A question on NPC stats.

[kisangoli57]

Hey I really want to run my next game with these rules but I come from the OSR community where statblocks are easy and readily available. Right now I'm struggling to find any statblocks for things I think will show up often in my game i.e., city guards, space police, pirates, other humanoids, etc.

Are stats for things like this available anywhere, if so where? When I need a bandit or town guard in DnD I just flick open the book and I'll find it no issue. Doesn't seem to be the case for Starfinder. Am I expected to roll up characters when my players are looking to shoot first and ask questions later?

Thanks in response to any answers.

[Peg'giz]

There are NPC stat blocks in books like the pact worlds.
Unfortunately they are not available at aonsrd.com yet. :(

[Garretmander]

If you don't own the first alien archive, the 'Creating monsters and NPCs' tables are on archives of nethys. Rolling up NPC characters is vastly streamlined in starfinder compared to making a whole level X character in other systems.

If your players get into an unexpected fight, it's possible to run a short encounter straight from those tables. For instance, a guardsman might be a CR2 combatant, just check the CR2 combatant line for stats instead of a statblock. The only major difficulty with doing so this way is in figuring out what loot they have if the players want to grab it.

While it adds to the prep work, maybe jot down a few weapons and armor of a level between your player's level and their level-3. That way you always have a small pool of loot to draw from when they encounter random NPCs.

[Ascalaphus]

Overall an NPC in Starfinder consists of two main parts:

- Numbers that are appropriate to its CR
- Some interesting abilities

The numbers can, and probably should, come almost entirely directly from the tables in Alien Archive 1. If you want a CR 2 guard, look at the CR 2 row in the combatant table.

This is a significant difference from PF1 where you built NPCs much like PCs, and where sometimes authors might try to make them as powerful as possible for their nominal CR by cleverly stacking modifiers. In Starfinder, that's just self-deception; if you wanted the amount of challenge provided by a CR 3 monster, don't try to dress up a CR 2 monster with clever hacks, just make a CR 3 monster.

So an interesting effect from this is that monsters of the same CR have very similar numbers. Does that make combat boring? It shouldn't, because of the other thing: interesting abilities. Giving NPCs some interesting abilities is really where you should be putting most of your effort.

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Also, to save you a lot of effort, this tool:
Starfinder Monster Builder