Merlin the Tuna
First Post
I'm bouncing around a couple ideas in my head for a campaign idea, and one of the things I want to make happen is to introduce the PCs to a handful of the world's movers and shakers (who would in this case be mid- to high-heroic tier) early on and to continue to pull these NPCs into and out of the campaign as they provide meaningful hooks. The tie-in to this is that at least a couple would end up being recurring villains, since ultimately it's more satisfying to finally lop the head off of the jerk that's been pestering you for the last 6 levels than it is to kill yet another leader guy of random enemy squad X. I don't want to be the guy that puts the PCs up against a level 30 destroyer of worlds in the first session, though. That doesn't really do anyone much good, especially given the group's typical play style.
I've been trying to work out the ideal method of making this work without it feeling totally hokey, and I think it might be to make the enemy a solo opponent in the first encounter or two, an elite later on, and a "regular" near the end. In my head, it works because, at level 1, the hypothetical bad guy would be a solo enemy capable of handling the entire party more or less by himself (and thus establishing him as a more than competent combatant) without being an unstoppable murder machine that lands a string of one-hit-KO's on the PCs and calls it a day. Later on at level 4, the PCs encounter him and a number of his lackeys again, but he's just an elite this time around. So two or three PCs team up to drag him down while his goons tie up the others. He escapes to fight another day and finally, at level 7, is just a regular "monster" that one of the PCs can finally take mano a mano and put an end to for good. This seems doubly effective since his hefty HP reserves, high defenses, and additional actions per round would make escaping the first couple battles that much easier to manage in a not-totally-hamfisted manner.
Has anyone tried something similar? I know that the idea of making one enemy an elite and another a solo is nothing new, but I'm curious to hear if anyone has tried taking an actual named humanoid and modified him like this over a long-ish time span, and how the players responded to this.
I've been trying to work out the ideal method of making this work without it feeling totally hokey, and I think it might be to make the enemy a solo opponent in the first encounter or two, an elite later on, and a "regular" near the end. In my head, it works because, at level 1, the hypothetical bad guy would be a solo enemy capable of handling the entire party more or less by himself (and thus establishing him as a more than competent combatant) without being an unstoppable murder machine that lands a string of one-hit-KO's on the PCs and calls it a day. Later on at level 4, the PCs encounter him and a number of his lackeys again, but he's just an elite this time around. So two or three PCs team up to drag him down while his goons tie up the others. He escapes to fight another day and finally, at level 7, is just a regular "monster" that one of the PCs can finally take mano a mano and put an end to for good. This seems doubly effective since his hefty HP reserves, high defenses, and additional actions per round would make escaping the first couple battles that much easier to manage in a not-totally-hamfisted manner.
Has anyone tried something similar? I know that the idea of making one enemy an elite and another a solo is nothing new, but I'm curious to hear if anyone has tried taking an actual named humanoid and modified him like this over a long-ish time span, and how the players responded to this.
