from base classes that were already done from level 1 to level 20. It's a good thing for DM's that want at least the basics for an enemy that will likely get slaughtered without all the work involved. The problem is, most of them are built fairly poorly and indeed provide less challenge.

So, I wonder, if there is a database somewhere for other characters that people(be it from the Playground or other places on the net) where people supplied their characters of various levels with spells-feats-stats already chosen, and if they have items already it's only a bonus, so it would make DM's like me work less when designing encounters?

[kellbyb]

I have never heard of such a thing.

That said, I would never use it. I enjoy making my own PC's too much.

[DarkEternal]

Nothing wrong with that. But when I want to toss a few enemies at my party, and not really feeling up to making a whole encounter from scratch, I'd like to use something others have done as well. I found that creating an encounter just takes too much time for me if I do it from scratch every time, time that could be better used on furthering the campaign or designing other things. Might just be me.

edit: And now I see the thread name should be "NPC characters out of the box." Blame the lack of sleep.

[Kafana]

The title should be "NPCs out of the box"

[ElenionAncalima]

I tend to rely on the PF codex, then I modify them to make them more appropriate and challenging.

I haven't seen something like what you are asking about, but it would be an interesting project. It would be easy enough to get submissions and give them categories like class, race or CR.

The biggest challenge I would see would be editing...as not all build are created equal. Not to mention even good build might have errors.

[Chester]

Well, the PHB2 for 3.5 has something akin to that . . . maybe just adapt from there?

It's not really "out of the box," but it gives you basic stats / spells / etc. for constructing quick NPCs.

[DarkEternal]

As an example, here's a page. I'm gonna put it in spoilers since I don't know if we can link to it or not

http://d20npcs.wikia.com/wiki/D20_NPCs_by_Challenge_Rating

There are quite a few characters there, sorted by CR. Some are pretty bad though, and from what I've seen they usually only use stuff from Core. Since I saw many people build characters on this page, be it for the Iron chef competition or what not, that there was some sort of a "compendium" of these characters somewhere, ready to use against the party, to see how they would fare against a well built npc(or party of them)

[Flickerdart]

Enemies and Allies is a book that contains a bunch of NPCs, and there are sample statblocks for almost every PrC. And yes, their builds are also terrible.

[137beth]

Enemies and Allies is a book that contains a bunch of NPCs, and there are sample statblocks for almost every PrC. And yes, their builds are also terrible.

And too many have mistakes:smalltongue:

[Firest Kathon]

Just for completeness, the NPCs from the NPC Codex are also available on the SRD (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s).

There's also an NPC Database (http://www.pathfindercommunity.net/home/databases/npcs) over on pathfindercommnity.net, though I can't tell how good their NPCs are built.