Enemy Classes

NPCs are coming for your characters! Don’t worry, these guys are just the grunts… Though there is one figure who looks like he’s directing these groups of grunts, could it be an adversary, or are they the lieutenant?
Wait, that’s a bad way to explain how NPCs in Project ARS work. Welcome to NPC classes, which help categorize your NPCs so you can properly challenge your players! If you’re a player, please kindly return to the other sections of Project ARS for cool ideas, this post is for the Story Masters (Mwahahaha).

NPCs, or Non-Player Characters, are characters that are run by the Story Master, and fill in the rest of the world. NPCs are creatures, people, villains and civilians, allies and enemies, and entities that the player characters have interactions. As a story master you need to track a few things, especially in social and combat encounters, for your own creatures. Making an NPC will be covered in the next few weeks (and as always, adjusted from playtests), but for now we are going to cover NPC classes, which is a handy way to categorize what NPCs you throw at your players. If you need a group of enemies that aren’t a great threat individually. We have the grunts, which are your basic minions, soldiers, and faceless enemies that your players can take out quickly in small numbers; adversaries that give a good challenge by themselves; Lieutenants, designed to lead minions and adversaries and are stronger; and Bosses, which are reserved for major battles and have abilities that challenge even well seasoned heroes.

Grunts

These are enemies that work better together, but fairly weak. use minions to harass players in groups rather than solo.

Grunts gain bonuses to offensive stats and skills when in a group, and share health.  

For every 2 npcs in a grunt group, add +1 to the attack and damage rolls, and  their skill checks.  As mentioned, grunts share a health pool.  When the group’s health goes down by one grunt’s health total, one grunt dies, and their bonuses go down.  While in a group, grunts do not have stamina.

Adversary

These tougher enemies come in a group or run a few minions as underlings. Adversaries challenge players by using tactics, though are still fairly weak by themselves. Adversaries are the baseline NPCs, and plugging in the arrays as is, whilst changing the flavor text, is a great way to use the Adversary class. 

Lieutenants

Far stronger that most enemies, Lieutenants challenge entire parties by themselves.  They get unique abilities that give them an edge, such as special reactions they can make, and sometimes call enemies to their aid. Because of their strength, I recommend making Lieutenant NPCs slightly stronger than other NPCs, increasing most of their stats by at least one and giving them a few NPC abilities, such as summoning or directing minion groups.

Bosses

These are the hardest to fight enemies. They’re designed to test your players and Push them,  and many bosses are designed to have powerful abilities, and some have stages that can change the dynamic of the fight.  

Bosses have HP thresholds, which, when they reach these thresholds, trigger unique abilities they have.  These can include additional initiative slots, extra attacks or abilities, or even transforming the NPC into something worse.  

And feel free to swap out some features or flavors when using the NPCs, especially if they’re enemies the players have faced before (showing their growth in power). 

And that’s it, next week I’ll have some more NPC stuff and (hopefully) some abilities. Thanks for following along and May your Adventures be Awesome!