Quote:
Originally Posted by dacoobob
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?  |
When walking down the street, the party is most likely to randomly bump into a commoner of some sort. How many different generic commoners do you plan on specing out in advance? Probably a handful is my guess. Over the life of a campaign, that number will be far exceeded by all the unique and recurring NPCs that you put together.
If you are preparing an encounter, you can add all those generic goblins and orcs directly into the scene script. You pull the goblin from the Vault and set the quantity to 6 (or whatever). The goblin leader might be special and have his own entry in the script.
Let's say the goblin leader is a recurring foe that the PCs will have to deal with. So he gets created as a global cast member outside the scene and merely linked to it. Then you can link him to multiple scripts where he appears. Each of those scripts would also directly include his disposable goblin minions (instead of being linked).
If you decided that you want all your goblin minions to be "special", you could also do that. You create a single "goblin minion" as a global cast member and customize it as desired. Then you link that one minion to each script where you want it to appear and set its quantity to the number appearing. Voila! You now have a scene with a custom goblin leader and his custom goblin minions. All for the low, low price of creating each of them a single time and then re-using them across multiple scenes.
I hope those examples make more sense now!