Sample Guinea Pigs... I mean, PCs?

[Dusk Raven]

Something I enjoy doing is coming up with homebrew creatures, or high-level NPCs or other combat encounters. However, in order to really gauge their strength and balance things accordingly, I need practical testing, since I often have a hard time predicting what will actually happen once the dice start rolling. I need to simulate a group of PCs going up against these encounters. But for that, I need sample PCs. Either I make them myself - and I'm really not good at optimizing characters, especially at higher levels or when gear is involved - or I find some online. Does anyone have or know of a database or other list of sample PCs (3.5, Pathfinder, whatever) I could use for this sort of thing?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Some of my stuff is a little esoteric but I'll give you something if you give me a level.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Threads from the Wizards forums (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?444041-Threads-from-the-Wizards-forums) has a bunch of builds of varying optimization levels.

[zlefin]

while not a great option; there's a lot of pathfinder NPCs available, of course they were built as NPCs, and with NPC wealth level. So it's not a great option. but there's enough of them to assemble parties out of.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/

[Zaq]

I mean, they're all directed towards somewhat atypical goals, but the various build competitions around here (Iron Chef and its derivatives) provide an awful lot of fully-statted full-length builds (with commentary and strategy, even! At least, most of the time) with some really wide variety. Maybe the typical Iron Chef character isn't exactly a typical home game character for most games, but they're not all crazy joke builds, and the majority of them strive very hard to be practical for most purposes. And, like I said, there's an awful lot of them. If The Spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oyjVU5JmeCnC8YTMqDArDqE5PszHl0Ysadz630kuTGk/edit?ts=59a4835f#gid=0) is to be believed, there's nearly a thousand builds in the main ICOC contest history alone. Perhaps they'd be a good resource for you?

[Kelb_Panthera]

I mean, they're all directed towards somewhat atypical goals, but the various build competitions around here (Iron Chef and its derivatives) provide an awful lot of fully-statted full-length builds (with commentary and strategy, even! At least, most of the time) with some really wide variety. Maybe the typical Iron Chef character isn't exactly a typical home game character for most games, but they're not all crazy joke builds, and the majority of them strive very hard to be practical for most purposes. And, like I said, there's an awful lot of them. If The Spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oyjVU5JmeCnC8YTMqDArDqE5PszHl0Ysadz630kuTGk/edit?ts=59a4835f#gid=0) is to be believed, there's nearly a thousand builds in the main ICOC contest history alone. Perhaps they'd be a good resource for you?

Small hiccup; those almost never include gear. You can take the closest match to one of the core classes for an NPC loadout from the DMG but that's not really going to be up to snuff.

[Zaq]

Granted, but it also won't be that hard to come up with "generic baseline" gear for most of them: stat bumps, magic defensive gear, and—if appropriate—a magic weapon of some stripe do indeed chew up a lot of GP and go a long way towards making up the difference between the build as presented and the build as presumably played.

Yeah, spending hours picking 20 levels of gear will come up with a more optimal result than throwing some +numbers gear on the pile, but if time is a concern, +numbers stuff is at least fairly simple.

[Dusk Raven]

It's okay if gear isn't optimized - I guarantee the gear of whatever I'm pitting the PCs against won't be optimized either. In fact, in general I'm really bad at picking the best way to build a class, but I also don't care to do so unless I chance upon some build and I think, "I like what this thing can do, I think I'll give it a shot." I'd rather have fun than play something so optimized it makes encounters a chore and devalues the other players.

Also worth noting - I've only played above level 10 once, and my level 15 character was built for me (since I sure as heck didn't know how, I hadn't played D&D for years prior to that), I didn't care for the build (some sort of Ninja/Master Thrower build that focused on throwing 14 returning daggers a turn), and I only participated in one fight anyway. My knowledge of how characters work in that level range is entirely theoretical, and as I mentioned I'm not very good at figuring out how characters work from theory alone. To be honest, I'd probably benefit from trying to build some characters myself... but I could still use any builds other people have come up with, as I'll need a lot of sample PCs.

Anyway, the PCs don't need to be amazing, just capable.