Simplified Stat Blocks for Eldritch Gambit

 I'm in a late playtest version of this game, and noticed it was a real nuisance filling out the bestiary, as brief as it is. Early on I had decided to make the character creation rules "symmetrical" between PCs and NPCs, because I wanted to be able to handle shape-shifting and transformations easily.

But statting out monsters as "typical" representatives of their species was excruciating and felt pointless. I can't imagine what the 3.5/5e D&D folks went through in terms of annoyance. And it's just so much overhead for a GM to consider.

I still want to make transformations easy, but it turns out I can just let my Template feature handle all of that without impacting Attributes whatsoever. In the end it's pretty similar to Whitehack's NPC method. Un-named NPCs and monsters can use a single value that gives their bonus to hit and damage, 10+that value for defenses, and 5x that value for HP. It works out to about 1/4 Level, so everything is still compatible. It also squishes down the stat block immensely.

 

Now that I look at it, that image is a little cramped. I'll probably add some more whitespace between things, but now I can afford it.

Check out the old version of Eldritch Gambit HERE!