How do you figure XP points for character like villains?
I have the PCs fighting a....
human 5th level warlock,
human 5th level warlord,
and a bunch of human rabble worth 31 XP each.
What are the rules for figuring out XP for the warlord and warlock?
Any thoughts?
I'm not sure how I would rank the difficulty of either an actual 5th level warlock or warlord. Of the top of my head, I think that they have about half the hit points of a monster of their level. I think they would have a bit more with the warlord's healing and I think that their encounter and daily powers will be quite a bit more brutal than the standard level five monster. I think that it would even out, and that they might work out as 5th level monsters XP-wise (200 XP each). But in the battle you might get a better idea of how tough they are, so I would say be ready to increase or decrease the difficulty if the difficulty of the villains were miscalculated.
There is also a guide in the DMG for applying class "templates" to monsters to give them class related abilities. I don't really like this, but it is still an option.
For those, what I would do is, instead of building them like PCs, I would build them like monsters. Figure out an attack bonus, hit points, and defensive abilities based on how tough I want them to be (which would determine XP). I would then find a few warlock or warlord powers and give them stuff that looks good. After that I compare it to the damage table and other monsters to make sure I didn't go overboard (or make it too weak). I think that this way, if you are starting from scratch, is the fastest and still should have most of the abilities they would have used as leveled characters.
One note, I believe that one should be careful with monster healing abilities (like those that might appear with the Warlord). Depending on how you implement them, they can really throw a lot of extra hit points for some monsters. In my experience, the best cases of it still ended up with the battle having several boring rounds where everyone had expended all of their encounter abilities.
Blazej is correct. 4e is not designed for monsters to be built like PCs. PCs have way more powers, in most cases, then momsters. Plus more surges, plus APs. PC on PC can be done, of course, but. IMO, there's no need and it would be hard to balance encounters.
The DMG has templates that let you add some PC elements to other monsters, or you can use the various MMs, and the Monster Builder to find creatures close to what you envision them as as PCs.
4e Monsters are very easy to build and tweak, it's one of the strengths of the system. For instance, for your encounter, I'd take the Human Noble, which is very warlord like to start with, and change one of it's encounter powers to a healing one (I'd choose to remove Urge Hestiation myself). That would make it a perfect, balanced, monster Warlord.
For the Warlock, I'd use the Death Cultist Mage as is and reskin it's powers (ie: rename them, and givem the a different look).
That's just one of many ways to do it, and in the end you have a 'Warlord' and 'Warlock' that look like PCs on the table, and are balanced inside the system.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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When I was running 4th Ed, I used a PC-built enemy at least once or twice (I remember a star-pact warlock, but I think I did another one too). He definitely had a lot more variety in his abilities than a typical monster, which was great a boss-spellcaster type guy and kept the party on their toes. I thought he was a very fun antagonist, but everyone runs things differently.
In a similar vein, I also on multiple occasions gave enemies magic items they could use vs. the party, weapons and armor in particular. Another fun addition, with extra versatility.
I'm going to go with the majority and recommend that the PC templates are usually the better way to go in this case. The templates are really quite well designed in my experience and do give the players a feeling of fighting class based enemies - mainly the enemies get a bit of a glass cannon feel, Unusually large number of good powers but not so many hps as the usual elite monsters of their level. I use that option reasonably often and the fights are often quite fun.
On the other hand running true PCs as monsters is tricky to balance because PC parties are built around using surges and the DMs enemy PC group will either mimic that (probably turns into a slog as both sides cycle through healing surges) or the DMs enemy PC group will be deficient in this regards in which case the enemy PC group has very few hps for their level making this far to easy.
On a side note I agree with Jason Nelson in regards to giving bad guys magic items - I do so myself and it tends to add to the fun without really throwing things out of whack to any significant degree.
What Amelia said, except about giving the warlord healing powers. I make it a personal rule to never ever use foes with healing. Foes last long enough as it is without BAMF I'M BACK BABY!
What Amelia said, except about giving the warlord healing powers. I make it a personal rule to never ever use foes with healing. Foes last long enough as it is without BAMF I'M BACK BABY!
I think if your going to include a Warlord in the enemies roster then a healing power is close to required since such healing is a defining feature of Warlords.
Essentially I think we are dealing with what amounts to an encounter creation issue here. Healing can be bad in encounters because it can really turn into a slog. One answer is just not to use a Warlord, pick a different class and that solves this problem right there. Most class based enemies actually work in the other direction - they are harder hitting but tend to have less hps.
Another option is to simply keep it very rare. The fact that the encounter devolves to at wills might not be a bad thing - but only if that is a rare occurrence. This actually depends a lot on your players and their class choices - if the players party is made out of defenders and healers its more likely things will go to slogs more often and the Warlord becomes a really bad choice for an enemy - if its made out of strikers then the issue is much less of a problem.
Furthermore the issue, in my experience, becomes less and less of a problem as the levels go up - especially because mile stones no longer effect how many magic item powers a character can use. As my group has moved into Paragon I've found that we run out of powers far less often then what was happening earlier on. We all now have loads of powers - both on our character sheets but also 4-8 more hooked to magic items. Furthermore we are entwing both our own powers but also each others powers to make potent combos. The result is it actually takes quite a while to use them all up and we often hit very hard. Here healing powers are a little less of an issue.
Thanks all for the advice and ideas.