Crafting NPC Parties

Spending ten hours in a plane allows for a lot of random brain activity. On the way home from my vacation, somewhere over Canada, I decided to enhance my Labyrinth Lord Monster Generator. I was actually considering how to expand it into something similar to the Treasure Book on Demand, which would be straight forward with the exception of the NPC groups. NPC’s appear on ten or more Wandering Monster / Wilderness encounter tables.

I have avoided anything related to randomly generated characters. Like many, I believe characters should be more than a random pile of results. While characters begin as a set of random statistics, interesting choices should be left to the player to forge the results into a unique individual. Non-player characters lie very close to my personal line in the sand. Having chosen to press forward, I have begun considering how to design the software and the information it should generate.

Balance

I’m no purist when it comes to balance in random encounters. I trend toward it most of the time but allow for outliers, which statistically might be less or more powerful than the player characters. NPC groups are listed by Labyrinth Level on the wandering monster tables. Still, balance goes further based on class (race) selection available within the group. Class defines the set of skills available to the group. Player groups tend to self balance when it comes to class selection.

Level balance is a reasonably easy problem to solve. The dreaded Gaussian bell curve can easily accommodate balancing the NPC levels around a target level while still allowing outliers. Picking the exact distribution and applying will take effort but having a 5th level show up in a party of 3rd level is achievable. Or even a first in a 7th level party even if the likelihood would be minute.

Class balance is trickier. Once again, I’m not a purist. I favor systems where race is not a class but rather an element of the character being generated. Still to be useful to many in the Labyrinth Lord audience, generating race as class needs to be an option. Allowing for race as a class goes against something I rarely see in D&D — single race groups. Treating race as a class gives you a narrow set of skills and abilities. I’ve never understood the logic behind it.

Looking at races as cultural entities, I would expect elves tending to adventure with other elves — not choosing to join up with a halfling, dwarf, gnome and the oddball human. Associating with other individuals who understand and agree with your culture is the norm, not the exception. Yet it is nearly forced upon you to achieve a wide mixture of talents useful for adventuring. Makes me wonder if the original writers were trying to achieve racial harmony except they noted tension between various racial groups.

I have no clear idea how I’m going to approach class/racial skill balance. For the initial attempt, I’m likely to avoid it entirely. Ignoring it may be fine but I still want to consider it.

Other Elements

Treasure and magic are difficult to define for NPC groups. Games range from low magic and low wealth to magic as common for adventurers and high wealth. Any random NPC party can be considered as non-lair and have a lower amount of total wealth with them. Tailoring magical items to the class and race need to be considered. I’ll likely have to invent a fair number of new treasure tables to match a portion of the items they utilize beyond the random loot they may be carrying home. I’m not going to spend a significant amount of time tailoring the tables to match. If it is critical for the campaign, a random group is not going to be encountered. Game masters can easily add or subtract from the results on the fly.

Names confound me. I’m certainly not alone in having difficulty choosing names for player characters let alone non-player characters. I’d like to include names since that is a detail that arises more often than not. Still, I do not have a good source of name data. Many sites have accumulated good databases of names. I am not one of them. First cut, I’m going to have to leave names out. Perhaps I can find another site willing to share name data down the road.

Spell books and available spells I can handle easily. I’ve already translated the known spells by class tables into a database table. Producing a list of spells ready to be cast vs. the overall known for magic users should be simple. It’s another detail generally ignored by most generators but one I believe important.

Wrapup

More decisions await me. I already have more questions to consider than answers. Perhaps I’m biting off more than I should. Still, I’m bull headed and going to push forward. I may succumb to failure. More than likely, I’ll constrain the options and leave many details up to the user.