Minimum Safe Distance
So you’ve got a villain. They’re a badass. They’ve got dastardly schemes. The motivations are compelling, and their mustached in imminently twirlable. One problem though: You cannot convey any of this shit to your players.
Think about it. If you put a party of heroes in the same room as a villain, somebody’s walking out of that encounter dead. The goodly dummies will pull the trigger and roll initiative before your villain is done monologuing. They’ll stubbornly chase after them rather than saving the trolley car full of innocents dangling over a narrative precipice. In a word, they’ll kill the baddy dead when they’re not supposed to.
I’ve linked this resource once or twice before, but the villain’s escape kit is something you’re going to want in your back pocket. Whether we’re talking about airborne escape, physical barriers, magical hindrances, or teleportation, or illusory escape, or simply sailing away real fast, you’re going to want contingencies in place. After all, it’s hard to pull off a really satisfying dastardly scheme when the heroes keep killing you BBEG.
So here’s my question for today’s comic. When you want your villain to live to fight another day, how do you ensure their safety? Do they deliver dire warnings via dream? Do they roll around the countryside in a giant wall of force hamster ball? Or maybe they simply summon a wall of exploding ice swords or whatever to buy time to run away? What your strat, let’s hear about all your best antagonist longevity contingencies down in the comments!
Oh, no – Artificer looted today’s rant and took it with her…! 😉
In all seriousness, don’t let the door hit ya where the gods split ya, villainous firbolg girl. =_= Shoo, shoo, ya bother me! Victory goes to Street Samurai and the pacifist android.
Now… where are those two idiots, Swash and Buckle?
Look, it’s 3:43 in the morning. I just got back from the bar. Gimme a second! I’ll write my rant. Sheesh.
I dunno about Swash/Buckle though. Maybe they sailed off into the sunset?
They’re hiding on board Artificer’s ship, inside two large cardboard boxes labelled “spare ottomantons”.
If she doesn’t notice before the next time she goes ashore, the ship becomes “the Unnammed Pirate Ship IV”.
Disappearing in a flash of light / cloud of infernal-smoke while laughing maniacally is always a favourite. And while you don’t want to overdo it, it’s hard to go wrong with Doom-bots…
In my Lancer game, my players had an AI ally whose robotic extensions were monitoring an area for them. When the bad guys appeared, those servitors were able to keep hidden and send a video feed, giving my players a chance to get a look at what the enemy force was bringing to the field while still on their way to the fight.
In a less tech and more magic setting, you might tru allies who can Scry on the enemy (and then get noticed and shut down or forced to take backlash), or magic that can reveal a past event in a location (think ghostly images going through the motions, walking through the aftermath), or even minions setting up programmed images of their boss doing an evil monologue to strike fear into the populace, if that’s their style, or the classic “I have clones stashed all over, you fools—kill me now and you’ll only delay me by a day or two at best” taunt if they simply must meet face to face
As a player I‘m extremely annoyed with recurring villains,
so as a DM they only happen in adventure paths or modules that I buy.
Helps when the true villain is the evil we the party committed along the way.
My go to is either they don’t realize that’s the villain until the end or the villain stays in the background and the whole story arc is clues leading to the finally face off.
One was the person they were going to for information during that particular story arc. She was feeding them false information and using them to spoil a competitors plans. They finally figured it out (and yes it took the “get a clue” brick) and set up a quite lovely little trap for her. After all the effort they put into it, I couldn’t bring myself to not let it succeed. So they got the happy job of dragging her in front of the local noble and revealing her plan. Lots of high fives in the group on that one.
For one of my most recurrent BBEGs, I took the Doritos approach. “Crunch all you want, we’ll make more.” a) Evil wizard clones himself and one or two chief henchmen. b) Wizard uses the inert bodies as the “flesh and/or blood” component of a simulacrum spell. (The spell requires a minimum quantity of tissue but does not list a maximum, and unlike gentle repose, it doesn’t have a duration and allows the body to impersonate the original until you’re ready for it.) c) BBEG and his right-hand enforcer have plenty of duplicates running around as decoys, and if you kill the real one, the soul migrates to a fully-functional copy elsewhere. “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” One party gave up hunting them all down and moved on to other threats.
On another campaign, the samurai, shugenjas, and monk reported the villains and their plot to the local lord and left the mop-up to him and his guards. Three of the four conspirators were caught and swiftly executed; the most dangerous foe escaped.
Guards: “There’s no sign of the blacksmith. His house is deserted; he left in a hurry and took nothing. He even left his still-unconscious dog behind. There is no mistaking his guilt, though. We found the ninja paraphernalia in the house shrine.”
PCs: “Not to mention all of the gear in his secret room.”
Guards: “Secret room?”
PCs: (realizing they’d forgotten to tell the authorities about the secret room) “Um, yeah.” (give directions to hidden door) “You did leave guards in the house, right?”
Guards: “Why guard a sleeping dog and an empty house?” (a short while later) “We found the hidden room. The door was wide open this time, the house had been ransacked, and even the dog was gone.”
PCs: (facepalm)
I’m a fan of awarding the player a “benny” (i.e. free reroll, etc.) to buy the BBEG’s escape.
So for example, if the Fighter Mc Fighterson delivers a killing blow to the BBEG, I’ll describe the villain escaping at the last second. I’d then award Ms. Fighterson a benny to acknowledge that she would have killed the BBEG and probably could have prevented his escape with a reaction. But I as the GM decided to take narrative control and railroad the BBEG’s escape.
I’ve had the dark eldritch greater power the evil guy works for drop a powerful minion in front of the players to keep them busy while his lackey beats the feet in dignified retreat.
Deus ex machina, it’s not just for player parties anymore 🙂
Send a messenger. Even if the PCs shoot him, they can still read the monologue afterwards.
I once had a long-time villain named Auguste de la Clar who occasionally “employed” the party against their will. As a businessman, he was not particularly strong, and neither were most of his employees. But in each encounter with him, he always had the upper hand through powerful associates and threats of even more powerful associates. He or his proxies were able to casually stroll out of the room each time because they always had a metaphorical knife to someone’s throat. Whenever someone asked “Why don’t I just shoot you?” they always had a compelling answer.
This worked for five chapters, until suddenly it didn’t. The party got strong enough to take on his toughest bodyguards, and neither implied nor real threats were enough to stop them. They hunted him down and killed him to death. The man had a good run.
„Why don’t I just shoot you?“
don’t ask, just shoot – whatever orders he gave, why should the ones receiving them follow through if their boss has just been annihilated?
“When you want your villain to live to fight another day, how do you ensure their safety?”
By not having them anywhere near the PCs. Anything else just invites BBEG death.
Now, depending on the genre, you can sometimes get teh PCs and BBEG to talk, monologue, etc and not try to kill each other, but the Players have to all be buying into the genre premise. The genre usually requires something like “Death Before Dishonour” as a premise.
I’ve also gotten away with villain and PCs mixing ‘safely’ in more fairy talesque stories where Guest Rights are sacrosanct.
Yeah, this is a lesson I got wrong. So I have a multiversal game and part of the framing device is a library with portal mirrors to the various iterations. And in my head, the way that I planned on making sure players didn’t stay too long in this framing device was big nasty creatures, in the “it is dark out; you are likely to be eaten by a grue” school of keeping things out.
I had completely forgotten that the seasoned tabletop player is going to instinctively attempt to kill such a thing and had to find a way to cut short the encounter that wasn’t supposed to happen. OOPS.
A DM of mine did something recently, they just effectively told us “Sorry, this is a cutscene” and we all just accepted it pretty much. Transparency can be the best policy at times!
My GM had a villain with Fly, Invisibility, and a Contingencied Dimensional Door. Nobody in the party could fly or see invisibility, so they felt pretty safe. One problem though. I just learned Fly, See Invisibility, and Dimensional Anchor. Suddenly this villain had absolutely no escape routes and every time it was their turn our GM would just stare longer at their character sheet trying to find a way to leave gracefully. Eventually they were pinned and the GM just said that they had actually had a ring this whole time that counterspelled Dimensional Anchor while we weren’t looking and they teleported away without making the pinned concentration check. I didn’t bother casting Dimensional Anchor since then.
The *minimum* safe distance for monologuing is the maximum range of the PCs weapons, including blast radius, plus their movement speed. The best application of this I have seen was a Paranoia game by a Commie general the Troubleshooters were hunting down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM
when my villain only need to tell off the players and doesn’t need to concern himself with whatever they might have to say, there is generally one best option -magic mouth.
if he also want them to know who it is that snubbed them so, it will be attached to an Instant Portrait as well (pathfinder 1st level spell).
one of my players kept a collection of them as a ‘to do’ list..