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dacoobob
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Join Date: Sep 2018
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Old March 6th, 2020, 01:26 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by rob View Post
The assumption is that "global" cast members are primarily going to be individual NPCs that the party runs into on a recurring basis. For example, the BBEG, his lieutenants, the people that run the world (e.g. nobles), the local merchants (if you opt to spec them all out), etc. Each of those is assumed to a "unique" individual.

There are also generic townsfolk that you might want to prepare for re-use, such as bar patrons, beggars, guards, bandits, and the like. Those would NOT be unique, but our assumption is that those are much less frequent than the unique NPCs.
Really? I'm very curious why you would assume that.

Say the PCs are walking down the street in a town-- who are they more likely to bump into: the Mayor, or a common merchant or beggar? Or, say the party is delving into an evil necromancer's dungeon-- who will they likely spend more time fighting: the Necromancer himself, or his hordes of undead minions?

If you're prepping an encounter with a goblin raiding party, would you really spec out unique statblocks for every individual goblin? I certainly wouldn't... I'd make most of them generic "goblin warriors" and call it good. The leader of the band might be more powerful-- and he might even have a name and a backstory-- but even then he probably wouldn't need unique stats, just a generic "goblin lieutenant" statblock. Surely those kind of encounters are more common than ones involving unique monsters or NPCs, no?

Last edited by dacoobob; March 6th, 2020 at 01:54 PM.
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