Emotional Attachment
Poor BBEG. That straight up sucks! I mean, do you have any idea how long it takes for a pet purple worm to grow to its full size? Neither do I actually, and I’m sure as shit not trawling through multiple editions worth of lore to come up with the answer. Judging by our dark overlord’s reaction, however, I’m guessing it was a considerable time investment.
Although I’ve never personally lost a colossal lilac annelid to the forces of Good, I do have some empathy for our grieving skele-man. Speaking as a GM, I know what it’s like to pour over a bestiary, cross-referencing abilities and applying conditional modifiers in the margins. Especially when you get to high-level play, GMs wind up sinking hours into understanding complex monster mechanics and figuring out how to make combat interesting. It’s fun work, but make no mistake: it is work. That’s why it can be such a tough pill to swallow when your precious beast gets exploded in Round 1.
The same principle applies to enemy NPCs, only more so. Sure you can throw an archmage at the party, but it’s so much more satisfying when you build that wizard from scratch! You’re shelling out for the Hero Lab subscription or D&D Beyond or whatever. Why not create a major antagonist with the PC rules? Sure it’s time-consuming, but this is an important figure in the campaign mythos! She’s got a tragic backstory and relatable motivations and everything. And hey, maybe if one of the PCs goes down in combat, she could come in as a suitable PC replacement, ready and waiting with a redemption arc for—
And just like that, it’s dead Jim. This is the most dangerous moment for a GM. Because your precious baby is lying in a growing pool of blood. You’ve only got seconds to convey that wicked-cool backstory with a few last words. And maybe, if you do well enough, the PCs will realize how much work you put into this NPC, and offer to heal them, and then they can joint the party, and then… Oh dear. It seems like I’m describing a DMPC. Hmmm….
My point here is simply this: It’s OK to put a little blood, sweat, and tears into your antagonists. If you do, it’s only natural to grow attached to them. But never forget that the PCs are the stars of the show. Learn to let your monsters go. You can always make another.
So how abut it, GMs? Have you ever grown attached to your villains? Did they manage to go out on a high note, or were you left in agony as the PCs killed ’em off before they could use their cool abilities or even-cooler story hooks? Tell us your tales of untimely monster death down in the comments!
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A while nack, I ran some “what if”-scenarios on a forum.
Basically, I’d describe morally ambiguous situations and ask people what they’d do if they were playing D&D.
The main ‘villain’ was a lichly mystic theurge, whose evil goal was… to be bloody well left alone so he could study. I got quite fond of him.
In one scenario, the lich was blamed for a plague – that he actually had nothing to do with. The players caught him by surprise and pulled his home down on his head, only for their cleric to drop dead of plague – and the lich to carjack his corpse.
“I did not spread this plague, but if you swear to let me walk, I can cure it here and now.”
In a later scenario, the players come across a beautiful mountain valley, with a well-ordered eutopia inside it. The people are happy, healthy, safe and well-fed. They have the latest advancements in magic and science and a good education. They are also all orphans, adopted from some of the worst places in the world. They LOVE their benefactor, who only asks they keep the place nice and not let anyone into his tower.
One of the theoretical PCs looks at the tower and sees the benefactor on a balcony, giving him a sarcastic little wave. It’s the lich.
So. What would YOU do?
I would refer back to the notes from class.
http://www.mesacc.edu/~davpy35701/text/kant-v-mill.html
I wrapped up an official module some time ago. The BBEG of that module was… not that powerful, considering the things the players should have at their disposal by that point. I ended up buffing them considerably.
In the end, I got to use all the tricks I wanted to, and the players snatched victory from the jaws of death (quite literally – the fighter got a nat 20 on his death saving throw, which woke him up and allowed him to deal the finishing blow).
And it was great. I loved it, my players loved it. It wouldn’t have been nearly as fun a fight if I had left them untouched. The party would have wiped the floor with them and gotten an anticlimactic victory.
I think it’s great when players destroy an enemy that’s supposed to be strong. It makes them feel awesome. The very final fight though? They should have to work for it. I’ve had a few campaigns as a player where the final fight was very easy, and each time it left kind of a bitter taste in my mouth.
That’s the trouble though. It works great when the players’ decisions naturally reach that point. But if you have to force a dramatic confrontation in the name of “fun,” you risk your players’ agency. Balancing acts etc. etc.
This is one of the reasons I like Pathfinder, honestly. While the above event is certainly more common in PF due to the explosiveness of critical hits, I find that the best remedy for being overly attached to NPCs and Monsters is getting just as excited as the players at their victories – and that’s way easier to do when the victory is truly spectacular. And honestly, there is little that is as spectacular as a critical hit from a scythe coming off a charge into melee. It’s easy to get giddy with that much damage popping the BBEG, no matter how much work you put into the bad guy.
Basically, Pathfinder is the Shonen anime of d20 games and I can’t be mad about it.
Pathfinder monsters all have just enough Tian fluency to know the word, “Nani!?”
I think Lich needs some lessons on anatomy for his cobbled-up necromantic horrors. Judging by the severed chunk of meat, his swallow whole monster (purple worm?) only has a bunch of sealed muscles and a severed spinal column under its neck, and no throat, esophagus or similar orifice to gulp down adventurers through.
Unless its entire digestive system is located in its head, or it sends its meals into a extrdimensional stomach (like a bag of devouring or a Dwiergeth), it wouldn’t be able to do much other than violently chew its meals.
https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Dwiergeth
You misprononced “BBEG.”
Note that Paladin doesn’t have elbows.
Noodle/muppet arms have been well established as a canon part of the Handbook of Heroes setting, though, ever since we met Sorcerer’s bloodline matron!
It is a canon rule of nature in D&D world that when a hole is pierced in a body, “muscular action closes it”. So muscular action sealed the severed neck stump after the monster was beheaded. It’s just how things work.
Our DMs have this happen on occasion, simply due to crits or high power levels between PCs and bosses of pre-written APs.
For example, in Starfinder, a giant who had a cool gimmick didn’t get to use it before she was burned down by our high AOE / Operative / Soldier damage.
In Pathfinder, a miniboss Magus character died in one turn after our barbarian critted them three times in the same full attack, dealing enough damage to kill them and one of their mooks in the first round of combat. Such are rocket tag levels.
What’s more interesting though is when a boss you’ve been prepping gets overshadowed by a mook monster! Due to varying tactics, intelligence, and special abilities of monsters, there a wide disparity in how ‘dangerous’ an encounter is… And luck is a big factor as well. A bunch of basilisks are weak in numbers, but can easily TPK a party with their petrification, compared to a scary Asura 4 arms and a bunch of feats to do 4-8 attacks per round.
For example, for the aformentioned giant in Starfinder, the room before her, our party fought a bunch of plasma elementals. They were intended to be fodder, mooks to fight before the ‘big boss’ of that section.
They ended up being the toughest fight yet, due to a combination of a absurd amounts of crits (for them), critical misses (for us), as well as being durable enough to not be easily focused down (including crit immunity).
Their crits were particularly harrowing as they had the ‘wound’ critical property, which meant there was a real chance of us losing arms, eyes and/or legs permanently! Luckily, we made our fortitude saves on the crits, so nobody was left maimed right before fighting the actual boss.
The difficulty of that mook fight was wildly different than that of the actual boss, making the giant fight easier and a bit of a letdown as a consequence.
You’ll see new GMs bemoan their players from time to time.
“They’re OP! They mow through all my monstesr!”
That’s just the bell curve talking. Most of the time the PCs win handily. Occasionally, however, some random monster rolls rocks. Those are the ones that turn out to be memorable, and the apparent randomness is part of the charm.
The placement of Lich’s hand makes it look like the Purple Worm has a green evil glowing eye. I only now realized that Lich is hugging the poor thing. Daaw.
BBEG works on Rayman anatomy.
I suppose you could say he isn’t humerus.
Because of the trickiness of playing in the time of plague, I can end up making adversaries months before the players actually face them. Which means I have plenty of time to get attached before they’re unceremoniously roasted, pummeled, skewered, or Kali-Ma’d by an electrified griffon eidolon. That poor orc…
It doesn’t help that there’s always one of my players always ends up playing a grappler of some sort, which can shut down a lot of interesting options for humanoids. And it’s not always the same one! (Though that’s on me for not adapting to their tactics.) But yeah, with an alignment shift, a lot of my villains are characters I’d like to play since, you know, I built them. But that’s more an issue with being an eternal DM.
Is it just their mechanics, or do you miss out on the chance to explain backstory as well?
I can usually work in a little backstory before the PCs get to the fight scene, but nowhere near all of it.
It’s the classic struggle, you know? How do you introduce a character and allow it to go through an arc without the players simply ROLF-stomping it in a round?
I can’t help but imagine that BBEG is making the exact same pitiable sounds that the rancor keeper from Return of the Jedi did. (If Star Wars was a campaign, he’d be one of those NPCs everyone remembers despite never being relevant to the plot)
As for the actual topic, I’ve occasionally run a session for my group. Even my “weak” enemies tend to give them trouble, due to me being the only one who knows anything resembling small unit tactics. I’ve never had the chance to send something actually special at them, though. Been thinking about a Troll that ate something smart and inherited its’ brainpower…
Dang it, I didn’t read the mouseover text! XD
Lol
Alright, so let’s assume that purple worm growth rates are comparable to the giant Gippsland earthworm, the only giant earthworm whose growth rate I was able to find in the amount of time I was willing to spend Googling. It grows from 20 cm (8 in) long to up to 3 meters (10 feet)—increasing in size fifteen times over—in about five years.
Purple worms are 80 feet long, and according to the Forgotten Realms wiki they are nine feet long when hatched. That’s about a ninefold increase in size, which means I need to make up some math that sounds good to me to figure out how much quicker they grow up than giant Gippsland worms.
I think logarithms make sense. log(9)/log(15) ~= 0.81, so let’s assume purple worms take about four years to reach maturity.
#TheyDidTheMath
Just yesterday I was running Book 3 of the Reign of Winter adventure path, and the group got to the main boss of that book. Avoiding spoilers, but he has a really cool ability at his disposal. He was #3 in initiative order. #2 was the gunslinger who crit on him, doing nearly 100 damage in that one shot, with shooting him 2 more times. Dead
I really do appreciate the “legendary saves” that 5e monsters get. It doesn’t get rid of monster crits like that gunslinger’s, but at least it reduces the chances for a one-hit-KO.
Oh I love all my villains, I subscribed to the Magneto school of villainy where no one really is the villain but the hero of their own story.
Some of them didn’t have the greatest deaths but they burned quite bright on the way out.
Any particular favorites to memorialize?
Gaunt the mad dog, proof that I can make particularly nasty fighters and don’t just do mages. He’s got a kink in his head where he’s curious to see how strong he is what limitations he has where his strength ends. To that end he’s become a serial killer choosing particularly powerful targets and avoiding those that he knows he’s stronger than or those that can properly fight.
His weapons of choice are twin rhokas and dressed in brass armor with a face plate not covering his mouth so people can see his smile and foaming mouth when he starts getting worked up.
“never forget that the PCs are the stars of the show”? According to who? Why can’t heroes be a footnote on your legend? 🙁
Heroic fantasy is nice and all, but some of the best games we got have been tragedies. Fighting as much as your pc can until they fell 🙂
Heroes don’t need to be the center of everything. That is why i like Beast: The Primordial, you can eat heroes and do a favor to society since they are assholes 😀
You’re confusing “PCs” and “players.” Of course villains can dominate a narrative. But in a traditional RPG, you want to foreground the players’ actions. It’s all about offering the feeling of agency.
“in a traditional RPG”, that is the thing. Even if you know you are gonna loose doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the game 🙂
Rigging the game against the players, even more when they know it’s rigged can be challenging enough. Giving all of them a good, satisfactory death can be rewarding 🙂
You should try 😀
I’ve played Dread and Paranoia. Meant-to-lose works fine depending on systems and styles. It does make a fairly short D&D campaign though. And obviously, that’s what I’m talking about in today’s comic.
If we’re talking about a hypothetical grimdark structure where the PCs struggle, and then die, and then reroll as replacement protagonists, that can indeed work (e.g. Call of Cthulhu gaming). But let’s try and stay on topic.
But nobody want to hear the story of how we killed by accident the BBEG of one of our campaigns 🙁
Yeah we do! That’s literally what we’re talking about today!
Describe your GM’s tears. Where they an ugly crier, or more of a noble suffering type?
More like: “Quickly, i need to make them thing this was part of the plan all along”. You know that kind of crying in which a person still tryes to keep a straight face 🙂
He shouldn’t have that spikes made that much damage 😀
During the final battle literally all of the players made their save against the final boss’ homebrew 9th level spell due to a mix of good rolls, advantage from Hero’s Feast, and the Paladin’s aura.
I was displeased.
Isn’t it the worst? The “reward” for building a mechanically sound character is that you don’t get to experience the novel situation.
What was the effect you had intended?
“Halve Time”. Every player would make a save or be affected by the Slow spell, and for every creature that failed you can give an ally the effect of a Haste spell. It seems mundane to replicate 2 3rd level spells, but doing both at once for one concentration, and applying Haste to multiple allies is actually pretty powerful in 5E.
Nope. I take it back. That thing needed to die ASAP. 😛
Well technically he’s still alive because He managed to escape the previous fight alive so he had a Clone handy (Some readings, including the one I chose to use mean you can only have one clone in the pipe at a time, so you can’t set up an indefinite queue of extra-lives) in his Demiplane, but they killed his bodyguard and closest allies in a fashion that stuck, and his remaining associates were loyal to the dead ally rather than him, and a mercenary respectively, plus they took his base so he no longer has the resources to do any of his schemes He was thoroughly defeated enough that he would never be a bother to the party again.
In many of our 3.5 campaigns, our players have a rich history of taking out the boss in a trice, then casually sweeping up the lesser encounters that were supposed to build tension or give valuable information, etc.
One first-time DM spent weeks building an adventure with a black dragon and its lizardman minions, only for his wife’s PC to score a Crit (Nat.20 followed by another Nat.20) with a circlet of blasting maximized by a lucky draw from a critical hit deck– and one-shot the dragon.
My own solution to the thoroughly expected but utterly unpredictable antics of the PCs was to create a villain with a habit of constructing simulacrum/clones of himself and his major domo. Whenever the players would unexpectedly kill one (by, say, using stone shape to create a door into the planned Final Encounter and skip the preliminaries and alarms), the villain’s soul would migrate to a fresh copy at a different secret base somewhere. This came in especially handy when the players (again) puzzled out the most likely location of the baddie based on what they knew of the map, then cornered the BigBad in his hot tub. Simultaneously drowned, beaten, shot, and zapped is an ignominious way to go. (I had planned for them to find a drawn bath, a cooling mug of tea, and an empty wardrobe with hangers still swinging, having just missed him yet again. When they arrived in the bath chamber early and without warning, I’d written myself into a corner.)
Your comment reminded me…. We kind of sort of did this topic once before:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/best-laid-plans
Always an odd mix of hilarious and sad when the boss gets KOd immediately.
Lich probably got that as a hatchling pink worm Familiar at 1st lvl Wizard and took the path to vilainity and lichdoom just to gain enough CR to be allowed to improve it to full size Deep Purple.
I got one BBEG that I grew so fond of while designing his lair he’s now easily a TPK waiting to happen, should the players decide to take the aggressive route.
But the advantages of Lawful Evil are that they can’t really condemn him for the evil he does.
Well, of cause they can, but he’s got plausible deniability on top of all legal papers.
Don’t like it? well you can take it up with the authorities here, here and there for which I provide an essential convict and undead despatch service.
And you can give them up north a call who depend on my other service.
Now bugger off before I swallow you whole.
Who said BBEG was a lich?
I’ve found an image of your villain.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/45/64/5a4564dc280fea6f6e70decec9b8c592.jpg
Oh this brings back memories to the times I’ve ran Mutants and Masterminds games when I was but an inexperienced GM. I’ve had 2 powerhouse bosses rendered unconscious by 2 or so rounds.
I think I mentioned this before, but I had what was supposed to be this awesome boss fight set up where the heroes were going to fight this weather-controlling supervillain over the helicopter pad on a hospital, where the villain would summon air or water elementals to get in the PCs faces while he keeps his distance and hits them with ranged effects.
Unfortunately, this never happened. Two PCs pulled out tasers and zapped the guy unconscious before he can get out of his hospital bed. And before I can even ask everybody to roll for initiative! So instead I had to use the two air elementals the villain accidentally summoned when his powers first manifested to fight the heroes, one to fight the heroes in combat, and the other to manipulate the battlefield to give the PCs a disadvantage in the fight.
Much to my surprise however, the players actually enjoyed the encounter, even when I had to secretly improvise with what I had left.
Dialing in power level is ROUGH in M&M. A slight miscalculation put adversaries an order of magnitude apart in terms of power, lol.
Players like feeling like their plans changed the world. When they players realize they change the DM’s expectations, that feeling of agency only increases. In that sense, I think that “oh no my monster died too soon” isn’t a real problem. It’s just a “feels bad” for the GM.
Good on ya for letting the players go through with their taser machinations!
The funny thing is, I never had that problem of having adversaries being too powerful for the PCs to handle. If anything, I’ve ALWAYS had a problem with the reverse.
The worst of it was a PL 14 boss villain that was taken down by two PL 10 PCs in the second round. Imagine a super-strong villain getting restrained by a bola made out of paper chains, fell to the floor, and getting blown up by an enchanted card. I didn’t realize that one of the PC’s effects happened to target the one Defense that I dumpstatted until it was too late.
Another encounter in a different game with a swordsman with a punny name and a teenage Shego, both on the same PL as the PCs, the party beat them pretty quickly. The PCs hurt the villains way more than the villains hurt them.
And this was the second combat encounter, after the first one where the PCs fought a hulk-like monster that was 2 Power Levels stronger. That they also defeated pretty quickly.
As bit of a Wargamer GM, I thought that the players would be unimpressed with how “easy” and quick the combat encounters were, so I would be surprised and confused when they said that the encounters were fun. With what you said about how players like to feel that they made a difference, I never really thought of it like that.
So many vectors of attack… It makes me wonder if the key to an ideal super-team is just to cover as many of them as possible?
You’d be surprised by how easy it can be to make ONE CHARACTER that can cover all those things, even when the villain has all their defenses meeting the PL limit. I included the dumpstat in that villain so I that don’t make the encounter too hard for the heroes.
As a homebrew-enemy addict who likes running a high-power, kitchen sink game, this happens so much for me.
This is why I’ve recently discovered the joys of multistage fights and enemies that fight dirty. Players still get the joy of rending monsters asunder; its just that they have to get the goblins out of the tree fort first, or the contingency spell kicks in and the monster gets back up for round 2.
Give us some examples! Do you literally have DBZ style transformations?
It has other advantages, too.
Multi-stage boss fights also let some kind of dramatic arc exist. Look at Smough and Ornstein for a well-known yet straightforward example. You fight both Ornstein and Smough at first, but once one is defeated, the other heals and takes on their fallen companion’s most dangerous attributes. There’s a clear sense of rising tension that’s absent from most D&D boss fights.
Is there a go-to for TRPG purposes? I’m picturing “and then reinforcements show up” type stuff, but I suspect that the 4e bloodied mechanics does this as well. What else is out there?
If I ever get to use all these villains I’m generating for character creation competitions, I’m going to have to watch myself closely to make sure I’m not getting unreasonable about keeping them alive/undead. For that matter, also to make sure I’m not railroading the players towards the ‘proper’ emotional investments.
The temptation is real. See the story on this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
My favorite story of a monster killed too early and too quickly is very personal, because it happened to me! (On the side of killing said monster… )
first, some background:
This is ye olden days of AD&D 2nd Edition. A random treasure roll grants the group a vorpal sword and I take it. We are level 2 (about to be level 3) and have done the usual fair (rats in the basement, my first dungeon, killed an ogre, etc) and are heading back to the town to get our reward and continue murder hoboing across the land from one dungeon to the next (because that is how one D&Ds, right? We were kids and also this was before the advent of shows like Critical Role that showed us a new way to play!).
We get back to the mayor or whatever he was (town leader of some sort) and turn in our quest, expecting to get our rewards and suddenly, the DM reveals him to be a vampire lord! (DUN DUN DUUNNN!!!). Without a second thought, I say, “I attack!” and swing my brand new vorpal sword at him.
Natural 20. Now, back in ye olden days of magic items like the Vorpal Sword, when you rolled a natural 20 it had different wordings and very specifically was all about the removal of heads (or otherwise killing things in a single blow when one rolled the nat 20).
Our DM pauses for a moment, checks some stats, rechecks some stats, looks at the Vorpal sword description, rolls a couple dice and says, “You cut off his head, he turns to dust… the vampire lord is dead.”
He closes the books and begins to explain that he needs to rewrite the story he had planned, because this vampire lord was meant to be the big bad… not get its head cut off by a murder hobo at the first opportunity he revealed himself.
On reflection, probably not a very good DM, but then we were not very good players either. We were kids. But it is a story I will forever remember, because it makes me laugh and taught me two big lessons for future DMing.
One: always be prepared to have the party take the story in directions you never intended.
Two: never give a party an ultra powerful magic item when they are low level, even if the random roll says that is what they get 😉
That’s some good wisdom.
In hindsight, how would you have handled the vampire’s death? Would you have him turn to smoke and reconstitute with a grudge? Retroactively say he was a lieutenant vampire rather than the BBEG?
Probably have the vampire return later in a shocking twist.
“You thought you could kill me that easily? HA! Pitiful mortals… ” then attack the party with minions and flit away to do it again over and over throughout the campaign until they finally confront him at the end.
Explanation? Naw. Not really necessary. Magic did it. Whatever, it is a world of magic.
Alternatively, just give the guy a legendary reaction to move away from the strike, whoosh away at lightning speed, and claim he will deal with them later, before vanishing into the night.
those options also sound good. Plenty of ways to handle it narratively that do not include shutting down the whole campaign one planned 🙂
I disagree, I think that you should give an explanation, a reason, a way it happened. Not necessarily immediately, but at some point, and the reason don’t have to be too special “he was raised by this evil cleric lieutenant here” is perfectly adequate.
This is to my mind important to avoid the risk of robbing your final confrontation of all catharsis and satisfaction.
After all when the villains earlier defeat was just arbitrarily rendered null and void by sheer fiat, why should you believe that this confrontation will be any different?
There’s been a few times in both Pathfinder and D&D 5e where we the players managed to kill the monster within a couple of rounds and prevented them from using a lot of cool abilities. Starting off a potentially very difficult fight, my dwarven warpriest used Righteous Might and Channel Vigor (swift cast using fervor) to get up in the face of a devil we were fighting and just beat the absolute tar out of it. It apparently had some nasty abilities that it would have used had we not gotten the jump on it and so the fight went WAY easier than it could have. Especially in comparison to the numerous undead fights that we’d had before and since that encounter.
Rocket tag, man. It cuts both ways.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RocketTagGameplay
My silly idea of scaling monster stats to PC stats has largely kept encounters fair on both ends. I also significantly inflate HP pools of big set piece enemies.
If you really sit down and look at it, the ability of a party to do a few hundred HP per round in a single target situation is hardly out of the question. Blunting all that throughput through jacked AC and saves offends everyone, but if they can chip a big foe down through their attacks, the fight feels more epic.
A colossal dragon has, on average, 300 hp. The average party around level 9 can drop that in two rounds. One with crits. So I think the average ancient dragon should have closer to 1500 hp. This creature is supposed to fill up a 60ft cube, right? If one player (5ft) cube can average 100hp…
This cocktail napkin math makes me wonder whether some kind of “bench-pressing” math should be included in DMG type books.
https://rpgwillikers.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/bench-pressing-character-creation-by-the-numbers/
Could be useful to know how tough the designers think the PCs are, and how that should adjust CR.
War For The Crown has a particular boss who’s supposed to be a recurring threat throughout an entire plot arc. Escaping, causing shit, warning other enemies the party is coming, the works.
My party skips the difficulties of getting into the walled, guarded city by teleporting into a warehouse they happened to know the address of.
Which, by coincidence, this boss happens to be hiding out in. He gets blitzed down in three rounds, while the party is a full level down because they’re supposed to level from getting into the city. The attack that killed him hit the action before his escape in initiative (On his last turn he’d managed to get over to a window and open it, his next action was going to be to Dimension Door through it)
They then used the vigilante’s shapeshifting abilities to perfectly mimic him, skipping a solid half of the book’s threats. On top of that, he has a set of notes on him containing information about the next plot arc that he’s supposed to ‘forget’ if he drops below 75 before escaping. Literally no part of the book is written assuming he dies in that confrontation.
Honestly that happened a lot in this particular campaign. I built a boss that had a fire aura and healed any time anyone took fire damage, with a bunch of undead mooks running into the flames to die and heal him. The party’s solution? Kill him faster than he’s healing without bothering to slow the rate of healing.
And then the final boss, who I gave TWO THOUSAND HEALTH, dies on round 2 because it turns out when you lose in initiative to two level 16 monks, you take like, 900 damage before you even act.
Ouch. How did you go about rewriting War for the Crown? I could see farming out this character’s plot functions to his lieutenants, but that does rob the players of some of their accomplishments….
Why didn’t you opt for “you didn’t quite manage to kill him before he escaped?” It seems like dropping the letter is a pretty good reward for this maneuver.
He almost did- at 50 hp, he casts an immediate action spell that drops a fake corpse and turns him invisible
Downside, one of the Relics (unique items from wftc) the party’s collected over the campaign has a 1/day charge of Truesight which the vigilante already had up to see through illusions, so as soon as he drops the fake corpse mid-full attack, the vigilante just points and shouts ‘HE’S NOT DOWN, KEEP SWINGING.’ and concealment was fairly unkind to him. That combined with a Stagger, a grapple, and a crit, saving his life would have felt like a little too much GM Fiating, at least, imo.
As for how I rewrote the campaign, I ended up tying in each player’s backstory into the later books (and skipping book 5 entirely in favor of a timeskip and an elongated book 6, since book 5 is only tangentially connected to the overarching plot and can be skipped without losing anything)
For example, the Kineticest in the party had a longstanding family grudge with a blue dragon, who saw the unrest in the party’s wake and said ‘this is the perfect time to take a human form and start informing their enemies of their weaknesses’
It was… uh. Count Strahd von Zarovich, actually.
So some Curse of Strahd spoilers ahead.
The players had managed to get ahold of two of the shiny items needed to beat Strahd: the Sunsword (given to the Rogue), and the the holy symbol that makes a big daylight aura (given to the cleric/paladin). The party chose to keep the holy symbol secret so scrying eyes couldn’t make a big deal of it.
Had lost a party member to Strahd earlier, an old dwarf grandma artificer who was looking for her grandson – Strahd convinced her to go with him because he knew where her grandson was (he was dead) and killed her.
The party was reasonably angry with Strahd at this point, and decided to get on with the main plot instead of sidequesting, finding the reincarnation of that girl he liked.
So as we’re planning to move her to a safehouse, Strahd himself comes down to punish us for messing with his plans. He drops down right next to the paladin. Who, predictably, activates the shiny Daylight ability on that item meant to fight Strahd. The rogue and the barbarian got all up in there too. A round of smiting, rage-striking, and sneak attacking later, Strahd decided he’d very much like to leave melee range now. So he casts fly and begins to escape. He’s about a round out of range when a rock thrown by the barbarian forces him to make a Concentration check (nat 1 on the check) and the wizard holds their action to Web him as soon as the paladin gets back in melee range. The party was level 6 or so.
It was an embarrassing loss for Strahd, and a good lesson for all wizards everywhere: “Even if you have special racial abilities (such as being a vampire) or class features that allow you to do better in melee, you are not a melee class and should avoid getting up close and personal with your foes.”
The DM in question thought this was an amusing enough end – ruling that he couldn’t mistform away while in the radius of True Sunlight – that he counted this as an Ending. The heroes who wanted to escape did so. The ones who stayed behind, sadly, got wrapped up in the cyclical nature of Ravenloft. Strahd reformed, and the Dark Powers never let him forget that time he got wiped by a bunch of newbies.
Ouch. Well, good on the DM for letting that victory stand, I suppose. Still, it seems a shame to…. Wait a damn minute. How did Strahd not have legendary actions left to avoid the web?
DM decided that he shouldn’t have them in the radius of the True Daylight and stayed true to his own ruling.
Fair ball. Although I suspect DM simultaneously decided that he wanted a new campaign. 😛
Yeah, we did an Eberron thing after. It was a lot of fun. 😀
I’m definitely the type to get way too attached to my animal companion. More than I could ever get to any of my fellow PCs.
You can always roll up another PC. There’s only one behir-bro.
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/He-s-not-a-Pet-He-s-an-Animal-Companion-273296468
This is why I am such a staunch defender of the villainous monologue. Everyone agrees banter is a free action, but whenever we confront a boss I hold my party back long enough for the bad guy to detail not only his evil scheme, but who he is, why he’s doing this and what childhood trauma led him down the path of villainy.
I know this feeling, though I’ve generally been able to have the enemy at least show off their cool power before they go down.
The best example in my campaigns was a dual-pistol-wielding boss who could make like 7 ridiculously low-accuracy ranged touch attacks. I really wanted to see how that was going to work, and the players’ reaction to what was effectively someone spraying two fully-automatic high-recoil Uzis all over the place, but instead, the PCs sneaked in through the back, and, on the players’ instructions, the Sanctified Slayer Inquisitor GMPC scored a devastating invisibility-caused surprise round sneak attack followed by a high Initiative roll and a second, equally devastating sneak attack on the flat-footed boss, which killed her. Basically, it was a video game stealth takedown, which was so awesome that I couldn’t really complain. (I did later have one of the party’s NPCs give the boss’s backstory as the PCs were autopsying the boss for… reasons.)
In another case, I used one of the pre-made NPCs (with one or two changed spells) as a boss. By coincidence, the NPC’s “before combat” tactics included casting two spells that would negate the party’s two favorite tricks (Black Tentacles and the Stinking Cloud bomb). I prepared a copy of the NPC’s sheet so I could show the players that this was pre-written and it wasn’t an example of me just screwing them over. They proceeded to, ignorantly, not use either of those tactics and killed the guy without ever realizing that he was immune to half their arsenal. Go figure.
I had pored over the NPC builder in order to turn the wizard at the end of Mad Manor of Astabar into a proper boss fight, by cranking him up to level 6 or so and also making him a werewolf. It was thematic!
I was worried I went too far, that I might end the game in a TPK accidentally. Everyone had latched onto my introduction of it as a scooby doo style module, and had built their characters around that instead of optimizing, so I figured there could be at least one death that I’d have to figure out how to fudge, even though I was rolling in the open.
That was the day I thoroughly learned how important Legendary Actions are in a 1 vs 5 fight. I think he managed to get 1 good attack in.
I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog.