When introducing enemies to your saga, do you stat them upfront? And if you do, do you give them full stats? or just the basic ones you feel they'll need?
What about other mages? How much Xp do you give them? As if they are PCs created at their age?
Sometimes. That's the answer to all your questions.
Now, I very rarely make enemies. Most NPCs are just people whom the players are free to antagonise or not.
Generally I stat them fully using standard char gen rules when I am worried about getting the power-level consistent and balanced. Otherwise I wing it.
On the whole no.
While I have generic stats for generic NPCs (guards, farmers, faerie knights...) I do not stat other people unless I have to. If I prepare an adventure where I am pretty certain a fight will break out (see my write up for the two dungeons) then I will stat out the enemies, but I mostly look at the combat grog stats to set the att/def/soak of the critters.
The exception is the two Tytallus which I have created as antagonists for the party, but I did it as much for the challenge of making two 50 year old magi as anything else (I made them by the book, with 30xp/yr). The only time they "competed" with the players was when they challenged them to disputatio and riddling challenges (I was ready for certamen and duelling too, but they preferred a riddling challenge).
1 Like
Sometimes I do, if only just for fun, but most of the times I remember it's wasted time. It is not like if the players were going to grab the NPC sheet and start looking to it with a magnifier glass to see if I spent 3 extra XPs in Athletics when the character was 13 years old.
What I like to do, specially for magi, is have an idea of the "shape" and "volume" of his capabilities. Which his focus might be, what spells or powers he might have, which abilities might he be good and bad at. I'd found that if I resist the temptation of making the character too flexible (because it spoils the fun if the NPC just have the exact spell or power or the precise ability to counter the PCs tricks, and not having it all black over white is easy for me to fall on that pit by default) and I just give him a distinctive and believable voice, PCs are fine with it. Just keep a couple of concepts in mind and extrapolate from there (usually just by looking at an already stated magus and swapping a few things around). Then if a NPC shows up too much and gets a lot of notes then it might be useful to stat him down anyway if only to avoid forgetting stuff, thinking weak spots and so on. But detailing everything in Ars is just impossible because you never reach the end. Ok, you statted that magus they glimpsed once in that path in the forest. But did you went through his season labs and get his new spells and magic items? And what about how much vis he carries? And how much can he get from his covenant? Did you, actually, statted his covenant? And his fellow magi? Did you fill a list of all the tractati he possess? And these on his covenant's library? You definitively need to stat that covenant! What about his grogs? And his parens? And his parens covenant? And that can go on and on and on...
Given that you have stop that at some point I think the closer you put the reasonable limit, the better for your sanity.
1 Like
If you have time to stat up all the NPCs, you have to few characters in your game.
1 Like
It depends on how much I need. If I'm creating an "encounter" that will probably turn into a fight, then yes, I like to have full stats for whatever demon / magical creature / faerie / hedge wizard / magi, etc. my PCs may fight. If I'm preparing a Flambeau tournament that's a certamen competition, then I'll have a list of competitors, with relevant arts, parma magica and penetration abilities, and age, so that the choices of the PCs to pick an art to fight over (or to veto) has an impact. If I'm just introducing an NPC into the game, then no, I don't fully stat the NPC unless he's part of the covenant or will constantly be arround the player characters. I'll work with a general outline. For a magi, that might be name, house, age, covenant, political factions, mystery cults, one or two virtues / flaws that are important to the concept, his reputation, and a general idea of what kind of magic he likes to use and develop. And as my PCs interact with it, I'll update my note with things like Com+Teaching totals or primary lab total if those things ever become important to the saga because an NPC becomes a mentor of sort. But the only magi I've ever fully statted down were to prepare a fight with an hermetic troublemaker, a member of the player covenants or for the parens for the player characters.
Generally yes, but then I have also been known to stat out over 100 craft and background grogs for a covenant along with children to take their places as they age and die, so I am hardly representative of a reasonable approach in this...
My aim is always to give each NPC the minimum level of detail necessary to bring it through a story without the players noticing.
The first time an NPC appears they usually have just a few descriptors, mostly based on what they want, what they can/are willing to give and other such as necessary to plot. If dice rolling becomes relevant I will give them some plausible sounding numbers.
If I know that an NPC will be involved in certain dicerolls I will give them numbers ahead of time. but only for those specific rolls.
Only if an NPC has started to recur regularly will I give it a full write up like it was a PC.
In my troupe, that's considered very reasonable.
Doing it for every covenant in the Tribunal, well, that's when it starts being a tad excessive.
We do not bother calculating derived quantities (e.g. combat totals) until we need them. But generally, yes, we come up with all the information necessary to completely define the character. We've found out that it often yields insight into making such characters "come to life" and be more "three-dimensional".
And while sometimes this is more effort than strictly necessary, it's also true that a well-crafted character can always be recycled at another time, possibly with a few tweaks here and there. We have a gigantic library of them by now.
By and large, yes!
My troupe is very free with such numbers. Rare monsters and fae were often statted up. A lot of the numbers I handwave, and write it down as it becomes needed. Most times I only stay personality traits and notes on specialties.
1 Like
While my group has stats for hordes of things like Grogs, many of them were produced using the Templates and Training Packages from the Grogs book. They allowed us to produce and maintain a massive number with much less work then by doing each individually by hand.