NPCs can be different from monsters, or not, so they may be more complex, nuanced. We can return to them another day!
For my stripped down running of the game, they have to be on note cards. It helps to have some procedural surprise built in for me as a player in the game. It really helps to have just a couple of numbers to keep track of during an encounter. For example, spiders in my current dungeon crawl...
First roll determines hit dice: two, three, or four
The next roll is the number of spiders, which riffs off of the hit dice. There are probably fewer bigger spiders or more smaller spiders, and the number is probably a d6 or maybe two.
The attack damage is directly related to the hit dice, with bigger spiders doing the bigger damage.
Armor class is 10 plus their hit dice, and that number is the same DC the characters need to beat to avoid paralysis.
Finally there are a series of quick yes or no questions. Rolling a D6 5 times quickly with a 1 to 3 being NO and a 4 to 6 being YES, we quickly determine what kind of spiders these are, how they behave. They could end up being camouflaged zombie spiders in a web network or ambush spiders who can shoot entangling webs. I can be as surprised with the encounter as the other players!
These are all dials of course, so if the party is in hot pursuit of another creature, the wandering spider may be just a distraction. If the dice indicate that the room is inhabited, then it may be a bigger group of spiders that the party has to contend with. If the party decides to leave, I note it down on my map as a discovery in the world that has been made, so that future explorers may encounter the same thing.
Monsters can also be easily dialed up. For example, the other night the party encountered a spider web covering a entrance to a great canyon. These are proper giant spiders, none of that 4 HD nonsense. So a quick doubling to 6 HD makes them a real menace that needs careful planning: AC 16 2D6 damage...
Yikes 😳
The party returned to the canyon with the fireball scroll, and, that worked well. What they have realized since is that without the spiders, the giant moth population has really escalated!
'First roll determines hit dice: two, three, or four'
ReplyDeleteWhat dice is that? 1d3+1?
In this example, I would just use a D6, with a 1 to 2 being two hit dice, 3 or 4 being three hit dice etc. But a D3+1 gets you to the same place!
ReplyDeleteI apologize for reposting this. I poked the wrong button in the app and couldn't find a way to revert to the previous version!
ReplyDelete