I am thinking about this for some time now, since my players declared war on another faction that would also have adventurers at their disposal.
Mostly I want to give my players variety in enemies, and thats when I though about making PC statblocks for different subclasses.
My only problem is that I don't want to match their power exactly, since that would mean a 50% chance for them to loose the fight. So just mathcing them with 6 Level 7 PCs is not the way.
I would like them to have a like 2/3 chance to win an encounter. Did anyone try to make PCs as enemies before and can give me some advice from personal experience?
My current ideas to balance the fights are:
Give them one less enemy than players in the Party or
Make the enemy PCs 2 levels lower than the Party or
I have often used counter parties of NPCs or given monsters character levels in situations similar to what you have described.
In my experience, gaining an understanding of the material in the "Creating Encounters" (DMG p.81-3) and "Creating a Monster" (DMG p.273-83) sections of the DMG was irreplaceable in my quest to continue this practice into my 5e games.
So I ran a campaign where I played a very high level character along with my PCs. I intentionally unleashed 8th level spells to aid the rest of the level 1 party, mostly as an intimidation factor. The character wouldnt stick around always, and would come and go, but they got very familiar and frightened with the abilities of this guy, and were always wary of pissing this guy off. Obviously, my PC was a villian who spent a lot of time simply manipulating the party, and it had the effect of making the PCs very afraid by the time they actually fought the other PC. So, depending on the setting of your world, maybe only make one or two PCs, but make them very powerful, far outclassing your group, so that there is a bit of unease going into an eventual fated battle between your PCs and the party.
The difficulty with PCs vs. NP-PCs is that things snowball fast. Player characters are glass cannons - they hit hard but don't have all that much hit points. Do you want to face one of your PCs with Action Surging warriors throwing 4 attacks their way? If there are 3 level 5 spellcasters on the enemy team, that's still potentially 24d6 worth of fireball damage to cope with.
If you have 6 x level 7 PCs up against 6 x level 5s, they'll drop at least one one of them before they get a turn, and on turn 2 they'll drop 2-3 more with both level and number advantage so your fight will be over in 2-3 turns.
But party vs. party is a classic. Instead of building PCs, construct a party from existing NPC monster stat blocks, and keep things simple - you don't have the mind-space to effectively manage 6 characters with all the abilities. For your 6 x level 7 PCs, I'd suggest:
This leaves the PCs with the advantage in action economy (6 turns compared to 5), the priest is an easy kill, the mage has some spicy things to throw but most of the enemy 'party' are simple "on my turn I attack" dudes. It should be a fun but fairly easy encounter. If you want to whack up the difficulty, a more powerful spell caster like a Diviner or a much harder melee like a Blackguard can increase the challenge.
I think many DMs have tried creating a "rival" NPC team through PC generation methods, and then realize there are better ways to spend your time if you're talking strictly about adventure/encounter design.
The reason why I don't believe in "crafting" NPC antagonist/monsters on a PC build is that the PC "sheet" and the PC itself is designed as something to play and advance through experience. Tying a DM up into that rule sets you up for a theorycraft metagame (on top of the mechanical issues in PC v PC) whereas working with statblocks is more efficient and give you more time to develop the important part of creating "rivals": their characterizations/personalities. In PC stats there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't often come into play in combat so, why is a DM doing all that additional work, outside of the pleasure of the theorycraft meta?
To that end Savnael and Androcus's guidance I feel are right on. I'm also curious about this "rival party" mechanic in the Neverdeep/CR adventure that'll be hitting stores shortly. Mercer may be the sort of DM who does create "character sheets" for important NPCs, but I'm hoping there's more guidance in the vein of "here's how you manipulate a NPC statblock to deliver a custom challenge to your party."
I have done both and would like to mirror what MidnightPlat had said; statblocks are just a lot easier. The DMPC enemies can be fun sometimes and maybe in 1v1 encounters, but it is a very bloated monster in terms of what can actually be used for a combat encounter, especially when it is a situation of team vs team.
I agree with what others have said above. Using PC's, especially 6, would be just a horrendous undertaking. PC's have so many abilities and situational effects, it's hard to keep track of 1 or 2 PC's at a time, let alone more.
One thing you might want to look at is the "Sidekick" section in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. It allows for customizing creatures and giving them class levels, but doesn't have as much going on as a PC.
But party vs. party is a classic. Instead of building PCs, construct a party from existing NPC monster stat blocks, and keep things simple - you don't have the mind-space to effectively manage 6 characters with all the abilities.
This is exactly correct. I'm a proponent of monsters modified with class levels, counter-parties, etc. I do it in my games because I think it's interesting and fun. But unless this is going to be a recurring villain/antagonist whose actions significantly drive the plot, it won't be worth the work relative to modified stat blocks. Even then, think twice. It probably still won't be worth the work.
NPC stat blocks are allot easier and often even the full spell caster monsters are a pain if you are going to have 6 different ones. My advice is pick one or two moves you want to do and create a stat block with only those. With 6 I'd say maybe only one move each is appropriate for this encounter as that's 6 different effects to know. It may also be worth doing group strategies to keep things simpler for yourself rather than having 6 different strategies for each npc. You can group npcs into interesting blocks and treat them like a single monster similar to a swarm.
Some examples:
Artillery squad or archer squads. On a set initiative the make x attacks or spells per survivor. You can have them all go at once
Secret wizard. an archer with an illusionist or enchanter using subtle spell and a disguise to also appear to also be an archer. Spells just appear and players need to take note that one of archers doesn't seem to be firing to notice they are the secret wizard. You can run the archers and wizards together , then if the players pass some insight or investigation check you just point to an archer and say "that ones the wizard"
Phalanx . A few gladiator with pole arm master or sentinel which basically forms a wall between the players and a squishy ranged attacker like an archer, rogue or wizard. Move them together in a block or in a line and they make an attack each when in range, if some one moves in range they get opportunity attacks and stop moving. You can treat it like one big moving environmental hazard.
Buff squad. A couple of spell casters buff up a powerful martial combatant while protecting themselves with blur or similar spells and casting cantrips or dodging. Pick a strong fighter npc and give them the effects of haste, enlarge/reduce and [Tooltip Not Found]. I'd even go so far as to treat it as to roll the wizards into this the fighters stat block like a kind of swarm. On his turn the buffs trigger and turns after that he can make an additional fire bolt per wizard, like they're channeling power into him.
I have often used counter parties of NPCs or given monsters character levels in situations similar to what you have described.
In my experience, gaining an understanding of the material in the "Creating Encounters" (DMG p.81-3) and "Creating a Monster" (DMG p.273-83) sections of the DMG was irreplaceable in my quest to continue this practice into my 5e games.
^---------- This is the simplest and best piece of advice on this thread thus far.
This can be done by assiging a different creature type to an existing NPC statblock (eg. Half Red Dragon Veteran, there is a set of instructions for the Half Dragon Template that might provide some inspiration), or by assisgning charater levels via Monsters with Classes.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Classes all have signature features. Toss one or two onto an NPC and call it a day.
If you want to give your players a variety of enemies, the best thing you can do with the highest return on investment is to get comfortable modifying monster stat blocks or making your own. Make some bad guys, pay attention while playing them, and adjust your process accordingly. Finding that sweet spot where an NPC is simple to run but also evocative of the concept you're trying to get across is a process that takes time and experience.
There aren't any problems, fundamentally with using player character sheets instead of statblocks. There's more work to make a character sheet instead of using a statblock, so you can save on prep by just doing a statblock, but that's not the biggest deal. However, there are two things to be wary about.
The biggest danger of building player characters is the fact that they are infinitely harder to balance than a statblock. Players come at many different skill levels and are constrained by the rules of the table. As a DM, there's always a temptation to fudge or buff your NPCs if you're attached to them- I've run campaigns for years and I don't even remember most of the characters I've played, but I still have the bad habit of "Well, I'm going to give this character bonus ability scores because they'll probably be outnumbered if the party fights them" or "I'll give them some items, let me just shopping list a few of the best ones" or similar lines of thought. That tends to be more meaningful for NPCs you develop throughout the campaign, so it's not as big of a deal for one off "party vs. party" encounters, but it is something to consider.
The second problem is that playing characters is much more complicated than playing statblocks. You have a lot of options on a character, and this can be bad in two different ways- playing more optimally than your party *and* not knowing how to play a bunch of different characters. I firmly believe that it takes about ten to twelve hours of combat to "learn" a character (less if you're very familiar with the class or playstyle, but never zero). Unless you're basically doing builds you're already familiar with, it's almost guaranteed that you won't be optimizing your characters you're using, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if your party doesn't optimize. However, it can make the encounter much more work to run and make your turns take longer- think about how long it takes for a player to play a turn vs. how long it takes for you to run a turn for a simple statblock. Now imagine that you're taking turns equivalent to the player turns (or more likely longer since you aren't as familiar with the sheet) and you have a potential time sink that makes the combat uninteresting.
Alternatively, you could spend too much time prepping and over-optimize your characters. One person playing multiple characters will almost always do better than multiple people playing a similar configuration of characters because you have perfect communication and know what your plans are for your entire party of characters. There will almost always be miscommunications or lack of awareness about the abilities of other characters in the party that makes players less effective than a single DM running a similar party. This problem is less serious if you aren't trying to optimize, but it can be a problem even if you don't think about it.
Even with all of this, I wouldn't say don't do it. There's plenty of reasons why you might want a character instead of a statblock, and they're not all bad. Just be aware of the above concerns. To respond to your suggestions about how to maybe do it, I think the one that makes the most sense is to just reduce the number of enemies by one. That makes things easier for you to manage, automatically makes balance easier because of the differential in action economy (so the players have an advantage), and avoids some of the pitfalls of the other methods. To respond more specifically:
Making the enemies two levels lower is a huge jump. Assuming your party is mid to high level, that's a lot to begin with, but if you're at lower levels (i.e. 4-7) a two level difference is very dramatic and will be felt strongly. Basically, any level gap that changes proficiency bonus, adds a new level of spells, or gives an ASI (for more power-gaming oriented groups that use feats for optimizing character effectiveness) is going to result in a very big disparity that will make the encounter much easier than two-thirds chances of success. Every mechanic, from HP to proficiency bonus to spell slots, is increased by level, so reducing that does the same thing, but it will make your characters feel like wet paper and not an interesting challenge.
Removing the proficiency bonus is going to have the same effect of trivializing the encounter. Even commoners add proficiency bonuses to their club attacks. If you want to do something like this, use a reduced ability score array instead. Removing game mechanics like proficiency bonuses entirely does two things- it not only makes it so that your characters are so ineffective that they're not a threat to the party (assuming you're at a level where proposing two levels down doesn't result in a curb stomp) but it also blatantly removes the mechanic. If I were playing at a table where a DM just removed proficiency bonuses from monsters, I would be insulted. Not only does this mean that your characters will be pathetically bad at things that their classes should be good at (basically anything with proficiency) it also tosses out a game mechanic that is intended to make things interesting- you'll be subtracting at least two from basically every roll that should be a challenge to your party's ability.
The static damage bonus to damage rolls is perhaps a little more permissible- after all, a creature with an ability modifier of +0 doesn't add anything to their damage rolls. However, if you want this outcome, just reduce ability scores to a point where you feel like the numbers are "safe". Mismatching to hit and damage rolls is potentially a cause of concern for characters who understand systems (if I saw a DM roll a +10 to hit but add +0 to the damage I would assume that the monster is *more* powerful, not less, because it's being carried by a huge modifier somewhere) but it also makes it a bit difficult.
That said, all this balance comes down to your party. Maybe your players are flower sniffers who don't want difficult combat, and making the encounter too easy isn't something that would make them check out. Or, perhaps, they're relatively new and they don't have optimization as a goal and they're not trying to break things (I am extremely jaded about this as a DM after years of power gamers at my table, so I worry about it more than most probably need to). Without knowing more about your group, you might not need to worry about some of my concerns. That said, I would always recommend "Same level, same mechanics, just one less" in this situation because it removes so many other balance considerations automatically. Just make sure that you try to build your characters with the same headspace as your players if you choose to go this way, because it is *very* easy to mess up balancing player characters against each other in either direction.
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I am thinking about this for some time now, since my players declared war on another faction that would also have adventurers at their disposal.
Mostly I want to give my players variety in enemies, and thats when I though about making PC statblocks for different subclasses.
My only problem is that I don't want to match their power exactly, since that would mean a 50% chance for them to loose the fight. So just mathcing them with 6 Level 7 PCs is not the way.
I would like them to have a like 2/3 chance to win an encounter. Did anyone try to make PCs as enemies before and can give me some advice from personal experience?
My current ideas to balance the fights are:
Give them one less enemy than players in the Party or
Make the enemy PCs 2 levels lower than the Party or
Set their proficiency Bonus to 0 or
Dont give them a static bonus on damage rolls
I have often used counter parties of NPCs or given monsters character levels in situations similar to what you have described.
In my experience, gaining an understanding of the material in the "Creating Encounters" (DMG p.81-3) and "Creating a Monster" (DMG p.273-83) sections of the DMG was irreplaceable in my quest to continue this practice into my 5e games.
So I ran a campaign where I played a very high level character along with my PCs. I intentionally unleashed 8th level spells to aid the rest of the level 1 party, mostly as an intimidation factor. The character wouldnt stick around always, and would come and go, but they got very familiar and frightened with the abilities of this guy, and were always wary of pissing this guy off. Obviously, my PC was a villian who spent a lot of time simply manipulating the party, and it had the effect of making the PCs very afraid by the time they actually fought the other PC. So, depending on the setting of your world, maybe only make one or two PCs, but make them very powerful, far outclassing your group, so that there is a bit of unease going into an eventual fated battle between your PCs and the party.
The difficulty with PCs vs. NP-PCs is that things snowball fast. Player characters are glass cannons - they hit hard but don't have all that much hit points. Do you want to face one of your PCs with Action Surging warriors throwing 4 attacks their way? If there are 3 level 5 spellcasters on the enemy team, that's still potentially 24d6 worth of fireball damage to cope with.
If you have 6 x level 7 PCs up against 6 x level 5s, they'll drop at least one one of them before they get a turn, and on turn 2 they'll drop 2-3 more with both level and number advantage so your fight will be over in 2-3 turns.
But party vs. party is a classic. Instead of building PCs, construct a party from existing NPC monster stat blocks, and keep things simple - you don't have the mind-space to effectively manage 6 characters with all the abilities. For your 6 x level 7 PCs, I'd suggest:
2 knights
1 Berserker
1 Mage
1 Priest
This leaves the PCs with the advantage in action economy (6 turns compared to 5), the priest is an easy kill, the mage has some spicy things to throw but most of the enemy 'party' are simple "on my turn I attack" dudes. It should be a fun but fairly easy encounter. If you want to whack up the difficulty, a more powerful spell caster like a Diviner or a much harder melee like a Blackguard can increase the challenge.
I think many DMs have tried creating a "rival" NPC team through PC generation methods, and then realize there are better ways to spend your time if you're talking strictly about adventure/encounter design.
The reason why I don't believe in "crafting" NPC antagonist/monsters on a PC build is that the PC "sheet" and the PC itself is designed as something to play and advance through experience. Tying a DM up into that rule sets you up for a theorycraft metagame (on top of the mechanical issues in PC v PC) whereas working with statblocks is more efficient and give you more time to develop the important part of creating "rivals": their characterizations/personalities. In PC stats there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't often come into play in combat so, why is a DM doing all that additional work, outside of the pleasure of the theorycraft meta?
To that end Savnael and Androcus's guidance I feel are right on. I'm also curious about this "rival party" mechanic in the Neverdeep/CR adventure that'll be hitting stores shortly. Mercer may be the sort of DM who does create "character sheets" for important NPCs, but I'm hoping there's more guidance in the vein of "here's how you manipulate a NPC statblock to deliver a custom challenge to your party."
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I have done both and would like to mirror what MidnightPlat had said; statblocks are just a lot easier. The DMPC enemies can be fun sometimes and maybe in 1v1 encounters, but it is a very bloated monster in terms of what can actually be used for a combat encounter, especially when it is a situation of team vs team.
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I agree with what others have said above. Using PC's, especially 6, would be just a horrendous undertaking. PC's have so many abilities and situational effects, it's hard to keep track of 1 or 2 PC's at a time, let alone more.
One thing you might want to look at is the "Sidekick" section in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. It allows for customizing creatures and giving them class levels, but doesn't have as much going on as a PC.
This is exactly correct. I'm a proponent of monsters modified with class levels, counter-parties, etc. I do it in my games because I think it's interesting and fun. But unless this is going to be a recurring villain/antagonist whose actions significantly drive the plot, it won't be worth the work relative to modified stat blocks. Even then, think twice. It probably still won't be worth the work.
NPC stat blocks are allot easier and often even the full spell caster monsters are a pain if you are going to have 6 different ones. My advice is pick one or two moves you want to do and create a stat block with only those. With 6 I'd say maybe only one move each is appropriate for this encounter as that's 6 different effects to know. It may also be worth doing group strategies to keep things simpler for yourself rather than having 6 different strategies for each npc. You can group npcs into interesting blocks and treat them like a single monster similar to a swarm.
Some examples:
Artillery squad or archer squads. On a set initiative the make x attacks or spells per survivor. You can have them all go at once
Secret wizard. an archer with an illusionist or enchanter using subtle spell and a disguise to also appear to also be an archer. Spells just appear and players need to take note that one of archers doesn't seem to be firing to notice they are the secret wizard. You can run the archers and wizards together , then if the players pass some insight or investigation check you just point to an archer and say "that ones the wizard"
Phalanx . A few gladiator with pole arm master or sentinel which basically forms a wall between the players and a squishy ranged attacker like an archer, rogue or wizard. Move them together in a block or in a line and they make an attack each when in range, if some one moves in range they get opportunity attacks and stop moving. You can treat it like one big moving environmental hazard.
Buff squad. A couple of spell casters buff up a powerful martial combatant while protecting themselves with blur or similar spells and casting cantrips or dodging. Pick a strong fighter npc and give them the effects of haste, enlarge/reduce and [Tooltip Not Found]. I'd even go so far as to treat it as to roll the wizards into this the fighters stat block like a kind of swarm. On his turn the buffs trigger and turns after that he can make an additional fire bolt per wizard, like they're channeling power into him.
^---------- This is the simplest and best piece of advice on this thread thus far.
This can be done by assiging a different creature type to an existing NPC statblock (eg. Half Red Dragon Veteran, there is a set of instructions for the Half Dragon Template that might provide some inspiration), or by assisgning charater levels via Monsters with Classes.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Classes all have signature features. Toss one or two onto an NPC and call it a day.
If you want to give your players a variety of enemies, the best thing you can do with the highest return on investment is to get comfortable modifying monster stat blocks or making your own. Make some bad guys, pay attention while playing them, and adjust your process accordingly. Finding that sweet spot where an NPC is simple to run but also evocative of the concept you're trying to get across is a process that takes time and experience.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
This. If you need help, I compiled a (out-of-date) thread that tracks official monsters with PC-like abilities.
There aren't any problems, fundamentally with using player character sheets instead of statblocks. There's more work to make a character sheet instead of using a statblock, so you can save on prep by just doing a statblock, but that's not the biggest deal. However, there are two things to be wary about.
The biggest danger of building player characters is the fact that they are infinitely harder to balance than a statblock. Players come at many different skill levels and are constrained by the rules of the table. As a DM, there's always a temptation to fudge or buff your NPCs if you're attached to them- I've run campaigns for years and I don't even remember most of the characters I've played, but I still have the bad habit of "Well, I'm going to give this character bonus ability scores because they'll probably be outnumbered if the party fights them" or "I'll give them some items, let me just shopping list a few of the best ones" or similar lines of thought. That tends to be more meaningful for NPCs you develop throughout the campaign, so it's not as big of a deal for one off "party vs. party" encounters, but it is something to consider.
The second problem is that playing characters is much more complicated than playing statblocks. You have a lot of options on a character, and this can be bad in two different ways- playing more optimally than your party *and* not knowing how to play a bunch of different characters. I firmly believe that it takes about ten to twelve hours of combat to "learn" a character (less if you're very familiar with the class or playstyle, but never zero). Unless you're basically doing builds you're already familiar with, it's almost guaranteed that you won't be optimizing your characters you're using, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if your party doesn't optimize. However, it can make the encounter much more work to run and make your turns take longer- think about how long it takes for a player to play a turn vs. how long it takes for you to run a turn for a simple statblock. Now imagine that you're taking turns equivalent to the player turns (or more likely longer since you aren't as familiar with the sheet) and you have a potential time sink that makes the combat uninteresting.
Alternatively, you could spend too much time prepping and over-optimize your characters. One person playing multiple characters will almost always do better than multiple people playing a similar configuration of characters because you have perfect communication and know what your plans are for your entire party of characters. There will almost always be miscommunications or lack of awareness about the abilities of other characters in the party that makes players less effective than a single DM running a similar party. This problem is less serious if you aren't trying to optimize, but it can be a problem even if you don't think about it.
Even with all of this, I wouldn't say don't do it. There's plenty of reasons why you might want a character instead of a statblock, and they're not all bad. Just be aware of the above concerns. To respond to your suggestions about how to maybe do it, I think the one that makes the most sense is to just reduce the number of enemies by one. That makes things easier for you to manage, automatically makes balance easier because of the differential in action economy (so the players have an advantage), and avoids some of the pitfalls of the other methods. To respond more specifically:
Making the enemies two levels lower is a huge jump. Assuming your party is mid to high level, that's a lot to begin with, but if you're at lower levels (i.e. 4-7) a two level difference is very dramatic and will be felt strongly. Basically, any level gap that changes proficiency bonus, adds a new level of spells, or gives an ASI (for more power-gaming oriented groups that use feats for optimizing character effectiveness) is going to result in a very big disparity that will make the encounter much easier than two-thirds chances of success. Every mechanic, from HP to proficiency bonus to spell slots, is increased by level, so reducing that does the same thing, but it will make your characters feel like wet paper and not an interesting challenge.
Removing the proficiency bonus is going to have the same effect of trivializing the encounter. Even commoners add proficiency bonuses to their club attacks. If you want to do something like this, use a reduced ability score array instead. Removing game mechanics like proficiency bonuses entirely does two things- it not only makes it so that your characters are so ineffective that they're not a threat to the party (assuming you're at a level where proposing two levels down doesn't result in a curb stomp) but it also blatantly removes the mechanic. If I were playing at a table where a DM just removed proficiency bonuses from monsters, I would be insulted. Not only does this mean that your characters will be pathetically bad at things that their classes should be good at (basically anything with proficiency) it also tosses out a game mechanic that is intended to make things interesting- you'll be subtracting at least two from basically every roll that should be a challenge to your party's ability.
The static damage bonus to damage rolls is perhaps a little more permissible- after all, a creature with an ability modifier of +0 doesn't add anything to their damage rolls. However, if you want this outcome, just reduce ability scores to a point where you feel like the numbers are "safe". Mismatching to hit and damage rolls is potentially a cause of concern for characters who understand systems (if I saw a DM roll a +10 to hit but add +0 to the damage I would assume that the monster is *more* powerful, not less, because it's being carried by a huge modifier somewhere) but it also makes it a bit difficult.
That said, all this balance comes down to your party. Maybe your players are flower sniffers who don't want difficult combat, and making the encounter too easy isn't something that would make them check out. Or, perhaps, they're relatively new and they don't have optimization as a goal and they're not trying to break things (I am extremely jaded about this as a DM after years of power gamers at my table, so I worry about it more than most probably need to). Without knowing more about your group, you might not need to worry about some of my concerns. That said, I would always recommend "Same level, same mechanics, just one less" in this situation because it removes so many other balance considerations automatically. Just make sure that you try to build your characters with the same headspace as your players if you choose to go this way, because it is *very* easy to mess up balancing player characters against each other in either direction.