Don't love your villains (or "How I screwed up, and how I fixed it")

[Piratecat]

I'm running a 4e campaign where the PCs are 12th level. I figured out a bad guy's plan that I thought was ingenious and clever... and I had six justifiably pissed off players on my hands.

Setup:
A current bad guy is a young noblewoman named Tanis Riverlimb. She and her noble father were poisoners, and she has a particular penchant for creating golems and flesh abominations. Other than that she's a lovely young thing, socially astute and politically important.

The PCs discovered this and executed her father. Tanis managed to escape. The PCs knew that she very badly wanted a sword that one of them possesses, as it's a unique item she could use to power a particular golem. The PCs managed to put a whammy on her that allowed them to track her, and they followed her to the family's isolated vacation home deep in their estates. There they used clever diplomacy to remove her allies, hit and run tactics to get rid of some of her golem bodyguards, and finally assaulted the manor.

Where I screwed up:
Here's where things got tricky. It took about three sessions for the entire assault, ending with them isolating and definitively slaying her. When they did they saw that she had no heart, and the place where her heart should be was filled with a magical golem-linked device. The PCs rested, searched, and cleverly uncovered Tanis's treasure vault. In it was a near-perfect unconscious golem body made up from pieces of beautiful women. Tanis's heart beat merrily in its chest. So, with the game ending at 10:30pm and treasure all around them, they decided to do the dramatic and appropriate thing by stabbing her through the heart with the sword that she had wanted so badly.

You see where this is going, right? She had planned for exactly this. The runic circle beneath her body activated, sucking the power from the sword into the golem and blasting the PCs backward. Just like that, the much-hated dead villain was back and stronger than ever.

Now, I thought this was super-clever. Ha ha! They beat her, and she still out-thought them! And.. and..

..and my players were justifiably pissed. It was 10:30pm, the end of the session. They were standing in a strongroom full of treasure. They had beaten the bad guy and searched the complex. From their perspective there was no way they could have known not to use that one sword. And - most importantly - they had done the dramatically appropriate thing and I had punished them for it.

How I fixed it:
Sending them an email, and talking about it the next day, helped.
[sblock=My email]

So, a few thoughts.

1. Why that happened:

Tanis Riverlimb is backed into a corner. She's being inextricably tracked by some very lethal and inexorable hunters who have killed pretty much everyone she's loved. She's smart enough to realize that they might kill her, too. She has her masterwork ready but no way to trigger it without that damnable primal sword, and they're coming. She tries to kill them, and it fails, and her hunters can't find them DESPITE her explicit instructions. This is bad. She can't break that damn avenger bond.

But not everything is lost. She has her shadow guard, and she has her skin golems. Surely they can take them? But just in case, that human has actually brought the sword here. This is where she wanted it in the first place, to fully denature it and use its essence. Is there some half measure she can use, some way to absorb its essence from a distance? Research indicates no. It would have to be struck directly into a specially prepared ritual circle, using life blood to complete a siphon. That isn't going to happen in a way that she can use it. But...

Hmm.

She has her masterwork. It's designed to be her body, but better. It doesn't have any of the infirmities, the lung pain from breathing all those fumes, the alchemical rashes she keeps hidden under her fashionable clothes. Ideally she'll use the sword to power the golem. So when the invaders go off her magical sensor, disappearing into shadow where she can't track them, she takes the risk. It takes a very careful ritual, and then tremendous care to hide the circle of runes with the golem's body. If they move the golem, the jig is up. Worse of all, she has her faithful lieutenant and sometimes lover (a minor noble from shadow and an accomplished mage) complete the ritual by cutting out her own heart and placing it - beating - in the body of the golem. The heart will beat for roughly a year. Her own body will stay alive for a week, much longer with extreme alchemical help, but this is a last-ditch effort. Either she kills Logan and uses the sword of Aleph to save herself, or they kill her -- and if they do, there's a chance, just a tiny chance, that they'll want to use that same sword to kill the heart they'll find in her golem.

She is out of options. It's worth the chance. The power draining ritual is set and hidden, she is horribly weakened, and here they come.

2. Where I screwed up.

So, I knew she was trying this. Mechanically it reduced Tanis from a solo down to an elite, greatly weakening her combat power, a choice she made so that she might have a chance to survive. It made her much easier to kill. I didn't expect or take into account several things, though:

1. How satisfying her death was.
2. How late in the evening you got to the body.
3. How much it would feel like an afterword when you dramatically slew her heart.

So I tried to leave a bunch of clues, and there were many ways to thwart her plans if you'd thought of them, but of course you didn't check for shenanigans -- meta-game wise you'd found treasure and were just wrapping up a loose end. I really wish I'd handled the timing differently. I'm sorry about that, and that you left the game feeling screwed. I'm all for clever and dangerous villains, but not if I as a DM handle something poorly in the execution.

Kevin

[/sblock]
The three week break between games gave them enough time to plan. I spent some time considering what Tanis knew upon waking up, instead of just coming out of it ready to kill. Did she have memories? If she had amnesia, what would her initial reaction be to nearby strangers? And the players handled it beautifully; one politely, diplomatically charmed her for a round, bantering until the rest of the group had healed a bit. She went down gloriously.

TL;DR version:
Communication makes it much easier to recover from a ban gaming mistake.

Have you guys run into something similar in the past? How'd you handle it?

 

[Vascant]

I think the difference is the group of players, for the most part my players love stuff like that. We have had a few bad sessions where villains were perhaps to dumb but you are exactly right the only way to figure out what is going on with players is to communicate. I get several emails between sessions from players asking questions or expressing an opinion about a ruling I made at the table (We do not slow down play with rules discussions, if I find out I made a mistake I fix it in game as a later session). I do think and feel that it is important both sides be given a way to express themselves without the emotions and energy of the moment, things get settled a lot easier. Sometimes I even learn to be a better DM

 

[IronWolf]

Communication is a great thing. I think if you sensed disappointment in your players with the situation then reaching out to them as you did after the game was a good decision. Much better than just continuing on without addressing the issue - whether the scene was what you intended or not.

Personally, I think what you did was awesome. And I can easily see our DM doing something similar. I think as players in our group we'd take it in stride and have a good time with it. Like "Oh man! How did we not think of that!" and then continue on.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think it's interesting that your problem was essentially a pacing problem -- the party didn't expect a sudden "TO BE CONTINUED" ending, and they were annoyed.

I remember once having some characters assaulted by a powerful wizard in their sleep when they had inadvertently killed his son...which, in retrospect, I should've communicated to them better. He could've been a great villain, but instead he was a "RUN AWAY ARG!" encounter, and they were annoyed at the ambush.

Big takeaway I guess would be: be VERY careful when throwing curveballs.

As for not loving your villains -- yeah, you've gotta let go. I also go under the "Despite what you throw at them, love your PC's," mantra, too. You've gotta be rooting for them to make the world better by killing your villains.

 

[S'mon]

What would have happened if they'd used a different weapon on the heart?

Personally I don't think players are entitled to always have things play out exactly as they expect, or to have their preferred denouement at the end of the session. As long as the result was the result of their voluntary actions (albeit planned for by a smart villain with a Thanatos Gambit) and not railroading, I can't see it as bad GMing. I almost never use Thanatos Gambits myself, but I reserve the right to do so.

 

[Derren]

Such situations are the point where you see if you player want to role play heroes in a fantasy word or movie actors playing heroes for a fantasy film.

Not everything has to work according TVTropes.

 

[Umbran]

Let me get this straight...

You know your enemy makes golems, and you know the sword can be used to power one. After you kill her, you find one more golem, deactivated, but with her still-beating heart in it, in the treasure room rather than in a lab. And you claim you had "no way of knowing"?

I'll accept that they were caught up in the moment, but I think you telegraphed that pretty well. What more did they want, a neon sign blinking, "Don't plunge the golem-powering sword into the heart of the inactive golem, it may not do what you think it will!" I mean, really?

Anyway, I don't think I've run a session with quite such a poor response to an unexpected event, but I played through one that nearly ended a campaign...

The game, White Wolf's Mage: the Ascension.

Setup:
Half the party is trapped in a paradox realm, but don't know it. The realm is structured to be the best of all possible worlds, where everything starts going right for the characters.

Where the GM screwed up:
The screwup is twofold. Part 1 - The GM designed this with pre-determined exit conditions. One is that the PCs simply realize that, hey, this world is too perfect, and that they must be trapped in a realm. The other is a ritual in which the PCs make blood sacrifice a large number of the "people" in the realm.

Part 2 - the GM does not realize that the party has a character capable of locating and breaking into the realm, and thus voiding the first escape route, and allows said character to do so. The second is that he doesn't realize that the players will utterly refuse the latter option. The GM thinks, "Hey, these are only constructs of the realm, they don't have real souls, the party won't mind killing them any more than they'd mind breaking toasters." We players, on the other hand, feel that the mass murder is symbolic enough to not be acceptable to our characters.

We run through fully 11 other ways that, given the rules and our powers, we should be able to break out of the realm. The GM says no to *all* of them, expecting that when we have run through all the options, we will just accept his. We finally ask, "Okay, GM, really, there's only that one way out, its an absolute?" He says, yeah.

We say, "Well, then, time for us to create new characters."

He sits and looks at us, stunned.

We eventually made it clear to him that none of us find his one remaining route to be something our characters would be willing to do, and we hand-waved another mode of escape.

 

[Jimlock]

Are you sure that your players were simply annoyed... or excited-annoyed?

The way I see it, you provided a nice twist they could not have foreseen (or perhaps you gave them the chance to find out?). If I was in their shoes I wouldn't be disappointed of the game/session. I would probably be kind of annoyed yet excited about the interesting scenario before me. Totally different.

Your idea was great, but... the single objection I might have, (and I say might because I don't know) would be this:

If everything I did as a player would inevitably lead to this scene, then I would be really disappointed. I would like to know that I COULD have avoided this situation if I had played differently. Perhaps I missed some clues, perhaps I failed while searching, perhaps I did not see past the innuendos of an NPC, perhaps I simply wasn't careful enough... If that was the case I would love it!

Of course there is no way for a DM to say things to his players like: "Well, if you had done this and that instead, you could have avoided it".
The only way to know is to trust in your DM, and trust that he didn't railroad you to the climax as he alone imagines it.

The story is told by BOTH the DM AND the players...

 

[steeldragons]

I'm with Umbran and others, here. You had a villain. A great set up. A great scene.

Just because it didn't end the way the players wanted??? Ummmm...so?

Players are not entitled to have everything work out the way they like...in fact, in practically every game I've ever played that is not the case...not always, at least. You work with wutcha got and adapt...or die. lol.

Myself as a player, and groups I've played with...that would have been a fantastic "Oh $#!t" moment!

What I might have suggested, that could conceivably have worked better, maybe...would have been to "end scene" with them in the treasure room with the beating heart...it was 10:30...game was over. See you next week/session...expecting that the start of the next session would involve finding out all of the awesome treasure they'd gained and distribution...then the big "bang" moment would have started off the next session instead of ending the previous.

The PCs leave feeling they have done all they can and with the anticipatinon mounting for next session to get rich and "I'm gonna plunge the sword into her heart" at the start of next session. Hind sight being 20-20 and all.

Water under the proberbial bridge, obviously. But just a note for pacing for "next time".

I think you handled it very well with the players after the fact...but don't ever short-change your ideas/plans (you are the DM after all) because the palyers might not like it.

Just my coppers.
--SD

 

[Pentius]

Wait, your players weren't happy with that? I got excited just reading about it!