5E's greatest weakness, in my opinion is the difficulty of creating NPCs. There is a "process" but compared to previous editions it's cumbersome and difficult to perform. Older editions, you "built" the NPCs using the same rules as the PCs and down the road you went. Instead, in 5E NPCs are just other "monsters" effectively with abilities that appear to be close to an equivalent PC, but there really doesn't allow the DM to have the flexibility to create memorable advasaries. Especially as I usually have my foes to be evil groups instead of "monsters" so to speak.

Adversaries & Allies is basically what the game is missing in this department (it's missing a lot of other stuff, but this is a biggie to me.) It's by far the best and most used unofficial product I use and pretty high up the list of things I use over all.

If you're the sort of DM that prefers humanoids, urban campaigns, or that sort of game, the monster manual appendix was surprisingly 'unbalanced'. CR's for creatures existed all across the gamut, with many holes.

This product fills those holes. It preforms that role, perfectly.

I use this resource all the time, it's so useful and adds some variety from the base NPCs in the MM.

I've gotten quite a bit more use out of this product than I had originally expected. It really does broaden the range of npc stats nicely, filling in some pretty big gaps. It's nice to have easy access stats that mix things up a little, so it's not all guard, guard, commoner x10, and omg, a scout!

This is a great resource that builds upon my most used section of the Monster Manual, the human NPC section. Definitely a good resource that adds value and options that you can't easily find elsewhere! This is definitely a product worth paying for.

A good collection of usefull NPCs ... and finally created by following the MM / DMG guidelines.

Fantastic list of human characters to expand on the MM. Saves time and as previously stated is a good look at how to put something on the Dungeon Masters Guild the right way. Great work!

This valuable collection of NPCs is a benefit not only to DMs but also to Dungeon Masters Guild authors.

This is a perfect product in that it fills in the gaps that a GM might miss or may not have time to prepare for if they get put on the spot. Further, I appreciate the design notes, allowing GMs to know what the philosophy behind the design was and how to modify it.

Very well done and very useful. Thank you for the excellent work.

Great Product!! I keep it at my side for every session. I reskin monster and NPC's a lot, so it gives me a handy reference for stat blocks.

This is my favorite kind of supplement for a DM because it allows me to fill a world with robust, well-designed NPCs while leaving me enough time to focus on story, villains, and treasure. Dan has done a great job of crafting the NPCs I NEED in a game, whether they're minions or townspeople. I'll be using this book for my brand new campaign and I just can't wait.

Check out my full review on Going Last!

Nicely done and great to have handy during a session.

My favorite type of supplement! Immediately useful, well-thought-out, and attractively formatted.

Time is a precious commodity, and this is the kind of product I was looking for to help me build my game. It is well-built and edited, with a very good variety of characters and interesting ideas to populate your world. What I was looking for is coverage of the basic classes (Monk, Ranger, etc.), and it does that very well, in addition to introducing some original ones (Skald! Oracle!). The charm of this description format does lie in its terseness, and the product still makes interesting descriptions for all character archetypes.

All in all it's very well worth getting.

That being said, there are a few elements I would consider to be somewhat lacking in that they are very useful when building and playing encounters, especially "in a pinch" (which is the general idea behind grabbing this kind of document in the first place - you don't have time to build all NPCs beforehand).

1) First, scaling: Having archetypes cover more than one experience level/Challenge Rating would be extremely useful. For instance, adding a CR5 and CR 8 Ranger template to the existing CR2 one would be helpful in making sure the encounters "scale" with PC levels and contribute to make the document even more useful on the long run. 2) Second, as these will be often used not as a base for PCs but as NPCs and encounters, the action choices could be made a bit clearer/streamlined, especially for mage types. Take example of the Warlock, for whom the Eldritch Bolt can and should have been an "Attack option" instead of a listed spell (which you have to look up). The same argument could be made for Mages with Magic Missile (although it's not a Cantrip per se, it's probably easier to consider it as such for gameplay purposes). 3) Also useful would have been a "tactics" section when relevant, giving basic combat and encounter steps for each achetype. "A Battlemage generally comes into combat having cast Blade Ward and taking targets out from a distance with Fireball, conjuring an Elemental before the fight if he can", or "The Charlatan will attempt to avoid conflict by any means necessary, for instance fooling the PCs into following false leads or pretending to be someone else entirely".

Being generally highly critical, I would have given it 3½ stars had half-stars been available, but having to choose between 3 and 4 stars, the product is certainly decent enough to warrant 4 stars, I'm just not entirely certain this will still be useful with my campaign a few months from now when PCs have significantly rised in levels.