Sporadic Notes on Fabula NPC Creation

Build around a theme. A theme can be anything that the NPCs can all take advantage of in some way. You could do increases to a certain attribute, inflicting a particular status effect, or counting how many status effects are on targets. The theme lets the NPCs synergize with each other and forces players to choose: do I kill the monster that buffs the Dex of the heavy hitter, or do I take out the heavy hitter before it debuffs our Might.
1. Build 3 or 4 monsters together. Think of this as the random pokemon that show up in a route, or the options listed on the encounter table of a module dungeon. These monsters, if they all care about a similar thing mechanically, should be interchangeable which will let you reuse them in different combinations while keeping things fresh. EX: if I have a monster that applies Poisoned, a monster that deals extra damage to things that are Poisoned, and a monster that heals allies that apply status effects; each of those can be combined to create a different conflict. In one fight the Poisoned applier is a buffer, in the other, it’s a tank!
2. Never fill an encounter with a single type of NPC. You’re asking for one AoE attack to wipe out the entire encounter with a single turn when you do that. You also don’t want to let a party get ‘bored’ of an enemy if you’ll be reusing them within your themed area. By mixing NPCs up, they see different skills shine in different combinations and it keeps the encounters fresh.
3. Make enemies in the same theme Vulnerable to different things. This increases the challenge in encounters, preventing one casting of Elemental Weapon from turning your damage dealer into a meat grinder for your NPCs. It also keeps players more engaged, as they won’t want to ‘tune out’ and let the one player able to hit that Affinity do all the work.
4. Enemies can take advantage of each other’s Resistances. A bit of a follow up point, but worth it’s own title. An enemy with a symmetric effect (one that targets allies and enemies) is a good way to balance a fairly powerful effect. The classic final fantasy enemy for this is a Bomb, which explodes on death. You can pair an effect like that with creatures that Resist the damage, are immune to the status effect, or otherwise mitigate the effect on themselves to fantastic effect as a synergy.
5. Soldiers are easier to hot swap in a themed group than Elites/Champions. This is simply a matter of action economy, You can use a different Soldier in a conflict for each PC if you wanted, but Elites and Champions take up two of the encounter slots. Pairing multiple of them together drops the number of combinations down even lower.
Build around your party. If you have a PC who took Dispel as one of their spells, they obviously want to use that spell. Very few of the default NPC skills apply in a Scene based buff fashion, and most aren’t worth dispelling. You should present opportunities for that PC to use Dispel against something that makes them feel like the hero of the hour, some kind of custom curse that’ll drop a target to 1 HP immediately after 3 turns or the like.
1. This applies to all things on your player’s sheets, be they spells, elemental affinities, statuses they can inflict… You can give your NPC more powerful options that are tied to these things as a counter balance. A big charge up laser blast is scary, but if it can be turned off when your Spiritualist inflicts Slow with Torpor, it’ll make that PC feel epic (or you’ll get to fire a big laser blast at them).
Soldiers with a vulnerability are hard to reuse. Once your party knows a weakness of a soldier, they can do 20~30 damage easy to that creature, if not more. The NPC will likely last two rounds at most, if it’s not focus fired. If you want that soldier to be around for a bit, say as a buffer to your other enemies in the theme, you want to mitigate the incoming beat down. You can do that by not giving the NPC any Vulnerability or by giving it a Crisis/skill effect that changes it’s vulnerability.
5 Damage is nothing to sneeze at. The Weaken spell (target suffers +5 damage of a given type) and jumping to the next tens digits of level (10,20,30,etc) increase NPC damage by 5. On paper, this doesn’t feel like a lot. In practice, it can turn a 3 hit KO to a 2 hit KO. It’s certainly not overpowered, but don’t overlook Weaken because it’s only 5 damage, and be aware that going to Level 20 NPCs vs your sub-level 20 party will big significant damage jump.
Access to Multi on PCs skews encounter math. Multi is a game changer. For PCs, you can effectively treat a that PC as cloning themselves if they’ll be using a lot of Multi attacks (Chanter Verses, Mutant Polypodia, Bladestorm, etc). You’ll likely want an additional NPC or two to keep them spreading the damage around. You don’t want to overwhelm them offensively, but you also don’t want most of your opposition dropping at once.
1. Don’t make NPCs vulnerable to something the PCs can Multi attack with. You mostly don’t want to setup the party to AoE hit all three of your bolt weak soldiers and bring them all to <10 HP in a single turn because then what was the point of starting this combat in the first place? The NPCs won’t get their chance to shine, the PCs won’t do much other than “button mash” the AoE, and you’d have been better off skipping the encounter. You can only mitigate this so much, for example, Elemental Weapon + Bladestorm/Polypodia are a two step combo to do most damage types, but it at least requires a bit of setup.
Access to Multi on NPCs helps keep the pressure on large parties. That said, I think Multi is very important when keeping the pressure on when using random targeting. If you have a party with a Faithful Companion, or one of 5+ players, you have likely 20% or less chance of hitting a particular target. Spreading the damage out this much weakens the overall threat of the encounter, especially if you also then have to get through Protect or Crossfire uses.
Pair NPCs that have minimal damage output with Multi NPCs to keep pressure up. In the above example, maybe the creature that applies Poisoned spends most of it’s turns doing that and doesn’t do much damage. In that case, you shouldn’t count it as much of a damage dealer in a conflict. This (usually) wouldn’t justify not counting it towards your action economy encounter balancing, but if you pair it with a creature that has Multi, that other creature is now “attacking for two”. This keeps the damage output of the encounter from dropping too low when you have a more support focused NPC present. (You can also use this in reverse, by putting a NPC with little damage output with an NPC that has a very high non multi-output to lower the overall damage dealt per round.)
The Objective action can always be used to disable a skill. If the players can come with a way that makes sense to stop the dragon from Flying, or the mech suit from emp blasting at the end of each round, always let them start that clock to disable the gimmick. Make the appropriate difficulty is the harder part, which leads to…
When creating clocks, 7 is a better Difficulty than 10 as default. by default seven is considered an easy difficulty on a Skill Check, 10 is normal, 13 hard, and 16 impossible. In situations where you are using your best stats this is accurate, but when you’re doing skill checks that dynamically come up while narrating a heist, sport game, or affect an objective clock in a conflict, it’s skewed. In practice, seven is a good difficulty to see one or two successes on most rolls. In practice, 10 actual makes it hard to get above one, and often times even to succeed at all.
1. Players like seeing the clock move, and it keeps the tension up as it moves. Players are also quick to lose interest in a clock when they think they can’t succeed on it. 7 Difficulty to interact works best with both of those points, no matter how many sections you have.
2. If you need something that’s challenging, say an objective clock that will severely hinder or even completely defeat an NPC in a conflict, that’s when the 10 Difficulty will be more valuable. You then must keep in mind that you’ll be seeing less successes per attempt, so you won’t need as many sections as you would with a 7 difficulty clock. The exact ratio is group dependent, but you likely want a third less sections.
Encourage Study actions. The book says this too, but really don’t let players sleep on this. Encounters go a lot slower when the party insists on attacking Resistances rather than study to find the Vulnerabilities.
1. Study can answer an question about an NPC’s Gimmicks. This is a less common use, but if you’ve got a party that’s stumped on figuring out that your NPC is getting a passive damage buff from their mech armor as long as they aren’t suffering Dazed, they can ask the question “how is that buff being created?”. This is a core part of the Study checks, it’s just a frequently forgotten one.
Charge Attacks. Charge attacks in jRPGs feel like a boss thing, and bosses can do them. But you have to be very careful about timing. There’s a number of ways to implement them, and some actually work best on Soldiers because they only act once per round. Some generic notes are to declare targets in advance (to give that PC the chance to Guard, act defensively). make the start turn of a charge attack also put the NPC in the Guarding state, and reuse other abilities on the sheet for the effect. I’ll frequently make the charge up modify the next use of a Basic Attack at the end of the charge.
1. The Clock Charge. The NPC can create a clock which they could fill via the objective action or by dealing damage, the PCs can empty the clock (which might have started filled) by dealing damage or the objective action, and after a set period the charged effect triggers based on the filled sections of the clock. You could do X damage per filled section, add an additional target to an attack per filled section, apply that many status effects, etc. This does NOT have to be a long term clock! A Soldier can set this clock on Round 1 and whatever the state of the clock is on Round 2 is what it’ll get. This gives the PCs the chance to completely neutralize the big attack, which is always exciting.
2. The Turn Cycle Charge. Depending on the effect, you’ll want to ensure that every player gets a chance to react before the attack fires. For Villains and the new initiative rules, this means using it on your first turn for the round. For Soldier this is easy, as everyone else in the conflict will act before they do. For Elite and Champions that aren’t villains, think carefully about how the turn order will cycle. Typically the effects on these kinds of skills are written like “This can only be used on your first/last/Xth turn in a round”, which helps remind you of when it’s good to use.
3. The Shutdown Charge. Give the Charge a weak spot. You’ll want to narrate how it might be a weak point, like “the big turbo laser has a giant fan gathering heat” for ice damage, or “the NPCs significant muscle mass lets him lift this massive spirit sword” for inflicting Weak. If the PCs hit the weak point in time, they end the entire Charge attack.