Monster of the Week: Humans and PC races

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Humans, and, to a lesser extent, other player races, are quite handy for use as enemies in many campaigns. I mean, the real world’s done pretty well with just Humans, even without magic! Incredible, yeah. Anyway, in both campaigns set in worlds closer to our own, and in just more city-based campaigns, Humans and other PC races will quite possibly be the most common creatures that the players encounter.

Humans naturally deserve special treatment above the other player races, because they’re omnipresent. You’ll rarely find a campaign setting without them (us?), and they are usually the most common race in each setting. This means that Humans will be the most common potential foe that the player characters will meet. Nevertheless, I will deal with all the player races in this post.

Most regular NPCs will be Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and the like as well. This naturally means that any confrontation between NPCs and PCs will likely involve player races as foes. Enemies from the government, nobles, guilds, companies… any campaign that is more than just hack-and-slash will almost definately use Humans or some such as foes.

Anyway, enough extrapolation.

Humanoid race foes will traditionally end up using the exact same rules as the players themselves: after all, why should they be different? 4E mixes this up a bit, but the result will be the same. A bit like Dark Elves, these enemies are not truly monsters: they will use similar abilities, equipment, tactics, and skills as the players themselves.

This doesn’t mean you have to make the battle a tough tactical fight against a party of a Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric combo or the like. There’s a reason why player parties are constructed like that. To throw a perfectly coordinated enemy party at the players is a recipe for a total party kill, unless they’re well prepared.

No, like monsters, you’ll use Humans and PC races in fairly simple ways. The standard encounter will have only one or two types: say, a group of Rogues working for the Thieves’ Guild, or a powerful Wizard with a few Fighter guards. This type of encounter is a lot more fun for players: they get the reward of being able to exploit weaknesses in the enemy. Remember: the aim is not to kill the player characters, it is to create fun for both players and DM by testing the PC strengths and weaknesses against those of monsters and NPCs.

So, lets get on to the mechanics. Surprisingly, there’s a lot to talk about. The race is the easy bit: the focus is not really whether the foe is Human, Elven, Dwarven, whatever. If it’s a PC race, the defining feature, and thus any difficulty, is their Class.

3.5 Edition

Really easy. Like, really really easy.

Two ways:

1. Hard way: Create the enemies from scratch.
2. Easy way: Pull the examples straight out of the DMG. There’s a big section completely full of examples NPCs for every PHB class for every level 1 to 20. For non-PHB classes there are sometimes examples, but you’ll probably have to make them from scratch.

CR = class level (Plus any monster CR adjustment, if applicable… but we’re talking about player races, so it’s really not an issue. Ahem. Anyway. Keep reading.)

If you’re creating a spellcaster, you really don’t need to write out the whole spell list. Find the spells the NPC/enemy will use for their top couple of levels of casting, and/or a couple of spells you know they’re going to use. Obviously if the fight is going to be long thene you need to work out more, but a typical fight’ll last less than 10 rounds for a caster, so you don’t need to plan out a list of 40 spells or whatever.

Incidentally, a computer tool like PCGen can be used to create an NPC or monster enemy with class levels a lot faster than you can do by hand. This makes it a lot easier, especially for higher levels. It has the other advantage that you’ve still got the save files if you lose the sheets of paper: good for recurring villains.

4th Edition

Simpler… and also more difficult. Paradox much. Yeah.

Basically, the PHB rules are completely unsuitable for NPC/monster use. It’ll take too long, and monsters are designed completely differently to PCs in 4E.

Fortunately, there’s a couple of ways around this:

1. There’s entries in the MM for Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Eladrin, etc etc. All the PC races. For general purpose use, these are what to go for. They cover the basic stereotypes for each race, and are designed like monsters; like all 4E  monsters, this means they’re really easy to use. Unfortunately, there’s few in Paragon and none in Epic: these MM versions are almost completely for low level play.
2. The other option is to create one from scratch. Fortunately, this is a lot easier than in 3.5. Leaf through your DMG to Chapter 10: The DM’s Toolbox. There you find both ways to apply class templates to existing monsters, and the NPC creation rules are perfect for making a foe of any player race of any level.

This all ends up being easier than 3.5. Why? Because 4E is designed from scratch to be easier for the DM (including a DMG that is a lot better than the 3.5 version). You will be spending a lot less time creating the encounters, and the premade Humans and other PC races presented in the MM really are worth using.

So. Whilst I doubt after reading this you’ll be using Humans and other PC races any more or less, I hope it makes it a bit easier to make them a viable encounter, and more fun for all involved.

Well, that’s another monster, or, at least, a… yeah, anyway. Semantics aside, log on to Dice of Doom next week for another Monster of the Week!

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