Compact Stat Blocks for Pathfinder

Once upon a time I came across an article about doing up skeletal location/encounter/scene notes. It's a great technique that lets you see the important parts of a scene at a glance. As a Pathfinder player though, one thing that really held me back form using this system was the stat blocks. You see, the article was written by somebody that DMed an older system… one that has magnificently concise stat blocks.

Wow, remember those days?

At the time I was running a fairly low-level game, and even a lowly goblin's stat block is pretty big and would dominate my newly streamlined notes. I decided to try paring Pathfinder stat blocks down to the essentials. I ended up trimming this down to this:

Troll
lrg; init+2; drkvis60, llvis, scent, perc+8; ac16 (t11, ff14); hp 63; regen 5 (acid or fire); f+11/r+4/w+3; sp30; bite +8/1d8+5, 2 claws +8/1d6+5; cmb/d+10/22; Best 268
special: rend (2 claws/1d6+7)

Not exactly 1e level brevity, but way better. Even when you add a few class levels, things remain fairly legible:

Goblin Boomer
init+4; drkvis60, perc+7; ac14 (t14, ff11); hp 36; f+5/r+8/w+0; sp20; bomb(dc15) +9/3d6+3 fire(splash)/×2 or scrap bmb(dc15) +9/3d6+3 +3 bleed (ref neagtes)/×2 or immolation bmb(dc15) +9/1d6+3 fire for 3rnds (full rnd ref neagtes)/×2; cmb/d+2/15; Perram’s Goblins 4
special: mutagen (+2 nat. arm & +4/–2 to str/int, dex/wis, or con/cha for 50m); pt blnk sht (+1 atk & dmg within 30′); precise bombs (select 3 squares to not be affected by splash effects); precise shot (no –4 for thrw into melee); ricochet splsh wpn (make atk w/splsh wpn if it misses & lands in an occupied sqr)
spells (cl5): 2nd (3/d)—cat’s grace, blur, defensive shock; 1st (5/d)—shield, jump, abjuring step, linebreaker, targeted bomb admixture

As it turns out though, paring stat blocks down is a fair bit or work, so I asked on Google+ if anybody had done something similar. Unfortunatly, it seemed that I was breaking new ground. So I continued on my own.

After a real-life test drive, I decided that my compact stat blocks work for me. At the moment, they cover only what I've needed so far, and suffer from a bad case of evolutionary messiness. Over the course of several months, I've refined the formatting in a way that works for me. Because of this, there are incosistencies in how similar things are formatted between blocks. With any luck I'll go back and make everything consistent one day, but even if I did slight format refinements would probably sneak into my next set of additions leading to a fresh set of inconsistencies.

Also, I found pretty quickly that condensed spell descriptions where pretty handy. Again, you may find some inconsistencies or stuff missing that you feel you need, but these work for me.

A few notes: